licensed in 1958, advanced in 1962, past my most active years by now, but play around with DM R with a few old turkeys...
Internet and the dogged insistence of Morse Code did a lot to make AR decline over the years. The days of 25,000 people at the Dayton Hamfest - trademarked 'Hamvention', by some goofs, are over, but there are still a fair number - almost all graybeards BTW.
I had one in the early 00's.<p>Especially liked packet radio stuff back then, but due to regulatory restrictions in practice the networks built are not really all that useful other then for contacts. So in a way, loved the tech but it's really a hobby just for the tech itself rarely applications there-of.
complicated "hard no".<p>I refuse to ask anyone for permission to speak, regardless of the technological means of encoding and transmitting that speech.<p>It's <i>polite</i> not to paper neighborhoods with posters, not to smash spectrum with noise. The proposition that the risk of impolite behavior requires prior permission to participate contradicts the principles our government operates under.<p>Amateur radio is great. Licensing sucks.<p>History may someday record that the biggest effect of Helene was causing the schism in the amateur radio community between the fudds and the hackers to finally crack open public and hard. I expect that to be as epochal as the AT&T breakup was to computer networking.