Yeah, I've been a ham radio operator and SWL for over 45 years. Love it, lotta fun, And I have talked to over 2,000 people all over the world!

73

I did some fm pirate broadcasting awhile ago. The FCC kinda got mad at me.

With the internet, the short wave broadcasts have become less interesting - BBC dropped the short wave broadcast to the US many years ago -- but my NPR stations broadcast BBC overnight. On the prairie when I was a kid, had a SW receiver - fascinating - w/ a long line antenna had just as much fun picking up AM broadcasts from the ionespheric skip -- after sunset, I could get Chicago clearer than Denver! Check Amazon for a book of SW stations that broadcast in English - had a copy when I bought a small Grundig for my man cave. The real hoot is tying into the Radio telegraph broadcasts - running them into an 8 bit Baudot converter and reading out the results -- a guy at work did this (tapped into the UP, raw news feed) - and gave us printed out news that never seemed to get in the paper -- quite a guy. The internet has "apps" that tie you directly into your local police/fire/ems broadcasts - eliminating the need for a scanner. Quite a nice hobby though, kinda long for the romance of radio.

Nope.

VA3-GMZ here... I got my ham radio license a couple years ago, mostly because of interest in emergency preparedness. If the grid goes down and there's no cell phone or landlines to be had, first responders (Police, Fire, EMS) go to the amateur radio community for communications. There's an entire disaster recovery protocol that involves ham radio operators...

I have a CB in my beast, only used it twice in 10 years during floods. Wish I knew more.

I used to DX and send postcards. I also used to love WRNO SW. I worked SSB into the sequel to my novel SCAPEGOATS. I never had a transmitter, though. One of the coolest things I ever saw was at a BBS eyeball, and the host connected a modem to a BBS via SW.

Green eggs and ham, sorry I couldn't resist.

I know there's a few who've picked up transmissions from all sorts of...shall we say...interesting places. Have you come across some yourself??

I don’t like ham the meat