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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Amateur Radio
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I've been wondering, what is amateur radio hobby about? I'm guessing I'm too young to understand it, since when I was growing up we already had a dial-up and then internet and mobile phones became common as I was starting highschool, but it sounds interesting.
I see a lot of notepads next to the radios in the article, is it about just catching and monitoring the traffic for fun, kinda similar to i.e birdwatching but with radio waves? Or do you talk to other radio operators around you and hang out?
I'm honestly curious what do people generally do, when they become amateur radio operators.
For me it is in part what you said. Radio birdwatching is actually pretty fun just bumping around the spectrum to see what you can find. There is the communication aspect of course. There is a bit of an emergency preparation aspect to it too. You can also do things like listen to satellites and get images from them or use the ISS as a repeater to get contacts from much further away than usual. It is a very broad hobby to get into. I am the youngest operator by probably 30 years in my area which is an interesting experience but it is cool to be able to operate old analog technology since I also grew up in the internet age (mostly). The entry price point into the hobby is relatively low now. I spent maybe 50 USD when I first started, unfortunately as you get more skills and interest the cost for equipment to do things you wanna do definitely goes up.
Can you point us toward an intro activity and equipment?
I am a US operator so my advice will be based on that but this is the path I took: get yourself either a baofeng GT-5R or UV-5R, both are around 20 USD on Amazon. Don't listen to baofeng haters, they are perfectly fine to start with and in fact I still use a couple of baofengs for various things. These radios are handhelds (also called HTs) and are low power but will cover the 2M and 70 CM amateur bands. With those you can look on a website called repeater book to see if there are repeaters near you. Repeaters essentially re transmit peoples radio traffic on a specific frequency for longer range. If you have one near you, tune to the listen frequency whenever you have the chance and see if people are talking. It may take some time depending on the number of operators in your area.You can also track the ISS on N2yo.com and attempt to listen in to the radio repeater onboard as it passes over you. Those will be amateurs from potentially hundreds of miles away talking on that repeater. You can look up something like ISS radio repeater on YouTube for more information on that. Or you could simply scan through frequencies automatically and see what you find. I guarantee you will hear some sort of signal if you do, though it may not be actual people. If you had some more money to spend you could get something like a baofend BF-F8HP (about 60 USD on Amazon). That is a triband radio that will get the 2 bands I mentioned early, but also will be able to pick up air traffic and ATC towers if you are in to aircraft watching. All of that would give you a little taste without spending too terribly much. To be clear though without a license you can only listen on these frequencies never transmit, unless in case if life or death danger. I know people to transmit without licenses and don't really care, that is their business but it is technically a crime.