Ham radio and short-wave listening has been a pastime of mine since I was a kid. Rather than being made irrelevant by the widespread availability of computers, the internet, and cell phones, Amateur Radio has enjoyed something of a rebirth among technophiles. Computers and digital protocols have revolutionized the way amateurs use their radios. Indeed the first internet experiments were done by hooking computers together over the airwaves.Pretty much anything you can do with a computer through the phone lines can be done over the radio: chat, transfer files, send faxes, images, we even have our own worldwide e-mail type system. An entry level license is relatively easy to get, and despite what you may have heard does not require knowledge of Morse code.
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