I've been contemplating going to the local Ham Radio club, just to have a look. The LoRa movement has piqued my long, long dormant interest in radio. There's been a few opinion pieces that have popped up on various feeds like this:
https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/guest-commentaries/why-we-need-shortwave-2-0
And I recently had a friend try and get into the local Search And Rescue group (he didn't, and by all accounts they were a bit dickish about it). That got me thinking about Dad. When I was a wee sprog, Dad did Search and Rescue, and did a bunch of the communications work for the local Civil Defence. Out in the shed, next to the darkroom he had for his photography, he had an electronics shack. When we lived out in the country there was always a huge aerial above the shed, and once a month or so, we would all pile up to the grandparents place for lunch and an afternoon running around the farm, while he wandered over to the local ham radio club meetings the next town over.
All of which has got me thinking how I'd introduce myself if/when I wander over to the local club. I suspect, that about the time I would have got interested enough in radio to start picking it up properly, was when Dad started bringing the ZX-81 spectrum from work home for the weekends, and all of a sudden I was poring through books on how to get this little black box to do things with BASIC.
I'm not the first to note that over the last few years, tech is no longer fun. Mainstream tech at least. I am lucky enough to work in a fairly niche area where there are actual practical applications for machine learning, but most of the AI hype is a massive grift. Everywhere things are being enshittified. The hardware feels like it's always more, but not different.
All of which contributed to pulling me into gemini - I'm not deep in (yet), I feel like I'm still paddling around the edges. Gemini, LoRa, a smidge of 3d printing, these things feel interesting. There's still scope to play.
The biggest thing stopping me going to the ham radio club is the fear/assumption that there will be awful people there - it's a baseline assumption I have (that's been validated a couple of times when I've tried something new the last year or two) that's a hang up from having been deeply involved in running a volunteer based festival a few years ago. Still, I think I will get there. And when I get there -
I was almost a ham radio enthusiast. Computers got in the way, but mainstream tech isn't much fun any more and I need something new to learn and play with.