I'm a ham radio operator as well. There's still areas that are highly technical and innovative.
SDR is continuing to progress, antenna design, digital modes, talking to satellites, design/launching of satellites, etc. I find it kind of crazy that a Pi+SDR could track any airplane nearby and contribute to a global map of plane tracking, all for $100 ish.
One cool project I saw was using starlink sats and a SDR to figure out your physical location, just like GPS. Seems innovative to me.
One thing I've been following is js8call. It allows for keyboard to keyboard communications at 20dB or so BELOW the noise floor (-24dB theoretical), so you can reach a fair chunk of the planet on just a few watts. Even some real world conditions where your transmission gets to destination via more than one path (i.e. east and west). This also allows things like multi-hop communications, store and forward, and other tricks to make the most of poor propagation conditions. Seems almost science fiction.
Sure, adoption of some new technologies is crazy slow, like USB instead of serial connections. But things do seem to be improving, it's becoming more common to put a smarts inside a radio instead of externally connected. This allows for cheaper, smaller, but still advanced communications. Like say setting up a radio, battery, and solar panel to help with propagation for an entire continent for just $200 or so, without having to bolt on a raspberry Pi.
So sure, you can buy a nice rig+antenna, learn nothing except what the license test requires, and just use it as a fancy voice chat. But if you want to push the boundaries there's quite a few areas to explore.
SDR is continuing to progress, antenna design, digital modes, talking to satellites, design/launching of satellites, etc. I find it kind of crazy that a Pi+SDR could track any airplane nearby and contribute to a global map of plane tracking, all for $100 ish.
One cool project I saw was using starlink sats and a SDR to figure out your physical location, just like GPS. Seems innovative to me.
One thing I've been following is js8call. It allows for keyboard to keyboard communications at 20dB or so BELOW the noise floor (-24dB theoretical), so you can reach a fair chunk of the planet on just a few watts. Even some real world conditions where your transmission gets to destination via more than one path (i.e. east and west). This also allows things like multi-hop communications, store and forward, and other tricks to make the most of poor propagation conditions. Seems almost science fiction.
Sure, adoption of some new technologies is crazy slow, like USB instead of serial connections. But things do seem to be improving, it's becoming more common to put a smarts inside a radio instead of externally connected. This allows for cheaper, smaller, but still advanced communications. Like say setting up a radio, battery, and solar panel to help with propagation for an entire continent for just $200 or so, without having to bolt on a raspberry Pi.
So sure, you can buy a nice rig+antenna, learn nothing except what the license test requires, and just use it as a fancy voice chat. But if you want to push the boundaries there's quite a few areas to explore.