However, I'm decreasingly enthused about HAM. I got my license so I could interact with devices that I wanted to build. However, there are almost no use cases where HAM helps. I cannot build something cheaper, or make it more effective than a commercially available product. It's only at the extreme, un-useful cases that HAM becomes a thing. (Want to bounce signals off the moon?)
What I'd like to see from HAM:
- More, different competitions. Long-term monitoring, stealthy side-channel transmissions, digital and analog networking competitions (like hackathons: Get a signal from A to B with minimal loss / delay using teams in disparate areas of the country --- internet OK), recovery games (set up a network serving x users with max datarate or voice capacity using this equipment), or encoding / decoding games, and so on.
- More support from local governments and infrastructure. I want to know where to sign up to be useful if telecommunications suffers a hiccup. If that is not useful, I want to know and be told how to be useful (esp studying different technology). Some certifications beyond HAM, and specializing in different niche areas would be nice.
- More training on HAM-adjacent technologies. To be useful / innovative requires knowing the telecommunications space, and sticking to SSB voice + FT8 for DXs is great, but not helpful when trying to understand telecommunications and make an impact on the world. God forbid a disaster did happen and the HAMs showed up with their 10m antennas and were useful for 30 minutes until the Verizon tech arrived. It'd be more useful if they could bridge 3G / UHF by setting up an adhoc repeater network to actually extend the range of whatever equipment didn't die in the zombie apocalypse.
For example: In the IoT area, I thought for sure HAMs would be front-and-center with new mesh networking technologies, WAN, etc. But no, we got another AWS product with minimal device-device communication and called it a day.