Amateur Radio

After a hiatus of many years, I have reactivated my amateur radio ticket and am active once again... so far, just on 2m, but will be widening my scope into UHF and HF as soon as funds allow.
That said... rigs are seriously cheap these days. I picked up what used to be my dream 2m rig, a Yaesu FT480R, off a ham radio sale site for £40 + postage. For a rig that only 10 years ago cost £500+, that's a serious bargain.
Since rf technology hasn't advanced really at all since day one, technology that was relevant 50 years ago is still relevant today... ok, PLL circuitry helps eliminate drift, transistors are much less current-hungry than valves and microprocessors allow such things as scanning and memories, but fundamentally, such things as signal modulation, wave propogation and all that are the exact same today as they were when Guglielmo was a pup.

Some things have changed though...

1. CW no longer a requirement. That's not going to stop me (re)learning it though. Many hams, particularly the oldskoolers, seem to think that that's the end of ham radio. Which leads nicely into point 2.

2. What happened to the old helpful ways of yesteryear? (ok, it's only 15 years since I was active, but still...) Now that one of the main forms of comunication between hams (as with much of the rest of the world) is the internet, the same anonymity-fuelled abrasiveness and impatience that plagues the multitude of newsgroups and forums is rife in the amateur radio community. Where once an invitation to mentoring and extreme helpfulness, a naive question can now attract such derision as to scare the newbie ham into quitting their burgeoning hobby outright.

No wonder potential new hams are either sticking to the unregulated and generally less skilled 11 metre bands or simply passing an extremely rewarding hobby over in favour of something else (or, worse, nothing at all).