> I can't help but feel the amateur radio community could have used a rebrand for the internet age. I understand there's a lot of history but it's hard to get young people interested in being _hams_, a word that has not aged well. I got my licence about a decade back and really loved the technical pieces - learning about how radio waves worked, propagation with different bands, the ability to (try) to build your own modem with two radios and an Arduino, but when it came to actually talking to people on the radio... other people just wanted to talk about radios.

> It is really fascinating what you can do with 2m band radios. For those times and places where your cell phone won't work, digital modes on the new Icom radios look pretty cool. Being able to hook up a radio to a laptop to send something digitally still seems valuable and relevant! But the community branding could use some modernization to push those use cases.

Packet radio is awesome. Long distance, communication unmediated by third parties is awesome. Building gateways for sms/email is possible. I pointed an antenna at a satellite in the sky and received data. If I got to touch this stuff as a kid it would have blown my world apart.

There is so much possibility, if people think ham radio is just old white dudes talking about radios they are not digging deeply enough.