[jquinby]

Don't forget low-cost SDR dongles - great for introducing digital signal analysis, satellite communications (wxsat, etc), ADSB aircraft tracking, HAB, and other ham-adjacent topics. This sort of thing was unimaginably expensive when I was first getting interested in radio. The first WinRadios I saw advertised in hobbyist magazines were, what, $700 or more?

[AWildC182]

Absolutely! These are how I got started. Just buying an RDL-SDR [1] for $20-30 will open up an amazing world of possibilities and provide dozens of hours of entertainment scanning around the waterfall listening to various transmissions.

No license needed!

[1] https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-RTL2832U-Software-Define...