[unxdfa]

The academic side is less bananas I will give you that. And your comment about 80m is spot on. The problem we have here in the UK, is that it's pretty easy to get a 2m HT and a license to use it. Huge swathes of amateurs never progress past that or take a technical interest at all. I've lived in 3 separate areas where the local 2m nets are full of people with very defective personalities. The sort you'd find in a flat-roofed pub. And they're the guys who actually go to the clubs and the hamfests here.

It's pretty not exciting here as far as emergencies go. So our emcom network (Raynet) are limited to dressing up like police offers as far as they can legally do it and managing the car park at public events. The real emergency services here are very well equipped to handle this themselves with cross service commercial radios. And there's very few places you can't get a 4G signal now, even in the middle of bloody nowhere.

I did enjoy working CW QRP and chasing miles-per-watt to some degree. It was also difficult to be an asshole on CW so people didn't bother. SSB / FM is just urgh.