[rcurry]

For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible.

Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety.

It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit.

Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.

[nightbrawler]

Yep! The New Mexico Mega-Link repeater network is still up and running.

http://nm5ml.com/nm5ml_map.jpg

There’s also a great APRS repeater network:

http://www.urfmsi.org/repeaters/aprs

With APRS you can send/recv text messages from pretty much anywhere in NM

[rcurry]

That’s great to hear, and thanks for the link to the map.