CB radio is alive and well across the country and around the world! It takes next to nothing to establish a station. Interested? Study into antennas, ground plane and Standing Wave Ratio (SWR). Any creativity that aims at these three goals will skip across the country with a well-functioning, old-school stock mobile radio on both AM and SSB. And you might even be pleasantly surprised to discover a local CB community, right in front of your face! If not, start one. What is Freedom without talk around the Water Cooler?
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CB Radio is so quiet now, I only hear anyone on it when travelling. I have been looking into getting my HAM license, talked to a guy in town the other day I know that is a HAM, and he said even HAM around here is pretty quiet compared to 20 years ago.
I bought my boys 8w portable HAM radios for Christmas. Trying to get them to get their license. Never know how important this could become.
From what I hear it is alot easier now that they took the Morse Code requirement out. Also I have heard several times to study up, and go take the test for the Technicians license, and right after finishing that you can take the General license test for free, if you pass the General then you get your General license instead of the Technician license, opening up more frequencies.
You can study for two hours to get the Technician license which is perfect for making contacts within a few hundred miles. Use a flash card system like Ankidroid. Tech license all you need to know is how not to break the law and how not to kill yourself or others. I got my General a few years ago which is needed to make really long distance contacts (global point to point) and that one took a LOT more studying, probably like 80 hours.
Extra Class amateur op since 2009 and volunteer examiner here.
General Class is worth it just for the HF privileges - wasn't too much harder for me. HF is a lot of fun (and can be very useful too - long distance comms with no infrastructure in between needed).
HamStudy.org and the ARRL license study books are both very good resources. QRZ.com for practice exams - keep going until you can hit 90 percent consistently, and you should be good to take the tests!