General license complete! Took the test online today with the great folks over at PARC. Disappointingly I missed a question and was then unable to get any information from the volunteer exam administrators (VEs) as to which question I missed. But so it goes. Now that I’m certified to operate on HF, I am probably going to try to get more involved with some of the local groups. Unfortunately one meets the same day as Scouts and the other is the emergency group which will be useful but likely is much more focused on VHF/UHF operations.

I haven’t really done any research on HF gear at this point. There’s a lot of reddit discussions on the topic with the general consensus being that $2-3k is the right number to get a reasonable first shack up and running from scratch. Ouch. That’s a big step up from some $20 Baofengs! Given that there’s no urgency I will likely see if I can find some stuff on estate sales or through the local Ham group.

What I really want to do is to get into some of the SDR (software-defined radio) world with some of the Raspberry Pis that I have around. I’d much rather do that level of work than install some software that does all the magic behind the scenes. But that’s another project for another day.