Amateur Radio
Amateur radio changed my life. In high school, I thought I was a nobody, maybe I wanted to be a truck driver, or a psychologist...who knows. Who cares? I was pretty depressed.I'm 28 years old and I fucking love amateur radio.I always had a curiosity about radio, being so interested in two-way radio that my parents had me tested for ASD. My mom had a police scanner and it had a button titled "HAM" [sic]. I found a repeater and no more than a few weeks later I was absolutely enthralled and was licensed in 2007.I got a radio, an antenna, installed it, and I was absolutely hooked. It did not matter that the average age of a ham was around 50 or 60, and I was only 15. It was just so much fun and there was so much to do an learn using it. I studied for my General and got it a few months after my first Tech license. A few months after that, I got Extra. All the while, I ran a YouTube channel documenting my experiences.I chose to go to Missouri S&T (formerly University of Missouri - Rolla) because they had a ham radio club (W0EEE). I declined a full ride to Truman State in Chem or CompSci, and went to S&T as undecided engineering. I naturally nestled into EE realizing a lot of the basic circuits knowledge was already covered under the Extra exam. Myself and one other ham became de-facto President and VP of the ham radio club, which we re-grew from near death.I ended up working at an Electromagnetic Compatibility lab for a while, before having a co-op at the Very Large Array radio observatory in NM where I ran cabling, designed antennas, and worked on mitigation of RF interference. My manager specifically sought me out because I was a ham.Acheving full time employment was also a no brainer. I applied to Rockwell Collins, Raytheon, Garmin, Boeing, Honeywell, Black & Veatch, maybe a few more, and had offers from everyone but Garmin (apparently proving my way around a smith chart dedicated to quiz grad students in the off-site interview, but choking at an unannounced op-amp circuit analysis by hand while two managers watched on-site wasn't good enough for them!). And now I design antennas for a living! All because of ham radio.Ham radio never ceases to entertain me. There's science, there's experimentation, there's socialization, and there's public service. I'm a advocate for youth in ham radio, and I'm starting to get into things like ARRL reformation and other politics, since - like the author says - ham radio has a bad image. Through programs like YARC[0] and YOTA[1][2] I'm trying to help change that.[0] https://yarc.world/
[1] https://yotaregion2.org/
[2] http://ham-yota.com/