I was fascinated with shortwave in junior high and high school and did a lot of DXing with a receiver. I couldn't
really get the hang of Morse Code, required in those days. The the Navy trained me in Basic Electronics,
Radioman school and Morse Code (I still felt I was a social promotion in code, despite my best efforts). Never
went back and tried for the Technician's License. For a while, a large public had a sort of easy road to a radio
hobby with citizens band radios. I knew a sailor on Midway Island who used the effect that caught a bounce off
weather systems to talk at very low wattage to citizen band radios around the world, sort of a poor man's HAM
radio. But back home it was all truckers and motorists and not much content. It wore thin fast, though I never
maintained a transceiver -- I heard enough in short rides with others. So, congratulations on your license. I
think radio frequencies are pretty fascinating; I came to know the ones we used on the minesweeper pretty well,
and how they fluctuated through the day/night cycle, the different major Naval stations around the Pacific. It was
almost a personal relationship with those places and the signals.
