You do realize that this hobby consists of nerds and pensioners, who sometimes spend thousands on being able to talk to other nerds?

If anything, you might need to politely stop people from over-sharing all the cool stuff they made… :D

As always, the answer is “it depends” :D

Feel free to PM me or ask in a new post

10W at 2m, 70cm and 10m. Except for the 10m, which I have never heard anyone use (*), that fits pretty well with the idea of giving high school kids an aliexpress handheld to get them into STEM.

The ugly part is, you need to do the same regulatory and legal questionnaire that you need to do for the larger licenses.

“N Lizenz” in Germany, for reference

(*) I just remembered that 10m is basically CB, but Ham. So if you find/inherit an old CB radio and want to experiment, it might be a really cheap way into the hobby.

My country just introduced a super-beginners license that can be done with basic high school physics. Of course, severe limitations, basically, a “Baofeng license”. Still great idea.

The fuck? It seems I have been lucky. Most people here follow the “don’t argue politics” advice.

Check out a local club. Literally, check it out. If it is full of arrogant assholes twice your age, leave. If they are cool but you don’t fit in, ask them for advice. There are so many retired radio operators who are doing it to stay “in it”, or retired engineers who finally have time and so on. Most of them are very happy to info-dump about their hobby.

It is fine for ham radio’s original purpose: technical experimentation and connecting people. "Don’t discuss politics’ is a long-standing Gentleman’s (woman’s) agreement for a reason.

If you want to encrypt, go for the ISM bands. Lora, meshtastic, whatever happens at 433 MHz, hell even at 2.4 GHz a few 100mW will get you quite far with the right approach.

The difference is, your stuff will be type-checked. No experimentation, no building the crazy antenna idea that will be surelu fine according to your back of the napkin math.

Everything is an antenna. Unless you want it to be an antenna, then nothing is.

We don’t have a lab :P

Also, to measure the far field, you’d need a non-trivially-large anechoic chamber, right? I figured an open field is the next best thing, and the park is the next best thing to an open field…

My recommendation: find a local-ish club/chapter with sane people. The prepper nuts haven’t really invaded those here. Probably because that would require being social and working together.

Only if you follow the rules. Those people don’t intend to follow the rules. They don’t want to help, they want to feel powerful.

If you actually want to help, at least on my side of the ocean they have official collaborations/trainings between ham volunteers and agencies for when stuff goes south. I guess the Arrl is (supposed to) organize that?. But I also know of a local initiative over here, where hams volunteered to put like repeaters on town halls and fire stations, just in case.

I think a lot of them, actually. Germany certainly does.

My condolences for moving to Crackfurt.

You are literally describing the idea of Debian. Yes, stable is old, but that is the whole purpose. You get (mostly) security updates only for a few years. No big updates, no surprises. Great for stuff like company PCs, servers, and other systems you want to just work™ with minimal admin work.

And testing is, well, for testing. Ironing out bugs and preparing the next stable. Although what you describes sounds more like unstable, the one where they explicitly say that they will break stuff to try out other stuff.

So, everything works as intended and advertised here. If you want a different approach to stability, I guess you will have to use a different distro, sorry.

I guess when you last tried it, it was at a time when a new stable came out, so testing was more or less equal to stable.

About the firefox: It ships Firefox ESR these days, meaning you get an older, less often updated tested firefox (with security updates, of course). Again, this is the whole point. Less updates, less admin work, more time to find and fix bugs. Remember the whole Quantum add-on mess, for example?

As others have said, you can install other versions of firefox (like the “normal” one) via flatpak, snap… nowadays. The same goes for other software, where you would need the newest and shiniest version sooner. I’m using debian on my work/uni laptop and a bunch of servers, and it works pretty well for me.