[Spud6]

That's a tough break getting interested in the hobby at a time that you can't take the license exam. There are many branches of the hobby and there are a lot of activities that you could choose to participate in to learn while you wait to become licensed. Depending on where you live, there may be an active ham radio club in your area that is using Zoom, Skype, etc, for meetings. I belong to the Virginia Wireless Society, which is a pretty large club in northern Virginia. There is a Lake Cumberland club (LCARA) that posts about club activities on Youtube pretty frequently. My guess is that most clubs would welcome you before you get your license because of the COVID situation. There are small local clubs spread throughout the country.

In fact, if you become active in a club, the members may be able to administer the test for you. Testing is done by volunteer organizations that are approved by the FCC. Many clubs include members who are Volunteer Examiners. Most clubs are affiliated with the ARRL, so that would be the first place to check for clubs in your area.

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is a great source of information (ARRL) for the hobby.

I will post additional details about the hobby in this thread.

I’m in Pikeville, KY. Have asked just about everyone I know about a club in my area but haven’t been able to find one in Pikeville or around Pikeville. I’ve currently programmed my Baofeng to monitor a repeater that is near by me but only hear a couple things here and there throughout the day. Doesn’t seem to be too active. But I can’t wait till I get my license so that I can transmit on the airwaves and try building up the community around me.

Most repeaters are not very busy even in areas where there are lots of hams. There is a lot of activity that uses DMR, D-STAR (mostly Icom), and Fusion (Yaesu) digital networks. These systems connect repeaters via the internet. The details of each system are too complex to get into here but the popularity of these systems is probably the main reason that repeaters do not seem to be as busy as they once were. Using them requires more expensive equipment but you can connect to them through a repeater from home or from a vehicle in Kentucky and communicate with people driving in Australia, for example. Of these three systems, DMR is the cheapest but more difficult to configure. Fusion and D-STAR are simpler to configure but the equipment is more expensive.

Repeaters get busier when clubs volunteer to provide communications for special events like marathons.

I believe that the closest clubs to Pikeville are located in Hazard, Paintsville, and Louisa.

You might want to consider buying a relatively inexpensive receiver to get more familiar with the various ham bands and modes. Prices for Software Defined Radios (SDRs) start at under $30 and fairly good quality SDRs can be purchased in the $100 to $200 range. Using an SDR would give you some experience designing and building antennas. A decent SDR will give pretty good results when paired with resonant antennas.

One piece of equipment that forgot to mention in my first post is the antenna analyzer. If you find that you enjoy designing and building antennas, and antenna analyzer is invaluable but they are not cheap. The most popular quality models are made by RigExpert, MFJ, and Comet. They are not a necessity but they are big time savers and provide a great deal of information about the performance of your antennas.

If your ultimate goal is to operate on the HF bands and your budget allows it, you might want to skip the SDR and buy either an HR transceiver or a so-called shack in a box, which covers HF, VHF, and UHF frequencies. You could use the radio as a receiver until you get your license. Deciding on a particular brand and model for your first transceiver will depend on how you plan to use it. If you are interested in portable operation, then you will want a smaller, lighter transceiver. You really can't go wrong with a transceiver from one of the Japanese "big 3," Icom, Yaesu, and Kenwood. They all offer a wide range of radios at comparable price points. There are other quality brands such as Elecraft, FlexRadio, but they are mostly higher end radios. There are also cheaper Chinese brands such as Xiegu but you would probably be more satisfied with a Big 3 radio as a first rig.

What incredible information Hoot. Thanks! 

My goal is to listen to local fire departments, state highway departments and eventually talk on the airwaves once I can get my license. But I don’t want a difficult setup in my house or start a antenna farm. Just a little side show hobby that would be cool to have if god forbid everything that revolves around the internet and cell phones goes haywire I still have a way of communicating till the fix for those things are completed.

You're welcome, Spud. I recommend that you consider getting an SDR for the versatility and educational value. I have an older SDRPlay SDR but have not upgraded to the latest software featured in the video below. Something that you need to understand about antennas and SDRs is that because of the wide frequency range of the SDRs, a single antenna will not give optimal results on multiple bands. For example, my Wolf River Coils Silver Bullet 1000 performs well on all of the HF bands of 80 meters through 10 meters but would perform poorly on VHF and UHF bands.

There are some receive-only antennas such as the discone that work on a fairly wide range of higher frequencies. There are other multiband antennas that work on bands having harmonic frequency relationships with each other. It is often said that all antennas are compromise antennas. There is no such thing as a perfect, one size fits all antenna. You could probably use a discone antenna to receive some of the emergency services bands that you mentioned and a multiband HF antenna such as the Silver Bullet 1000 for HF bands. DX Commander makes vertical fan dipole antennas that get excellent reviews and cover multiple HF bands without the need to retune for each band.

I am going to upgrade my software to get the scanner plug-in that is demoed in the following video. The software is free and the SDRPlay SDRs start at $120. The SDRs are available from the following vendors, both of which generally have better prices than Amazon:

Ham Radio Outlet

GigaParts

Here are links to two of the HF antennas that I have mentioned. There are many commercially available antennas but simple wire dipole antennas work well, are fairly easy to build, and relatively cheap.

DX Commander

Wolf River Coils

Below is a great source of ham radio equipment reviews.

eHam.net


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That’s something I need to study up on. Like the difference between analog, digital, SDR, d-star, and there’s like so many other names I’ve heard that I have no clue what they are.