What are the most interesting things people are doing with Ham these days? I’ve had a technical class license for a couple decades but never used it, which I keep renewing. Willing to get a more advanced license.
It's sort of hard to answer that. In a certain sense, the answer is "talking to other people on the radio". Which taken literally, sounds kinda boring. You can talk to people lots of ways.
That said, what people get out of ham radio varies a lot from person to person. A lot of people are interested in the hardware, and the electronics of building, tuning, and/or repairing radio equipment. Other people focus on "DX'ing" or making contacts from as far away as possible, using the last amount of power as possible. The fun part is all the fiddly details and what not to optimize the situation at hand. You could think of it as being a sort of analogue to "code golf" - trying to squeeze a certain algorithm into the smallest number of lines of code, or the least amount of memory.
Other people are interested more in the "public service" aspect being discussed in TFA. They are interested in being available to help during disasters and other events. Also, just as an FYI, hams do more than just help during disasters or other emergencies. At least here locally, hams often volunteer to help run comms for sporting events like marathons and what-not.
And then you get people who want to experiment with new modulation schemes, or who want to use genetic algorithms to evolve interesting new antenna designs, or who want to bounce signals off the moon, or who want to talk to the ISS, etc. etc. Other people like messing with inter-linking repeaters to see if they can talk to somebody on the other side of the country using a 5 watt handheld, by linking 5 or 6 repeaters (or whatever it takes). Other people interconnect ham radio systems with the Internet, or do digital data transmission over the air using APRS or similar protocols. Other people might use DTMF tones to remotely control some kind of device. Others are maybe into drones and might experiment with strapping a repeater to a drone and seeing what that yields. Some might use ham radio to collect telemetry from their drone (or other device).
So really, "talking to people" is kinda the base of the whole thing, but there's a lot of other aspects of ham that entice people. Me, I do a small amount of random talking with people on the local repeaters (so called "Ragchewing") but my interest is more in the electronics aspect, and the public service aspect. But there's lots of room to experiment and play around with stuff in the ham space.
It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power, and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)
It’s the only time I’ve used my General class privileges.
https://aprs.fi/ is a site that displays a bunch of devices online.
Some people have APRS radios in their cars so they can see exactly where it is for example.
Contesting is also fun. There are a variety of modes. I got into RTTY contests lately. It's a bit of a thrill to work through a bunch of callers or to snag a rare multiplier.
I should also mention Parks on the Air. I like going to parks and within a few minutes have people calling me. Or to hunt for other people in parks. Almost like a contest and DXpedition rolled into one.
N3RTW
https://www.amateurradio.com/codec2-open-source-vocoder-proj...
WSPR is all over the ham bands. There's people making relatively small, hydrogen filled balloons and trying to see how long they will stay alive. They're using WSPR on 20M to broadcast their telemetry (search for Traquito).
apologies, I'm ignorant when it comes to HAM but have always been interested in it: what does DX'ing and contesting mean? I'm assuming DX = talking to other HAMs, but I can't figure out what contesting would be.
Contesting is when there's an event, usually over a weekend with a set of rules and a point system for contacts. People get on the air and try and get the most points by making contacts. Big contests might have 10 or 20 thousand people all over the world participating and top competitors are running 2 or 3 radios simultaneously to get rates of over 400 contacts an hour. But there's also smaller contests such as QSO parties where a State tries to get people from every county on the air and people from across the country try to work them. Or silly ones like the Zombie Shuffle at the end of this month where people make up funny names and exchange them at low power, low speed Morse code just for fun. https://www.contestcalendar.com/ shows all the contests and gives you some idea of the variety.
Since some of the less popular countries tend to get active during the big contests, many DX'ers will enter contests just to find a few more.
FT8 - a weak signal mode that lets you make contacts around the world with not much power. From Canada, I've made contacts with Japan and Romania on 10W of power.
Satellites - the ISS has a repeater, so you can make VHF/UHF contacts with people in a huge footprint.
N7YHF