Time to yeet your smartphone into the long grass

You're telling me that this radio was made out of a Glazed Ham?

I would lo e fo get into radio chat hobby. But I don't know.anything about it so i just listen to radio recordings of ppl chating on YT

There is just something really amazing about being able to communicate directly between two points on the planet by bouncing EM waves off layers of the atmosphere. Like, imagine two people hundreds of miles apart are shining flashlights (or torches, if you prefer) at the distant sky, just above the horizon, and seeing the sky glow from each other's beams signaling each other. At the right frequencies and with the right conditions, certain atmospheric layer boundaries become reflective, like the boundary between air and water, so imagine that distant sky looks a little glossy up there, like water's surface reflecting your beam.

But then run that light source through a machine that does that flickering signal fast enough to encode your voice in the pattern of flickering that's glowing in the sky over someone else's horizon.

That's pretty closely analogous to what amateur ("ham") radio operators are doing when they play with the HF range of the radio spectrum. The electronics are less sophisticated than cell phones, but our usual gadgets rely on many other devices to relay info across the Internet (which is also amazing, in a different way). Ham radio, on the other hand, is like a fancy version of talking through two cans on a string, sometimes up to thousands of miles apart, but using fast flash lights instead of string and cans.

I practically got a migraine trying to read this text on that background.

Just trading one scroll wheel for another. "Surely the next channel won't be another crazy preacher." (It was).

I've had my ham radio license for sixish years now? Still don't own a radio though.

Pass.

I'm already on meshtastic following people testing their latest firmware update and that's about 95% of the traffic

Cause I live near an idiot who floods the air waves with spam.

For real? I got my GMRS license a few years ago, and sometimes I just put a radio on scan to see which construction companies are violating FCC regs. Haven't found a rando to talk to yet, but the range is pretty small. I've been mulling over getting my HAM license and Baofeng to dick around with.

...or you could just use a PC with a secure operating system (Linux) and use a secure voice chat (Matrix) to achieve the same result without needing a loicense.