One of the things that is misunderstood about ham radio

is that you can now buy a $12 handy-talkie off of eBay and communicate all over the world with it station to station.

I suppose you can but you will be doing it through the internet. This means infrastructure and a big part of the draw to ham radio is being able to communicate station to station without infrastructure.

You can't do that on the two meter band which is what these inexpensive rigs work on.

Actually a lot of 2 meter communications are done through repeaters which is actually infrastructure. If the repeater goes down so does a lot of 2 meter communication in the area. A repeated is generally put on high ground and 'repeats' the message sent. Two meter is VHF line of sight and limited.

Where you get all of the around the world stuff you hear about ham operators is when they go on the air with HF, or High Frequency which allows signals to skip off of the ionosphere and bounce all over the place.

That's not a $12 eBay purchase. A basic station, purchased brand new runs about $1500-2000 for a solid starter set that you can gird the globe with.




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