Ham here. WT1J. I chat with quite a few hams that run the entire age spectrum. Young and old are into SDR. The older hams use everything from super expensive co

Ham here. WT1J. I chat with quite a few hams that run the entire age spectrum. Young and old are into SDR. The older hams use everything from super expensive commercial SDR's that come with rack mountable hardware to Ham Radio Deluxe. The younger hams use RTL-SDR and HackRF along with the pricey gear. It really depends what you're doing. If you're contesting on RF for example, you'll find younger european hams that have HUGE budgets and build enormous multi-band yagi antenna towers and use very expensive SDR's to monitor the whole band and for excellent RX and signal discrimination capability. Then you've got the SIGINT crowd that hang out at defcon and they'll generally use cheaper SDR's with bleeding edge software. The HF band ragchew crowd tend to use boat anchors (old ham radios) with big amplifiers up to legal limit (1.5kw) and hang out especially on the lower frequencies like 7mhz, 3mhz and 1.8mhz. (40m, 80m, 160m in ham speak). But generally once you get into radio you realize it's less about the base station and more about the antenna.