I bought an RTL SDR just a few weeks ago off the back of getting interested in listening in on various web SDRs (furthermore, the first of which I visited was l

I bought an RTL SDR just a few weeks ago off the back of getting interested in listening in on various web SDRs (furthermore, the first of which I visited was linked to a HN thread about a Russian numbers station). Now I can pick up local signals and listen/decode them and get a sense of what the spectrum (in my case between about 60MHz and 2.1GHz for the range of my receiver) is used for. Running the software on Linux is super simple, a graphical receiver programme such as gqrx is quite nice to play with, and versions exist in most distros package managers. Further to all of the above, I looked at the RSGB site about UK licensing, and they have example exams for all license levels. The first exam I looked at I self-scored at about 85% without even doing any reading at all - though I have some basic knowledge of electronics (and a tiny bit about radio) already. In the UK there is also OFCOM which manages the local legalities of radio reception and transmission.