Some ideas for getting going: 1. Find a local repeater and jump in! Before long you'll hear a topic you know about and can contribute to the discussion. I lear

Some ideas for getting going: 1. Find a local repeater and jump in! Before long you'll hear a topic you know about and can contribute to the discussion. I learned about #4 and #5 below like this. 2. Most areas have some kind of daily chat net organized at scheduled times, which is a great time to check in. 3. Keep your radio with you tuned to 146.520 and turned on when you're driving around. Many hams monitor this frequency. Listen in and periodically transmit your call sign and ask for another station to come back. It's exciting to make your first contact without a repeater. 4. Give yourself a reason to use the radio. Look for activities you might enjoy. I got into SOTA. It's an activity where you climb onto nearby mountains and make contacts to score points. If you tune into 146.520 on weekends in the mountains you're likely to hear and participate in some activity there. 5. Consider blending ham with other hobbies, such as radio controlled aircraft or modifying routers to do long range broadband communications. 6. Learn how to use your radio as a scanner. Then learn how to scan the repeater tone frequency so you can chat back when you do find an active repeater. This is a good emergency skill if you're traveling and don't know the repeater frequencies where you're at. (It's important to know the ham frequency ranges on 2m when you do this because there are active and forbidden frequencies right at the edges of what is legal for Hams.) [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summits_on_the_Air https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summits_on_the_Air [5] http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/