I agree completely. I've also found that the community can be, at times, fairly hostile to the hacker mentality. I've often asked people about trying to get m

I agree completely. I've also found that the community can be, at times, fairly hostile to the hacker mentality. I've often asked people about trying to get manufacturers to open source their firmware such that it could be modified and improved but I usually just get a line about how "nobody wants to do that so why should they?" or that it's a "waste of their time". The old men seem to only care about playing with shiny new radios but don't seem to care about doing anything interesting with them. I will say though, Travis Goodspeed and his work has been a huge bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape. He's reverse engineered radio firmware, built a ham watch out of a casio calculator watch and an MSP430, and created a ham satellite tracking dish among other things. I really wish we had more people like him. You also mention the preppers... I've come to find that they're basically the only thing keeping the hobby afloat at this point. All of the .22 hoarders keep buying up truckloads Baofengs, Icoms and Yaesus and while some get drawn into it, a lot seem to stick them in the basement and never even bother to get licenced or learn how to use them. There seems to be some internal regret about hitching the hobby to that group but it was all but inevitable given the central nature of EMCOM to the hobby.