There are often old guys chatting on 75 meters in the evenings. Most of their contacts are a few dozen or a few hundred miles away at most. They typically park

There are often old guys chatting on 75 meters in the evenings. Most of their contacts are a few dozen or a few hundred miles away at most. They typically park on the same frequency every night and shoot the breeze. This is a very small part of ham radio, but sometimes people who are new to it encounter those signals first because of how strong the signals are (3.5 MHz signals are often extremely strong after dark over a distance of a few hundred miles). If you are new to radio and you start tuning around the HF bands without much of antenna, these might be some of the only signals you are aware of, and because of this the uninitiated sometimes generalize that this is all that hams are/do. And because of the high average age of amateurs, the data point of 75 meters seems to be a case in point that all hams are old/crotchety and/or survivalist/conservative. But in reality, there are so many dimensions to the hobby that making the generalization about a few geezers is extremely off base. For some, the fun is in building the gear and then making a few contacts to test it out. For others it is radiosport contests or moonbounce, for others it's mountain tops or trail friendly setups, for others it's meteor scatter, restoring antique circuits, etc. So if it were a book and had a cover, the cover might be the 75 meter pig farmers, but there is a lot more going on that is worth exploring if one has some innate interest in the subject.