Effectively being limited to your local repeater or maybe some local simplex (if you're lucky) gets very old, very fast. Not just because of the people, but the

Effectively being limited to your local repeater or maybe some local simplex (if you're lucky) gets very old, very fast. Not just because of the people, but there's just not much interesting to do. What I mean is that pushing a button on an off the shelf handheld doesn't require much sophistication. Same for handhelds as for car radios; and anyway car ownership is also less prevalent among young, urban people. Many people I know do carsharing. Can't install stuff there. Most people want DX (long range) on HF bands, and that mostly requires moderately large antennas (for the non-hams: rule of thumb: ideally λ/2, where λ=100m-10m. smaller is a compromise). It's by far where most of the activity is, and if you can't participate in that, that may lead to a feeling of being left out. (I say effectively because there are many niche areas that you can cover with handhelds and small antennas, like building a small cross yagi to reach a hamsat. But still, how often do you really do that? How much activity is there, really? Keep in mind for any mode, you need someone to talk to.) So that leaves going outdoors and operating portable. Summits On The Air (SOTA) is so much fun. But with prep/driving/hiking/setup/teardown/driving/cleanup, that always takes most of a day. Not something you can do for an hour, after work. (And completely infeasible for kids too young to drive.) And you have to carry everything, which limits you to low power gear. Which leads me to... ...my 'best' experience: I was outdoors on some hillpeak, with a 15W portable radio. Had a nice diy antenna, but still couldn't reach most (with SSB anyway). Overheard two older hams running 1.5kW, talking straight over me, ranting that quote "young people just don't know how to listen". Toxic.