There are a number of intros to ham radio, ARRL has https://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio https://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio but searching for "intro to ha

There are a number of intros to ham radio, ARRL has https://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio https://www.arrl.org/what-is-ham-radio but searching for "intro to ham radio" will give you plenty of hits. Also YouTube channels such as hamradiomadesimple, TheSmokinApe, HamRadioCrashCourse, etc. also may be of interest. As far as activities, the sky isn't even the limit! Sort of a joke there as there are all sorts of radio astronomy / space-related RF, a few are: bouncing signals off meteor trails and aurora, communicating w/ satellites and the ISS, pulling weather imagery straight from NOAA satellites, conducting EME ("earth-moon-earth") communications, the list goes on. You really don't need huge antennas or anything like that unless you start getting into something very specific and/or high power. Even using the lower frequency band (still called "HF" high frequency), you can use a very small diameter wire that you can temporarily toss up in a tree and talk to people around the world. The length of that wire grows the lower in frequency you are operating but it's still a small light wire you can wind up and toss in a pack. You can buy a Baofeng UV5R handheld ("HT") for under $20 USD and start listening to people on local repeaters and listen in on weekly "nets" conducted on those repeaters straight away. A repeater is just a powerful station that is ideally somewhere high that rebroadcasts your communication to a wider area than a handheld could do. You'll see some criticism of that radio and other budget radios by some of the more grumpier types but they are a great way to get started for not a lot of money. You can also listen to NOAA radio weather reports with one, which is particularly useful if you are in an emergency situation, power outage, etc. If you get licensed (hamstudy.org is a great resource for this) then you can talk on those repeaters and direct ("simplex") to other local hams. That Baofeng handheld operates on VHF and UHF bands, specifically the 2 meter band and 70 cm bands (you'll typically see bands listed in meters and millimeters, this is roughly how long the radio wave [wavelength] is for that band - e.g. 2 meter band is 144 MHz to 148 MHz, and a 148 MHz radio wave is 2.053373 meters long) These bands aren't really great for long distance communication. You can make/buy an antenna and make a contact with the astronauts on the ISS though! Depending on your interests, it's a lot of fun building radios from kits or completely doing it yourself. There's a whole subset of "QRP" (reduced power) communications where people use tiny low power radios and still make contacts around the world. There's an activity called POTA (Parks On The Air) and SOTA (Summits On The Air) where people will set up in a park or on a mountaintop and try and make as many contacts as they can in a period. You'll often see them using small QRP low-power radios. You can send images and video (SSTV - Slow Scan TV and ATV - Amateur Fast Scan TV) over the air, there are lots of digital modes / packet radio where you can send emails, messages, and a plethora of other activities. SDR (Software Defined Radio) is fun as well, they are basically USB sticks you can hook up to a computer and receive a wide range of signals. I run one that monitors for ADS-B beacons on nearby aircraft and I feed that to some of the flight tracking sites. You can listen to shortwave broadcasts from other countries and pretty much everything mentioned above (and more!) You can check out some online at http://websdr.org/ http://websdr.org/