> Ham radio's time has come and gone, It is still very much alive. There is a major world wide event called CQ WW dx contest in which on the order of 30,000 h

> Ham radio's time has come and gone, It is still very much alive. There is a major world wide event called CQ WW dx contest in which on the order of 30,000 hams participate. There are three morse code events each week, one on each of Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Wednesday event has four separate one-hour sessions. If you tune in on one of these onto 20 meters, you will a whole mass of signals. My local club, the North Shore Radio Club gives massive help to the Chicago Marathon, with on the order of 200 hams helping out with emergency traffic. Imagine a crowded event in a major city--the cell network becomes absolutely overloaded. Their help with traffic about medical events has doubtless saved lives. The advent of the new digital modes invented by Joe Taylor (yes, that one, the Nobel Prize winner) embodied in the program WSJTX is massively active. This is a low-signal mode used on HF, LF and VHF/UHF. It significantly helps moonbounce communication. Perhaps the most social of events is Field Day in which hams all over North America go to (generally) an outdoor location and set up stations to exercise emergency communications and use emergency power setup. You can check the ARRL web site in June to find one near you. A recent activity is Parks On The Air where hams go to parks to set up temporary stations and pass out contacts to folks all over the world. So Ham Radio is far from dead.