If you’ve ever done research on retirement, chances are one of the top pieces of advice you encountered was: Make sure to have a life outside your job! Non-work social connections are a top must-have; hobbies are close behind.
What if you were a workaholic who didn’t have many interests besides your career? One of the suggestions I’ve read is to think about hobbies you used to enjoy years ago, maybe even as a child, but for whatever reason stopped doing.
Happily, “I can’t think of anything to do besides work” wasn’t a problem for me. Even though I leaned a bit too much toward work when it came to work-life balance, I still had plenty of things I enjoyed. Like many people working full-time, my problem was a lack of time to do other things, not a lack of other things I wanted to do.
So it surprised me when I recently had the urge to return to one of my long-ago hobbies, one I’d drifted away from decades ago: ham radio.
My amateur radio journey
My husband and I got our ham radio licenses together in the late ’80s, around when I left my first job at a local newspaper. In some ways, leaving that newspaper job was more socially wrenching than retiring. For several reasons, including highly erratic hours and incredibly long work weeks, just about all the local friends I’d made since moving to Massachusetts were through that job.
Ham radio became my new social life. I discovered lifelong friends through my local radio club, and other lifelong friends overseas on the airwaves. This was before social media and the World Wide Web. There were no smart phones, and no one had high-speed Internet at home. Being able to carry a portable radio and chat with people locally, or turn on my station at home and talk regularly with people in Europe, was magical.
But as the years unfolded, there were other ways to accomplish the thing I loved most about ham radio: communicating. There were still aspects of amateur radio that made it compelling: designing and building things, competing in contests, helping with emergency communications. . . . But for me, it felt like time to move on. I had a home computer. I was able to build software, which I loved and still do. There were other activities I enjoyed: photography, travel, walking & hiking, running, crochet, yoga, meditation, writing, reading, learning languages, occasional piano playing . . . . and not much time to do them. I kept my ham friends, but let go of my ham activities.
The itch to return
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a neighbor about some of my former radio activities and how I’d helped pass messages during emergencies. And I realized that I was sorry I was no longer equipped to help in difficult times. What if a big storm or other emergency knocks out not only electricity but Internet and cell phone service? What good will my ham license and dust-covered old gear do me or anyone?
I want to get at least part of a station operational again.
As I looked into the current state of the hobby, I discovered things have changed even more than I expected during the last quarter century 🤣 . There are all sorts of new digital modes you can use over the amateur radio airwaves. In the ’90s, I ran a little ham BBS (bulletin board system) – Internet protocols over radio waves (again, remember, no high-speed Internet at home) – for ham stations to connect with each other. Now, there are ways you can send conventional email to non-hams from a hand-held amateur radio!
And, there are other interesting ham-adjacent, send-a-written-message-by-airwave possibilities, such as low-power “mesh networks” that don’t require any license at all. I just ordered a little “Meshtastic” device which combines a battery power bank that can charge up my phone with a low-powered radio that can send and receive messages to other similar devices nearby, without the Internet or cell service.
It’s all been surprisingly energizing. I’m re-starting an old hobby, but in a new and different way. I can use some knowledge from before, but I also need to learn a lot of things from scratch (often with help). It’s a nice metaphor for vibrant aging: Combine what’s good from the past with striving to still learn and grow.
And now that I’m retired, I have time for it all.
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