As someone who has looked on into the hobby in Canada. I feel there needs to be another class for people who just want to use a store bought radio.
I have to take time to study an exam about how increasing x changes y, and all these other fun facts about radio equipment. However the draw for me is talking to people, not building radio equipment.
Interesting - in the UK we have a 'Foundation' license which is effectively just that. Sadly I don't think you could take it and use it abroad (i.e. outside the UK) though.
You can't. I passed my foundation this month and am moving to the Republic of Ireland later this year, so I won't be able to operate from there. Ireland has a Class A/B licence a bit like the old City & Guilds exam, so there's a massive gulf between foundation and a Class A licence.
There is some degree of sneakiness that may technically allow UK residents to operate their UK rigs remotely via the Internet, but that's not a road I'd go down.
As I'm going to be hopping back and forth a bit over the next couple of years, I'll probably do the UK intermediate in about a year, then either do the Irish class A or a British full licence after that depending on where I settle down for good.
Yeah I'm kinda in the same place (not literally, but I'm not a UK resident - Finland now) so I leveled up to intermediate but I'm still waiting on Full (which gives you HAREC, so a reciprocal full in most of the world) before I start transmitting, do hope the RSGB set it up soon :)
TBH as someone licensed in Canada, the basic exam is just that. I have an EE background and it is not needed for the basic license exam. There are a number of apps that have all the possible questions for studying. Would recommend using that to study.
Having an EE background definitely helps with the advanced exam though
My 12-year-old son will be taking the basic exam next month -- studying for it has been his quarantine/summer project. It's been fun teaching him the basics of electronics, but there is some cramming required, especially for the questions related to legal matters.
Yeah, definitely just straight memorization on a lot of the questions. I did a couple practice exams on my subway ride to work each day and after a month it was no problem.
You can definitely do that for the 2 and .75 meter bands. $30 off of Amazon for a BaoFeng.
HF and the bottom half of VHF is where you start needing more (expensive) equipment and the antenna setup begins to really dominate performance.
The other problem is that you'll go through all of the expense for a turnkey radio, get on the bands and all you hear people talking about is their radio setup.
Ah, sorry! I misunderstood what you meant. You are correct.
You're likely aware that you can get CB/MURS/FRS type radios without a license, but that wouldn't help that much. It would be nice to have a small slice of each ham band that would be available to non-licensed folks, but the hardware would be tricky, you'd have high physical capability (and cost) but it would have to be locked down to basically a 'slice selector', speaker and microphone...basically what you get with FRS radios.
Yeah, I just think it would be nice to have a "non-custom equipment" license. Allow me to buy the BaoFeng equipment with a license based on radio etiquette, laws, etc.
And avoid all the test questions about amplifiers, and antenna configuration, etc.
The other month in Canada we had a huge outage of 3-4 cellular service providers and home internet issues due to a MPLS failure. Being work from home due to COVID I had no idea how to determine if this was a local level event, or a larger event. I turned on my trusty AM/FM/LW/SW radio. However in the fashion of today's radio landscape they're all multicast of national programming etc. Nothing about a huge outage.
Had I a license there are a few HAM guys I know 60 minutes down the road and it would have been a decent check to see the severity of the outage.
If the draw is just talking to people, you may be very disappointed. Unless you are the specific target demographic for 2m repeater crowd or the "broadcasters" in the HF, you will be shunned at best.
But hey, you may be entertained by hearing old farts complain about immigrants!
I have to take time to study an exam about how increasing x changes y, and all these other fun facts about radio equipment. However the draw for me is talking to people, not building radio equipment.
Just my two cents.