Ham radio, the activity of sending and receiving radio messages as a hobby
To be honest, up until quite recently, I did not know much about amateur radio. I remember that during my freshman year in the university, I saw some amateur radio magazine on a bookcrossing shelf. Their group photo, shall I say, stuck with me -- a bunch of middle aged men standing in white T-shirts with some letters in Arial... Can you feel the vibe already?
Recently meshtastic has come under my radar and it turns out that without an amateur radio call sign one cannot set up a meshtastic node exceeding miserable 25 mW. And with a call sign one can go to a whooping 100 mW output power. Still not very impressive really, because the lowest rank ham radio operator can stream up to 5 W in certain bands. But not in the one meshtastic works in in Russia, because this is not an amateur band. Still you need to go through the exam that only has questions that apply to amateur bands to get a call sign to be able to register a radio. Bureaucracy at its finest.
That is what I was thinking when already submitting papers for an exam. This article was helpful. Most questions are not hard with basic logic and physics also come in handy. The rest is easy to memorize. The highest-skill russian license requires one to pick up Morse code quite fast, so I have post-poned it for a while.
Today is the day I have finally received my call sign, which is everywhere in this article as you can see. Decided to celebrate this by registering a domain, UB9OGU.RU namely. Catchy, right? Idk what to do with it as of right now, but I have some ideas.