I'm vacationing in Japan at the moment, visiting relatives. It is sweltering so we stay mostly indoors, but I have been a couple of trips to akihabara. Initially I only meant to buy a used ic-7100 this year, but then of course I also needed a new psu, so alinco was it. After a couple of days I realize that an brand spanking new ic-7300 was half price compared to home (provided I manage to avoid VAT coming home) so I bought one. And now I of course need a new antenna for all this fancy new equipment..... It snowballs.
I know I'll have to do mars mod on the radios. No trouble. That's easy.
Actually my main worry is my baggage allotment when flying back home.
Three months ago, we organised an infostand on amateurradio at a makerfaire .. and 'talking to people' was hardly ever mentioned.
Amateur radio is a technical / scientific hobby for everything about radio, radio communication, radio technology and radios propagation.
Actually, the first thing we showed was a small WSPR transmitter and showed that with just 'a little bit more transmission power then your wifi-router at home' we could be receiver 4000 km away. (and explained that by transmitting a radio-signal very slowly, you can reach very long distances, ... and about HF propagation, greyline propagation, and as wspr signal is so simple, you can build such a transmitter yourself)
please do not equate hamradio with 'talking on the radio'. That is probably the worse way to explain what our hobby is about. Ham-radio is 'a giant playground that allows you to play around with radio-technology and learn how radio really works'.
Kr. (ON1ARF)