Aww. In high school I was absolutely enamoured of this boy who was two years ahead of me. He did ham radio stuff, and to this day my password is a variation of his call sign. Not that that's interesting...
Wow. That's serious trivia.
Yeah, the ham thing is kind of being a geek among geeks. I have friends in the Silicon Valley who are like, "Uh, there's this thing called
the Internet now" and don't quite get it. I used it in disaster services scenarios as a volunteer when every other communication channel went to hell.
Ironically, I did get to use it for the first time in many years sometime last year...
http://forum.juventuz.org/threads/25092-What-Are-You-Doing-Right-Now?p=2948832#post2948832
My cop brother bought me a new ham radio the Christmas before and I took it out on a weekend excursion in the snow in Yosemite. I used it in a mountain valley to reach someone who called the state transportation dept. in a snowstorm so they could send out a truck to saw through the fallen tree that blocked the freeway in front of us. (A place that had zero cell signal.)