This continued piece of disinformation is incredibly destructive to the hobby.
You don't need a tower or a huge piece of property to get involved with ham radio. I do most of my operation portable, sometimes operating out of a backpack and have plenty of fun with it.
If you want to put up an antenna as a renter you can easily do so on a small freestanding tripod.
I second this. You can get on HF with very little space. If you have 16ft of space, you can easily put up a temporary 10 meter dipole.
I have an HOA, so every time want to get on HF at home I put up the 10m dipole. I stick three 7ft wooden stakes in the ground, tie the dipole to them with paracord, and talk to people all over the world.
That dipole is just 2 pieces of 8 foot wire soldered to a SO-329 connector. It probably cost me $10 at most.
You can get a low powered portable HF digital rig for less than $100. With less than 20W and a homebrewed antenna you could be making contacts all over the world.
Admittedly, I'm currently making contacts all over the world right now on Hacker News. As children of the Internet, radio, at first, seems like a silly, antique hobby when the Internet has connected us together. Maybe it is just me, but there's something really fun and geeky about radio. I've been a maker for decades and I've grown a bit bored of making LED blink. HAM radio has given me a practical reason to get the solder iron out again. I really love building the crappiest equipment out of scraps and see if it'll work.
Parks on the Air is another really fun aspect of the hobby. Almost every weekend since I got my license, I go out to a nearby state or national park. I pack up my FT-991a base station in a cheap harbor freight hard case. I bring a battery, some coax, an EFHW antenna I built. I throw in antenna in a tree and sit in the park and play radio. I find it quite relaxing to get outside and see who I can talk to.
KB9VBR has a nice video what a POTA activation is like. If you're an outdoorsy type or want to be one, POTA is a fun excuse to get outside.
> Admittedly, I'm currently making contacts all over the world right now on Hacker News.
Itβs the difference between crossing the ocean in an airliner vs. in a sailboat. The end results are the same, but the methods and skills are wildly different.
You don't need a tower or a huge piece of property to get involved with ham radio. I do most of my operation portable, sometimes operating out of a backpack and have plenty of fun with it.
If you want to put up an antenna as a renter you can easily do so on a small freestanding tripod.