Ham radio often sounds like a big undertaking from the outside, but there are some really good (and often free) resources for getting your license.

I suggest Ham, because like you, I don't get out a ton, but ham radio has helped me interact with more people, and coincidentally they're largely retirees in their 70s lol. But also because there are ham radio communities on Lemmy and all over the place, so it's usually not hard to find other hams near or far.

I took the US Technician and General tests back to back in March using ONLY hamstudy.org which doesn't even require an account. It costed me $50 to take the test which also included 1 year membership in my local ham club, and a Baofeng radio can be had very cheaply from Amazon or similar. With a cheap handheld radio (no giant antenna, or yard space needed), you can talk on repeaters in your area for many miles depending on geography

It often helps to find a specific common interest to link a group of people together, so if you're looking for like minded individuals to talk to, almost any hobby can be a good starting point.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    Dolphin does online multiplayer for game cube, and I think also wii

    There's also a neat back way to use steam for it too. You need a game that supports steam's remote play together, and you can replace the install files with an emulator, rename the emulator .exe to match the game you replaced and launch it with steam. I might be missing part of the method, so googling might be necessary, but I've done this with a few friends before with xbox emulation and it worked great.

    Edit: found the forum post I used at the time!

    https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/3/1643178512758489324/

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  • There are a couple of local groups I talk to mainly, but there's also truckers on channel 19, some local big operators on channel 6 (known as the superbowl), and long distance on single side band.

    CB radio occupies the 11 meter band which happens to consistently have really good propogation at certain times of the year / solar cycle, which makes it so you can talk in one place and potentially reach the other side of the world, though usually for short periods depending on location, time of day, transmit power, antenna design, etc. This phenomenon is usually known as "skip" by CBers.

    My favorite part of the hobby is trying to chase skip, and talk to operators in other countries. On a good day I've spoken from the US to Mexico, France, Canada, Germany and the UK.

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    cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/48914192

    I want to talk about foods with the bare minimum ingredients where if you would have added more, it would have been a disservice.

    Watcha got?

    Edit: dude I got so much love on this post for something so simple, this is a solid community. Thanks for showing up guys

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