Gear

About

We’ve shown that there are many ham-related activities that a person can enjoy without buying any new gear. But of course, buying or borrowing radio equipment dramatically expands what a ham or ham-to-be can do. There’s an old saying that if you ask two hams the same question about what gear to buy, they’ll give you three opinions, and you should ignore all of them. Ok, so that’s not much help. And it’s not completely true either. There is good advice out there. It’s just hard to find in the midst of the vast quantity of information.

In this short section, I’m going to give you a very opinionated take on how you should think about what gear to buy, not what specific bit of equipment to buy.

But before doing that, here are some general observations:

• There is no perfect (fill in the blank, i.e., radio, antenna, etc).
• Most hams who remain active in the hobby end up with more than one radio. I will repeat this for emphasis: You will want and likely own more than one radio, maybe many more.
• Yes, older used equipment seems more expensive than it seems like it should be.