After four decades in the broadcast radio industry, I finally convinced my Dad to join me in getting an amateur radio license this summer.
In the US, there's a huge community of amateur radio operators, or 'Hams' for short. There's a whole history to how they got that name, but to me, radio's a lot of black magic.
Throw on top of that the fact that Hams are always slinging around weird terms like QRT, using morse code—or as they call it, CW—and they call themselves weird things like NK7U!
But we cut through all that jargon and learned the basics—well, I did. My Dad went the 'Extra' mile and ran through all three tests, relying on his 40 years of radio experience! We both have licenses now (I'm KFØMYB, and my Dad's KFØMYJ) and made our first contact. Here's a video documenting that entire journey (up to the point I sent out my first QSL card!):