Why Ham Radio Hooks Some of Us — and Why We Really Buy New Radios

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment.

You probably didn’t buy that new radio because the old one was broken.
It wasn’t the wrong color.
It may have lacked a USB port or the “right” video output.
The menu system may have worn on you over time.
It may have simply felt a little dated.

And that’s okay. We all arrive at these decisions in our own way.

There’s nothing wrong with working hard and buying something nice. Radios—especially new ones—are wonderful objects. Fresh knobs. Clean displays. That unmistakable feeling of sitting down in front of something new. Anyone who says they don’t enjoy that moment is probably not being entirely honest with themselves.

But if we pause and look a little deeper, there’s an uncomfortable truth hiding there. When we buy a new radio, we often explain it in practical terms—performance, features, reliability.

Most of the time, though, we’re not really buying capability.

We’re buying a feeling.

It Started With Knobs, Buttons, and Wonder

For many of us, the fascination began long before we ever knew what amateur radio was.

As a kid, I was drawn to anything with buttons, knobs, switches, and dials. I grew up in a time when computers still felt like science fiction. When I was seven, my brother and I got walkie-talkies for Christmas—two small pieces of electronic magic. We spent hours riding our bikes around the neighborhood, talking back and forth, amazed that our voices could travel through the air at all.

In elementary school, a friend showed me his shortwave radio. That was it. More bands. More sounds. More mystery. Another friend went even further and built his own amateur radio station from a kit—boxes of parts that somehow became real, working equipment.

I didn’t have access to kits, so my brother and I improvised. We took an old tube-type AM radio, stretched a long wire out into the yard, and connected it to the radio’s small antenna. Suddenly, there were even more stations—some close, some far away. It felt like the world had quietly expanded.

In the mid-1970s, when the CB radio craze was in full swing, my dad—an over-the-road truck driver—bought a CB for his rig. That led to a CB in our car, then a tube-type Teaberry base station in the house. That’s when the experience shifted from listening to participation. I could speak into a microphone and my voice would travel through invisible waves to someone else.

That realization stays with you.

The Contact That Changed Everything

For me, the defining moment came early.

I was listening on a CB channel, expecting nothing more than local chatter, when I heard a distant station barely cutting through the noise. I wasn’t trying to make a long-distance contact—I didn’t even know that was possible. Most conversations only reached 15 or 20 miles.

That old radio had a range gain switch, a fine-tune knob, and a small built-in RF power meter, all feeding an omnidirectional antenna. I assumed the distant station must be running a directional beam—and maybe more power than he should have been. I was certain he couldn’t hear me.

Still, I tried.

I called his handle—and to my complete surprise, he answered.

I was in North Carolina. He was in Illinois—the Land of Lincoln, he said.

I remember sitting there stunned. The world had suddenly stopped behaving the way I thought it should. That was the moment I realized something larger was at work—something unseen, something powerful, something I didn’t fully understand.

If you’re honest with yourself, you probably had a moment like that too.

Mystery.
Magic.
Possibility.

That’s what hooked most of us—and in many ways, it still does.

 

A portion of this article is paraphrased from Callum's YouTube video, Why We Buy New Radios (When the Old One Still Works).   It caused me to reflect on my own path into radio. If you're not a subscriber of his channel, DXCommander, I highly recommend it. I am happy to say that I own one of his vertical antennas, the DXCommander Signature-9 Antenna.