Part of our Start Here: A New Ham’s Guide to Getting On The Air guide.
I get asked some version of the same question all the time: why would anyone still bother with ham radio when everybody has a phone in their pocket? I built a presentation to answer it for club meetings and new-ham sessions, and this is the written version. My short answer: ham radio is a great hobby on a normal day and the last thing still talking on a bad one. It has been proving that for more than a hundred years.
What Ham Radio Actually Is
Amateur radio is a licensed radio service for people who want to communicate, experiment, and learn, with no money involved. The FCC issues the licenses in three classes (Technician, General, and Amateur Extra), and as of October 2026 there are about 729,000 active individual licenses in the United States, according to the ARRL’s running count of FCC data.
The part that matters most is what you do not need. A ham station needs no cell tower, no internet, no subscription, and no company that can go out of business or lose power. Two radios, two antennas, a battery, and two licensed operators make a working link. Add a repeater on a hill and you cover a metro area. Add HF and you cover a region, a country, or the planet.
Ham Radio as a Hobby
I want to start here, because nobody sticks with a tool they never pick up. The reason hams are ready when things go wrong is that they spend the rest of the year playing radio for fun. And it is less one hobby than a dozen of them sharing a license:
- Talking to the world. On HF you can work stations on other continents from your kitchen table. Chasing new countries (DX) is addictive.
- Getting outside. Parks on the Air (POTA) turns a picnic table into a station, and ARRL Field Day, held every June since 1933, is part contest, part emergency drill, and part campout. I wrote up Field Day vs POTA vs SOTA if you want to know where to start.
- Digital modes. FT8, JS8Call, and Winlink let a computer and a modest radio make contacts and pass messages through conditions where voice would never get through.
- Building and tinkering. Antennas, power systems, go-boxes, and kits. Cutting a wire dipole and making your first contact on it is a feeling that never gets old.
- Contesting. Weekend sprints where you try to log as many stations as you can. It is a sport, and it sharpens your operating fast.
- Community. Weekly nets, club meetings, and the old tradition of the Elmer, the experienced ham who helps the new one along.
- Learning. Propagation, electronics, and space weather stop being abstract once your signal depends on them. You will understand the ionosphere better than most people with a science degree.
Me, I spend most of my time on HF with SSB, FT8, and JS8Call, plus weekly local nets. Every one of those habits doubles as practice for the day I actually need them.
A Tool for You
Start with the individual. A ham license gives you a way to talk that does not depend on anyone else’s network being up.
- Off the grid and out of coverage. Backcountry roads, trailheads, and long stretches of desert highway have no cell service. I keep handhelds in the Jeep for off-road trips because a repeater on a peak reaches places a phone never will.
- Knowing what is happening. When the news and the internet go dark, local nets and HF tell you what roads are closed, where the fire is, and whether the outage is your street or the whole state.
- Skills that stay with you. Operating on battery, putting up an antenna, and passing a message accurately are skills, not purchases. Nobody can take them away in a power outage.
A Tool for Your Family
The scariest part of any disaster is not knowing whether your people are okay. A family that has a radio plan answers that question in minutes instead of days.
- A plan written down. Which frequency, which repeater, and what time you check in if the phones are down. A PACE communications plan is the simplest way to lay it out: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency.
- Radios staged and charged. I keep a lineup of handhelds on a rapid charger as our family kit, programmed and ready, because a radio buried in a drawer with a dead battery is not a plan.
- An easy on-ramp. Not everyone in the house will take a ham exam. GMRS covers the whole family under one license with no test, and it pairs well with a licensed ham in the house. My GMRS Complete Guide covers it.
- The reach to get word out. If your family is spread across states, HF and Winlink let you get a message to a relative far outside the disaster area, who can then make the phone calls for you.
A Tool for Your Community
This is where ham radio stops being personal and becomes public service. Organized amateur groups plug directly into the people who run emergencies.
- ARES and RACES. The Amateur Radio Emergency Service and the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service put trained volunteers in emergency operations centers, shelters, and hospitals when normal systems fail.
- SKYWARN. Ham spotters feed severe weather reports straight to National Weather Service offices, often through a net that runs on a local repeater.
- Served agencies. The Red Cross, the Salvation Army (through SATERN), hospitals, and county emergency management all work with hams. North Carolina, for one, routes official auxiliary emergency traffic through its AUXCOMM program, and hams worked alongside it after Helene.
- Public service events. Marathons, bike races, and parades use ham operators for safety and logistics, which doubles as practice for the real thing.
- Clubs and nets. A weekly net is a standing test that the radios, the antennas, and the people all still work. The Clubs and Nets guide covers finding one or starting one.
A Tool for the Nation
Scale it up and hams are part of the national picture too. The National Hurricane Center runs its own amateur station, WX4NHC, and nets like the Hurricane Watch Net collect ground-truth weather reports from inside a storm. SHARES, a federal HF program, and Military Auxiliary Radio System volunteers move traffic between agencies. Internationally, amateur societies coordinate through the IARU, so the same skills work across borders.
When Ham Radio Saved Lives and Changed Things
Here is the part I find most convincing. None of this is theory. Hams have been showing up when everything else failed for more than a century. A few moments worth knowing:
1912 to 1914: Licensed, Pushed Aside, and Organized
The Radio Act of 1912 required amateurs to be licensed and confined them to 200 meters, a wavelength considered nearly useless at the time. Two years later Hiram Percy Maxim founded the American Radio Relay League around a simple idea: chains of amateur stations could relay messages farther and more reliably than any one station alone. That relay idea is still the backbone of emergency traffic handling.
1917: Hams Go to War
When the U.S. entered World War I, amateur operation was banned, and thousands of hams volunteered as military radio operators. They needed roughly 100 hours of training, compared with about 16 weeks for soldiers starting from scratch. The hobby had built a trained reserve the country did not know it had.
1921 to 1923: Amateurs Prove Shortwave
In December 1921, American amateur signals were copied in Scotland during the transatlantic tests. Then on November 27, 1923, Léon Deloy (8AB) in France made two-way contact with Fred Schnell (1MO) and John Reinartz (1XAL) in the U.S. on about 110 meters. Amateurs working with the “useless” short waves showed the world that long distance radio did not need giant stations. Commercial and military shortwave followed.
1964: The Great Alaska Earthquake
The magnitude 9.2 quake on March 27, 1964 is still the largest recorded in U.S. history. With normal communications out, Alaska hams carried emergency traffic that aided relief and rescue in the days that followed.
1980: Mount St. Helens
Gerry Martin, a ham volunteering to watch the mountain for Washington’s emergency services, was posted on a ridge north of the volcano on May 18. When the north face collapsed, he calmly described the blast coming toward him over the radio until his transmissions stopped. His reports are part of the record of what happened that morning, and he is remembered as one of the volunteers who gave everything to keep others informed.
2001: September 11 in New York
Phone lines jammed, cell systems were overwhelmed, the city’s emergency management office was in the World Trade Center complex, and a club repeater on top of the towers was lost in the collapse. About 500 amateurs, some from as far as Texas and California, staffed the Red Cross headquarters, a dozen shelters, hospitals, and the site itself, with the operation running into the week of September 23. Red Cross calls that took 15 or 20 attempts on the phone went through on the radio.
2004: The Indian Ocean Tsunami
Bharati Prasad, a ham from New Delhi, was in Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for an amateur radio operation when the tsunami hit on December 26. Within hours she had her station running on a hotel generator. She and six colleagues relayed thousands of messages about residents’ welfare and needs, and the islands soon had seven ham stations supporting the relief effort.
2005: Hurricane Katrina
The House select committee’s report on Katrina, A Failure of Initiative, credits nearly 1,000 ARES volunteers from across the country with serving in the affected area. Hams worked at hospitals, evacuation centers, county emergency operations centers, and around 250 Red Cross shelters and feeding sites, and tracked evacuees at airports so families knew where they were. SATERN alone received more than 48,000 requests for help.
2017: Hurricane Maria and the Force of 50
Maria knocked out power, phones, and most cell sites across Puerto Rico. For the first time in their long relationship, the American Red Cross asked the ARRL to send operators. Fifty volunteers answered within a day and deployed in two-person teams to shelters from San Juan to the west end of the island, moving health and welfare information to the mainland with HF digital stations, wire antennas, and small generators.
2024: Hurricane Helene
In western North Carolina, floods and mudslides took out power, roads, and cell service, and for several days radio was the only way to pass information. Hams ran pop-up nets on mountaintop repeaters with backup power, including the repeater on Mount Mitchell, plus HF and Winlink. Traffic ranged from insulin requests and road closures to the most common message of all: tell my family I am safe. In Tennessee, a request on the ARES net got batteries donated and delivered that brought a key repeater back on the air. Before landfall in Florida, hams passed more than 100 surface reports to National Hurricane Center forecasters over 25 hours.
For a broader view of how the service grew from spark gaps to digital modes, see The Evolution of Amateur Radio: A Timeline.
The Pattern in Every One of These Stories
Read those back to back and the same three things show up every time:
- The infrastructure failed. Power, phones, cell sites, and the internet all depend on each other. When one goes, the rest follow.
- People with their own gear and their own power filled the gap. Not a company, not an app. Individuals with batteries, generators, and wire antennas.
- They had practiced. Nets, drills, Field Day, and years of operating for fun meant they knew their equipment and the procedures before the day they needed them.
That third point is the one I keep coming back to. The hobby is the training program.
Why It Still Matters When Everyone Has a Phone
Cell networks are amazing until the sites lose power or backhaul, or a million people try to call at once. Satellite messengers are useful for one person reaching one service, but they do not build a local network of people who can help each other. Ham radio is the opposite design: decentralized, owned by its users, and able to run on a car battery. It is not a replacement for 911 or your phone. It is the layer underneath them, the one still standing when the others fall over. I go deeper on that in Why HF Radio Matters Most When the Grid Goes Down and Your Repeater Is Not a Plan.
How to Get Started
- Get your Technician license. It is a 35 question multiple-choice exam, and a few weeks of focused study gets most people there. I am a Volunteer Examiner, and I would love to see you at a session. Start with Getting Licensed.
- Find a local club and a weekly net. Listen first, then check in. It is the fastest way to learn and to find an Elmer.
- Build a family plan. Pick your frequencies and check-in times, program every radio, and keep them charged.
- Upgrade to General. That opens up most of HF, which is where regional and long distance reach lives.
- Volunteer. Join ARES, take SKYWARN spotter training, or work a public service event. That is how the hobby turns into a lifeline.
If you are brand new, the Start Here guide walks through the whole path. When you are ready for the serious side, Emergency Communications and Preparedness collects everything I have written on it.
So, Why Ham Radio?
Because it is fun, because it makes you more capable, and because every time the modern world has gone dark, hams have been the ones still on the air. The people in those stories were not special forces. They were hobbyists who had practiced. You can be one of them, and the best day to start is a normal one.