Turn CB on. Hear next door's PLT.
As a teenager I was into CB heavily in the 90s before moving on to get my full amateur licence. At that point I realised I really liked Morse having been forced to learn it, and spent so many hours working 20m and 40m bands on the key. Obviously didn't really have a girlfriend back then! But the thing is that there was always something about CB that made me want to go back to it. Working SSB on 11m was somehow more fun because it's illegal. Good old 70s / 80s rigs - President Grant, WKS, etc. were cool to use, and it was fun to make up little EPROM boards (or even just use a bunch of CMOS binary adder ICs) for those rigs whose PLL ICs were modification-friendly.
About a year ago I decided to try getting back into it (grabbing an original boxed President Madison AM/FM/SSB homebase on eBay £40 buy-it-now just minutes after it was listed) and found that 11m SSB activity is surprisingly healthy. Not only is there a lot of skip propagation at the moment enabling contacts into Europe very easily on the right day, but I also find that there are quite a few local nets on both SSB and legal FM bands.
Tried to explain its appeal to my wife, but just got funny looks. I suppose I'll stick to my computers and radios, and she'll stick to horseriding.
Like someone else commented, I got into packet radio too (though via the amateur bands). That was incredible fun, and it meant you could access bulletin boards and exchange mails electronically with people all over the world quite some years before much of the general population even knew what the Internet was.
Yes, people took the piss back in the day, but as others have said, CB or amateur radio was the closest we had as an equivalent to 'social networking'. And in so many ways, it doesn't compare at all.
What is particularly sad is that things have moved on to the point where it's often difficult to use CB or HF amateur radio bands in many residential areas now due to damned PLT. I had Ofcom get one removed from nearby (it was one that BT had installed with BT Vision) so I can use the radio again for a while if I want to; but the problem is rife, and I know so many people have simply been forced to give up their radio hobby because of it. Things have moved on to the point where a so-called "technology" is allowed to render the entire HF radio spectrum useless in many areas just for the sake of having the telly and router at opposite ends of the room without an Ethernet cable between. A few years ago, EMC laws would have protected the radio users and upheld the very principles that EMC laws are there for; these days, it's all about corporations and money and loopholes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
