u/sunnyCUD2

Hi! I’m looking for a hobby that’s somewhat related to my field, and ham radio caught my attention.

I work on designing and building low-loss RF coils for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In many ways, I think there’s quite a bit of overlap with antenna and RF design. I have experience with impedance matching and tuning, amplifiers, filters, and other RF components. I also have some experience with microwave-frequency circuit design, although not as much.

The problem is that my work doesn’t always give me enough opportunities to scratch the itch of actually designing, building, and experimenting with hardware. I really enjoy that part, so I’m wondering if ham radio could be a good hobby for me.

From what I’ve learned so far, though, ham radio seems to have a pretty big emphasis on communication and actually talking to people. That part doesn’t interest me nearly as much. I don’t particularly care about talking to strangers, and I’m terrible at keeping conversations going anyway 😅. I’m much more interested in building circuits, antennas, filters, amplifiers, experimenting with RF/microwave stuff, and measuring how well everything works.

Would ham radio still be a good hobby for someone like me?

If so, what equipment would you recommend for getting started from a hardware/experimenting perspective? I did a little research and thought about getting a USB SDR just to explore the radio spectrum and understand the radio world a bit better, but some of them can get pretty pricey. Is that a good place to start, or would you recommend something else? Any ideas or advice would be appreciated!