What use is an F-call?

Recently I was sitting on a plane talking to a person whom I had just met. We were discussing our interests and experience and the subject of Amateur Radio came up. There was the obligatory CB radio comment and some discussion about marine radio, but the discussion boiled down to this:

"What's the point?"

I eased into the subject by observing that as a hobby I found it to be technically challenging without it having a direct relationship to my day-job in IT. We discussed the ideas that embody the hobby, non-commercial use, experimentation, discovery, camaraderie. We talked about the natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan and the subsequent issues with their nuclear power plant. I explained about making contacts and exchanging information, call-signs, signal reports, dealing with electricity and backup batteries and the like.

The conversation went for about an hour, we talked about the SES, about HF long distance contacts, the solar cycle, the ionosphere, experiments and the development of technologies like the mobile phone.

The thing that struck me during this conversation, looking at the topics we discussed, some in passing, some in-depth (well, to the depth of my eclectic knowledge at least), that Amateur Radio touches a lot of aspects of society.

I used to think that IT was the only field that impacted the world every where in every which way. Now I'm not so sure. Amateur Radio to me appears to have dibs on a large chunk. I supposes I'm saying that Amateur Radio has a public relations issue, people don't know it exists, yet it affects their lives in ways that most never even notice.

Perhaps all this just relates to my better understanding of the Radio Frequency spectrum and my personal part in the puzzle, but I think society would benefit from at least a smidgen of the understanding that comes with having an Amateur License.

If you have thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB