##Ancient history
###When I was 11, back in the mid-1970s, my parents bought me a transistor radio for Christmas. It was a Benkson medium wave and longwave portable, made in Hong Kong, which fitted nicely in the hand, ran for ever on a PP9 battery, and with it I discovered (although I didn't understand the physics at the time) the wonder of over-the-horizon radio communications.
We lived in Devon in the south west of England and during the day I could hear all the usual BBC stations you would expect, but at night it brought in dozens of foreign broadcasters too. As night falls the D-layer of the ionosphere becomes depleted when the sun's ionising effect fades, so the medium wave signals it absorbs during the day can get through to higher layers of ionisation, which refract them back to the ground hundreds or thousands of miles away. I was thrilled.
###Amateur (ham) radio
That was just the first step towards passing the amateur radio exam and getting my transmitting licence when I was in secondary school. This has turned out to be a life-long interest in radio not for entertainment or news, but for its own sake as a technical pursuit and for its ability to put you in touch with other enthusiasts on the other side of town or the other side of the world, without a computer in sight.
I wasn't the only boy at my school with an amateur radio licence, and at the time if you wanted a technical hobby it was the obvious thing to do. At around the time I got my transmitting callsign the Sinclair ZX80 and then the ZX81 personal computers came out, but I was doing long distance VHF radio all around Europe from my bedroom and I couldn't see the point - even if I could have afforded the kit version of those machines which you assembled yourself. I remember seeing the ads for them in Hobby Electronics magazine, but I couldn't imagine where home computing would lead in the following decades.
###Getting to the point...
Amateur radio activity has been going on since the 1910s and it is still popular today, although VHF in particular is quieter than it used to be. Computers are now integrated into the hobby, and a range of data modes make global communications possible even with very simple equipment and antennas, although to be honest I prefer the original digital mode, Morse, decoded with the traditional Mk.1 wet computer between my ears.
The point of this post, if there is one, is to reflect on what boys like me and my fellow hams at school in the early 80s would do now. A very few may still find their way to a local radio club and if they are lucky then among the mostly elderly men they find there will be someone who recognises their enthusiasm and potential and gives them some encouragement. Most technically-minded youngsters don't do that, and perhaps see a future in software engineering rather than, say, electronics.
Of course all of them, without exception and technically-minded or not, have instant global communications at their fingertips, 24/7. Something which my generation had to pass technical exams and a government Morse code test to be able to do is easily achieved by anyone with a 'smart' phone. This is not a bad thing by any means, but I think it has taken the magic out of communications, which have become not only ubiquitous and effortless but, because they rely almost exclusively on black box technologies and platforms, it means the users can't fully understand them and certainly don't own and control them. Call me old fashioned, but at least the ionosphere belongs to everyone.