"This is KD4DYV," I said, announcing my ham-radio call sign for the first time in twenty years. "Can anyone hear me?"

Static.

I fiddled with my handheld radio, an old Icom IC-W2A, and tried again. Nothing. The radio was all that remained of a childhood hobby, back when I also had a big, boxy rig hooked up to a thirty-two-foot antenna in my parents' backyard, and a Morse-code key for tapping out messages. The technical name for all this is amateur radio, an old-timey pursuit in which operators pass a test, acquire a license and call sign from the Federal Communications Commission, and then spend their days chitchatting across the globe. The term ham was once an insult, a name professionals gave to amateurs with clumsy Morse skills and mediocre equipment.

When I joined as a squeaky-voiced 12-year-old in the 1990s, it was like discovering the Internet before the Internet. Ham is built upon the thrill of the contact: Operators routinely hold contests to reach, say, someone in every state, or they clamor to talk with a fuzzy voice floating in from some far-off island. To confirm conversations, they send each other a personalized postcard. I had hundreds on my wall.

But then I grew up. Now I'm 34, married, and with a kid on the way, and last fall my dad found my expired ham license. At first I filed it away as a memento. But then I remembered: When a disaster strikes, ham radios are pivotal to survival. Operators become community lifelines, with hams talking to each other and working with first responders to relay local conditions. There's even the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, a volunteer-based group. I still owned my old handheld, and it seemed foolish not to have it at the ready. So I renewed my license for free and set about seeing how ham has fared in the digital age.

The answer: quite well. There are now almost 725,000 licensed hams in the U.S., an increase of almost 200,000 since I bailed two decades ago. In part this is because of new technology that enables talk on previously inaccessible frequencies. And to encourage newcomers, the FCC no longer requires that hams know Morse code. There's also a new smartphone app called EchoLink that patches hams into transmission repeaters, devices that receive weak signals and retransmit them with more juice.

With my radio busted, I downloaded EchoLink and found a repeater near my Brooklyn neighborhood. "This is KD4DYV," I said again. "Can anyone hear me?" This time a voice rose from the static: It was Zane, a dad who lives down the street, and who earned his license two months ago. Zane recommended buying a $30 Baofeng UV-5R. "I'm on this repeater pretty often," he said, inviting me to return. I will, with my new radio. It's good to know I can reach a friendly voice. Hopefully just to chat, but also just in case.

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