>>2198911there's a ton of shit you can do. it is a social hobby fundamentally but there's loads of cool signals firing through the ether at all times. for example, you can get free OTA tv with a cheap set of antennas (prolly <~$20). i don't know many people who choose to pay for cable these days so that's "useful" i suppose. all the coolest shit you can do becomes more and more technical. examples -
can listen in on all sorts of comms, from cops and ambulance to any service or organization that uses the space. some might be encrypted, much is not difficult to decrypt
moonbounce - basically, firing signals at the moon to get back to you. lot of competitions are related to distance contacts, in good conditions you can bounce a signal around the earth off of the ionosphere and hear the echo a split second later as it reaches you.
radio astronomy. be able to map space for asteroids and other cool things by monitoring the spectrum
decode GSM / SMS signals to listen to convos that are still on it or read texts. very boring and illegal however
along those lines there are all sorts of signals you can use to map and track boats, planes, get imagery from satellite broadcasts, receive fax messages, etc etc.
take a look at a frequency allocation chart and fuck around, it's fun and doesn't cost much to get into these days with shit like websdr
