[Jeffhs]

I live in an apartment building, so cannot use my HF gear. I stay somewhat active in the hobby, however, by using the local 147.81/21 repeater, which is about a mile or so from my apartment. I am a member of the local ham club, the Lake County (Ohio) Amateur Radio Association; have been for many years. I check in to the club's weekly 2-meter net, which also runs on Echolink. I cannot use EL with my computer at this time, however, since the program was erased from my system the last time I had it in for repairs; I am still trying to figure out how to reinstall EL on the computer since I switched to Ubuntu a few years ago, but I can still use EL and check in to the net using my 1.5-watt Icom IC-T22A HT with a 1/4-wave telescoping portable antenna.

Amateur radio is changing, to be sure, but it isn't dead yet, not by a long shot; I honestly do not believe for a second it will die any time soon, not as long as there are local FM repeaters and services such as Echolink. At nearly 65 years of age, I have no intention of moving from my apartment, so EL is allowing me to stay active in a hobby I have enjoyed since I was 16 years old in 1972.

Certainly, running strictly 2m FM and Echolink is not the same (far from it) as working the world with an HF station, but, my situation being what it is, I have pretty much resigned myself to it and am fairly used to it by now. Running an HT with Echolink and through my club's 2m repeater is nowhere near what I was running when I lived in a Cleveland suburb, but I am still somewhat active in the hobby, which is all that matters to me.

I will not let my license expire, or become completely inactive, just because I cannot use HF as I had been accustomed to when I had my HF station. One big advantage to running strictly 2m with a handheld is I no longer have to be concerned about losing antennas in windstorms (I lost at least one all-band HF dipole in high winds and snowstorms when I was active on HF), or having to worry about lightning striking the antenna.

One other tradeoff is I cannot use CW on the local FM repeater (or any such machine, for that matter), so I am resigned to using voice on that repeater. I wish I could use CW as I formerly did, but my circumstances, again, are such that I am more or less forced to operate FM voice, or nothing.

Using a local ham's station is out of the question as well. I say this because one local amateur, who lives only a block or so away from me, will not speak to me or have anything to do with me; the reasons for this are a mystery to me as I never did or said anything, that I am aware of, anyway, to cause him to shun me as he has been doing, literally for decades. I do not know any other amateurs in my area either (I live in a very small town, population 3109); I do not want to pester or to be a nuisance to anyone in the club I belong to, so when the person I just mentioned started ignoring me, I just gave up. That is, I will (and do) still occasionally check into my club's 2m net, but that's all.

I never thought after almost 50 years in ham radio it would come to this, but....oh, well. I guess if I had moved to a large city rather than to the village I relocated to 21 years ago (the reasons I moved from the Cleveland suburb in which I lived and operated my station until then are immaterial), things would be quite a bit different, but I am here now, and, given my age, I am in no position to move again except in case of a dire emergency.

73,