Over the past year, I’ve taken on a new hobby that has quickly become both fascinating and surprisingly relevant to my background in IT and technology: amateur radio.
I completed the licensing course with the Oslo group of NRRL (LA40) in the autumn of 2025, and received my amateur radio license in November the same year. Although I come from a technical background, this was my first real step into the world of radio communications as a hobby.
What has surprised me most is the sheer breadth of topics that amateur radio covers. It is far more than just voice communication over radio frequencies. It includes antenna theory, signal propagation, digital modes, electronics, and even software-defined radio. It’s a field where practical experimentation and theoretical knowledge meet in a very hands-on way.
One of the most interesting aspects for me is the connection between traditional radio and modern wireless technologies. As someone working in IT, I constantly see parallels between amateur radio and technologies we use every day— WiFi (2.4, 5, and 6 GHz), 4G and 5G mobile networks, Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, and Z-Wave. At their core, they all rely on the same fundamental principles of electromagnetic wave propagation, modulation, interference, and spectrum management.
Exploring amateur radio has given me a deeper appreciation of how these systems evolved. Many of the challenges that radio amateurs deal with—noise, range limitations, bandwidth efficiency, and signal reliability—are the same challenges that modern wireless engineers continue to solve at scale.
For me, this hobby has become a bridge between classic engineering principles and modern digital systems. It’s both educational and practical, and it offers a unique way to understand the invisible infrastructure that surrounds us every day.