So you got your technician's license? You get to do such fun activities as: call out on simplex FM voice for no one to respond or talk to the 70-year-old+ "repeater guys" who are on every day from 6 am - 6 pm about uhhhh radios, grilling, ex-wives if you want..... and then listen to the silence when everybody runs out of things to talk about in the presence of an "outsider" (someone who hasn't been on the repeater every day for 10+ years).
Not interested? That's fine, instead you can just listen to the activity on the repeater when they think no one else is around and hear interesting conversation topics like what the repeater guys would do if someone they were dating had an abortion including, but not limited to, "putting 2 between their eyes".
Not interested in even that? Okay, if your radio is capable of digital operation, you can connect to a system of linked repeaters and make contact with a different set of 70-year-old+ repeater guys. Once you make contact and talk a bit (maybe even have a good time listening to their stories if you're into that), you can look up their callsign and find their Twitter and find out they're REALLY RACIST and that probably the only reason they spoke to you in a polite manner or at all is cuz you have a "normal-sounding" male voice.
If this is what the self-policing culture of amateur radio is like (at least where I am in the United States currently) then we need to give many, many more Baofengs to unlicensed zoomers immediately
Anyway, that has been my experience so far in a rural area in the US. It hasn't been all bad (making contact with the International Space Station was cool) but yeah. I'm going back to a city soon, maybe it will be better there.
I really do want to get into this hobby and I love the technology (need to find the money sometime to do more packet stuff) but a lot of this type of stuff has been off-putting
Sorry to hear about all the negative experiences. It's so cool you've contacted the ISS, though. I wanna do it at some point as well!
I'm also in rural, southern USA (North Carolina. Only gotta drive about 2 minutes up the road to see a house with a confederate flag flying!) and similar experiences to yours have driven me away from most local nets. Some of the wild stuff I've heard these boomers (and older) say has made it unpalatable to say the least. I recall when studying for the Technician's exam, the study guide I was reading said "There's really no specific list of things you can't say on the radio, but basically don't say it if you wouldn't say it in front of your mother." Unfortunately a lot of these guys would clearly say a whole lot of casually racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, etc stuff in front of their mothers without a second thought.
One local net I was frequenting about 2 years ago had a woman show up and all the guys were just super weird about it. Like a video game lobby voice chat, but older and creepier. 🤦♂️
I agree we gotta start handing out cheap handsets and licenses to zoomers ASAP, lol. I'm a millennial (33) and would very much like for HAM radio to be more inclusive.