I can see why, with those letters and a 2
You might like SSB on 80 or 160 meters. More regional than a repeater, covering most of the SE and you should find people to talk to. CW is still going strong as well with more folks learning it. It’s not really fast code but people are using it.
The higher frequency bands are getting a little better. This last couple of weeks I’ve heard Cape town, SA, Canary Islands, Japan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador on 20 meters.
I never did much on 160. I have worked ssb on 80 & 40, but mostly on 15. 20 meters was always "kilowatt alley," and if you didn't run a lot of power, you weren't real successful. I had the FL2100B linear, but the only reason I bought it was for RTTY, which is FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) requiring 100% duty cycle, 100% "key down." I was running a Yaesu FT-101E back in those days, so I figured that if I cut back to about 30 or 40 watts out of the Yaesu, and fed that into the linear, I might get 300 or 400 watts out on RTTY, and nothing would be running all that hard. I made plenty of RTTY contacts without the linear, so I never used it. It still sits in its original box, somewhere down in the basement. If I ever were to try to use it, I think I'd power it up slowly through a variac, to let the filter caps "reform."
We (about a half dozen of us) formed a RTTY neighborhood net on two meters simplex. We all built ST-6 terminal units, and we were all on autostart. We had a "picture" net every Tuesday evening where we swapped RTTY pictures. Lots of cartoon characters, holiday pictures, and lots of Playboy centerfolds. This was back in the late 70's, and we also did something else that I believe, HAD to have been a "first..."
I used to work for the telephone company, and the Heathkit H-8 computers were fairly new. Two local guys who's back yards connected, both built H-8 computers. I supplied some telephone cable which they buried in their back yards, and established connection between the two houses. When they got their computers up and running, they used a spare pair in the cable to establish an RS-232 link between the two computers. One of the guys had, "Colossal Cave" (The Granddaddy of all adventure games) running on his computer, and the other guy interfaced his computer to his 2m radio. With the two computers connected via the RS-232 link, I sat in my house on 2m, with my TTY, and I would key up, type an adventure command, then immediately drop my carrier to get the response. I was able to play "Adventure" on 2m from my house, using the setup of both these guys computers & radios. This was all on (to the best of my recollection) 144.52 simplex. I believe it was a first back in the late 70's.
Today all "teletype" communication is electronic. It was fascinating to just watch the TTY machine (especially the Teletype model 28 ASR) typing away at either 60 or 100 wpm, smell the oil, and feel the heat and listen to the sound... It's just not the same without the MACHINE! Remember when every newscast you ever heard always had the sound of a teletype "tickey-tacking" in the background?
Thanks for the memories...