In grad school I used to work on a mountain top about 30 miles out of the city. There was about a mile of gravel road to get there and it was not plowed in the winter so I had to ski in (carrying my supplies for a few days including a 25 lb block of dry ice (until we built refrigeration for the sensors). There was a phone line but it would occasionally go out (tree limbs). I tried CB radio but it really wasn't very useful so I thought I'd try ham radio. So my dim memory recalls that there were 4 levels of license at that time (1979): novice, regular, advanced, and extra. They all required morse code 'way back then. The novice license was limited to code only. Voice was the prerogative of the higher classes. So I went about studying morse code. I finally figured I could handle 5 words/minute so I went in for the test. The test started with 20 words/minute for the extra license. Of course it was all a blur. Then 13 words/minute for the regular and advanced license. After the 1 minute test I had copied 5 characters. I took the test, which was a multiple guess test. I passed it somehow.

Having passed the code test, the test on rules/regulations and radio theory were no problem to a graduate student so I walked out with an advanced ham license.

The ham license did not allow me to transmit data from my remote site to work, but I could talk to people on 2 meters. Pretty easy to build up a group of friends to talk to, so if I ever had a problem I could just ask them to make a phone call. Some of the 2 meter repeaters eventually could connect to the phone system so I could make a phone call directly.

As far as the lower frequencies were concerned, it was pretty easy to talk to people around the world. It was random: you never knew whom you were going to talk to. But most of them spoke english. But the signals were frequently noisy and my hearing has never been all that great so noisy voices just weren't my thing. I concentrated on morse code. After a couple months of playing around I got my code speed up to 35. Faster than I could write it down.

So I collected gear. Eventually I had a 50' tower with a triband antenna and a 40 meter beam. Then I got a tractor. One day my wife decided to mow the lawn. The roll bar snagged one of the guy wires and bent the tower in the middle. It fell away from her. That was pretty much the end of my HF activity.

I continued on 2 meters for a while. I used to go to work at 5am so there were a few people who were commuting at that time and we usually spent the commute talking. There was one guy who lived in Pawtucket RI and worked in Nashua NH. He had to drive all the way across MA to get to work and back.