Joseph, Still need to clear up some questions here. As you know, majority of hams are not yidden. In older threads you have come out very strongly against socializing in any way with these types of people. How do you reconcile this with the hobby.
As I mentioned in one of those threads, Rebbe Yehudah Hanasi was extremely close with the Roman ruler Antoninus. So much so that when he passed away, he cried and said nispardah hachavilah, the bundle has broken.
When I was younger, although I went to Orthodox schools, occasionally I met non-Jewish boys my age, who were extremely respectful, and we even built some projects together at each other homes. The parents of one would always get kosher ice-cream in plastic utensils for me.
Once I met a retired fellow who invited me and my family to come up to his home in New Hampshire any time we happened to be in the area, and once we did go to New England, and we took him up on it, and he and his wife welcomed my parents and myself and my siblings to his home on a lake and we had a nice visit.
More recently, A major officer of the club I belonged to who was a non-frum Jew passed away. He always conducted classes and organized meetings and was one of the best-known people in the club. I went to the funeral, and one of the speakers was a non-Jewish officer of the club, who is an extremely sharp-looking professional, and one of the major regional directors of ARRL, and was very close with this Jewish fellow, and he cried the whole time, they were so close. I thought, wow, this is the total opposite of anti-semitism, such warmth from a non-Jew towards a Jew. I was astounded.
Note that I believe if one is involved in yiddishkeit because he enjoys it, even non-Jewish friends will not cause him to go off the derech. I didn’t. However, if it is forced down one’s throat, and everything the child wants to do he is told no, then he may go off the derech to rebel. Yiddishkeit should be a happy and healthy experience which is not threatened by meeting other people.
But anyway, given your hashkafas, I am curious how you reconcile this hobby with your philosophy. If you are a baal teshuva, who was involved before you were frum, have you totally repudiated the hobby now?
On another topic, just wanted to clarify that when I received that citation for being out-of band, I had been out of the Novice area by only 1 KHz, and was probably due to the mechanical dial misreading the true freq (they used to be connected by string and pulleys from the knob to the tuning capacitor, something I learned from building kits, before electronic digital displays became widespread). Still, the FCC picked up on that.