If you're interested in playing with radio, HAM equipment/bands aren't even the easiest/cheapest/most fun.
You can buy breakout boards for all sorts of protocols and such (most in 2.4Ghz) on Adafruit et. al. for a few bucks, and hook them up and play with them with a RPi, Arduino, etc. to you heart's content. Without a license.
Basic HAM gear is, for the most part, expensive (with the exception of cheap VHF hand helds), limited, big, heavy, bulky, and/or typically nowhere near cutting edge.
Dunno, depends on your interest. Sure you can pay $1000s on a nice rig, but you can also build a small radio that fits in a altoids tin for a few $10s.
The above are far from the cheapest, and smallest. There's quite a few solutions under $100 and smaller than a deck of cards, just depends on what you want.
Personally I wouldn't consider any of those particular expensive, big, heavy, or bulky.
Yes and no. But the broad implications are an issue. I've been a licensed ham for over a decade and dropping money on a nice HF radio and antenna is something I have not had the luxury of. Luckily now there are things like QrpLab kits and the Bitx, which do make it way more affordable, but they also require time, patience and willing to learn at least a little electronics. Which comes back around that for quiet a few people, cost is a barrier. I know plenty of people who would love to play with antennas, but have no interest in soldering components and they are not in a position to drop $700 bucks on a yeasu.
Amateur radio is a different beast. A full license permits 400 Watts!
Not that you need it if you are building an Adafruit weather station for your garden. That is to say — and and I say this with the utmost respect to my fellow license holders — actually doing something useful with the spectrum.
A lot of amateur radio culture is more about building your own equipment from scratch and then trying not to cook / kill yourself with it. It’s like an open access drag strip for home made muscle cars, as opposed to testing your hand built recumbent bike on the public streets.
Well the trick is, amateur radio is hard. If you want a community to help when there's a storm, earthquake, hurricane, power grid failure, large fire, etc you need them to practice regularly. Ideally with no external funding.
Hams are often civic minded, so they will help out in bike races, horse races, and similar events ... especially if they are out of reach of cell towers, which is quite common even in central california.
So if you want something to fall back on when the local cell tower and internet provider is down, you need to have something the community finds worth while to participate in when there's not an emergency. So it might seem like a useless hobby when there's internet and no emergency, but that's just the training for them to have the needed skills in an emergency.
You can buy breakout boards for all sorts of protocols and such (most in 2.4Ghz) on Adafruit et. al. for a few bucks, and hook them up and play with them with a RPi, Arduino, etc. to you heart's content. Without a license.
Basic HAM gear is, for the most part, expensive (with the exception of cheap VHF hand helds), limited, big, heavy, bulky, and/or typically nowhere near cutting edge.