negative on the echo link, I have a Icon 746 pro and some other goodies. all going up to 74" to the top of my tower, 2meter 4 element beam at 74' 6 meter beam at 68' 2meter 13 element beam at 60 ' and a Mosley 33 senior 4 element 14" boom beam at 51' . just last month I got qso at Itally, Sydney Austrailia and France all in the same day.
I only have a dual band HT and a 2 meter Icom V8000. My neighbor has quite a shack with 2 HF radios one Yaesu and one Kenwood. He has a 1/2 wave 40 meter folded dipole and a couple of verticle antennas. I've been on HF in his shack but spend most of my time on the 2 meter. I've talked to a guy in England on a local repeater that he accessed through echo-link.
Mostly goof off on PSK31 and a couple HF nets. Not a contester or world coverage guy. I use folded dipoles on 20m & 40m and an old TS-140. Nothing fancy, just functional.
K4RAK here. Not real active but have an ICOM 6M, 2M, 70cm handheld and a few homebrew antennas. Also have an old Heathkit HW-8 QRP CW rig that hasn't been used in 30 years. Need to get that out, dust it off, and re-learn code.
Got my Tech license a few years back, but haven't used it much. I have a handheld. Funny, I was just thinking about amateur radio when reading the recent thread on VHF range.
We are in an area with great cell coverage, which is much easier to use than radio in an emergency.
I have the general license as N0JLG. NW MN has active people all over the place. Recently put my toe in the DMR world. As always, much, much, much to learn.
I am not, but out of curiosity I looked up why it is called "Ham" radio. Very interesting. Turns out it is the last name initials of the three guys who started the first amateur wireless station. Their names are Hyman, Almy, & Murray, hence HAM. This happened back in 1908.