Passed my Technician exam last week

[Electronic M]

Thanks everyone.

I managed to find the mobile rig. It is a 2 Meter only Midland 13-510. ISTR the ham that gave it to me told me the power regulators or supply was dead. This was ~1 decade ago, and I think the conversation went 'here take this, and start studying for the ham exam, by the time you pass you should be able to fix it'. If I get a chance (next week or two will be very busy for me), I'll try powering it up and see if there is life.

I'm probably never going to use CW mode as I don't know or honestly care to learn morse code.

Besides voice, packet radio and some of the other data formats, as well as some of the TV modes interest me.
I have some VHDL programmer boards and programming experience (getting rusty though) so it could be fun to try and build my own gear for the data modes.

The DX-60 probably is not going to be on the air (unless I can mod it for 6m). From what I saw on the ARRL's map of the ham bands it seems that the Technician segment of 10m is SSB only and the DX-60 is a AM/CW rig....It might be possible to use it as a TX amp for a weaker SSB 10m rig, but I'd probably be better off just modding an OLD motorola police/fire base station* I have that uses the same output tube type.

*That thing IIRC is FM mode just above the broadcast band, and probably not built to work on any current legal mode so it would be a great candidate for invasive modification/redesign/cannibalization.

I still need to look into local clubs. I know some exist. A few months ago I was chatting with a local ham at a thrift store, and he was telling me about IIRC a regular friday or saturday night chat about how to get started in ham radio that occurs in a frequency range that IIRC corresponds to the 2m band. If the Midland is a hard fix I think I have an RX (old regency scanner) that can tune that to listen in.