About two years ago I got a ham radio license. I haven't done anything with it so far, but I just ordered my first HF radio transceiver, and materials for a ~100ft temporary antenna in my back yard (I'm extremely lucky in that my new house has a 120ft tree in the back that I can lift a wire into).

We're approaching a peak in the solar cycle, which means that over the next year or so it will be unusually possible to communicate over extremely long distances. You can look at dxmaps.com/spots/mapg.php (especially the "10m" and "40m" tabs) to see real-time examples of the kind of distances I'm talking about: In the evenings, if my setup works well, I'm expecting I'll be able to have conversations with people in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, without any intermediate infrastructure at all. This is such a wild thing to be able to do; I'm really excited.