The original article talks about attracting newcommers to the ham radio community, on the other hand I'm here to complain about the trouble of staying in the community.

From my experience, one major killer of ham radio is the horrible and dehumanizing electromagnetic interference in modern cities from 0 to 30 MHz. HF/shortwave remains the most interesting spectrum in ham radio - it's the only spectrum capable of international communication without specialized equipment or infrastructure, just throw a random wire out of the window, how wonderful it is.

Unfortunately, 0 to 30 MHz is also where most electrical and electronics devices operate at. A cheap bike charger with PWM control can easily disable all HF communication around it, so can a cheap switched-mode power supply, also, yes, builders of transparent PCs without metal enclosures, I'm looking at you (although it's not much of a problem compared to commercial devices)! Government regulations on EMI/RFI is useless when tons and tons of nonconforming devices made by the cheapest vendors are flooding the market. While it's easy to add filters or stop using them if they are yours, but in cities, you often cannot possibly know where they are coming from. And even worse, nobody cares - without a spectrum analyzer (or an SDR equivalent), nobody can see or smell it. Remember those stories about car key fobs being jammed? The media makes them sound almost mysterious, because EMI/RFI is unknown to the general public. Car keys are only a tip of the iceberg, VHF is actually pretty clean, HF is horrible. And even to some people with respective knowledge on the subject, many still don't care - the worst offenders, such as VDSL and Ethernet over Powerlines technologies, are fundamentally harmful to radio communication and can disable all HF receivers in sight. In an ideal world where telecommunication regulations are faithfully enforced, nobody should be allowed to use them, yet the interests of ISP trumps HF amateur services and governments allowed their deployment.

Even with all these jammers, HF is still somewhat usable, but only for picking up powerful stations, or using slow, digital modes designed for weak-signal communications. It's better than none, but quite limited (this includes digital modes that requires a higher signal-to-noise radio). When HF becomes a lost battle, the enjoyment and capabilities of amateur radio is reduced greatly. So one is forced to go somewhere else, either physical moving your home or your radio (not an option for most), or moving the spectrum of your operation: VHF (without special setups) is only capable of local communication. Then the only remaining choices for international communication are satellite communication, meteor scatters, and tropospheric scatter. They are interesting technical challenges much in line with the tradition of amateur radios, but far from easy like HF. For example, satellites at Low Earth Orbit are only usable when they are passing your location.

With the launch of the first geostationary amateur radio satellite, QO-100 (Es’hail 2), I can only hope the situation of amateur radio without HF will continue becoming better at the next decade and enjoy global coverage by geostationary satellites.