I recently got my amateur radio license. I'm a Technician class, so I can't operate HF, which lets you talk long range.
This weekend, I went out to an ARRL field day event in Greenville, NC. It was hosted by the Brightleaf Amateur Radio Club (BARC), call sign W4AMC. I ended up working throught the night, from about 10PM to 6AM, local time. In fact, if you made any phone (voice) contacts with W4AMC between 1AM and 6AM, you were talking to me :).
I was operating on 20 Meters and 80 Meters, and probably made close to 100 QSO's over the night. Most of the night I was talking to the southeast, from Florida and Georgia, all the way over to Texas. I also made some QSO's with Minnesota, the Dakotas, and that region. I heard California several times. I even talked to someone in California on 20 meters, but the signal was pretty bad. He got my call sign, but couldn't get my report (3ANC), even after several attempts.
There was some other stuff there that was pretty cool. There was someone who was working morse code. He had a machine to do the standard exchange (call sign and report), but he could copy it and key it by hand, apparently very well. One person was working digital, essentially Teletype over radio. It also used about 1/20th the bandwidth of a voice channel. Another person was using IP over radio, and was sending e-mails.
Also, there was a rig setup to communicate over amateur radio satellites. It was pretty cool, it would track the satellites as they cross the sky. You also have to account for the doppler shift when communicating with the satellite.
