I got back into the hobby after letting my license expire years ago. SDR and GNU radio are what pulled me back in. I feel like it's a renaissance for amateur radio.
Exactly. Terse QSOs get vacuous real quick. Most onair behavior seems to be stuck in the 1950s. With all the spectrum at your disposal, personal apps like (if in FL) monitoring red algae distribution using 23cm-band FPV on drones would be more interesting and practical.
Been pining over a SDR and that (well, TFA really) got me looking into renewing my license I let expire last year, luckily there's a 2-year grace period so all's not lost.
Also been wanting to play with some 70cm transceiver chips I got a while back off ebay but never really messed with.
As mentioned the RTL-SDR group on Reddit is good. You can also play without any hardware (and with better antennas) using online SDRs:
http://rx.linkfanel.net/
I personally use both rtl-sdr and a HackRF One. The HackRF makers have some pretty good videos on their site https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/
I've built a few basic radios from scratch as well, and the only reason is because the SDR makes it cheap to test and interface with whatever I make. Radio shack may be gone, but any component you could dream of is only a few days away via amazon, etc.
I’m not particularly social so qso’s around the planet aren’t really interesting to me beyond the basic astonishment of how far 5 watts can go.
The ability to tx from a weather balloon at 20 miles up and having an emergency means to communicate are way higher on the list.