That’d be Guinea fowl, but all you’ve done is created a new problem unless you have a large area for them to range and a high tolerance for bird guano.
Can confirm. Grew up in suburban Atlanta during the period depicted, including getting caught in the first big Freaknic blowout he describes. It’s so dead-on it made me homesick.
I used it exclusively for my graduate theology studies - all my papers, presentations, and so on. Along with Zotero, I had everything I needed.
Just for fun, I did a few papers in LaTex, but I ran into a minor footnote formatting issue that I couldn't fix, so I didn't use it for my closure projects. LibreOffice was fine.
Also an Extra. I actually delayed renewal this year, but then re-upped when I remembered that I'd been using the callsign@arrl.org email forwarded for a bunch of stuff and shelling out for one more year was easier than hunting down all the places I'd used it. I'll probably address that soon and let it go for good after this year.
With a handheld radio and a Technician License, you can get on the air via local repeaters, work the VHF/UHF satellites, tinker with APRS (using something like this: http://www.mobilinkd.com/).
$500 will get you a good HF rig, but as another comment mentioned, you'll need to factor in the cost of a DC power supply, some decent coaxial cable and something to use for an antenna. Antennas can be dirt-cheap - just wire cut to length and lofted however you can.
/r/hamradio is a solid online resource. There's a semi-official IRC channel too.
Don't forget low-cost SDR dongles - great for introducing digital signal analysis, satellite communications (wxsat, etc), ADSB aircraft tracking, HAB, and other ham-adjacent topics. This sort of thing was unimaginably expensive when I was first getting interested in radio. The first WinRadios I saw advertised in hobbyist magazines were, what, $700 or more?
Absolutely! These are how I got started. Just buying an RDL-SDR [1] for $20-30 will open up an amazing world of possibilities and provide dozens of hours of entertainment scanning around the waterfall listening to various transmissions.
