@zombeebytes This is a complicated question!First: you actually really do need to know what you’re doing on the Amateur bands to make actual amateur radios work for you at all. That’s a lot of what the test is about. It takes actual expertise. So if you do the movie thing and walk up to a random transceiver and turn it on and start pushing buttons and cranking knobs, you’re probably not going to talk at all. And even if you do talk, you’re almost certainly not going to be heard.Second: If it’s an actual emergency with imminent threat to life or health and if you do manage to talk and be heard: you don’t need a license! Of any kind! It is legal – exactly as long as the emergency lasts.But you won’t know how to do that, and outside of those emergency circumstances, yes, you absolutely need a license and people absolutely care if you don’t have one, because it absolutely shows.As above, Amateur/Ham radio is complex. Getting heard isn’t that hard, but you can not only interfere massively with other peoples’ communications if you do it wrong, and you can actually destroy your own equipment if you do things wrong badly enough.So. That’s why you need the training/study necessary to get the license, and the practice during normal, non-emergency times to get it figured out, get at least decent at it, and hopefully get comfortable with it.Because if you’re not some degree of comfortable with it outside of an emergency, you won’t be able to do it in an emergency. For that, you need the training, and you need the license.
