Yeah, I got the German equivalent (Klasse E) a few months ago, and always don’t know what to say after someone responds to my CQ call. Mainly just been listening to other people on HF.

How hard is it to get into POTA/SOTA? I guess you might need to register somewhere?

I’ll have to look into that. While I can use some of HF, I don’t have a battery for portable HF. I’m not near any really large cities, and looking at the map there aren’t any parks near me. I might try hunting instead of activating.

Controlling a radio with a Steamdeck looks really interesting. I guess you’re using digimodes? The HW-9 also looks pretty cool. Since they stopped producing it in 1991, it’s approx. 30 years old. I’ve never tried building a radio from parts, I think I’ll stick to antennas though, I’m no good at careful soldering.

CRT screens generate bremsstrahlung (x-rays) from slowing electrons, so the front piece of glass is normally made of lead glass, or barium-strontium glass to block it.
After the General Electric incident, testing showed that nearly every manufacturers TVs were emitting too many x-rays. This led to the recommendation to stay 6 ft. away from the TV when it was on. The FDA then later imposed limits on how much radiation a TV was allowed to emit.
With the these regulations, if you were to absorb all x-rays from a CRT for 2 hours a day, every day, you would get 320 millirem per year (comparable to the average US background radiation of 310 millirem per year). See here, as well as this article.
Edit: Also, significant doses of x-rays can blind you. Radiologists in medicine particularly have to shield against it, since they are exposed to it every day, and exposure builds up. See here and here.
Edit again: Wasn’t paying enough attention. That last source talks about ionizing radiation specifically, so not x-rays.

Mine is a little messy. Sometimes I can fit my laptop in to run a WSPR beacon for a day or so.

A bit. Here’s one, I’m waiting for a friend to finish 3D printing a mounting point for the driven element.
I’m fairly new to ham radio, and like building antennas.

Yes, it’s for 2m. I don’t really have much use for it, since repeater coverage in my area is great. Though there is one I can only just receive with the rubber ducky antenna, so this might work for that.

I have line of sight to the Alps. I assume there is some SOTA going on there.

lemmy.world is your home instance, but you should have a way to select Subscribed/Local/All. Looks like this for me (in German):

That will show posts from all the instances lemmy.world federates with. The “main” instance is lemmy.ml.