I’ve had a few QSOs though amateur satellites. I bought a dual-band antenna from a company in the US and used a cheap Chinese handheld and my 20 year-old FT817 for the uplink and downlink. There was a surprising amount of activity, really tricky to make myself heard.
Yes, I’m new to Lemmy, ex-Reddit, and now I’m looking at what else I can do. I ran Linux Mint on an old laptop for many years, but that was when I was still working and I also had a company laptop on Windows if I needed it. So now I’m retired and currently I only have a refurbished Lenovo with Win 10, which goes out of support soon. I suppose I could do dual boot on that machine, but I’d rather have Windows in a VM for the rare occasions when I can’t get something to run in Wine. I have no idea where I’d buy a copy of Win 11, but presumably Microsoft have a store.