I'd love to do more local / device networking, but I feel that's basically a solved problem. I can plug zigbee modules in all day and make serial packets bounce anywhere.
Hackers are sparse geographically. It's not like my friend down the street would plug in his radio and we'd share packets. And if we did, why not use the internet?
HAM has been a bit of a letdown to me, too. I had higher / hackier hopes for it.
> that's basically a solved problem. ... why not use the internet?
Pretty close to everything you can do with radio signals is "solved", just like almost everything you can do with computers is solved.
But these problems have been solved by other people. Not you. What are your motivations for hacking at all? It's probably not because you're in entirely novel territory.
There are experimental protocols and PHYs... you just don't (generally) find them on the VHF repeaters, which, I agree are super boring.