My father, W1HDX, similarly was so into HAM that it was a large part of my childhood, even though I never got my license. I very much remember his explorations of packet radio in the very late 1970s. And when he put up a couple of large dish antennas in the yard to start receiving weather satellite transmissions, the entirely ignorant neighbors complained that he was "irradiating the neighborhood" and the other local kids thought he was talking to space aliens. These days he's into mapping the radio emissions of H1 regions.