Well, quite a lot really. Everything that uses radio waves – mobile phones, WiFi, TV, Microwave ovens, broadcast radio. All these wouldn’t be around if not for amateurs.

When radio waves were first discovered it was just a curiosity with no practical applications at the time. They were not very controllable and equipment to produce them complicated and dangerous. Any thought to use them as a communication channel would be ambitious, as the range that anyone could get with it was just a few metres at best, and that produced only a spark at the other end.

People started experimenting with them to try and figure these radio waves out. These people were not being paid to do this, they were the first amateurs. Gradually they worked out how to increase the distance that they could detect them by erecting an aerial, and how to control them better. The first useful detectors of these radio waves was known as a coherer, simply a glass tube full of iron filings, which increased the range that they could be detected.

At this point, there was no thought that they could be used to transmit speech as all they could do at the time was turn it on and off.

At some point, someone decided that the radio wave transmitters were useful enough that they could be used commercially to make money by transmitting information using Morse Code. Experiments were conducted and the first transatlantic message transmitted. For the first time, you could now communicate with people the other side of the ocean in near real time – certainly faster than a ship could travel there. Commercial radio was born. Ships started to have radio equipment installed so they could keep in contact with shore stations. All this using morse code.

All this was made possible because people experimented with radio wave long before they had any useful applications – the first amateurs. This story continues today – amateurs continue to make advancements. Amateurs are continually developing ways of using radio. Amateurs were to thank for developing a way of “tuning” the waves so that you could have many stations transmitting without interfering with each other, and this passed on to the commercial world. Amateurs developed ways of transmitting sound, not just on/off and this also passed on to the commercial world.

Amateurs are the ones who make the majority of advances in radio. The commercial world uses these advances and may tweak them to make the ideas better, but it is the amateurs who generally make the advances, which are then used by the commercial world. So, what have radio amateurs done for you? Quite a lot.