The last thing I need in my life is yet another social media. As I perused Facebook, however, I noticed an advertisement for something called HamConnect. This new BuddyBoss social media site is designed specifically for amateur radio, or Ham, operators. It interested me because I am a “rookie.”

Like Facebook and Tea Party Community, they give you only a glimpse of what they are about unless you sign in. It is a new site and still in development. It is a much different look from Facebook. I just signed up on February 16, so this article gives only a general impression.

The first thing that I noticed is that it can be difficult to create a cover photo. With Facebook, you create a cover photo 851 x 315 pixels and your created cover photo fits right in. In HamConnect, I attempted to use one of my Facebook cover photos and the beautiful frame that I created did not show. I made several attempt to resize the cover photo with varying degrees of success. It appears that about 850 x 250 worked. The frame I created around the cover did not appear correctly, however. It appears that HamConnect tries to stretch the cover photo to fit it in the frame.

The controls are not similar to Facebook and there are less of them. They are actually quite well-organized compared to Facebook. It does not take long to get used to them.

There are several groups formed already. One is for ARRL members and the other for the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) created by ARRL. I am not sure who created the site. They do have a Facebook page. They started the Facebook page February 1, so you can see how new they actually are.

So far, I have not seen any news feed like you get on Facebook. I have not tried to include articles or photos into the feed for the world to see. I might start with this one.

Another problem is that you can invite friends to join. In the email, it gives a link to check out your profile. Clicking on the link, however, takes you to the main page to register. It should bring up your wall as the link indicates.

This site has a few problems, in my opinion, as any start-up does. There are not a lot of ads, as yet, but you can expect them. After they get more feedback, they will probably work on correcting them. Because it is limited to amateur radio operators, it is probably less likely that you will encounter trolls than on Facebook.