Plenty of hams live for the contact — the rare DX on the other side of the planet, the ragchew that runs past midnight, the contest sprint. I respect it. It’s just not the part that pulls me. What pulls me is the bench. The soldering iron, the oscilloscope, the moment a circuit I built does the thing physics said it would. I’m an edge-case ham: I do less operating and more tinkering, because I was in this for the electronics long before I ever keyed a mic.