Can a HAM operator listen to any other hams?
Yes. yOu can listen to operators all over the world, depending on the reception situation and all that. You don’t have to talk to listen, though I couldn’t tell you where great sources of information are.
Of course, world-wide reception is very dependent on atmospheric conditions. The signals can “skip” off layers of the atmosphere, from thousands of miles away, and then suddenly not be there any more.
I really should be doing some listening myself - I have the setup and a general license. I just haven’t been “hamming it up”.
Oh absolutely! It was the whole purpose for creating public frequencies back before WWI. There was no internet, no trans-oceanic cables, no way to talk to people beyond the telegraph basically.
I remember the Pueblo incident in 1968. We were trying to get signals out of North Korean waters via short wave and it was hit and miss. Atmospherics were terrible. Such a comm problem today is almost inconceivable.
Ham radio operators always try a CQ call (seek you) to get an operator in some hot or remote global spot and by mail exchange QSL cards. Some of those cards are priceless keepsakes. One of the most prized QSL cards is from Pitcairn Island in the eastern Pacific where Fletcher Christian and some of the mutineers of the British man of war HMS Bounty settled, hiding from Royal Admiralty justice.
Ham radio (amateur radio) operates on bands set aside for non-official communication and experimentation. For instance, broadcast television began on the amateur bands with what was called 'slow scan video'; slow scan because there were maybe only 10 frames a minute or slower as opposed to later commercial television with 30 frames per second - which required more bandwidth than could be achieved on short wave. Of course what they called 'short wave' is today very long wave, up to 80 meters in wave length as opposed to, for example, today's UHF broadcasts which are a fraction of a meter.