Oh good grief, just do like everybody else did first out of the box. Get yourself some old second hand shortwave set, toss a long wire up in a tree and connect it to the ANT terminal on the back. Plug in the radio, turn it on and start fiddling with the dials. Nobody told me where to tune or what to listen to, I just picked it up as I went along. Then I read something about a radio club in the back of a magazine and I was on my way.
What would you do without internet forums to ask questions on? You'd do what I did before the PC and the internet were invented, that's what you'd do. Kids these days are SO darn spoiled, I walked miles to school in six feet of snow...
"However, be advised that eventually, you will find yourself standing at the bottom of freeway off-ramp dressed in rags begging stopped motorists' for spare antenna parts."
But first you have to spit on the windshield and wipe it with a dirty old newspaper. You don't get something for nothing buddy! Oh, I almost forgot, those cars with Amateur Radio callsign plates are gold mines. I used to have a trunk full of antenna parts, bits of this and that, a tool kit and a butane pencil torch for emergency soldering. Careful with that, one time in New York a cop spotted it and started babbling something about crack, I said you can't use a torch on cracked circuit boards. He just shook his head and walked away muttering something about radio nuts.