The hardware architecture often isn't anything that exciting... but the algorithms and software can be quite intriguing -- there's some amazing things people can do with error correction and getting incredibly close to Nyquist limits.
Yeah, but satellites are filling the same roll of being able to provide communications when ground-based infrastructure is taken out... and -- unlike HF -- the limit to a satellite's bandwidth is largely dictated only by how big your wallet is.
It's kind of an odd world for hams who want to help out in diasters these days anyway... some government agencies embrace them, some just ignore them, and some are actively hostile towards them. Some of the later is probably due to some officials just not knowing what hams can do for them -- just as word processors largely replaced secretaries, Blackberries have largely replaced the the radio man.
HF is still quite cool, though -- I hope that kids today can appreciate that while, yeah, a run-of-the-mill cell phone gets you a megabit-per-second Internet connection, a camera, and voice communications, it relies on a truly massive infrastructure, and yet with not much more RF power than what a cell phone produces you can --often-- communicate to the other side of the planet with no additional infrastructure whatsoever.
---Joel