Goodwatch – A Ham Radio Wristwatch (2020)
kk4vcz.com
kk4vcz.com
He even gave me a couple GoodWatch boards. Nice guy!
Side note, as someone who works adjacent to the RF and electronics industry, getting my Ham license was the best thing I could have done to help my CS brain understand the radio and electronics side of what we do. If you’ve ever been curious about getting your license, I highly recommend it!
I still remember that he was W4LMU, and searching on it finds this:
https://www.qsl.net/kq4pl/skeys.htm
His gear was huge, still used vacuum tubes (already retro in the 1980s but he was a Ham), and consumed enough power to run a small neighborhood. He'd be delighted with this.
Personally, I had been thinking about getting my license, but finally did it as a extra skill for my SAR team application. As the younger guy with the rope skills, I got into infrastructure work. Towers and antennas and remote cameras and microwave links, etc.
People are into everything from mesh networking to digitally encoded communication methods to hiking to remote mountaintops and seeing how many people you can contact to building prepper type SHTF communication systems to contesting and seeing how many/how far contacts you can make to setting up data collection systems for scientific research to supporting public safety, large events, and emergency communications. And a lot more I'm not coming up with off the top of my head.
My local radio club was in an area with a lot of retired defense and aerospace type engineers but it also had younger folks from tech, media and anything else type backgrounds.
People talking on the radio is sort of dead. HF is still popular. There is FT8 digital mode that let's make contact with low signal. I've reached Australia, Chile, and Russia from west coast.
There is a lot of hacking, but it doesn't seem to get into mainstream. But there are lots of things to build; I have little radio waiting to be soldered.
That's a shame. I have vivid memories of one radio or another chattering away in my dad's study when I was a kid. Of course, to the point I guess, he's still around but doesn't really do any of that anymore himself. He now mostly plays with radio astronomy in his dotage.
I don't have any reference to how it used to be, but there's a fair amount of voice activity on the 2m and 70cm repeaters near me.
In my area, we used to have quite a bit of traffic on one 2m repeater, mostly around morning and afternoon commute times. We had a retired police officer who seemed to spend most of the day chatting. He went away, and most of the chatter went away with him. I would guess all the guys who used to talk while in their cars are still out there, but no one is getting the conversation ball rolling like he used to.
Mike - KE8ATC
Cheap, firmware hackable HTs are hawt, in particular the Quansheng UV-K5,K6.
Tons of SDR receivers out there to explore, and many extremely exiting transceiver projects out there also. Just so much:
Makes me really happy to run across random unexpected things like that
The PoC||GTFO series, I only have vols 1 & 2, have to be some of the most fascinating books ever published. These and Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment are the most fun in my bookcase.