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Comment by caseyy | Hacker News Reader

I wish this was for sale assembled. I know probably about 50% about printing PCBs compared to what I’d need to know, don’t have a 3D printer, and I expect that the firmware and apps probably have at least one or two quirks to take into account. All together, this makes it a big difference in accessibility between being able to buy an assembled item and tinkering oneself. I know tinkering is fun for many people, but having a mobile ham is fun for many more.

P.S. Upon second glance, it looks like I’d need soldering skills, too. These things really add to the price. The price of components may be $35, but the cost of learning all these things (time) and mistakes along the way may be in the thousands if we take the hourly rate of a tech worker. Flawed comparison, I know, but you get the point.

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> soldering skills

It's...not that hard. Unless we're dealing with SMDs, soldering takes about a weekend to learn correctly. Most DIY kits involve through-hole components that you can master after you take a cheap iron to a couple dozen header pins or something equally banal. SMDs, on the other hand, take a bit more finesse, but can be achieved with a wee bit of time and patience.

I work in industrial controls and it blows my mind how many people in the field are terrified of soldering, even something as simple as tinning wires so the crimps fit a bit better, let alone the amount of "DIYers" I meet that don't even own an iron. Y'all are holding yourself back by not learning this easy-to-grasp skill.

SMDs are not that bad, I always design my boards with SMD components, though I never put smaller than 0805. The chips are even easier to solder once they are fixed at two or three points. I totally abandoned THT elements once I felt confident with surface mounts. I'm doing this with an iron tip, so no BGAs for now (until I turn old toaster oven into a PCB oven).

It’s not necessarily about how hard it is, but what’s the ROI on learning a skill. If soldering was something I did at work or if I often repaired my own electronics, then it could even be worth learning it if it took a month of evenings. But as I’d not have many of the tools and schematics to do component level repair on today’s electronics and I almost never need to solder anything at my software engineering job, so this skill would be used maybe once or twice in a decade on a hobby project, it is mostly not worth investing even one weekend.

We can learn a lot of skills that are useless. Coming from a conservative family, I learned to play the violin and piano at a very young age instead of spending time with friends. These are skills I never have any use for and I’d rather just have some better memories from my childhood. Even if learning to play piano was relatively easy — with one weekly lesson over about 6 months it is extremely doable.

Those are sort of the real costs and benefits of learning skills. Easy or hard doesn’t mean necessarily that it’s worth or not worth learning.

Respectfully, you're over thinking it. In the time you took to write this post (what was the ROI on that?), you could have soldered your first thing. Unless you're really not interested, you should just do it.

Touché

Honestly, learning things and doing projects together brings memories too. If that wasn't the case, your family was doing it wrong.

Plenty of kids jam together in a garage, have awesome memories from the school band, or otherwise. Great memories are formed. Or sitting around a camp fire playing a harmonica or a guitar.

If you're learning "instead of" rather than "as a means to," well, there's your problem.

Learning how to solder (and to solder very well) is much easier than learning to play the piano or the violin.

It's also tool-using skill that changes the way one thinks about stuff; it opens doors.

These days I'm fairly comfortable and confident with ordering custom PCBs to support various hardware and software projects. This lets me build stuff that I would not have imagined without the ability to solder.

I don't do component level repair at work or at home if it goes beyond changing out an obviously-bad electrolytic capacitor or something, but I have rescued many things quickly and inexpensively by swapping things like obviously-bad electrolytic caps. That saves me money, and by extension it also saves me time.

I wouldn't have ever considered any of that if I didn't know how to solder.

Bonuses: Unlike learning piano, it doesn't take six months to learn soldering. And unlike the piano itself, the soldering kit is inexpensive, portable, and low-maintenance.

I think a relevant gap you may be underestimating is "if you finish your solder job and it just doesn't work, what now"?

Just getting some melted metal onto a thing is really ~none of the skill cap that makes it "scary", when it inevitably doesn't work, the skill involved in debugging it, fixing the issue (desoldering), identifying if you fried other small cheap components that may need to be replaced, that's really the part that makes soldering a scary skill.

FWIW I think this is an example of a broader class of "being a beginner is much harder than knowledgeable people think"; if you're skilled then you also actually don't make nearly as many basic mistakes to begin including the connection being bad, accidentally shorting, wrong polarity, wrong sized component, and you'll recognize something might be problematic right when it happens. That means you don't even need to do noideadog debugging when a beginner must.

You can probably imagine doing "carefully solder and just fail the project if it still doesn't work at the end" being a strategy that would have a pretty good success rate, when it would actually have a dismal project success rate for an actual beginner.

All of those knowledgeable people were beginners once, made those mistakes, and came out the other side as knowledgeable people. You'll never do anything if you don't start somewhere. This is a fairly simple electronics project, with relatively easy soldering.

I am not sure what gap you mean, since troubleshooting is part of the learning process. If someone expects to always get it right the first time, they are a bad student. Problem solving is relevant to all learning.

What I meant is that the comment said that you can learn soldering in a weekend and described only the physical aspect of getting solder onto some components.

I spent a number of weekends trying to get any intuition over basic circuitry components and how you might debug things and got basically nowhere. I can put some hot metal on stuff but it's not useful if you can't debug and the knowledge needed to debug isn't remotely obtainable in a weekend.

> may be in the thousands if we take the hourly rate of a tech worker. Flawed comparison, I know, but you get the point.

I get what you're trying to say, but if "tech worker hourly rate" is your metric and "putz around with ham radio" is your goal, honestly, the answer is go buy an off-the-shelf radio for 1-3 TechWorkerHourlyBuckaroos [1]

If the goal however is "tinker with electronics", the relevant metrics are precisely "counting up the mistakes" and "tallying up the opportunity cost wasted at the workbench".

"Why buy this for x when I can build it for x^n" is the motto of any sufficiently-respectful building-shit hobby in the era of global drop-shipping.

[1]: +/- the "ham spectrum requires a test and a license before you can touch it" legaleese

Don’t get discouraged. This is a good opportunity to dabble in each of these areas and this is a project that the author shows will work, so you can follow the recipe. There’s some up-front investment for tools, but you may find it fun and challenging.

You have to get a ham radio license and a callsign to lawfully make bodily contact with a ham radio device. Reading through textbooks and taking tests on a sunday and shaking hands with cellular clones of Gabe Newell and all that.

Allegedly that's easier for some or unbearably gross for some in comparison with soldering.

You only need a ham license for transmitting, not for working on radios or listening

You can learn all these things at your local makerspace, and teach whatever your skills are to give back to the community.

If learning some DIY skills isn't your jam, then maybe a DIY ham project isn't for you.

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