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RF Cafe

rfcafe.com

250 pointsgregsadetsky44 comments

Ham radio websites might be my favorite genre of website. Their design is always a throwback to the internet of my youth, and they almost always have tons of interesting technical content.

> throwback to the internet of my youth

It's interesting how simple advertising is as well.

> Please Support My Advertisers!

Some jpegs. No js, no moving shit, just logos, some text, some call to action in a banner format. That's it.

Also:

> A random number generator determines which company's Banner Ad will go in a particular position*. I wrote the code myself and it is very simple and foolproof.

> I do not collect page traffic or link click statistics for advertisements. Your website server statistical analysis is a much better reporter of inbound links from RF Cafe than I or anyone else can provide.

Nice.

> Banner Plan: $400/month

I count 22 advertisers, so there's obviously lots of incentives for advertisers to work with this site. Good for them, and nice to see it can still be lucrative for what I believe to be a single person operation. Quality content still matters.

More importantly, because the ads are not evil (no tracking attempts) then my adblocker and privacy plugins do not recognize them as any sort of threat. They are rendered just like any other honest jpeg. So these adds are more effective than 99% of all other adds: I actually saw them!

While I agree with the sentiment, the world of Internet advertising just doesn't run like that at this point. The current advertisers all look like they're in the RF equipment supplier, which is probably, all things considered, what we'd probably call a niche. I would totally prefer things to be that way, but having compared to major ad networks, in the eyes of advertisers, doing things this way mostly mean throwing away that sweet sweet analytics data and some control. There's just very little incentive for most businesses past a certain scale looking to advertise to do things this way.

It's a niche website, and they're advertising for people who are interested in that niche. I do hands-on work with RF sometimes, and I learned of at least two new-to-me companies with products that relate to the space I operate in while just poking around the website for a few minutes.

This isn't stuff that I want to buy for me to putter around with at home. It is instead stuff that I can use to solve problems for clients; things that be quoted as a part of a larger-scale job.

Like the advertising that supported the trade rags of yore, there's definite function to this very deliberate style of ad placement that probably isn't worth trading for that sweet sweet analytics and some control.

These weren't random ads for dick pills, Raycon headphones, or NordVPN. It is instead all highly-targeted and industry-specific.

It's remarkable in that I saw the advertising at all since I've been blocking ads on the web for as long as we've had a web to advertise on.

But I did see these ads. I noted some of them. None were garish or distracting. I took no action to block them.

If he's trying to offer ad placement for companies who want to inform people like me of the stuff they sell, and I think that he is, then: His method completely nails it.

I don't disagree at all, and as I said, I'd love for this approach to still be more of a thing. My point was more that it's taking an ever shrinking proportion of the advertising pie, cause your typical marketing people are more interested in targeting to as large a targetable audience as they can, meaning these smaller sites aren't even on their radar. They speak in hit and conversion rates. For niche markets however, as you said, there's visibly still an audience, so hat off to him for still offering that kind of space.

But that's always been the case. Do you think Vogue advertisers were ever the same as Byte magazines or whatever?

> the world of Internet advertising just doesn't run like that at this point.

They're doing it though.

> the world of Internet advertising just doesn't run like that at this point

It has always worked this way:

1. if you can sell the ads yourself, you get better rates and better, relevant advertisers.

2. if you can’t sell ads yourself, you use ad networks and send your audience the worst of the internet.

All the major pubs do this. It’s impressive that a smaller outlet does it.

Bonus 1. I see it despite having an ad blocker.

Bonus 2. If ads were like this, I wouldn't need the ad blocker to start with.

Ah yes, the good old internet where “you cannot access this website from your region” was the absolute norm. Why cant i access this website? God knows. I just cant.

This is most definitely NOT the internet of my youth.

Love this design. Kind of reminds me of this Norwegian web shop: https://arngren.net/ hasn't changed much since the early 2000s or even late 90s

Reminds me of the early 90's internet I used to browse. Filled with people obsessed with tech and zero politics. I miss that internet.

I love the information density on that page. Feels like very fresh compared to today's minimal pages.

You'll love this one then:

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/

Just, whatever you do, do NOT press the red button!

Old school Japanese sites - same vibe.

> Your country is not allowed to access this resource

https://archive.ph/ZAFHY

Which country is that? Here in Spain it works fine.

Brazil.

Same thing here. I can get it with Tor as most of the exit nodes as far from Brazil (for good reason).

Perhaps we should mirror the entire site (it seems to be plain good old HTML) and archive it on IPFS or so to get rid of these dumb geoblocks.

Not working from Thailand

Thanks! I wonder why. In the EU we see a lot of American sites blocking us because they don't want to bother with the GDPR, cookie permissions and such. For example https://www.homedepot.com/ . But I don't think Thailand has such restrictions?

On the About page (https://www.rfcafe.com/business/about-rf-cafe-disclaimer.htm) there's a map showing some high level visitor distribution, and there's a couple of dots in Thailand.

There's also the following copy on the same page:

"Repeated, crippling DDoS attacks from the following countries has caused me to block their access. Apologies to the innocent.

Brazil, Singapore, Angola, Seychelles, UAE."

My guess is that the geolocation Gods placed GP in Singapore.

Weirdly that works for me in the UK, despite us having the same laws.

RF always had a reputation of being a black art. There was a brief time in the late 2000s where RFIC design was the top paying field for EE grads.

With the rise of Meta, Google, etc paying CS grads 500k etc, now it's quaint and hilarious, if you check r/chipdesign, the millenial RF practitioners still think you need a MS/PhD minimum to get a grad job.. Fellas, there's not a single Stanford EE grad that still wants to work in your field... and half the RFIC designers went took their MATLAB skills into "Data Science/ML".

I'll spare both of us the rant but this comment won't age well.

It's already not aging well

Even though there are so many packed buttons and links it seems to like a vastly superior design compared to modern websites. I don't know if it's me being used to this or if we went wrong somewhere.

Funny, I entirely disagree. On one hand, the design itself is heartwarming because it's old internet. Also, once you navigate into the topics, things are neatly organized, and there I agree with you. But the content on the main page itself lacks a common thread, no idea where i'm supposed to read or what belongs together.

I'd say there is a pretty common thread for it, but man is it a mishmash of interests, which really makes it charming.

It's certainly not focused. Sure this site is about RF, but the owner decided they'd throw in basically all their interests into one website. I mean, it has crossword puzzles and a jokes page :D

This is the site to send someone to who wonders "What was the internet like before Web 2.0".

It’s horrible to use on mobile. Which you may or may not care about, but that’s why this style of design died out.

I just browsed it on mobile. Each article preview is in a little box, just scroll around to it. It works fine for me.

The alternative modern mobile view leaves very little on the page, and forces you to click back and fwd, and back button functionality is usually broken. I think it's easier to scroll

Hmm. If only we had some sort of language that would allow us to display a page in different ways without losing meaning. Hmm....

This is amazing

What is a 40 GHz , 20 W amplifier used for in amateur radio circles?

There's a HAM band at 47 GHz in the US : https://hamradiohub.com/ham-radio-frequencies-bands-in-the-u...

It provides 200Mhz of bandwidth so it would make a nice point to point high speed microwave link

Isn't encryption forbidden on the amateur bands? Pretty useless if you can't run TLS.

Yes it is. But there are many things it can still be used for. In Holland for example they use microwave connections to create a backbone network to do things like repeater linking and to distribute amateur TV without using the internet like most current repeaters do.

See some of their applications here: https://hamnet.nl/toepassingen/ (Sorry, it's in Dutch but you can use a translator :)

Only if it's used to obscure the meaning of a message.

You can encrypt passcodes and remote control commands for sattelites and other radio control codes for various craft or devices. You can also still use message authentication codes for integrity of plaintext messages.

Telemetry is fair game for encryption IIRC as well.

The secret is nobody can tell. There are probably like 5 people playing with that band who have the equipment to receive it and as long as you don't do anything too obvious within literal line of sight of those 5 (very old) dudes the world is your oyster.

Reducing the effects of loss over long distance coax runs.

20W is a lot to pump into a piece of coax if it's not going to an antenna. Besides usually the practice is to simply put the signal handling equipment at the antenna, or down convert to a lower frequency like an LNB does.

I would imagine it's more for a local microwave link. Microwave antennas have huge gain due to their directionality so 20W can do a lot. And you are limited to the horizon anyway.

I'm getting a

" Your country is not allowed to access this resource "

Quite odd

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