Without quoting all of this email, I'd like to say that this exchange
between Rob and Cathy has been very good. Both of them make excellent
points. And from where I sit, there are MANY ham radios.
Ten years ago, I moved from Chicago to Santa Cruz, CA, which is just an
hour from Palo Alto, the birthplace of Hewlett Packard and the heart of
Silicon Valley. I'm a member of three clubs -- a DX club more or less
local to Silicon Valley, a contesting club whose membership is spread
over a 175 mile radius, and a club local to Santa Cruz. The membership
of each of these clubs ranges from those with little or no technical
background to those with very broad technical backgrounds to those with
very specialized technical backgrounds. Some are from the RF world, some
from computers and programming. There are members with vast experience
in advanced telecom, others who have built and maintained VHF/UHF
repeater systems both commercially and for hams.
The vast majority are either on Medicare or about to qualify. I could
count the under-21 membership of any of these clubs without taking my
shoes off, and it's the local club that has the most of those. That
local club has, by far, the greatest "shack on the belt" membership, but
it also includes a lot of hams with extensive technical backgrounds.
NR0V, who developed the Pure Signal algorithm is a member of that club.
So is AE6TY, author of the excellent SimSmith freeware Smith chart
program. K6XX, one of several engineers employed by Elecraft. WA6NMF,
owner of a small company making world class studio microphones. Another
of my ham neighbors, W6GJB, is an aeronautical engineer retired from the
space program, and holder of a dozen or more patents. He doesn't build
gear, but he does build stations.
Another neighbor, KA6SQG, developed and built a very sophisticated
multi-site UHF repeater system that is SIMULCAST ! The transmitters are
synchronized to the Hz, the receivers are voted to feed the entire
system when the PL is 100 Hz, or to feed only one repeater when the
local PL for that repeater is transmitted. That system, which he is
continuously expanding, is designed for emcomm, with a goal of talkie
coverage from north of San Francisco to south of Monterey. That's quite
an achievement, given that there are multiple mountain ranges in the
way! The link below describes that system in considerable detail.
There's also a slide show and a audio/video recording of a talk at
Pacificon. Matthew was licensed at age 11; his dad is WB6ECE. A few
years ago, his older son, then 10 years old, passed his Tech exam.
http://www.wb6ece.org/technical-info.html
The monthly general membership meetings of that local club are generally
pretty boring, but the strongest point of this club is the bi-weekly
Saturday morning CAKE sessions (coffee-assisted knowledge exchange).
There is sometimes an invited presentation (one of the Elecraft guys did
a great one on three ways to do remote ham radio, only one of which was
theirs), and every attendee is invited to bring something to talk about.
An important part of these sessions is mentoring of new hams.
The contest club and DX club have members who have led and/or
participated in DXpeditions to some of the most remote places on the
planet. Those are MASSIVE exercises in station-building (and design),
logistics, organization, as well as both physical and mental stamina!
I don't build gear, but over the last ten years have built a station
beyond my wildest dreams. I've done a lot of research and published it.
And I've done a lot of tutorial writing aimed at both new and old hams.
Since 2010, I've been a contributor to the ARRL Handbook. Like Rob, and
many other members of this list, my hamfest purchases are from the flea
market (out here they're called a "swap meet")!
So I say that there are MANY ham radios.
73, Jim K9YC
On Tue,1/3/2017 6:17 AM, Catherine James wrote:
Rob Atkinson<ranchorobbo@gmail.com> wrote:
"All this demonstrates is that there are two ham radios..."
There are at least two ham radios, and probably more. Even among builders, the
one that involves restoring boat-anchor gear doesn't have much overlap with the
one that involves homebrewing microwave gear.
In my own local ham radio club, I can think of three active members (including
myself) who routinely build or repair stuff and have the experience to do it.
The others are either recently licensed, not very active, or strictly operators
who don't build.
"Some of you inhabit a world foreign to mine. In my ham radio, nearly everyone I
know is a 'ham in a basement with a soldering iron'."
Do you belong to a local club that includes newly-licensed hams? Or does "your" ham
radio consist entirely of hams who have been doing this for 10+ years? How many hams in
"your" ham radio do not have gray hair?
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