[Amps] Decline of homebrewing?

[Jim Brown]

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 at 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?