radioAe6rt

After a number of years away, I decided to rejoin the ranks of radio amateurs, having once been WN0OWP in Missouri, and now AE6RT. Mike Outmesguine’s book Wi-Fi Tricks contained a chapter on building a 3-element Yagi out of — a tongue depressor and three paper clips for 2.4GHz. One look at the picture of the completed antenna and I was thunderstruck. I could no more not go back to amateur radio and all its RF experimentation possibilities than you can not think of an pink elephant with purple polkadots right now.

Amateur radio during my father’s generation was as cool as podcasting is now (podcasting is cool, isn’t it?). The irony is that it’s lost none of its appeal. Every night at 7:30pm Pacific, I can tune to 14.313MHz and hear the volunteer amateur operators of the Pacific Seafarer’s Net take roll call of private sailing vessels plying the South Pacific — live (hear them via Shoutcast, too). I can build my own radio and use it to transmit over whatever distances it can muster. I can do software radio. I can do radio in every portion of the radio spectrum from millimeters (fractions of an inch) to 160 meters (~500 feet). I can launch a signal on 20meters across the mighty Pacific, and have someone at the other end hear it, and respond — if the sun and ionosphere cooperate.

Of course, television and the Internet obsoleted amateur radio. So they say.