Radio kits: Heathkit, where are you?
The open source creative outlet of my early teen years was the Heathkit radio product line. Buy the kit, assemble the radio yourself, and learn a lot about how the radio works in the process. Smell the solder while you’re at it. This, like everything else with fond memories (new-car smell), is of course now bad for your health. Well, whatever. Smell the solder anyway.
Get a ham Technician license, which is real easy. If you like wireless as a superset of WiFi, you’ll get to send your radio signals across the world rather than just around the house.
And then check out the $130 NorCal40a or the higher end $600 Elecraft. Building these kits gets a guy outside the pure software world into the physical realm, where the winding spacing on toroids matters.
That said, if you prefer a mix of hardware and software, take that $600+ and get yourself an Ettus Research USRP, a platform on which you can do GNU Software Radio. GNU Radio has an active developer community, and will support you while you learn how to make the radio do what you want it to do via signal processing code you write.
Wireless is more than just WiFi. Check ‘em out.
[tags]ham radio, software radio, radio kits, gnuradio[/tags]
