Radio Shack Electronic Kits

Cliff,

So what? Although I understand your point here -- you'd like people to build their own equipment and learn a few skills -- I would sure hope that anyone who's been messing around with electronics since a kid has terminated hundreds or thousands of cables, built plenty of cheesy wall-wart-like power supplies, and wired plenty of their own cables. If they're smart, they've advanced their skills well beyond the point and now have good paying jobs and buying those pre-manufactured items is arguably a much better use of their time than making them.

It just doesn't make sense to build your own power supplies when you can buy something like a 5V, 1A switcher with 100-240V input for do hams actually BUILD anything these days?

Sure... look at something like GNU Radio, the Elecraft kits, the TAPR VNA kit, etc.

Being able to build something from a schematic prepares you for a job that pays little better than flipping burgers.

This is very much like mowing your lawn -- if you can afford to pay soomeone else to do it, there's little point in doing it yourself unless you truly enjoy and experience and understand the "opportunity cost" (the time you won't be able to spend doing other things you might enjoy more) involved.

I do, if I find something worth the effort. It is fun....... I don't mind building, including making my own PCs, but it has to be something which I can use - not just throw in a drawer once done - never to see daylight - again. I've built some pieces of test equipment which saved me a lot of aggrivation and time - once completed. Heck, I wish I could do a project a week - just to do it.

CLF

then.

to

learned

many

electronics...). At the time I was big into neon lights (sad I know), and had collected lots of the little bulbs from Radio Shack, salvaged equipment, etc.

listed as requiring 120v (without a resistor specification, and not pre-attached resistors, assembly, etc). I had to have a couple, as surely these were exotic and unusual bulbs.

order form, and mailed the whole thing to Digi-Key, along with a personal note about how much I loved neon lights (yes, still sad).

orders, effort of fulfilling tiny requests, shipping charges, yadda, yadda... and enclosed in the envelope with this letter were two neon lights wrapped in bubble wrap!

limiting resistor. Still, something seemed ominous about that, so I enclosed the first one in a glass jar, "just in case". Applied 120V and POW, tiny neon bomb!

wrapped, back to Digi-Key with a nastygram of my own, stating what had happened and how these were NOT 120V neon bulbs despite the catalog specification. Couple of weeks later I received a reply in the mail, with an apology, a statement of catalog revision, and... a replacement neon bulb ;) .

it is stories like these that always make me wonder how lots of kids like that survived child hood

had a similar experiment story (similar age) mixing Acetylene and Oxygen from the torch into a small 16oz glass bottle then putting a match near opening to see what kind of flame would be produced :)

for some unknown reason (alludes me to this day) i decided to put it inside of a 5 gallon paint bucket and that was the better part of the idea

robb

Talking to someone via ham radio means you are talking with someone with developed skills with which you have something in common. There is a kinship that is comfortable. Also, it's great fun to use low power and make contact all over the planet.

There is nothing similar to ham radio, in the internet.

Don

Just so you know, Goodwill (and other thrift shops) sell those wall warts for $1 apiece.

Maybe the economy and so on - isn't what it once was - BUT - those who knock "knowing" electronics would be up a creek - were it not for those of us who DO. Those gadgets don't make themselves.

You're right about the Foster Seeley..... Hell, I've seen "hams" - using the term lightly as we're not all on the same platform - not even know what a "fuse" was! OR a ground! Eh....... seems to me they should have failed. But - that is my beef with the newer tests. You get all the answers given to you in a book. Years ago, you really didn't know what to expect when you went in front of the FCC. If you didn't know electronics, you were just wasting your time. My - how times have changed.

CLF

Say, doesn't Linux have some provision for using the ham radio bands for telecommunication? Anyone have any experience with this?

I'm not so sure being a "ham" was the point. However, that is how many of the current technicians/engineers (myself included) cut their teeth. IF it weren't for people getting involved in electronics, those who can't seem to understand the desire - would have no computers, no TV, no Stereo, no anything. SOMEONE had to "design" these items and test them for them to be able to be marketed. You just don't do that without "knowledge". Parts can be soldered on by machine if need be - BUT - they had to be designed and tested to get there. These kids wouldn't have their Gameboys, cell phones and so on - if "someone" didn't take the initiative to design and create. Maybe the phones are made in China, so be it - who do you think installs the cell sites? Not chinese. SOMEONE has to know what to do. THERE IS - need for people to become interested in electronics. Give that up and the rest - and yes we will truly become slaves to those who would love to destroy us. It is too easy to sit back and do nothing.

CLF

In particular, with ham radio, you don't need an ISP or a telephone line. You can talk to the other side of the world with no equipment except what is owned (and could even have been built) by the people on the two ends.

For emergency communication, ham radio is indispensable. Also, I think shortwave technology should be kept alive in the interest of freedom. A tyrant can take his country off the Internet but can't block all incoming radio signals.

VY 73 N4TMI

All operating systems do. There's not much to it. What you need is essentially a packet radio modem, and from there, TCP/IP over the air is not hard to do.

You can't mix ham radio with the Internet because of the strict laws against commercial traffic on ham radio. But apart from that, it's a good thing, and very useful in emergencies.

I don't do packet radio myself because it's too much like my day job, but it's certainly a popular part of ham radio.

Yabut - another ham and I were discussing the design of a phase discriminator. Mention Foster-Seely to any of the other hams listening and they thought it was a mattress. One of them didn't know how to solder a resistor to a PC board ... afaik the others didn't even try. Let me put it this way - some hams' time would be better spent opening a book or melting solder than buying a wall wart.

Ed

Joerg, etc. wrote:

As Katrina just showed. OUr local newspaper just had a nice spread about hams being the only means of communication into and out of La. and Mississippi for a while after the landfall.

John Perry

I have to wonder what is the point of being a ham in the day and age of the internet.

Exactly. Almost all ham gear these days runs on 12 volts DC, so anywhere you have a running car, you can power it. Much of it is low-power and will run for a very long time on a car battery.

you could do the same thing over a computer. Connect to people sharing your interests, using low power, worldwide.

Perhaps, but I am not sure what it is exactly.

Hello Joel,

Not quite. As a kid I learned a whole lot from making other folk's Heathkit projects work. Sending them in to Heathkit would have been the ultimate embarrassment for them so they'd rather have someone local do it. Schematic sez it should work but it ain't, so ... lessee.

That taught me a good dose of diagnostics and showed me lots of ways how they designed stuff. You learn from examples and then go on to doing it from scratch.

Lawn, yeah. Other stuff? Not quite. I am just doing a plumbing/framing project because a broken fixture in a bath turned out to reveal huge shortcomings in what the "professionals" did. I am not going to let that happen again. BTW, they'd esily charge a couple thousand plus material. Probably doing it myself will in the end equate to a fat three digit hour rate.

Regards, Joerg

There is also Linux based IP-over-radio project, I am not sure how far it went.

Have you listened to the ham bands lately? There is a deadly silence there most of the time. I wonder how fast the ham population is disappearing.....

You get to (legally!) transmit on the HF bands where just a handful of watts can carry a message around the planet... that's still pretty darned cool.

It's also a lot easier to find a free chunk-o-spectrum with a ham license if you just want to build a few transmitters or receivers than trying to do something on the ISM bands... and you get to use a lot more power.

The average ham today probably does have far less "electronics" knowledge than one 50 years ago, although one has to keep in mind that 50 years ago it was a lot easier to have a lot of "deep" knowledge in many fields than it is today. Building something like a modern cell phone requires so much knowledge that you can't really begrudge the guy who implemented, e.g., the Viterbi decoder in some digital logic in some corner of an ASIC the fact that he doesn't know how to solder.