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MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

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Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#91

Post by plowjockey »

dbcurtis wrote: post #41
topspin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They offer a huge catalog of low cost equipment. Some of it is very popular and much of it is pretty niche. Quality is occasionally an issue: you buy their stuff with expectations commensurate to the price or you risk being disappointed. That is a feasible business model with hams, however. Then again, maybe not? I can't think of any one thing they make that isn't available elsewhere. Some of their bread and butter t…

> Quality is occasionally an issue Understatement of the century. Mighty Fine Junk -- it's been a looooong time since I've wasted any money on MFJ rubbish. Life is too short.

I also heard "Mississippi's Finest Junk" as well. To be fair, I found the MFJ items I had to be able to the job. It was never best of breed but was always serviceable.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#92

Post by markemer »

jjav wrote: post #73
germinator wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. It might be a part of it, but the hobby just lost its luster. It used to be this magical way to connect with friends and strangers. Now, cell phones and the internet make it a lot less magical. Other aspects of the hobby aged poorly too. The ham community (and the regulators) were slow to embrace use cases that might have been interesting to younger people in the 21th century - say, mesh networking. Instead, the…

> Now, cell phones and the internet make it a lot less magical. I know people feel that way but IMO ham radio is still magical because you can communicate across continents without any dependency on anything or anyone else . Sure the internet is faster and more convenient, but for that IP packet to reach its destination it depends on a cast of thousands of components across dozens of providers to all be working corre…

Maybe it’s just because I’m an EE, but I really got into the data modes too. Like did you know how stupid simple old school pagers are to create signals for? You have to make some slight modifications get them into the Ham Bands (or buy a new one, apparently a thing!) but after that it’s just 512 baud FSK.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#93

Post by Dalewyn »

germinator wrote: post #43
topspin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember about ham radio is that there is a bit of natural bias in the demographic: a lot of the stuff involved requires a certain minimum amount of things that older people tend to have. Property being one of the keys. HF antennas, towers, etc. are essentially outlawed by HOAs and entirely infeasible for renters. Some of the equipment is pricey as well. You can do a lot at low cost and without property,…

Eh. It might be a part of it, but the hobby just lost its luster. It used to be this magical way to connect with friends and strangers. Now, cell phones and the internet make it a lot less magical. Other aspects of the hobby aged poorly too. The ham community (and the regulators) were slow to embrace use cases that might have been interesting to younger people in the 21th century - say, mesh networking. Instead, the…

>Frankly, I don't know of any other hobby with a comparable amount of gatekeeping.

Personal computing, and particularly FOSS.

>the hobby just lost its luster. It used to be this magical way to connect with friends and strangers. Now, cell phones and the internet make it a lot less magical.

I surmise personal computing tomorrow will be the ham radio of today. We're already seeing the disillusionment among the masses and particularly the young.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#94

Post by MandieD »

fortran77 wrote: post #67
SamPatt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a ham. I communicated with someone 8,000 miles away from me (Midwest US to South Africa) by bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere from an antenna I built myself using as much power as a light bulb. The hobby is definitely dying, but it still provides some awesome moments. Tons of nerds here would find it time well spent.

My WSPR beacon is routinely heard at a research base in Antarctica.

Every time I see DP0GVN in my list of received WSPR transmissions on WSPRnet.org, I smile about bothering the penguins.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#95

Post by cbfrench »

germinator wrote: post #43
topspin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember about ham radio is that there is a bit of natural bias in the demographic: a lot of the stuff involved requires a certain minimum amount of things that older people tend to have. Property being one of the keys. HF antennas, towers, etc. are essentially outlawed by HOAs and entirely infeasible for renters. Some of the equipment is pricey as well. You can do a lot at low cost and without property,…

Eh. It might be a part of it, but the hobby just lost its luster. It used to be this magical way to connect with friends and strangers. Now, cell phones and the internet make it a lot less magical. Other aspects of the hobby aged poorly too. The ham community (and the regulators) were slow to embrace use cases that might have been interesting to younger people in the 21th century - say, mesh networking. Instead, the…

Last night I got a place to stay in Switzerland through a PSK-31 QSO. Didn’t even ask. Mentioned that we would like to visit the country in the next couple of years, and it just so happened the ham I was contacting lives on top of an Alp next to a monastery. When he found out Switzerland was on our list, he enthusiastically offered to make whatever arrangements necessary for us to stay at the monastery to visit. I’m definitely sending him a QSL card.

Sure, that interaction could have happened on the internet, but it is highly unlikely to have done so, given how I (and most people) use the internet. And no one is calling random foreign strangers on their phone.

Perhaps radio is no longer “magical,” but it is still serendipitous. When I sit down, I have no idea who or where will be receiving my RF. I have talked to a wider variety of people all over the world with my radio than I ever have with my laptop—at least in terms of real conversation and not just interacting on a reddit post or what have you. And, sure, plenty of QSOs are also just about your rig, your antenna, the weather, etc., but even being marginally curious about others’ lives usually garners some interesting conversation.

These are people with whom I would never have had the chance to converse without the happenstance of the ionosphere. So, I dunno, seems pretty magical to me. Maybe the broader issue is that folks generally aren’t interested in having random encounters and conversations with others.

As far as the gatekeeping aspect, that’s definitely a problem. The number of sad hams out there still bitching about how “FT8 isn’t real radio” is too damn high. But it’s a big hobby, and there are more licensed hams in the US now than there ever have been in terms of raw numbers, and it’s pretty close to an all-time high as a proportion of the population, too. So I think there’s room for optimism about it.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#96

Post by cbfrench »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #4

I'm not a Ham, but my grandfather (W8IGY) was, and I credit him for letting me know a larger, more technical community existed "out there" than what was apparent from the small rural town I grew up in the pre-internet days. Ham radio's time has come and gone, but I still treasure the memories of listening to him talk to people all over the world. MFJ shutting down is likely one of the final nails in the coffin, but I…

>Ham radio’s time has come and gone

I dunno about that. There are more licensed hams today in the US than there ever have been. And as a proportion of the US population, the number of hams is close to an all-time high.

https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/stats/index.html

I also serve as a Volunteer Examiner (ham who helps administer license exams), and the group with which I volunteer administers remote licensing exams to multiple people on a daily basis. So, anecdotally, I do think there are still plenty of folks out there getting into the hobby.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#97

Post by throw0101d »

topspin wrote: post #31
cogman10 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am surprised that someone didn't want to buy them. I mean... how big is the market for ham radios? I've not really met an enthusiast that wasn't at least 10 years older than I am.

One thing to remember about ham radio is that there is a bit of natural bias in the demographic: a lot of the stuff involved requires a certain minimum amount of things that older people tend to have. Property being one of the keys. HF antennas, towers, etc. are essentially outlawed by HOAs and entirely infeasible for renters. Some of the equipment is pricey as well. You can do a lot at low cost and without property,…

> HF antennas, towers, etc. are essentially outlawed by HOAs and entirely infeasible for renters.

An "apartment antenna" that can be attached to balcony railing:

* https://mfjenterprises.com/products/mfj-1622

Portable antenna:

* https://www.buddipole.com/buddipole.html

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#98

Post by gosub100 »

pjc50 wrote: post #79
WheatMillington wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be in a position of extreme privilege to even make a decision like that. I'm barely getting by and yet work more than I should. I don't have the option of just working less.

People over a certain retirement age get a thing called a "pension". I don't know if I'd consider it extreme privilege, but it's supposed to enable them to live without working.

Oh like the pension that United airlines pilots had?

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#99

Post by bnpxft »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #87
topspin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember about ham radio is that there is a bit of natural bias in the demographic: a lot of the stuff involved requires a certain minimum amount of things that older people tend to have. Property being one of the keys. HF antennas, towers, etc. are essentially outlawed by HOAs and entirely infeasible for renters. Some of the equipment is pricey as well. You can do a lot at low cost and without property,…

This continued piece of disinformation is incredibly destructive to the hobby. You don't need a tower or a huge piece of property to get involved with ham radio. I do most of my operation portable, sometimes operating out of a backpack and have plenty of fun with it. If you want to put up an antenna as a renter you can easily do so on a small freestanding tripod.

I second this. You can get on HF with very little space. If you have 16ft of space, you can easily put up a temporary 10 meter dipole.

I have an HOA, so every time want to get on HF at home I put up the 10m dipole. I stick three 7ft wooden stakes in the ground, tie the dipole to them with paracord, and talk to people all over the world.

That dipole is just 2 pieces of 8 foot wire soldered to a SO-329 connector. It probably cost me $10 at most.

You can get a low powered portable HF digital rig for less than $100. With less than 20W and a homebrewed antenna you could be making contacts all over the world.

If you need more power, you can get a mobile 100W HF rig https://www.dxengineering.com/search/part-type/mobile-transc...> for a little more than an XBOX. A 100W HF base station for the cost of a mid-range laptop https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-015268> https://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=71-002065>

Admittedly, I'm currently making contacts all over the world right now on Hacker News. As children of the Internet, radio, at first, seems like a silly, antique hobby when the Internet has connected us together. Maybe it is just me, but there's something really fun and geeky about radio. I've been a maker for decades and I've grown a bit bored of making LED blink. HAM radio has given me a practical reason to get the solder iron out again. I really love building the crappiest equipment out of scraps and see if it'll work.

Parks on the Air is another really fun aspect of the hobby. Almost every weekend since I got my license, I go out to a nearby state or national park. I pack up my FT-991a base station in a cheap harbor freight hard case. I bring a battery, some coax, an EFHW antenna I built. I throw in antenna in a tree and sit in the park and play radio. I find it quite relaxing to get outside and see who I can talk to.

KB9VBR has a nice video what a POTA activation is like. If you're an outdoorsy type or want to be one, POTA is a fun excuse to get outside.

https://youtu.be/LL6R4U9ualI?si=KH4ZRssscpd7ooyb

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