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MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

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Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#101

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'll add that POTA and antenna building is just a small sliver of this hobby of hobbies.

Josh of Ham Radio Crash Course did a talk the various things you can do with a technician's license

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV3nzEdXhbw

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#102

Post by wglb »

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,

It is still very much alive.

There is a major world wide event called CQ WW dx contest in which on the order of 30,000 hams participate.

There are three morse code events each week, one on each of Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Wednesday event has four separate one-hour sessions. If you tune in on one of these onto 20 meters, you will a whole mass of signals.

My local club, the North Shore Radio Club gives massive help to the Chicago Marathon, with on the order of 200 hams helping out with emergency traffic. Imagine a crowded event in a major city--the cell network becomes absolutely overloaded. Their help with traffic about medical events has doubtless saved lives.

The advent of the new digital modes invented by Joe Taylor (yes, that one, the Nobel Prize winner) embodied in the program WSJTX is massively active. This is a low-signal mode used on HF, LF and VHF/UHF. It significantly helps moonbounce communication.

Perhaps the most social of events is Field Day in which hams all over North America go to (generally) an outdoor location and set up stations to exercise emergency communications and use emergency power setup. You can check the ARRL web site in June to find one near you.

A recent activity is Parks On The Air where hams go to parks to set up temporary stations and pass out contacts to folks all over the world.

So Ham Radio is far from dead.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#103

Post by MobiusHorizons »

markemer wrote: post #92
jjav wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Fascinating! Is there overlap of some equipment with a ham band or do you have to modify the frequency of the equipment? What band do you use? Now I want to try this.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#104

Post by wglb »

_JamesA_ wrote: post #47
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.

Incandescent or LED?

I regularly contact Europe from the Chicago area with a very modest antenna using five watts

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#108

Post by 082349872349872 »

defrost wrote: post #78
minetest2048 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reverse engineering the early Navstar GPS packets before they were public Any write ups on this? GNSS reverse engineering seems interesting

Possible but unlikely on the net, I was very young at the time although happy to tackle the puzzle parts, the people doing the hardware and other projects of that time were a kind of post war loose knit quango of former commonwealth | european south east asian post z-forces collective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Wong_Sue * was in and out and round about, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Beadell dropped in an…

Nice to see that Bonnie and Lassie made the marker plate.

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#109

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

defrost wrote: post #11

There's a lot of old Hams retiring out of the game in their 80s and 90s now. I recently attended the funeral of the wife of an Australian Ham ~ 90 who relayed Space Shuttle communications to NASA for astronauts and their families including some sensitive "possible farewell" type calls. This was the same person who lead me into fun projects reverse engineering the early Navstar GPS packets before they were public, and…

Cold War VLF transmissions

Damn that seems super interesting. I guess it's too sensitive to have a write up?

Re: MFJ is ceasing its on-site production

#110

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

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…

I'm wondering how feasible it is for individuals to crack encrypted communication, and hack radios, preferably secured ones but I don't know where to buy one. Those encrypted radios in the 70s and 80s must be obsolete, right?

I'm not into communicating with other people. Hacking computers and radios seem to be a lot more interesting.

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