I read this today and it made me do one of those funny tick/shiver things. Like when you really have to have a piss and when you finally do your whole body does this quirky spaz.
What the hell? If your ham radio is down and you need to communicate with your ham buddy on the other side of hamland, and decide to fire up MSM messenger, JUST TYPE!
Now I know there is a hamgeek protocol that says every time you communicate with another hamgeek you must use the most outdated form of technology to do it. But give me a break. You’re already on-line. You and your hamgeek buddy already have MSM installed. Just type your message already.
If you are going to head down this silly path why don’t you phone your hamgeek buddy up and “beep-beep-be-be-be” over the phone at him?
Ok, so perhaps I’m a little sensitive about hamgeek protocol because my mothers ex-boyfriend was a hamgeek, and he and his friends were the only real hamgeeks I’ve met. But I have to say they didn’t do much to convince I need to fill my extra bedroom with radios.
“Well Seven, if the telephone system and electricity go off line, who do you think is going to help the police and medics? It’s ham radio operators, that’s who.”
Perhaps other ham radio operators, but not any of you dorks. None of you have POWER GENERATORS. You’ll be off line like everyone else.
Am I missing something here? Is there a reason hamgeeks are afraid of using regular e-mail?
They’ve made the first step at least into 1995 by having a website. Couldn’t they just babystep into the 21st century and use something simple like hotmail or yahoo?
Oh man. Daughter of a serious ham geek here. I hear ya. I am the only member of my birth family who has never had a callsign.
My dad is Gadgetman. My parents’ basement looks like the wreckage of a Radio Shack that blew up in the 50’s. Transistors, vacuum tubes, stacks of old “73” magazines. My dad writes notes in ham abbreviations and 10 codes. I got a radio for Christmas EVERY YEAR. There is a picture of my dad’s van that I drew when I was in the first grade – with about ten antennas on it. The sound of Morse often lulled me to sleep. NOw my dad thinks he knows all about computers. HE DOES NOT.
Be glad you have never had to live with a hamateur.
One thing about amateur radio is that is hams used to love experimenting. Hams were, at one time, known as innovators, ejither inventing or being the first to try new technology that would eventually make its way to commercial communications.
Now, though, that spirit of innovation is lost. The OMs who can’t get away from Morse, which unfortunately are in the great majority, are far worse than the old-school computer geeks that eschew GUIs, surfs the Web using Lynx on a 3 gigahertz box, and/or prays for the revival of Amiga.
I let my ham license lapse. There’s few young people involved, and too many OMs and obsessive-compusive county and country chasers. Not enough fun, not enough innovation, not enough return for the time you put into it.
Yeah, the demise of HAM radio is, in a lot of ways, kinda sad. I remember lugging an antenna up into the mountains so that we could bounce 2m signals off the side of a mountain and get some extreme range. It was great fun. Now it seems kind of… lame.
Thanks, dwc, but I’m not going to translate every single post in a thread. English please, or (just because I’m in a good mood today :)) small phrases in morse with an English translation provided.
From my experience there is an awful lot of overlap. I came into computers via Radio Shack’s TRS-80 equipment and half of my club would come to meeting with their radios clipped to their belts.
To be fair, though, there is still a great deal of experimentation going on and some of the love of old computers stems from a belief that they still haven’t found the true limits of older equipment, that gigahertz/gigabyte machines are simply used so that bloatware runs fairly well, and that a True Master can make do with less. Case in point: the Contiki operating system for the Commodore 64 and other small computers.
