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... can download free/open-source plotter emulation software at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/misc/7470.zip. This may be helpful to you if you buy an older scope from eBay. It will let you grab screenshots, overlay them, print them, and save them in several formats including their original HP/GL-2 plotter language. You can see some typical screen captures at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/synth.html.

I use a Tek 2430A on my own bench. These are great scopes -- you can get 150 MHz bandwidth for about $400-$600. A National Instruments GPIB adapter to interface it to the PC will set you back another $100.

I'm trying to add support for as many instruments as I can to this package. Any interested parties should feel free to email me...

... can download free/open-source plotter emulation software at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/misc/7470.zip. This may be helpful to you if you buy an older scope from eBay. It will let you grab screenshots, overlay them, print them, and save them in several formats including their original HP/GL-2 plotter language. You can see some typical screen captures at http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/synth.html.

I use a Tek 2430A on my own bench. These are great scopes -- you can get 150 MHz bandwidth for about $400-$600. A National Instruments GPIB adapter to interface it to the PC will set you back another $100.

I'm trying to add support for as many instruments as I can to this package. Any interested parties should feel free to email me...

There's the Q-codes that have already been mentioned, and prosigns, but for real message word count reduction look no farther than the ARRL numbered radiogram messages.

Were I on vacation in Florida when a hurrican hit, I could send the message back home that "We are all safe, don't worry. There was only slight damage were we are, and we will be coming home soon." as: ARL ONE ARL FOUR ARL TWO

There is some header information needed by the message passing system (NTS), but the base message goes from 21 words to 6.

K

from all you whippersnappers. You don't know nuthin'

We were talking across the world and making friends with strangers before Al Gore was a twinkle in his father's eye, and we were doing it for free. Not only did we invent 133t speak, we but we refined it .

We had to deal with inteference from the neighbor's electronic organ, changing band conditions, sloppy handkeying, line interference, nests on the antennas, having to make our own equipment, the massive russian woodpeckers equipment problems that we had to fix ourselves, and having to log our operations.

And we were grateful

NA7E

While it is cool and all that, forget sending your email address as morse code when your ship is in trouble because nobody is listening!.

While direct reception of Spirit and Opportunity is probably beyond the capabilities of single-amateur equipment, reception of a continuous wave (unmodulated carrier) beacon transmitted by the Mars Relay Radio System aboard the Mars Global Surveyor on the way to Mars was achieved by amateurs in 1996. At the time, the 1.3 Watt transmitter was approximately 5 million km away from Earth.

The Mars Express probe that launched the ill-fated Beagle 2 lander, and the Mars Orbiter in orbit around Mars, were both detected by this station in November last year, although it stretches the definition of "amateur" quite a bit; also by these guys with much more modest equipment.

For a real challenge, the New Horizons spacecraft, scheduled for launch in 2006 to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond, will employ beacon cruise mode, in which it will send a fixed tone (see page 42), designed for easier reception by amateurs, while cruising in deep space.

Additional information on amateur deep space reception is available here.

While faking the gps signal might be it bit of a long shot for terrorist, jamming it definantly is not. Since this system is unlikely to stear a plane "away" toward the ground, one would have to keep the plane bouncing into the virtual WTC protection walls untils it runs out of full to crash it using the "herding from the ground" trick. Not an easy job, but it would work with every plane in the range of the jammer...

However when a suicide pilot places a simple home made (or russian store bought) jammer near the antenna of the GPS system, the GPS system should lose sight of all the sattalites. I guess in such an event airplance GPS units would stop reporting their position and the flight computers would have to rely on other positioning sensors lik gyro`s, acceleration meters compas, altimeters and radio beacons. Werent these the primary ones anyway?. Now if this system watches only gps (unlike normal flight computer systems) then it cant function with GPS disabled (lets hope it is programmed to realize this). If its just a patch to normal flight computer software then it will still have the beacon directions, compas and other non gps sensors. It seems unlikely these would still be able to pinpoint a place as "small" as the wtc. Ofcourse the radio beacons used in aviation might be jammed just as well leaving the plane with pretty much a compas and its speed, after an ocean trip, nonone could tell where the WTC was without looking outside at the skyline.

That is unless I guess commercial airlines transmit on L1 & L2 frequencies. Provided of course the military sees fit to allow commercial airlines to use that frequency. Which makes me wonder about what juridstiction the United States would have if say a Japan Airlines plane was using that frequency when it pulled in our airspace... Oh well back to work

Here or if that gets Slashdotted, here

"eventually for stopping high-speed chases or tracking fleeing felons."

So they'll require all cars to have one in case the fleeing felon steals my car? Or would they take it one step further and require all persons to have microchips for tracking that "would be used to find kidnapping victims and fleeing felons, not (wink wink) for developing marketing data for sale to the private sector." I don't trust the govt. *that* much. (Why? You have nothing to hide!) How about the frequency of my attendance at a local strip joint?
How about applications for detecting restraining order violations when I inadvertently travel within 1000 feet of the protected person?

I'd rather put my own tracking device on my car both to make cool maps and in case it was stolen. That seems reasonable enough, it's just the issue about requiring it that bothers me.

So - how is this impacting HF ham radio?

The hams seem to have a pretty good handle on solar weather. Its also the first site I found that explains what this M3.5 X17 X28 etc scale is. Seems to be logarithmic scale of X-ray flux averaged over 5 minute periods.

No. Here's the monthly averaged daily SSNs and here's the last six daily SSNs (scroll a third of the way down to see 'em). The daily SS numbers for the six day period ending on Oct. 28 were 122, 160, 139, 191, 238, and 230. The number dropped to 76 today, which is roughly normal this late in the cycle, but that's because the huge spots are rotating out of view (not to worry, they'll be back in 2 weeks). Once the monthly averages are updated, we'll see that this solar cycle has a peculiar third peak (and even a second peak is somewhat unusual).

http://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html might be of use. You can load extra keplars into it if I remember correctly.

"In a lab maybe, but it's still radio."

• When they offered it, Sprint Broadband Direct was much faster than that, on the order of megabits per second.
• Harris Microwave has theier Constellation system can work up to 155 Mb/sec.
• Here's a homebrew 10 Mb/sec microwave system

From looking at the pictures, they just used a parabolic dish antenna. You will get about 20-24db gain on one of those and it narrows the beam a LOT for that gain. So dont think anyone within 110km can log onto the network and lan away. This is a strictly point to point thing.

Ive got two c-band dishes right now with a point to point network around town. The longest link is around 30km. if i dindt live in the mountains(of if i wanted to hike to the top of said mountains) i could get a link as far as the curvature of the earth allowed me. Two ten foot dishes with 30-35 dB of gain is capable of amazing things at 2.4ghz.

OH, and about legality. 500mW will be legal anywhere. But with a dish gain of 24dB, they will have a equivelent power of around 128 watts. DEFINATLY illegal, at least here in canada.

If anyone is interested in playing wiht this and they dont have a lot of cash, there are lower cost ways to do it.

You can take any parabolic dish, which can be had for about 50 dollars, and use a cantenna as a feedhorn. Or if you wanna spend 20bux more, just go to Pacific Wireless and they sell a 2.4ghz dish and feedhorn, with 24dB of gain, for 70bux. even comes with the pigtail.

For a cheap amp, you can buy 1 watt 2.4ghz amp IC's for very cheap. Here is a site that has a schematic and board layout for it.

With a watt and a 24dB gain antenna, you have an ERP of about 256 watts.

Have fun!

Some links:

KI7cx dish
Primestar dish
Bi-Quad feed for primestar DIY
10 Euro dish with biquad feed
Modifying Confier Antennas for Wireless Networking

More info: Wireless Leiden

3. Low SNR communication applies to machine de/en/coded morse as well.

No big surprise to us here in Oregon. We saw the value of Amateur Radio as a reliable communications backup years ago. As things stand, if there were a large-scale outage in Oregon, the HEART (Hospital Emergency Amateur Radio Team) would activate, alone with Oregon ARES, and individual hospotials' groups, and provide a reliable infrastructure for the Portland-Metro area hospitals (and more broadly, any Oregon hospitals - and possibly later even interstate hospitals) to communicate

As things currently stand here, each hospital maintains it's own group of volunteers to staff the hospital, passing communications both between departments internally, and also acting as the voice to the outside world. (I volunteer at Providence Portland for the Disaster Communications Team.) The individual groups (in my case, DCT) interface internally with their home hospital, and externally with their home HEART net to pass traffic between local hospitals (in my case, hospitals in the Portland-Metro area). HEART then acts as the radio infrastructure for local hospitals, and the connection to the district ARES net, which can pass emergency traffic through different parts of the state (via the various nets for each ARES district). In theory, our system could scale up to provide a reliable interstate and even national communications, but I don't see a crisis of that magnitude necessatating it any time soon... Not to mention that I doubt the emergency services between states would cooperate well enough to have it work anyway. :)

The only gap we haven't filled at this point is Ambulance communications, but groups like Mountain Wave, whom do emergency-service style dispatching in other capacities already, are slowly being recognised as a resource and stepping up to the task. Sadly, that's still probably a ways in the future before actual MOUs are crafted. But we'll see...

If bouncing signal off the Moon or meteor trails is not modern enough for you geeks then I don't know what is.

Umm... Ok, if only appliance operators count, then you're right. On the other hand, you can build and operate station for less than USD20 (I am counting the crystal). I admit, I use mostly my FT-817, as I like to have all frequencies and modes at my fingertips, but I love the challenge of working minimalist.

I'm a ham, and I don't think this is a troll. It brings up a very valid point about the relative merits of two different communications paradigms.

HF ("short wave") communications certainly lacks the strategic and commercial importance it once had. It's always been a relatively-noisy, unreliable, and bandwidth-constrained way to communicate, and nowadays, HF is used primarily as a backup for satellite and long-haul microwave circuits. We could live without if we had to.

If, by sacrificing the entire HF radio spectrum, we could actually wire every home in the USA for economical broadband Internet access, I honestly wouldn't oppose it. Amateur Radio operators and commercial/military/governmental HF operators alike should realize the truth: we can't shy away from the technological, economic, and social potential of universal broadband Internet connectivity because of the lamentations of a few modern-day buggy-whip manufacturers.

Now, as a disclaimer, I will say that I don't believe that power-line distribution makes sense for broadband Internet. The power companies have spent the last hundred years optimizing their network to ship 60-Hz sine waves around, and trying to shovel data through a network like that is bound to be more trouble than, say, running fiber to every curb in America.

Impressive yes, but typical of what ham radio operators do all the time. (Many of the ASL team members are hams, as was mentioned in the story.) We're always building equipment out of such mundane stuff as tuna fish cans and coat hangers, and making contacts around the world.

It's a myth that the free space path loss increases with frequency. The free space path loss is independent of frequency. Think about it: If the path loss of electromagnetic radiation increased with frequency, we'd never see any light from the sun--at 500,000,000 MHz, it'd be severely attenuated!

The effect often seen is due to the antennas used, not the frequency of operation. WLANs often use resonant dipole antennas. Such antennas have constant gain with frequency; a 900 MHz resonant dipole has the same gain as a 2.4 GHz resonant dipole. However, the 900 MHz resonant dipole is physically larger than the 2.4 GHz resonant dipole. The 900 MHz resonant dipole can therefore collect more of the incident electromagnetic energy than the 2.4 GHz resonant dipole. Said a different way, the effective area of the 900 MHz resonant dipole is greater than the 2.4 GHz resonant dipole. The sunlight thought experiment works here, too: A larger solar cell collects more of the incident electromagnetic energy (sunlight) than does a smaller cell. In fact, the effective area of dipole falls inversely with the square of the frequency of operation.

There are antennas that have a constant aperture with frequency. The parabolic dish is one example. Its effective aperture remains constant (a function of the physical size of the dish), but its gain increases with the square of the operating frequency. Two radios using parabolic dishes would find that the apparent "path loss" actually decreased with increasing frequency. If they then switched to resonant dipole antennas, they would find the apparent "path loss" increased with increasing frequency. If one used a dipole and the other used a parabolic dish, they would find the apparent "path loss" independent of frequency.

I don't know about everyone else, but the local repeaters here are getting more and more active, rather than less, though the nets don't get much turn out. I've had my license since I was 12, and am 17 now, a Tech. I would have loved to have joined the SARA/Nanticoke(SP?) clubs for their field day this year, as I have done for serveral years, but I just have too much work to do. I'm not the most active ham, but once I get off my ass and learn code, I plan on getting on HF a lot (I passed the general writen, now just need to learn code and pass the code test).

Seven Three
N3WAU *starts to drool again from thinking about the new QSL.net setup

TAPR! - These geeks will whoop yer ass in a second! A lot of them are commited to open source. They actually help fund HARDWARE projects (we could learn something). Check out their LINUX sig.

Uh, no. One of the reasons I left the packet scene several years ago is that I couldn't find anybody who wanted to experiment with transfer rates 9600 baud or higher. Everyone was stuck at 1200 baud. Unlike computer modems, the jump to higher transfer rates often requires a substantial investment in hardware upgrades to handle the increased bandwidth of higher transfer rates. 19.6 kb or higher usually requires a jump into the UHF realm, since the lower frequencies don't have the necessary bandwidth allocations.

I was involved in TAPR at the time, built a few of their 9600 baud modems, but TAPR at the time was stuck as well. A quick review of their site shows they are basically stuck in the same time warp.

You want to read about some folks that will whoop ass? Check out these guys. They are on the cutting edge of wireless. TAPR is but a candle flickering in a strong wind compared to the GBPPR folks.

The gain of a horn antenna is dependent on the size of the final aperature in wavelengths.

OK, I think I was overestimating a bit. It looks like for 2.4 GHz, a pyramidal horn with a 30cm x 30cm opening is about 14 dBi. That's probably going to be your typical "cardboard box" horn size.

It would take a pyramidal horn with an opening of 1m x 1m to be 25 dBi for 802.11b. That certainly is not impossible to build (use wood, not cardboard), but a lot easier than building the equivalent parabolic dish. It is all "straight lines."

Now for 802.11a (5 GHz), you can get a 25 dBi pyramidal horn with an aperature of only 50cm x 50cm...

Helicopter: 10,000 parts flying in loose formation.

Screw it, I'm intent on making you look like a really fricking stupid idiot.... I am going to have a lot of fun at your expense :-)

let's start some links to educate you and possible get something worthwhile into your head.

one

two

three

i can go on forever..

As long as metal isn't grounded, it can go straight through it. Same with wood or (to a lesser extent) with stone which is why, *GASP*, YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE RADIO IN YOUR HOUSE!

Again I say WRONG,first off unless you have aluminum siding and a metal roof with aluminum screens and storm windows as well as metal doors with metal screens covering your windows on the doors.. RF ENERGY CAN GET IN.. Duh.. a 11 year old in basic science knows this. and they havent made airplanes out of wood for at least 50 years... and BTW carbon fiber is conductive and therefore is conductive and act's like metal.. if you need an education in that please feel free to ask.

Jesus fucking christ. is it just me or is /. getting stupider by the day?

Judging by your lack of any knowlege and obvious lack of any real cognitave abilities... I would agree.. people like you are making slashdod dumber by the day...

if you would like more of a whipping please feel free to let me know.

I suggest buying the ARRL handbook and the ARRL antenna handbook or going to www.arrl.com and start getting an education from reputable sources because whoever or wherever you get your information is either living in bizzaro world or you make crap up as you go.

Yeah, but just try debugging or modding SMD stuff. It's practically impossible.
I personally miss the the gradual disappearing of through-hole work, because I could debug it and fix/mod it. Can't do anything interesting with SMD.

I'm glad I wasn't convinced of that before I tried my first hobby SMD design project. SMD boards are great -- you can hand-solder chips with 0.65mm lead pitch without too much grief, and unlike most garden-variety through-hole PCBs, you have access to every component and connection from the top of the board. For RF work, SMD combines the convenience and tweakability of dead-bug construction with the professionalism and neatness of PCBs.

It probably won't be too long before many types of chips and discrete components are available only in SMD. The more interesting RF chips are already unavailable in DIP packages. This is one of those generational changes, like the transition from vacuum tubes to solid-state technology, that you'll just have to deal with if you want to stay current in the hobby.

this guy built one and it seems rather trivial.

I hit it on the first link of a yahoo search. So, for that, you get the big middle-finger-in-the-face award.

It is not illegal in anyway to receive the data stream for the US government's weather satellites. I work with them everyday.

Yep. They are, in effect, a publis service of the U.S. Government. Anybody who wants to can receive their signals and do what they will with them. The signal format itself is based on the 1960s-era TIROS format, but keeping it simple means that even dirt poor countries can get weather satellite data.

I do my own: have a look at some pretty (if a little stale) pictures of mine. I wrote my own sound card demodulator program. Linux, of course...

...laura

The best place for surplus stuff is hamfests. Big hamfests, like Dayton. There's some friggin surplus there for ya. Here in northern New England we like to go to Hosstraders. May 2nd & 3rd!!!

Definitely not an expert but sheps idea sounds good. Especially when combined with a cheap tower in downtown B.F.E. .

If you know the bandwidth you can build your own antennas (maybe even your own repeater). Of course you could always build the thing (things?) and just nail it in an appropriately located treen on the high ground.

"The phrase "high tech" doesn't spring out at me here."

anonymous coward

Some information and pics on those GPS Jammers.

http://www.qsl.net/n9zia/wireless/gps_jam-pics.htm l

...in the medium to long term, for replacing most of the internet infrastructure with an amateur-operated wireless net, free of corporate or governmental intrusion?

Actually, before the internet became widespread, there was a large network of packet radio users on the east coast. Although it was slow (300bps to 9k6), it is possible. And there's been some work on 10 gHz broadband radio links. There's also been other bands used, but I don't have links to them.

The main problem with attempting to do this over the ham bands is the fact that encryption isn't allowed on the ham bands. Compression is allowed iirc, but encryption isn't.

You could directly connect this piezo-electric spark generator to this spark-gap transmitter and you'd be set!

my thoughts exactly.. Quick search on google comes across this page with *ooooh* pretty pictures.

my thoughts exactly.. Quick search on google comes across this page with *ooooh* pretty pictures.

Well...here's the link I used to double check myself to make sure I didn't have my head up my rear.

link

It reads: "Now, what's the point of all that? Well when you get right down to it, it's to keep you and others alive and to keep you out of the "poor house." The problem arises when for any given reason the utility grid loses power. You'd think that your motor acting as an asynchronous generator would cease to generate because it lost it's excitation. If it were just your generator and the power company's, the power would drop out like a heavy duty rock. However that's not the case. There's a factor knows as "resonance" to deal with that's inherit with power distribution systems. Some of it comes from power lines being parallel to each other, thus forming a "capacitor". However most of it comes from "power factor correction capacitors" the power company installs within it's system and inductance in transformers. Maybe some day I'll expand on those to things but for now lets stick with just the effects of resonance."

I have seen that kind of thing said on more than on occasion onm various tinkerer's sites. I wouldn't hook one up to the grid anyways personally just because of the fact that I dont' want to even get into it.

As for what it takes to start one generating, spin up an induction motor as a generator for a few minutes...then stop it, and remove any load. Wait a few minutes and start spinning it again. It'll likely generate. I have an old GE continuous duty pump motor that I got as scrap that does it...and from what I have heard, that's pretty much the norm (I read up on this stuff in the past because I considered trying to make a little generator out of it - decided against it. Would rather just get a proper generator if I need it.)...if it's dead for a longer period of time (obviously, this depends completely on how the motor is built), you'll eventually have it completely dead. Here's another link on to a site that explains it likely better than I can. Link

Basically, here's what is said: "This system depends upon residual magnetism in the rotor to start generating. Almost all the motors I've tried begin generating just fine on their own, with the appropriate capacitor connected of course! If it doesn't start generating, try speeding the motor up. That will usually get it going. However, it is extremely rare to find one that doesn't start.

If a motor doesn't start generating on the very first try, then apply 120 vac or even 12 or more volts DC to the motor for a few seconds. That will usually work to magnetize the rotor and your generator will start by itself from then on.

It is important to not shut the generator down with a load connected to it. This tends to demagnetize the rotor and can cause it to not self-energize. That is, the motor will turn, but it will not produce voltage. It is not a serious problem since the rotor can be remagnetized by following the instructions in the paragraph above.
"

You could plug lights and stuff into it little cheapo one like the above link describes, and probably a good deal of other stuff - but there are things that wouldn't take too well to it, and I don't even want to have to think about it. Eh...that's just me on that one...to each their own.

Eh...sorry if I came off like a jerk...but the whole guerilla power thing (plugging into the grid improperly/illegally) just annoys the heck out of me...even if just for safety reasons (or personality quirks...I am probably just being anal about it). Alot of the people prone to doing that kinda thing honestly don't know enough to be doing it...I don't and I'll be the first one to admit it, so I leave it the heck alone. If someone wants to crank out the juice on their own though (either off the grid, or with the right hardware to sync their output to the grid), hey...go for it. (But I can't imagine that the permits to do it are THAT hard to get if you really have the appropriate gear for it?) I'd even call it a good thing...I hope the increasing numbers of people using solar eventually knocks the price down to get it in more wide use. I think the price of it is what kills the idea to most people.

You won't need any external DSP resources, but the term "software-defined radio" is still a gross misnomer because you still need an RF front end to do anything really interesting.

At a minimum, this would consist of a mixer and 1st local-oscillator synthesizer, preferably with an RF preamp in front of it all depending on what frequencies you want to cover and what kind of antenna and feedline you're running.

The mixer and RF preamp can be off-the-shelf parts from Mini-Circuits or eBay.

The synthesizer is less convenient. I'm finishing an article on a "turnkey" octave-range VHF/UHF/microwave synthesizer design (http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/synth.html that anyone with a decent soldering iron should be able to put together, but it's still not a trivial project.

A lot of software-defined radio efforts are targeted at relatively narrow bands like the 2.4 GHz ISM band, where a bandpass filter can theoretically be used to take advantage of ADC aliasing via undersampling. With a scheme like this, you can dispense with the mixer and synthesizer. I'm not optimistic about these kinds of ideas, though... to achieve competitive performance, every dollar you save on the mixer and 1st LO synthesizer will have to be spent on a super-high-quality ADC configuration. It seems like the sensitivity would be pretty crappy, not to mention the fact that plenty of interfering sources near other aliased frequencies would be likely to survive the trip through the front-end filter. (I will admit that I don't have any direct experience with this topology, though.... there are probably quite a few advantages that I'm glossing over.)

At any rate, though, by keeping the traditional front-end mixer and oscillator while letting software handle the IF processing, you can use an ordinary sound card in a direct-conversion scheme (see this month's QEX to demodulate just about anything in the entire spectrum -- FM, NBFM, AM, SSB, FSK, QAM, you name it. To me, that seems a lot more interesting than the "Antenna at the ADC" schemes that a lot of people are hyping.

There are two possibilities here.

Case A: Your receiver's front end is overloaded with the strong signal. Extremely strong transmitters will induce large voltages in receiver circuits that have automatic gain control circuits and 'fake them' into believing that the station they're listening to is extremely strong. That, or the front end amp simply can't handle the (relatively) large voltage coming in and it's just thrashing everything.

Case B: Skywave vs. ground-wave propagation. Radio signals from 1-50 MHz often bounce from earth to ionosphere and back, and often several times to get to your radio. That signal may be not propagating well via ground-wave to your current location, and the skywaves are effectively bouncing right over your head.

Here are a few links to get you started:

Realtime HF propagation news from qsl.net
Lots of info on propagation effects

802.11 isn't a service or a communications protocol, it's a network layer. This is like complaining that 100 base-T doesn't have a MOTD

Brand new MOTD for cat5e!

As used by radio amateurs to satisfy the identification requirements of their license. (Amateurs using 802.11b kit can still use part 15 [or local equivalent in other countries] but in many cases they can also transmit at higher power if they comply with various conditions, including broadcasting their callsign).

I suggest you read:

Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (NEMP) Survival

This is an Amateur Radio satellite, so you need an Amateur Radio license to work it.

See www.arrl.org/hamradio.html

for a general overview of Ham radio.

Then you can set up your radios and antennas.

A page was referenced, but posted by an AC so its only at 0. Here's the link again: www.qsl.net/vk3jed/1st_sat.html

As for books, look around the ARRL site, they have a vast collection of good books.

-----------
73 de K6LNX

... or at least, it was supposed to be.

Take a look at eBay's components and test equipment sections sometime. For the price of a decent HF station, you can outfit your shack with better equipment than NASA had when it launched the Voyager probes. If you can't think of something interesting to do with all that stuff, it's time to turn in your license and take up birdwatching. :)

The Amateur Radio Service's underlying charter emphasizes the advancement of the radio arts and sciences, and for a long time, that was what hams did. Things slowed down for awhile when Heathkit went away and the Japanese started commoditizing the radio business, but those things happened a long time ago. The truth is, you can do more fun stuff with ham radio now than at any time in the past.

The amateur radio club of the Florida Atlantic University, K4FAU and the Boca Raton Amateur Radio Association are having their combined Field Day on the ropes course of FAU in Boca Raton.
Here is a map of the Boca Raton Campus. The ropes course is indicated with the number 74.
Everybody is welcome to visit us.

We will have a special G.O.T.A. (get on the air) station running where you can operate a radio under supervision and can see, feel and hear for your self what Amateur Radio is about.

73's de w4/pa3gvr

The Albemarle Amateur Radio Club (WA4TFZ) will be holding it's FD2002 (warning: PDF) at the Earlysville Firehouse. Come check it out if you're near Central VA. Should be starting around 10AM on Sat. morning.

no hams are actually allowed to use this band. hams can use an off the shelf WAP and modify it, say add way more than 1 watt, all we have to do is add our callsign into the data every 10 minutes. not a problem. but then looking at porn over this ham connection would probably be illegal. here is an example of some hams doing what i described http://www.abrn.org/default.asp?s=hs
check this page for a howto too.
KG4AKV, John Brier

Umm. No.

Two words: Claude Shannon.

You're better off trading bandwidth for a better S/N. Here is a good overview of the positives of spread spectrum communications.

Here are some:

Cellular Phone & GPS Jammers