That's true for most of amateur radio like you said. But go check out the QRP guys. They are truly the next revolution. Making it real again.
The receiver section in the Red Hot 20 I just built pretty much holds it own or kicks the crap out of anything that is commercial. The designer just kicked butt. Plus, I learned a ton about RF electronics.
Red Hot Radio
Plus don't get me started about the K2. High performance direct conversion receiver that has some serious mojo....and I'm going build it next!! yeehaw!!
K2 and Elecraft site
Go check out the QRP guys. Get on QRP-L or just go through the archives on the web. Those guys are just RF ninja masters (well, at least a few of them).
The commercial guys never get it. They want to build stuff that is all things to all people.
They are indeed interested. They have war rooms set up for this purpose. In the beginning, we were doing absolutetly awful with respect to the Arab world and Al-Jazeera TV in getting our side out. We had a substantial learning curve and still do.
But you are very correct in saying that someone should bring this to their attention. When we work in Iran, we will have to paint with a very fine brush. This *will* be brain surgery. The culture is very young in terms of the ages of the population. It is very old in terms of history, language, literature, and culture. These must be left untouched while we try to deal with parts of the regime.
And yes, you are right, entertainment and culture is probably our biggest export in impact. But I'm not sure if that is good for us. I'm a conservative and I piss on Hollywood and the media. But I am not alone. Seems even lots of lefties I know around the world can't stand it either. Hah! Something to agree on!:-)
Exactly. I wish the guy the best of luck and hope he beams some stuff our way as well.
I think the reason I really love the movie UHF is that, one, it was made by a nerd, Al Yankovic. I think because of this, the movie has a real sweet nature where we really come to love that community and all of the oddballs in it that just want to have a nice TV station.
Production values are horrible. Their product is amateurish. But the people are having fun and getting involved in the community and they end up being number one. And they end up being on the cutting edge.
I really do love that movie. It's hilarious, but it's also a very sweet natured movie about people that want a better community. We could learn from it.
Wow, getting serious about a "Weird Al" movie....time for coffee....
Good post. And I bet even the high lattitudes could be covered too if we just shoot it up to something in a Molniya orbit and then relay that to the constellation.
It appears that things have evolved significantly. Do a search on adaptive optics and all sorts of incredible stuff will come up. I would bet that adaptive optics combined with the lastest in signal processing could do alot barring the weather. I don't know. Niche application perhaps?
Seems like the code requirement should be fairly easy, somewhere around 5 wpm if my bad memory is right
This is true. FCC no longer demands that applicants pass a 13 word per minute or 20 word per minute test to gain greater access to the HF bands. Today, once you've got 5 WPM, you're done and you've got it all (not counting the theory tests).
And you're right on the point of being resourceful. The simplest communication circuits to build are those that use CW as their mode. This is fantastic from the view of education, especially in secondary education. Kids can build a cheap circuit, memorize the code (children do this better than adults), and play with their new toys.
CW, along with packet and other digital modes, are also very effective in disaster situations because they avoid the language barrier. Language is very tricky in voice modes because words and expressions can mean different things to different people. Throw a bunch of different people together and you get *alot* of congestion (asking for repeats, clarifications, etc.).
The problem with ham radio (and I will freely admit there are alot) is indeed as the article stated a lack of regimentation and fervor on the part of many. And this is OK if your aim as a policy maker is to emphasize the educational and experimental nature of the service. I would probably emphasize this aspect more myself had an F5 'finger of God' not hit less than 10 miles from my house.
But ham radio does have a dark side as part of its existence and that has been to train a nation's citizenry for darker times such as war. Go to the American Radio Relay League's website and learn about the National Traffic System. It is a system of operators relaying messages around the globe. It truly is, in my mind, a system straight out the days of "duck and cover" when all that would be left were a few hardened bases and scattered ham ops.
In the MSNBC article, one of the complaints was the lack of help and welfare traffic provided by conventional communication systems. ARRL's National Traffic System is supposed to do just this (and did as I'm told). I was ready a few weeks ago to admit that it probably was a holdover from a darker time. Now I think it needs to be reevaluated.
Oh well, not sure how all of this will go down or what form things will take, but I do hope that hams (like the article says) are given a new look and that some ideas can be gained from that community.
I can accept that. We've done the code debate before. I'm willing to entertain the notion that if such an organization were to come about, it would probably want to attract people with a wide range of skills. For instance, you might happen to be a PhD in physics or engineering, or languages, but never had time to learn the code. You would still be of use to such an organization. But I still maintain that the FCC's Amateur Radio Service with maybe some tweaking in the licensing structure would still be a good model for this. It has really worked for us and we enjoy it alot.
I am a ham radio operator. I along with many many ham ops belong to RACES, the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service. In Texas RACES is coordinated through the Texas Department of Public Safety which also oversees state troopers and the Texas Rangers (not the baseball team). RACES along with another ham volunteer organization called ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) works all over the United States in case of disaster.
The San Francisco Amateur Radio Club has a site with descriptions of one of its member's trials in New York.
http://www.sfarc.org/
Here, in Central Texas, the stuff of local legend and the singular event in the lives of many hams is the Jarrell, Texas tornado outbreak of May 27, 1997. An F5 destroyed an entire subdivision in a small town just north of me. There was *nothing* left - only slabs of concrete.
The 800 MHZ system for my county was destroyed. For the first hour, communication was handled *exclusively* by hams. My friend Bob describes a dark and surreal scene when he drove up. It was dark and scary and policemen where haplessly clicking there shoulder mikes and not getting anything. Only a couple of Texas DPS state troopers had comms. The rest were dark. For the first hour, all we had was ham radio. After that, ham radio served as a type of 'glue' communications because even then some services where not compatable.
This event has forever changed ham radio in Central Texas. Around 30 people died. We are now *always* included by our local government officials. We are a part of the equation now. We have weekly practice nets on our local repeaters and practice our skills using different ham modes (esp. packet radio) at bike races and fun runs. We have gotten much better since that day and are adding new capabilities as we go along. Packet radio is a key area we are improving on. We can work long haul traffic on HF nets and local traffic on freqs all the way up to daylight.
Ham radio needs our support. Unfortunately, it has an older demographic and needs alot of new blood to keep it going. Ham radio *is* the original geek force. It was established for this purpose - keep our citizenry experimenting and improving the radio art and electronics and to give the United States a pool of comm experts in times of crisis.
Sorry to write a book, but this is very close to me.
MACH 3 was awesome. Lost alot of money on that one. Another game that was similar to that was based on one of my favorite 80's movies Firefox with Clint Eastwood. It was also a laser game with computer graphic overlays on real terrain.
Link here:
http://www.zen.co.uk/stuart/
and here:
http://www.atarihq.com/coinops/laser/firefox.htm l
and then one for MACH 3:
http://www.klov.com/M/M.A.C.H._3.html
BTW, the *real* Mig 31 turned out to be an interesting aircraft. Still, I dream that someone will build this one:-)
Airforce 1 is touted as having the best in communications systems so that the president can do his part to run the country after all the nice bits have been blown into radioactive rubble. Why didn't we hear from him then?
DFing. They wanted to be as quiet as possible moving around in a big sky. IIRC, they didn't even let reporters with them use cell phones. My ham buddies and I have gotten very good at DFing and we use toys made of PVC pipe and wooden dowels. A buddy has a nice circuit built on copper clad board which implements a doppler device and he has it interfaced to GPS. We hunt here in Austin one Saturday night a month and then go eat. Geek fun. But we're just losers compared to the pros.
So you had an unknown enemy jumping several places at once in a highly coordinated fashion. Their capabilities were unknown, but it was clear that they were highly motivated and out for blood. There are grad level courses on this and tons of think thanks that study all this I'm sure. They did the right thing...
During the situation with the US Navy EP-3 on Hainan Island, CNN interviewed a gentleman (think he was NSA or some agency, not sure) who demonstrated some of the boxes on board the plane. Just removing a screw causes the box to zap to firmware inside and you're just left with an anchor - useless silicon with nothing on it.
I like the Superman III scenario personally. For some reason that scared the crud out of me when I saw it in the theater. I was about 7 then. Didn't look at my C64 for a week:-)
I skimmed all of it, but didn't see a direct reference to the Chinese Room. I just saw an indirect reference to it on the first page when Joy describes the debate between Searle and Kurzweil.
Searle's "Chinese Room" argument tries to make the point that machines are only capable of manipulating formal symbols and are not capable of real thought or sentience. He is using this as a rebuttal to the Turning Test and others.
Searle says to imagine an English speaking American enclosed in a room. In this room, he has thousands of cards with Chinese characters printed on them. There are Chinese "computer users" outside feeding him input, in Chinese, through a slot. The person inside, in addition to the cards, also has an instruction booklet written in English telling him how to put together Chinese characters and symbols suitable for output.
So the person in the "Chinese Room" does this and uses his instructions to produce output that makes sense to the Chinese speakers on the outside. But that person still does not know Chinese himself! He just manipulated symbols in accordance to instructions he was given by a "programmer". He has no idea what the input or output means.
So that's Searle. Someone correct me if I got any of that wrong. Also, the previous poster stated that this argument can be ripped up. I'm not a philosopher, so if there are any out there, I'd like to see a response.
Best Regards, Shortwave
Whoops, that's wrong...
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
Should have said Dr Clifford Stoll (he's kinda got this thing for astrophysics besides computers:-)
Best Regards, Shortwave
A Great Book on This...
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
High Tech Heretic by one Mr. Clifford Stoll. Have not read it yet, but was watching him talk about this very subject on CSPAN "Book TV". I was crying from laughing so hard (especially when he stands on the table and quotes Hamlet). Lots of good points.
I too was a little put out to see yet another Katz column today. Please God, not another talking head!
Not to be disrespectful or flippant to other people's pain and suffering, but sheesh John, let up a bit! We've but only finished burying the dead and treating the wounded and still have yet to gather all the facts in this case. This is going to take weeks and maybe months (and maybe years) to figure out. Meanwhile, we need to be patient, pray for those who are hurting, and use our God given hacker abilities to solve these puzzles and conundrums and get on with life for all our sakes. So let's not let Slashdot fall prey to the hysteria that has infected the major media or we'll be sucked in too and lose that which makes us special - being hackers and problem solvers. This place should be a refuge from that mess.
The bracket notation in articles is used by writers and editors to add context and meaning when quoting a source. Sometimes verbal communication in an interview does not translate well to text since there is alot of 'hand waving' and other nonverbal things going on. Also, they guy just might not be a good speaker or very articulate, but an interviewer can still get the gist of what he's saying while the transcipt would be harder to parse.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true for most of amateur radio like you said. But go check out the QRP guys. They are truly the next revolution. Making it real again.
The receiver section in the Red Hot 20 I just built pretty much holds it own or kicks the crap out of anything that is commercial. The designer just kicked butt. Plus, I learned a ton about RF electronics.
Red Hot Radio
Plus don't get me started about the K2. High performance direct conversion receiver that has some serious mojo....and I'm going build it next!! yeehaw!!
K2 and Elecraft site
Go check out the QRP guys. Get on QRP-L or just go through the archives on the web. Those guys are just RF ninja masters (well, at least a few of them).
The commercial guys never get it. They want to build stuff that is all things to all people.
Melt Solder!!!
Snort Rosin!!!
They are indeed interested. They have war rooms set up for this purpose. In the beginning, we were doing absolutetly awful with respect to the Arab world and Al-Jazeera TV in getting our side out. We had a substantial learning curve and still do.
But you are very correct in saying that someone should bring this to their attention. When we work in Iran, we will have to paint with a very fine brush. This *will* be brain surgery. The culture is very young in terms of the ages of the population. It is very old in terms of history, language, literature, and culture. These must be left untouched while we try to deal with parts of the regime.
And yes, you are right, entertainment and culture is probably our biggest export in impact. But I'm not sure if that is good for us. I'm a conservative and I piss on Hollywood and the media. But I am not alone. Seems even lots of lefties I know around the world can't stand it either. Hah! Something to agree on!
Exactly. I wish the guy the best of luck and hope he beams some stuff our way as well.
I think the reason I really love the movie UHF is that, one, it was made by a nerd, Al Yankovic. I think because of this, the movie has a real sweet nature where we really come to love that community and all of the oddballs in it that just want to have a nice TV station.
Production values are horrible. Their product is amateurish. But the people are having fun and getting involved in the community and they end up being number one. And they end up being on the cutting edge.
I really do love that movie. It's hilarious, but it's also a very sweet natured movie about people that want a better community. We could learn from it.
Wow, getting serious about a "Weird Al" movie....time for coffee....
Awesome show! Not to mention "Raul's Wild Kingdom" and "SECRETS secrets secrets secrets of of of of the Universe"
"Today, we'll be learning to make plutonium....from common household items...."
Good post. And I bet even the high lattitudes could be covered too if we just shoot it up to something in a Molniya orbit and then relay that to the constellation.
73,
dit dit
It appears that things have evolved significantly. Do a search on adaptive optics and all sorts of incredible stuff will come up. I would bet that adaptive optics combined with the lastest in signal processing could do alot barring the weather. I don't know. Niche application perhaps?
Anyone know anything more about this? Could this be a way to get a link to and from the ground?
73,
dit dit
Seems like the code requirement should be fairly easy, somewhere around 5 wpm if my bad memory is right
This is true. FCC no longer demands that applicants pass a 13 word per minute or 20 word per minute test to gain greater access to the HF bands. Today, once you've got 5 WPM, you're done and you've got it all (not counting the theory tests).
And you're right on the point of being resourceful. The simplest communication circuits to build are those that use CW as their mode. This is fantastic from the view of education, especially in secondary education. Kids can build a cheap circuit, memorize the code (children do this better than adults), and play with their new toys.
CW, along with packet and other digital modes, are also very effective in disaster situations because they avoid the language barrier. Language is very tricky in voice modes because words and expressions can mean different things to different people. Throw a bunch of different people together and you get *alot* of congestion (asking for repeats, clarifications, etc.).
The problem with ham radio (and I will freely admit there are alot) is indeed as the article stated a lack of regimentation and fervor on the part of many. And this is OK if your aim as a policy maker is to emphasize the educational and experimental nature of the service. I would probably emphasize this aspect more myself had an F5 'finger of God' not hit less than 10 miles from my house.
But ham radio does have a dark side as part of its existence and that has been to train a nation's citizenry for darker times such as war. Go to the American Radio Relay League's website and learn about the National Traffic System. It is a system of operators relaying messages around the globe. It truly is, in my mind, a system straight out the days of "duck and cover" when all that would be left were a few hardened bases and scattered ham ops.
In the MSNBC article, one of the complaints was the lack of help and welfare traffic provided by conventional communication systems. ARRL's National Traffic System is supposed to do just this (and did as I'm told). I was ready a few weeks ago to admit that it probably was a holdover from a darker time. Now I think it needs to be reevaluated.
Oh well, not sure how all of this will go down or what form things will take, but I do hope that hams (like the article says) are given a new look and that some ideas can be gained from that community.
73
dit dit
I can accept that. We've done the code debate before. I'm willing to entertain the notion that if such an organization were to come about, it would probably want to attract people with a wide range of skills. For instance, you might happen to be a PhD in physics or engineering, or languages, but never had time to learn the code. You would still be of use to such an organization. But I still maintain that the FCC's Amateur Radio Service with maybe some tweaking in the licensing structure would still be a good model for this. It has really worked for us and we enjoy it alot.
I am a ham radio operator. I along with many many ham ops belong to RACES, the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service. In Texas RACES is coordinated through the Texas Department of Public Safety which also oversees state troopers and the Texas Rangers (not the baseball team). RACES along with another ham volunteer organization called ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) works all over the United States in case of disaster.
The San Francisco Amateur Radio Club has a site with descriptions of one of its member's trials in New York.
http://www.sfarc.org/
Here, in Central Texas, the stuff of local legend and the singular event in the lives of many hams is the Jarrell, Texas tornado outbreak of May 27, 1997. An F5 destroyed an entire subdivision in a small town just north of me. There was *nothing* left - only slabs of concrete.
The 800 MHZ system for my county was destroyed. For the first hour, communication was handled *exclusively* by hams. My friend Bob describes a dark and surreal scene when he drove up. It was dark and scary and policemen where haplessly clicking there shoulder mikes and not getting anything. Only a couple of Texas DPS state troopers had comms. The rest were dark. For the first hour, all we had was ham radio. After that, ham radio served as a type of 'glue' communications because even then some services where not compatable.
This event has forever changed ham radio in Central Texas. Around 30 people died. We are now *always* included by our local government officials. We are a part of the equation now. We have weekly practice nets on our local repeaters and practice our skills using different ham modes (esp. packet radio) at bike races and fun runs. We have gotten much better since that day and are adding new capabilities as we go along. Packet radio is a key area we are improving on. We can work long haul traffic on HF nets and local traffic on freqs all the way up to daylight.
Ham radio needs our support. Unfortunately, it has an older demographic and needs alot of new blood to keep it going. Ham radio *is* the original geek force. It was established for this purpose - keep our citizenry experimenting and improving the radio art and electronics and to give the United States a pool of comm experts in times of crisis.
Sorry to write a book, but this is very close to me.
73
dit dit
MACH 3 was awesome. Lost alot of money on that one. Another game that was similar to that was based on one of my favorite 80's movies Firefox with Clint Eastwood. It was also a laser game with computer graphic overlays on real terrain.
m l
:-)
Link here:
http://www.zen.co.uk/stuart/
and here:
http://www.atarihq.com/coinops/laser/firefox.ht
and then one for MACH 3:
http://www.klov.com/M/M.A.C.H._3.html
BTW, the *real* Mig 31 turned out to be an interesting aircraft. Still, I dream that someone will build this one
Airforce 1 is touted as having the best in communications systems so that the president can do his part to run the country after all the nice bits have been blown into radioactive rubble. Why didn't we hear from him then?
DFing. They wanted to be as quiet as possible moving around in a big sky. IIRC, they didn't even let reporters with them use cell phones. My ham buddies and I have gotten very good at DFing and we use toys made of PVC pipe and wooden dowels. A buddy has a nice circuit built on copper clad board which implements a doppler device and he has it interfaced to GPS. We hunt here in Austin one Saturday night a month and then go eat. Geek fun. But we're just losers compared to the pros.
So you had an unknown enemy jumping several places at once in a highly coordinated fashion. Their capabilities were unknown, but it was clear that they were highly motivated and out for blood. There are grad level courses on this and tons of think thanks that study all this I'm sure. They did the right thing...
During the situation with the US Navy EP-3 on Hainan Island, CNN interviewed a gentleman (think he was NSA or some agency, not sure) who demonstrated some of the boxes on board the plane. Just removing a screw causes the box to zap to firmware inside and you're just left with an anchor - useless silicon with nothing on it.
:-)
I like the Superman III scenario personally. For some reason that scared the crud out of me when I saw it in the theater. I was about 7 then. Didn't look at my C64 for a week
I skimmed all of it, but didn't see a direct reference to the Chinese Room. I just saw an indirect reference to it on the first page when Joy describes the debate between Searle and Kurzweil.
Searle's "Chinese Room" argument tries to make the point that machines are only capable of manipulating formal symbols and are not capable of real thought or sentience. He is using this as a rebuttal to the Turning Test and others.
Searle says to imagine an English speaking American enclosed in a room. In this room, he has thousands of cards with Chinese characters printed on them. There are Chinese "computer users" outside feeding him input, in Chinese, through a slot. The person inside, in addition to the cards, also has an instruction booklet written in English telling him how to put together Chinese characters and symbols suitable for output.
So the person in the "Chinese Room" does this and uses his instructions to produce output that makes sense to the Chinese speakers on the outside. But that person still does not know Chinese himself! He just manipulated symbols in accordance to instructions he was given by a "programmer". He has no idea what the input or output means.
So that's Searle. Someone correct me if I got any of that wrong. Also, the previous poster stated that this argument can be ripped up. I'm not a philosopher, so if there are any out there, I'd like to see a response.
Best Regards,
Shortwave
Should have said Dr Clifford Stoll (he's kinda got this thing for astrophysics besides computers :-)
Best Regards,
Shortwave
High Tech Heretic by one Mr. Clifford Stoll. Have not read it yet, but was watching him talk about this very subject on CSPAN "Book TV". I was crying from laughing so hard (especially when he stands on the table and quotes Hamlet). Lots of good points.
Drinkers with a Linux problem... :-)
I too was a little put out to see yet another Katz column today. Please God, not another talking head!
Not to be disrespectful or flippant to other people's pain and suffering, but sheesh John, let up a bit! We've but only finished burying the dead and treating the wounded and still have yet to gather all the facts in this case. This is going to take weeks and maybe months (and maybe years) to figure out. Meanwhile, we need to be patient, pray for those who are hurting, and use our God given hacker abilities to solve these puzzles and conundrums and get on with life for all our sakes. So let's not let Slashdot fall prey to the hysteria that has infected the major media or we'll be sucked in too and lose that which makes us special - being hackers and problem solvers. This place should be a refuge from that mess.
The bracket notation in articles is used by writers and editors to add context and meaning when quoting a source. Sometimes verbal communication in an interview does not translate well to text since there is alot of 'hand waving' and other nonverbal things going on. Also, they guy just might not be a good speaker or very articulate, but an interviewer can still get the gist of what he's saying while the transcipt would be harder to parse.
Any more April fool's jokes and I'm going back on medication!!!!!
I'll market a new product...
I'll call it "Mr. Fusion"....!
And you can do cool stuff with it like mount it on top of your DeLorean and time travel on old beer cans and banana peels.....woohoo!!!!
"Switch to....targeting computer......."
- Red Leader
See above. I love mine. Not worried at all about Y2K! :-)