That article was so poorly written, I struggled to get through it, save for my interest in Malick. What a half baked analysis of Thin Red Line. There's just so much more going on in that movie than the author gives credit for.
Not sure about this. I searched for my own podcast, The GMRS Podcast, and the suggestions were all over the place. The Tournament Poker Podcast being number one followed by a Magic The Gathering podcast and some automotive stuff. Needs work.
It seems like it would be pretty easy to stand near one of these with a frequency counter, or even a handheld Yeasu FT-60 and find out what frequency it's using. It would be very clear if it was relaying data or voice as well. From there you could take that frequency and figure who would be using it and what for.
I'm pretty deep into radio and never in a million years would have thought I would be. I even remember giving a co-worker a hard time for getting his ham radio license. Now, I'm a full-fledged GMRS and ham nerd.
1) It's worth getting into for 3 reasons: emergency communications, learning about some very interesting technical things like how antennas work, networked repeater systems, and there's a social aspect to talking with others on simplex and repeaters. Radio is far more technical than I ever realized and it's a very deep topic.
2) There are some good YouTube channels that can give you a quick overview of what's possible (Ham Radio Crash Course, Ham Radio 2.0) I also have a podcast where I talk about GMRS (similar to ham but very limited) at gmrs.fm
You might be surprised at how interesting radio can be. I was.
TIDRadio make something similar to this with a Bluetooth interface instead of the cable. It's a decent piece of hardware, but the app is pretty bad and limited.
There's a market in ham radio for a Bluetooth interface to replace the ancient programming cables and software we all use for both HT's and mobile transceivers.
One radio does this (the VGC VR-N7500), the interface for the entire radio is an app, but the app again is horribly designed. If it were some kind of open protocol, app developers could do some truly interesting things with it.
Unfortunately that's the only one I know of with an app interface. I did reverse engineer the app and tried to get some cooperation with the manufacturer of the radio to create an app of my own, but they weren't interested.
I always wondered how DarkSky got that "hyperlocal" weather data. After getting into amateur radio and learning about APRS, I'm thinking they used APRS weather beacons to obtain that data. If not, it sure would be good source for very localized weather in an app.
