Carbon steel pans / stainless steel pans are also an option. Switched to carbon steel a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. Sometimes it’s a little more difficult, but once you get the technique down it’s as easy as non stick.
It’s also cool to know the pan will work for decades to come. Non stick pans inevitable start breaking down and just become toxic trash.
If you're not averse to high prices, copper pans are available too. Though a full set seems like it'd set you back $5000 or more. I've got a few from estate sales and other places for just a couple bucks, but there's only like 3 or 4 places in the United States to get them retinned, and they all want $120+ per pan (and that's with shipping it twice where they could get stolen, lost, or crushed).
Half-tempted to try to do it myself. What's a few ounces of tin cost? The fiberglass glove's not that expensive. Afraid of screwing it up somehow though.
Modern copper pans are lined with stainless steal. Falk in Belgium pretty much makes all the copper material for cookware by using high pressure to fuse a thin layer of steal to a thick layer of copper. This makes the pans safe for any acidity and still benefits from coppers amazing conductivity.
Yeah in that case then I’d get them re-tinned. Might not be the easiest service to find today. I’d still prefer the modern ones though. They’re so good. By far the best cooking pots/pans for many use cases.
I can't tell if you're ignorant or trolling. They're not commonly sold, because poor people have to make due with $10 teflon pans (you know, the "forever chemicals") at Dollar General.
The 12 piece set is $4200. You were probably too poor growing up to ever learn anything about this is my guess. But to reduce your anxiety, I'll point out that the cooking surface is tinned.
I can't tell if you're ignorant or trolling. You have evidently not read the case reports of copper toxicity from cooking utensils resulting in irreversible organ damage.
Even if the internal surface is tin, it will easily thin out when on the stovetop, resulting in the food coming in contact with copper, leaking much copper into the food. Tin is also not okay with acidic foods either, again thinning out and bringing the copper into contact with food. I guess money doesn't teach even an iota of common sense.
In short, it is not worth even $42. If you're making a museum at home with your utensils, you're solving no one's problem, not even your own.
Again this was solved a long time ago. And even with tinned pans you’d have them relined. But with stainless steal linings that’s not needed. It has been this way for decades. Get with the program.
As various comments have noted, stainless steel and cast iron are the main choices for high-heat cooking. The steel can be either 18/10, otherwise 3-ply or 5-ply with an aluminum core.
> microwaved in a glass bowl
There is nothing wrong with microwaving in a glass or ceramic bowl. Both are perfectly safe, so long as the glass is like pyrex and the ceramic is lead-free.
It doesn't by default, but you can set the AUTOSSH_GATETIME environment variable to 0 so that autossh retries even if the first connection attempt fails.
Ya it’s simple economics unfortunately (I’m a hardware engineer). Software can pay more because the cost to produce is lower and so the margins are higher. Hardware has abysmal margins - design, r&d, failure, debugging, schedule push back, component cost, supply chain logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, etc… the list goes on there’s a million things eating into the bottom line.
Using those examples when comparing software and hardware engineering _in general_ gives a skewed perception of things. Three of those companies are only interested in hardware as a way to optimize their (incredibly profitable) software business, and Apple/NVIDIA are two of the three largest companies on earth. That's a teeny tiny slice of the job market.
I'd bet that if you averaged out compensation from the top 100 paying companies for both hardware and software engineering rather than the top 5, the software number would be nearly double the hardware number. Once you start look at "normal" companies, the difference in margins between software and hardware and its effect on pay becomes very clear.
What? We are talking about a major IC designer/manufacturer not gateway desktop computers from 1999.
Theres still tons of money to be made in chips - the whole world runs on them. but the cost is in the multi-multi-billion dollar r&d to build a fab that actually makes functional chips. And then having the work force that can produce successful yield after successful yield 24/7 that keeps the economics of the whole thing on par with Taiwan and other major supply chain countries in the indo-pacific where wages are lower.
Im a signal processing engineer by day focusing in comms. That is to say, I think radio is really exciting. I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.
From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering. With the advent of Amazon and cheap electronics anybody can now get into it without tinkering at all. Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.
> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring. It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.
my experience, too. I did EW in the military and it was interesting-ish. decided to, a couple years back, get the license and play around, see if I could connect with some of the local Elmers -- and it was laaaaaaame.
by comparison, other meetup groups like for drones, linux, or other nerdy-as-hell topics was still pretty lively. I went to some LUGs in Australia that were a straight-up blast, Linux trivia night in bars, etc.
but ham was a snoozefest, and outside of doing some illegal-ass shit that the FCC would absolutely hammer me for, I can't think of anything cool to do with the license.
They talk about so little because that’s what the fcc rules limit them to. Can’t blame people for behaving like Elmer the safety elephant all the time.
What can you do with a license?
Jam live music with other people over the air, in full duplex mode. Thats something only analog radio can do—because the latency is so low.
I think this is true for many states, however I personally am not interested since callsigns are easily looked up online. I don't really want to be driving around with a giant sign on my car telling every random passer-by who I am.
I do sometimes wonder if the privacy of amateur radio operator info should be reconsidered - having my name and home address plastered all over the internet just because I have an amateur radio license is rather annoying.
With all due respect, if you can't think of anything to do with a ham radio license then that shows some lack of imagination. Just because most of the users on voice are boring ass old fucks doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on in the amateur radio world or that you yourself can't be a tinkerer and come up with your own experiments and contributions to the space.
It's a bit like saying the internet is stupid because of all the social media and you can't think of anything else to do on the internet.
I'm sorry but you are just wrong. Radio is about communicating, and if the only people to communicate with are boring, then what can you really do? And ham radio has way less reach than the Internet, and requires a license, so the pool of people is way, way smaller. You can't compare the two.
Ham radio is about whatever you want it to be. It can be about designing and building your own radio then seeing if you can make a contact with it. Same can be said about designing and building your own antennas.
It can be about designing your own digital protocol or software to decode other published digital modes. It can be about attempting to make a contact at the lowest power output with the lowest noise floor at the farthest distance possible for any given situation.
None of these things really require talking to anyone about anything. All that's required is someone to respond with their callsign, location and signal report. 99% of what I've done with ham radio over the last 20 years is mostly just that. Tinkering with radios, antennas, and different digital modes, not sitting and chatting with people.
Maybe you find that all boring too, which is fine, but the hobby is what you make it.
> if the only people to communicate with are boring
I keep reading this refrain in this thread. Which, when you think about it, means it can't possibly be true. There seem to be more than enough people who think everyone else in ham radio is a bunch of grumpy old farts, so how come this evidently large-enough group people are never on the air to balance it?
Or is it just more fashionable to complain than to actually get involved (with good faith) in the community?
I have a HAM license, I got encouraged by friends from our local Hackerspace to get it. Since getting it, I used my right to TX maybe twice. Those friends, they're not boring. I still have no first clue what they're finding interesting about all this.
My brain simply cannot wrap itself around it. I'd dare say, the boring farts are boring farts because being a boring fart is literally all you're allowed to. Can't have a longer conversation about anything interesting, because the frequencies are for general use, not expert discussion on $thing. Half of interesting topics are legally or culturally prohibited. Can't do anything actually fun with the radio, either, as that too is illegal.
What is there to do on air? CW sounds cool, but I don't have a peer group it would impress, so: boring. Other than that, fox hunting and chewing rags. I can't see anything else to do there. General chit-chat and whining about equipment and the weather seems to be the common ground, but that is exactly how you become a boring old fart.
EDIT: sure, I'm allowed to build and operate my own transceiver. But why would I, if hardly anything interesting to do with it is covered by the license? SDRs are way more fun anyway.
i have rag-chewed on both HF and repeaters (and simplex VHF/UHF) for hours at a time. It's fun, but to me the hobby was a lot more interesting when there were other people using fldigi and such. everyone now is using JT's software and i find automated stuff like that "boring" to participate in, in the general sense. It is extremely useful and powerful as a tool to help detect "skip", the ability and positioning of your antenna, the efficiency of your choking and transmission lines (run wspr at 200mW, say).
With that said you can do all of that with fldigi or RTTY or even just using the morse function on most radios thanks to online sdr receivers. but talking to oneself is also "boring" after a bit.
If anyone has a ticket but doesn't really "get" the hobby, go to a field day. The official ARRL field day just passed june 12th or something, but there is a quasi-official winter field day in a few months, It's a 3 day thing, if you want it to be, but noon on saturday till noon on sunday the goal is to make as many confirmed contacts on any bands you can using whatever modes you want. The scoring isn't simple "1 contact = 1 point", you get more points if you're off-grid, or low power, or "outdoors", for instance.
If you've ever been the person that "fixed the LAN" at a LAN party, you might just get a kick out of the entire thing, and it's usually bankrolled by a local club, so if they have a decent number of members you even get good food and a great location.
Our club gets the Sheriff's dept command post truck every field day, and half the people operate out of it, and the other half out of a building somewhere nearby (the rules say all of your antennas and transmitters that score have to be within an explicit radius).
> I still have no first clue what they're finding interesting about all this.
Did you ask them? I'm primarily a casual contester and POTA hunter. Most non-amateurs (and quite a few amateurs) find that boring.
> CW sounds cool, but I don't have a peer group it would impress, so: boring.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but does an activity have to impress a peer (or any) group to not be boring? Amateur radio as a whole is unimpressive to many (most?) people, but why should that stop you?
Because they only briefly flirt with ham radio? When you account for time on air rather than total number of connectors, it’s probably still all boring people.
Correct, this is the problem. See my other comment here about the difficulty of just getting on a repeater. If you get past that initial obstacle and get on a repeater, just to find that it's not interesting, you don't stay long.
For me, ham was about off grid communications. Back in the day I used to do a lot of backpacking and this was before cell phones. New Mexico had this incredible repeater network that was linked into Kirkland AFB, so you could be just about anywhere in the wilderness out there and use the auto patch to make a phone call. It was incredible.
Now days we have satcoms for cheap and soon we will have Starlink even on mobile phones so ham has lost a bit of its value proposition in terms of backcountry safety.
It’s still nice to have when there are big power outages or emergencies, but you are right that the social side of it has died down quite a bit.
Edit: it’s also good to have a ham license if you’re into flying RC airplanes - you can use much more powerful radios and have a lot more range.
The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now. There are other things ham radio could grow into, but the community does not seem to be interested in the radical change needed for them yet.
I mainly make contacts with digital modes, and the whole point to bounce radio waves off ionosphere and record contacts with faraway people. The digital mode is better signal than voice, and don't have to talk to anyone.
Do actual conversations normally happen in digital modes (whether CW or one of the ones that need a computer)? I got my technician license years ago and quit for the reasons others have listed above but have considered getting back into it for digital HF, but I've gotten the impression that people mostly just exchange callsigns and signal reports then move on to the next contact. I'm basically looking for old internet chatroom vibes but over radio.
Most people use FT8 for doing contacts because it works with low signal and does the exchange, just have to click on the other person.
There is JS8Call which uses same technology for doing chats. There are older digital modes for chatting but my understanding is that they used less these days; PSK31 is only one heard about being used.
> The value prop used to be "talk to other nerds around the world" but the internet does it better and easier now.
That's funny because it makes intuitive sense, but I'd argue the opposite.
As the internet has become more accessible and the world of HAM has remained fairly obscure (with some financial barrier to entry and government KYC sometimes), you're far more likely to encounter interesting and enthusiastic fellow nerds with HAM if you get into it.
It's a good thing that you don't need the community to do interesting things with radio signals, just an interest in doing so. Chatting with other people is just a nice side effect of working with signals sent over RF.
And when it comes to doing interesting things with technology, there are many other communities to collaborate with; someone might even build their own community of people who also want to chat over RF.
I was talking about commercial activity. Flouting the rules on that would be a bad idea. We need to change the rules, not flout them.
The core idea "individual accountability and exclusionary property rights are complementary mechanisms for sharing spectrum" is probably eternal, but HAM mindshare is sill stuck in the days when building kit and studying for a license was worth it to access the glorious nerd forum in the Earth's Ionosphere, and the internet flat out replaced that. HAM could reinvent itself as an on-ramp for ambitious young'uns with big ideas to challenge stodgy incumbent telecom if it wanted to, but right now it's coasting on the social groups that were formed back when its value proposition made sense and it will stay on a downward trajectory until it fixes this.
Telecom and its problems are bigger than ever. This is HAM's key back into the land of value-prop-positive activities. If you plug a broadband antenna into a spectrum analyzer and wave it around, you see that almost all of the action is crammed into the lightly-licensed "trash containment" bands. That's interesting. We probably have the fixed vs flexible allocation wrong. Does 10% of the traffic need 90% of the spectrum? Probably not, now that technology has advanced past fixed-band dumb endpoints. We need to slowly unwind that. 6G was a good start, but the ISM rules mean that we are going to get slightly faster wifi, not some wild and wacky mesh network thing that tries to offer "internet sans video" for $5/mo or whatever.
Are you saying that the ham bands should be opened up for commercial exploitation? Because if so, I recommend cracking open a radio history book and reading up on the reasons why those bands were intentionally set aside for non-commercial use by the FCC in the very beginning.
Re ISM band usefulness: yeah. I grudgingly admit that the propagation characteristics of HF and probably even VHF aren't a great match for the ISM governance model, but at least everywhere I've ever used radios, UHF HAM bands are as dead as a doornail and don't (fine, generally) propagate far enough for small numbers of negligent users to create major problems for large amounts of users. Take some 400mhz UHF and make it ISM. 902-928mhz ISM has a ton of great stuff like LoRa going on, but access to 400mhz bands would be a huge shot in the arm to the practical usability of projects like Meshtastic without significant risks to the general usability of that chunk of spectrum.
Another interesting thing about the history of protocol development in ISM bands is how the need to cope with noise/overuse/other forms of spectrum degradation has spurred enormous advances in encoding and signal-processing techniques, quite contrary to the initial expectation of useless garbage dumping zone bands.
Exacly. I've myself been looking around HAMs from networking point of view. I am networker and I would love to get hands on some digital radio.. at least 128Kbps, ideally 1024Kbps stuff where I can slap all the protocol to build network on top of it and then IP. But nope, cannot find anything interesting with decent ranges and cheap enough to buy for tinkering. It seems to be a nische that noone cares to claim.
I know about HSMM, but they are using normal WiFi AP and just slap custom software on top of it and use HAM frequencies. Not bad idea...
They communities are also awfully closed. I tried to find some IRC servers for HAM/network related stuff and no luck really. Found one channel, but they are mostly US people out there (TZ issue for me).
That's somewhat of an unenforceable policy. Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference.
And there's a ton of perfectly allowable obfuscation techniques that are good enough to secure most comms while still following the letter of the regulation. It's true, this isn't going to replace internet applications, but that's not why hams are doing this to begin with.
> Encrypted content is pretty much indistinguishable from noise or interference.
Wrong. This is only true in the sense that the bits sent appear to be randomly chosen. Encrypted content sent over radio is still going to adhere to a modulation scheme like FSK, QSK, or something. A simpler analogue is sending coded Morse code. Yes, the dots and dashes appear random, but it's certainly not noise you can very clearly recognize it as Morse. Also, you need to send your callsign in clear text in each transmission. So people will see your call sign and then unintelligible bits after it, and it's easily recognized as encrypted transmissions.
What you're describing is more akin to frequency hopping where RF transmissions are sent out over a broad spectrum. But even then it's still distinguishable from noise unless a very fast hop interval is used.
You're right that you'll probably not get in trouble for it. The FCC really only cares if you're disrupting much more important activities.
There aren't many radios in the higher frequency bands that can be used for networking. That is why people repurpose existing hardware.
BTW, amateurs are limited in what they can use radio for. Replacing existing communication systems is not allowed, efffectively meaning that can't have non-ham users. The systems I know about are for ham-only communication, like linking repeater sites.
Yes, discussing politics or broadcasting music is not allowed over ham radio. Basically all we can do is exchange call signs, locations and details about our signals and stations.
I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).
What you want to do isn't really what the HAMs want you to be doing anyway.
128-1024 Kbps generally means a ridiculously large bandwidth compared to what most HAM channels allow unless you're really close to your recipient and can use a very wide QAM modulation, in which case your equipment is going to be $$. Your best bet is to stick to the ISM bands, which is where WiFi is anyway.
HF is ~300baud (it matters that it's baud, because "what's a symbol, really") The faster you send information, the more bandwidth it takes, even if it's morse code. A slow, 6-10 word per minute transmission may be 1-3hz wide, but a skilled operator, even with a clean transmitter will take 30+hz to do 60+WPM. i don't remember the exact number but basically any reference will explain it.
so 1024kbps with the sort of technology that exists in the space right now is basically larger than the spectrum available to us in any band in HF. 128kbit transmitted is probably larger than the spectrum available (you can't transmit past the band edges per license, even if it's "splatter") on all of the HF bands, too.
With multi-level modulation, baud is only half of the story, and the other half is SNR. 300 baud at QAM-4096 is 1.2 Mbps, but you have to have extremely good SNR to use QAM-4096.
SNR + bandwidth goes into a calculation of the Shannon limit of a channel.
Thanks for info, but I do NOT need network stack. I have my own, I can build my own. I need decent hardware, because I lack knowledge and skills here. Also, its not an interesting stuff to me to play with DSPs and all that stuff really.
A colleague of mine (networker and ham radio) engineered a small devices based on LoRa to connect over SSH to network gears consoles during a campus network migration.
Indeed the typical VHF repeater conversation is quite dull. It's a combination of the demographic and the statistical fact that (as a broad generalization) the people who spend much of their day chatting on the repeater don't have all that much interesting going on in their lives.
That said, there are absolutely some fascinating people in amateur radio, and on the air. I'd recommend:
2M FM simplex (146.520 MHz)
VHF SSB (6 meters or 2 meters)
HF SSB, specifically 30 meters or 17 meters
That's about trying to randomly find interesting technical people to talk to on the air.
Even more interesting is the specialized communities around microwave (10GHz point-to-point) and satellite (skip the old VHF/UHF FM satellites and check out the 5/10 GHz geostationary and other recent projects).
Those geostationary sats sound really interesting, but I've struggled to find any remotely modern tools or DB's to find visible sats - is there a current best of breed I can look at?
I suspect most tinkering is happening around digital modes these days. I got my amateur radio license four years ago and I have zero interest in talking with (other) old dudes where they're driving. I currently enjoy the hobby by watching the ISS flyover schedule and transmitting to the amateur radio repeater on the space station. It's fun! It's even more fun during the early evening highly visible passes. In those cases, I don't even have to look at a chart in an app to know where to point, I can just aim the antenna at the very bright dot zooming by in the sky. (Fun to see those visible passes anyway, even without a radio license.)
I interact with the space station using "APRS", a digital mode that is the equivalent of sending short text messages. It's fun to see how many thousands of miles a message can go with just a $30 handheld radio and $150 billion space station 250 miles above the earth.
This is where emergency backup communications sneaks in as the other interesting part of the hobby... It's fun to experiment with the scenario of being in the middle of nowhere with no phone signal and still being able to bounce a signal off a satellite (or space station) to get a message out. Of course, that's extremely unlikely to really work well in a real emergency, and less magical if it's a built-in feature of common mobile phones, but it's fun to practice gaming out those scenarios anyway.
APRS also works on 30 meter band, which means HF, which means "hemisphere without trying very hard" distances. Obviously the radios are not $30, but really if one cares about the hobby one should not splatter so much.
It will also work if there's a (nearly?) statewide internet/cellphone/landline outage due to natural disasters. The $30 radio would too (if you can get in to an APRS repeater, or the space station, or whatever), but i'd rather have HF in an emergency of that scale, and VHF/UHF for day-to-day use. I forget the (VHF) APRS frequency offhand but you can find out if there's a digipeater or even a regular store and evenutally forward repeater in your area by tuning to that frequency and see if you hear the same station replying whenever any other station sends a message - it's usually pretty obvious.
also https://aprs.fi/ if anyone wants to see what else it can do. I built a slack bot after map reducing all of the weather nodes aprs.fi knows about to "least distance from zip and/or city/state", then hitting the public web and beautiful souping the weather information from aprs.fi for that particular weather station.
I agree it is largely boring, particularly on the local bands where it's basically a local discord of people talking about traffic.
But if you get your General license you can play with HF and get geeky with antennas, try to make contact with people on low power (qrp) on protocols like JS8.
I was able to make contacts from Texas to South America and Canada, and even Europe I think, on 10w with a crummy EFHW antenna, a wire slung over a tree at 45 degrees.
As far as more geeky protocol hacking, I haven't gotten into it.
I've played with a cheap Chinese clone sdr receiver and LNA and filter and have received FT8 calls from Indonesia and Australia on a length of scrap wire I hung up in my loft here in London UK. Calls from all over Europe and from USA are pretty trivial to pick up.
I would be interested in getting licensed to TX, but then to apply that practically I'd need to invest also in 100s - 1000s of £££ of gear rather than a mere 10s. And then once I've done that ... I think the novelty would be mostly gone if I'm honest. I don't think the practical expense seems worth it.
I'd love to do more local / device networking, but I feel that's basically a solved problem. I can plug zigbee modules in all day and make serial packets bounce anywhere.
Hackers are sparse geographically. It's not like my friend down the street would plug in his radio and we'd share packets. And if we did, why not use the internet?
HAM has been a bit of a letdown to me, too. I had higher / hackier hopes for it.
> that's basically a solved problem. ... why not use the internet?
Pretty close to everything you can do with radio signals is "solved", just like almost everything you can do with computers is solved.
But these problems have been solved by other people. Not you. What are your motivations for hacking at all? It's probably not because you're in entirely novel territory.
Generally, it is not possible to claim ownership of a frequency or band. However, repeaters are one very narrow exception to this. The owner of a repeater can say who is and is not allowed to use the repeater. This is just a guess on my part, but I assume this came about back when repeaters were much more complicated to set up and run. (E.g. there were repeaters that operated only on battery, or were owned by an individual to talk with his friends and family in a mountainous region, or had weird technical limitations.)
Repeaters which are open for use by anyone with a license are called "open" repeaters and those which have some kind of requirement or permission are called "closed." Closed repeaters are actually pretty rare these days, most repeater owners are more than happy to have anyone use their repeater as long as they are not intentionally being a nuisance.
additionally, VHF repeaters generally are horizon + 10% sort of range, and there is a committee to help with frequency allocations to avoid interference between systems that are close together. So really, the "slice of the band" is regional, the same way (broadcast) FM stations are.
> Would be nice to see people start tinkering again - really go crazy on protocols, experimental PHYs, etc. that’s the only way it’s ever going to be exciting again.
I was hoping to see some innovation after the FCC lifted the baud rate restrictions[1], but so far nothing seems to have changed.
It sounds like you listened to rag chewers on 75 and came up with a knee-jerk impression that ham radio is boring.
Ham radio is far more than what you observed. I advise that you check out some of the following before you give up on it:
- QEX magazine
- MSK144 meteor scatter and similar modes
- CW Ops, CW radiosport
- FlexRadio, SmartSDR, PowerSDR
- The QDX transceiver, QRP Labs, etc.
There is a tremendously active community of experimenters and people doing really interesting things. It takes a little bit of digging to find it. Much of it is on email lists rather than traditional discussion forums.
Yes, the MM "net" is known to just be a bunch of lids looking to pick fights with strangers for their own entertainment. They've been doing it forever.
I got mine and have used it a handful of times, mainly helping my friend test his radios. it's all radio tests or talking about your radio. it is incredibly boring and I like boring technical stuff. SDR is where all the fun radio stuff is.
> I recently got my ham license for fun and boy is it fucking boring.
Well, that "recently" there in that sentence is likely the root of your problem. You've barely scratched the surface, run into a dickbag or two (which exist in EVERY community) and then decided to stereotype the whole culture. You have no idea how wide and deep the hobby is, and probably won't as long as you hold onto your false generalizations.
> It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to
And might I ask, who are you to judge what other people talk about on the radio? If you don't like what other people are talking about, spin the dial. Or go to another repeater/frequency and call CQ so you can talk about whatever interests you. Be the change you want to see in the world.
> gate keeping the spectrum through repeater systems that you need to pay to be a member of or else you might get a stern finger wagging.
I live in a metro area and have over 40 repeaters programmed into my radio. Most of the repeaters are owned by various clubs. I have never ONCE heard anyone get a stern finger wagging for using a repeater for a club they aren't a member of. Around here at least, the attitude is, the more the merrier.
> From my understanding, ham radio back in the day was about tinkering.
It still is, you just didn't look hard enough. The past couple of years have seen interesting long-range weak-signal digital modes, mesh networking using commodity hardware, hackable handheld radios, and bunches of independent QRP kits. LEO satellite repeaters, POTA, SOTA, Field Day, designing antennas with cheap $50 antenna analyzers, these are just the things that I find interesting. I could go on forever.
There is more to explore in ham radio than you can fit in a lifetime. If you find it boring, that is not ham radio's fault.
You're barking up the wrong tree! Get into HF digital modes: the lowest hanging fruit is WSJTX, but there's so much beyond that if you want to tinker.
I can honestly say I've never plugged a mic into my transceiver, and I probably never will. And I have 500+ confirmed contacts across 40+ countries. Phone is boring :)
This, been a ham for 20 years, have never been on the mic. Digital modes are where its at and where all the fun tinkering is. Plus there's so many small radio kits you can also build if you want to tinker that way, not to mention antenna building which is an entire hobby in itself.
Get your General license and get on HF and have fun. Be the change you want to see. There's more to ham radio than just decrepit Boomers talking about their gout and diabetes. It's like saying there's nothing interesting to do on the internet because of social media.
This sounds great. I just got my tech license and have just been messing with the UV-5R radios. The chatter on the local repeaters isn’t boring either.
But I was drawn to ham radio because I am tired of the internet today. I want to get that feeling back like the early internet.
Early internet with bizarre protocols like gopher and finger. You had to know your way around and everyone else put in the effort too. Just a great time in history to connect with someone across the world
Then you will enjoy the digital modes because there are so many different ones that all use different tech to accomplish different tasks. Some are extremely popular (like FT8, which is BY FAR the most popular thing on ham radio, even more than voice), down to very obscure experimental digital modes that very few people use but half the fun is trying to use them and see who else may be out there trying to do the same.
The FCC also just increased the bandwidth limit on HF so I expect a ton of new experimental modes to start popping up in short order.
You can volunteer for comms at stage rallies, we always need volunteer hams. My first stage rally experience, over 10yrs ago now, was sitting around the campfire in the Mendocino forest with a bunch of hams the night before the event. They had good whisky, too. :)
>It’s just a bunch of old dudes talking about where they are driving to and gate keeping the spectrum
Yup and the grouchy boomers who LARP as emergency preparedness personnel.
My experiences with amateur radio people have been universally negative, and in my opinion the death of ham radio is squarely the fault of its participants.
Interesting. My experiences with amateur radio people on the air have been largely positive.
But on the internet, there seem to be only two groups:
1. Old hams: New hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby!
2. New hams: Old hams are the cancer that is killing the hobby!
Funny enough, I ran across a ham radio magazine from the 1920's and found letters to the editor that said the exact same things. A hundred years ago, the same old flame war rages on.
The standard refrain of "it's always been like this" is a great way to avoid confronting the very real problems facing amateur radio.
But despite your insinuation I'm not a "new ham". After a few brushes with the ham community in my area I very quickly decided I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
My experience with ham radio has also been positive. I've been a ham for about 14 years now, and I can't recall any bad experiences. Most of the contacts are barely more than signal reports, but any conversations I've had have been at least cordial.
I can't speak for bityard, but I think that pointing out that there have always been complaints is just saying that there are always unhappy people regardless of the state of the hobby. Most people don't talk about something if there's no problem. The people that speak up are unhappy with something. That can make it seem like the problems are common, even if they are rare. That's my take on it anyway.
Uhm yeah talking with people is optional and only required to check how well they receive you when you set antenna up.
Buying off the shelf everything is not fun. Buy radio and try to build an antenna from metal wire or whatever else. Then try to see if old farts can hear your calls.
It is much more like fishing it is supposed to be boring unless you are really interested in the topic.
Yes there is Chinese vendor that you can buy antennas that will work much better than whatever you cobble up by hand but yeah YOU are the one to make it fun for yourself not old farts in your propagation range.
I was going through all the alternative HDLs the other day to see what’s out there. So many one off projects to appeal to this language or that language, but none solving real problems in the space.
The problem? Modeling large systems with modules with large I/O (DSPs or something else) and verifying those things is hard and not well suited for a complex verbose language.
Fight me, but I really think a mathworks simulink type visual modeling environment is a better way to approach this problem (and I hate mathworks with a passion, this isn’t a plug for matlab). That type of environment coupled with a way to generate high quality HDL is what I really want. I know mathworks has HDL coder and it’s ok, but still doesn’t quite do everything and you have the pay the enormous mathworks fee and can’t crowdsource platform updates as well as a well managed open source project might be able offer.
So when I see stuff like this I think “cool” but also “why???”
If you are doing hardware verification, more than using IP blocks in the space, verification tasks are typically oriented around
1. Design : architectures need to be well constructed
2. Well derived tests on case-elements/state-conditions : asserting that a specific signal-value achieves a specific state at a specific time is not hard, but coming up with the conditions are.
3. Placement & technology specific details of delays, glitch management & etc.
Event-driven simulators are essentially doing a lot of simple things correctly, so the language doesn't need to be full-featured, ideally it is as efficient as possible in computation, since checking the verification takes the most time for complex systems.
Additionally after logic has been verified, there are many physical implementation details that have to be layered on top of this, including placement & route optimizations.
Veryl to me looks like a SystemVerilog competitor in Rust-like language aspects.
> Additionally after logic has been verified, there are many physical implementation details that have to be layered on top of this, including placement & route optimizations
Software designed chip fabrication. Please someone make this happen in my lifetime.
Funnily enough, Matlab offers a high-level synthesis (HLS) tool to lower Matlab code and Simulink models to Verilog [1]. I have not personally used it, but the last I heard, it works well enough for those who need it and Matlab puts in the work to support it. However, HLS is another whole can of worms, and it can be confusing when discussing new HDLs and the distinction between an HLS tools and high-level HDL dialects.
same I’ve tried to use flux multiple times and there’s just not an intuitive thing about it. I could barely draw a schematic.
I should add that I’m somewhat experienced as well. I’ve successfully designed 6 layer boards with blind via, BGAs, Bluetooth trace antennas before trying flux. Still have no clue how to use flux.
I was thinking the same thing (I'm an EE by day). I think this idea is very cool, but since the dawn of time schematics and PCB layout have always been visual because you are actually building a physical thing. Its easy to see hardware bugs in schematics visually. However, it might be very hard to track it in code, unless the code is one day smart enough to find the bugs for you. You have to hold more context in your head that you cant export to your visual senses when its written as code. You cant see the actual circuit flow.
edit: just wanted to double down on this being very cool though. i dont mean to deflate this project and I'm about to design a pcb for a personal project - I might give this a go for fun. the promise is there and asthe project and feature set grows i can see it being the way forward.
I have found taking a 'functional programming' like approach, where you build up your circuit from small blocks with specific functions that are easy to hold in your mind and then building up by combining those. For example instead of sticking a bunch of resistors and caps in your top level file, you can abstract them into their functions like a filter, resistor divider etc. Very curious to get your thoughts on using the tool!
I agree - also an EE - and I think it is similar to 'programming music' packages like Sonic Pi. If you are used to reading and writing standard music coding will be an odd and difficult change.
Right now we have a comfort for seeing the layout and such physically, and since that is how we manufacture it this is going to be an output anyway, but there is some future world where it is all put together automatically within the requirements we specify and we have an entirely new way of designing circuit boards.
Each component would come with not only a footprint but an array of basic design implementations that would mix and match with others.. autorouting on steroids of sorts.
We do agree. We built an early version of a viewer in the project but later moved away from it because it wasn't good enough to interact with. We might come back to it with something that is more targeted at inspecting only sections of the circuit or provide a block diagram level representation. But we don't think that just outputting a schematic the way they look today is the right solution.
It wasn't so much "pc board by code" so much, but it was more a "pc board by CLI" approach.
And by that what my goal was, was to offer primitives and utility functions that would build the board up over time, but it was to be done incrementally in a Lisp REPL.
My use case scenario, was ancient AutoCAD.
Back in the day, while you could hook up a tablet or other pointing device (I'm talking pre-mouse here) to make AutoCAD drawings, a lot of it was done simply through typing in commands, in AutoLISP.
(lineto 100 100) kind of thing. And the drawing would appear on the screen over time, you'd save the data model, and manipulated with the REPL. If you wanted 10 lines:
(dotimes (i 10) (let ((x (* i 10)) (y 100)) (line x y x (+ y 100)))
(HN does not have a paren matching editor, apologies...)
Where it broke down for me was coming up with a graphic rendition using CL.
If emacs had anything reasonable regarding graphic support (its SVG support is Not Good), I'd have done it there.
Rethinking it, it just occurred to me I could have probably gone a good way using ABCL in a Java GUI shell.
But the key point is that I think using a REPL for building up something like a circuit can actually work, actually be efficient for users, especially if it's extensible (i.e. (defun grid ...) ). Especially a hybrid (like clicking on a line pastes an identifier into the REPL).
My experiences with KiCAD drove me down that mad hole.
You might find this a stumbling point for adoption. My first thought is this could be a good tool for me to use, but how can I send a design to someone else to get feedback on if I’m not going to expect them to also also learn how to use this or how can I get my design manufactured if the tools can’t export out the, normally very visual, layout files.
I do think that is fair. The reason that we don't have a visualizer is not that we don't want one, but rather that the value to effort ratio is quite low (and really because the effort is high, not because of low value). I'm sure we'll get there at some point. But at the moment there are more pressing issues for the people who are ok dealing with no visualization (like typing, language server, equations etc...).
I’d definitely consider not letting some basic visual schematic outputs fall too far down the priority list.
A lot of existing EE is basically just the visual diagrams and a lot of existing EE people will expect the tools to give them the visual diagrams they work with somehow… like even just including the compiled schematic as an SVG in with the compiled outputs of netlist, gerber, etc… something that other software can be used to convert to PDF without extra complexity in your tool and can be used to interoperable with the existing talent pool of EE people who have not just no idea how to use your tool… but know how to read typical style circuit diagrams.
It’s also cool to know the pan will work for decades to come. Non stick pans inevitable start breaking down and just become toxic trash.