Ham Radio and Maker Culture

Pity, that spirit has mostly dissolved, replaced with fully functional off-the-shelf components and rigs. There is far less experimentation than there was 20, 30, and 40 years ago where Amateur Radio was a significant contributor to encouraging would-be Hams to become engineers or even their garage built discoveries.

I'm afraid the excitement of being able to occasionally skip a signal off the ionosphere and talk to someone in, say, Australia has been somewhat blunted in our young'uns with their knoweldge that they can simply pull a cell out of their pocket and call there anytime for free.

It seems the experimenting kiddies today just want to pull things apart and hack them into being other things. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Internet change the all of that.

A Ham named Victor Andrew set out to make an improved antenna in his garage, the year was 1937.

I live near the high school that was named in his Honor.

And yet still, when things get really bad in a disaster and cell phones, landlines, cable and the internet are all inaccessible hams are usually the only ones to manage to provide emergency communications.

WB2PFV