> Nothing forces you to interact with other ham radio operators. You can > happily work in isolation communicating among your own stations if you > wish.
Unless you need to do frequency coordination, which you usually do. Then you have to deal with the oldest, gnarliest hams around, the ones who 50 years ago got access to mountaintop towers and have been squatting on them ever since, like trolls under bridges. > However, ham-land contains a ready pool of technically inclined > people, most of whom are interested in but not well informed about > subjects like software defined radio and Free Software. I got a ham Tech license in the 1970-80's and it was one of the more disappointing experiences in my life. What a culture clash! The ham fraternity was filled with people who spent all their time chit-chatting on their handheld radios about their personal lives, but who knew and cared very little about radio technology or computers. (Nowadays everyone has cellphones, but in those days they were the only ones who could communicate mobile.) They fought uselessly over stupid little status things like how short or long your callsign was. I soldered together a 1200 bps packet radio interface board, ran BBS's, evolved protocol software, and taught classes on digital radio communication protocols to the interested part of the local Bay Area ham community (led by Hank Magnuski, KA6M). The almost universal attitude among the hams who I met was "We got here first, we own these frequencies, don't you put any funny computer stuff on 'em because that will just attract more of the public to horn in on our monopoly." They actively threatened to turn me in to the FCC for any real or imagined violation of the incredibly picky rules, like letting someone else log in over my radio modem ("carrying third party traffic"). Really friendly folks. I decided to retire my ham license until a large number of the existing hams died off (many were middle aged or older). Perhaps now the worst jerks have cleared the ranks, and some more welcoming people are hams; I don't know. I moved my digital radio experiments to the unlicensed bands, ignored the hams, and have been much happier ever since. I think the hams are still doing 1200 bps FSK, while the unlicensed folks have evolved to 108,000,000 bps WiFi. There must be tens of thousands of hams nationwide. There are tens of thousands of WiFi nodes in San Francisco alone -- and no crazy restrictions about not using encryption, not letting other people use your radio, etc. John _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio