by Garth » Wed Mar 05, 2014 5:59 am
When I got into ham radio nearly 40 years ago, they (not I, since I was a low-budget teenager) were doing moonbounce, satellite, repeaters, SSTV, TTY, amateur television, etc., and there were automatic keyers based on logic ICs, but no one had a home computer yet to do the keying. It would make it faster, but I could key it by hand faster than a lot of people could listen to it (ie, not decode it with a computer), and as long as the timing wasn't too sloppy, it was nice to quickly be able to recognize various people's "voice," ie, their hand. I have little idea what hams are doing today, but I've had a mild interest in getting back into it. One friend was trying to get me interested in VLF, around 170kHz! I worked in applications engineering at a VHF/UHF power transistor manufacturer in the mid-1980's, and we had about $100,000 worth of equipment per engineer in the lab at that time. It'd be great to have that kind of equipment at home. Most of what I worked on though was for military radar and communications.