Hi Len,

You have a lot of interesting history in there!

wrote in message
ups.com...
But, as some 1950s-technology hams may grouse, "that's not RADIO!"

Yeah, I'm surprised just how 'neatly' some people seem to be able to decide
what is and isn't 'radio.'

Hey, the huge electronic supermarket called Fry's is just a
mile and a half from my house here. Lots of low-cost, very-
high-tech "toys" available in there.

I think it's ironic how the cool fashion accessory today is something like a
Motorola Razr phone with its associated millions of transistors buried in
numerous ICs running software that even relatively few BSEE's would fully
understand without a fair amount of additional study (turbo codes, direct
sequence spread spectrum systems, psychoacoustic codecs, etc. not usually
being a large part of the undergraduate curriculum...), yet 30 years ago
anyway hauling around a brick-sized ham radio or CB was quite the nerdy thing
to do... Incredible how times change...

If they want to TEACH students what goes on in industry of the
day, absolutely. They've gone insular amongst themselves in
the last few decades...in the teaching part of their activity.

IMO one of the biggest problems universities face is that everyone is
"expected" to get a 4 year degree these days, and yet the reality of the
marketplace is that relatively few jobs truly require anything approach that
level of "hard core" education. Hence, engineering courses get watered down,
and a lot of BSEE of BSCS students end up performing straightforward
programming or digital design using techniques that a 2 year technical college
could have easily provided them with. Industry has often contributed to this
problem, requiring even technical sales people to now have those 4 year
degrees... sheesh!

Maybe automotive electronics is next (some
applications using RF for "wireless" things like tire pressure
measurement while rolling)?

I think we're just about there -- I've seen chipsets that'll provide, e.g.,
some tens of bytes of data once every second or so and consume mere tens of
microwatts (on average) to operate; that seems like the kind of thing some
clever person can generate just from the rotation of the tire itself using
some horribly crude & dirt cheap implementation of a "generator."

Well, in my view, there's too much ham emphasis on transmitters
and power and mechanical aspect of things.

What would you like to see more of?

Another case in point: Neil Hecht's neat little frequency
displays out of AADE in Seattle.

I haven't used one, but I'm aware of their existance. I bought one of Neil's
L/C meters years ago now and put it together myself -- I don't recall if an
assembled version was even available as an option then. I came across his web
site again recently while tracking down a copy of his filter designer (which
includes some very useful hints and tips on various transforms), and was
pleased to find that he now gives it away for free, stating that he was
selling so much more hardware than software anyway, it wasn't worth his effort
to keep charging for the software!

Oddly, most hobbyist programmers don't like to show
flow diagrams...those aren't as "cool" as source code
statements neatly arranged by the source code development
program. :-(

I always figured they just didn't want to go to the extra effort. :-) I
agreee that source code alone usually isn't as good as a clear flow diagram.

I don't quite agree with the gist of your argument. SDR is
the new buzzword and it can certainly apply to digital-based
communications (cell phones, etc.) but not necessarily to
the analog HF world.

I did mean "true" SDRs, such as GNU Radio, Flex Radio, etc. I think it has
plenty of application to the HF world (indeed, the development of digital
modes for HF seems much more active than on VHF/UHF, which has always struck
me as kinda bizarre given how much less bandwidth is available there in the
first place... but of course the fact that you can get a signal to the other
side of the planet on 100W in good condition is always a big motivator...)

IF - and only IF - amateur radio voice communications goes
digital on HF will there be any real need for SDR in ham
radio "bands" (the ones on HF).

I agree with you on this (in that, with analog HF modes, you don't really gain
that much by using SDR), but I hasten to point out that there's no "real need"
for the analog modes either :-). Whether or not that means
Yaesu/Icom/Kenwood/etc. actually make a full-blown HF SDR that supports both
the traditional analog modes and some set of newer digital ones, I don't know.

One problem with digital voice is that there isn't
even a hint of a standard protocol or of many experimenters
yielding any results on same.

Have I mentioned how some of the best low-bit rate CODECs are proprietary
and/or patented and not licensable by a single lowly hobbyist? ;-)

Back to watching HDTV from the Winter Olympics in Turin...

We have an HDTV tuner but only an "EDTV" TV (an older plasma set), and it
still looks fantastic; I've been most impressed.

---Joel