On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Highland Ham wrote:

With commercially manufactured equipment now mandated here for foundation
licence applicants my greatest fear is that we will lose our greatest
priviledge of being able to design and build our own transmitting
equipment.
My first SSB transmitter was, of course, all valve. It started at 483Khz
with a phasing system followed by two half lattice crystal filter sections.
Output started as a 6146 and then grew to 4x811A's in parallel. One of the
real problems was getting the VFO really stable and the best I came up with
used the worm drive capacitor out of one of those TU6 tuning boxes with the
tuned circuits connected remotely via coax lines to the oscillator stage
which was on the main chassis.
All a long time ago but I still believe that such experiments were a good
way to learn and am also of the opinion that the newcomers who simply
purchase a commercial rig are missing out on a lot of the basic fun that we
had when a piece of junk disposals equipment could be transformed into
something useful.
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Firstly , Foundation Licensees in the UK are permitted to use
self-constructed transmitting equipment from an 'approved kit' , whatever
that 'approved' means.

The younger generation(s) are no longer interested in our hobby for all the
well known reasons, Internet- Mobile Phones - Sat TV - iPod etc.
Their first priority is 'socialising' and a 'nerd' sitting in a shack
soldering and using test equipment is NOT socialising.

Right. Today's business model is profits. You don't need brains,
knowleddge, or skill to _buy_ an already assembled gadget. Just money (or
debt).

Moreover ,homebrew equipment is NOT necessarily cheaper than off-the-shelf
stuff (with the exception of very basic equipment and peripherals).

Best to look at hamfests (don't know if you have these over where you
are), used equipment, and war surplus (we have a few left here in US).

Being involved in assisting people to get a Ham licence , most if not all
recruits are retired or are about to retire.
We now live in 2007 and beyond ............that's the reality .

Frightening, isn't it?

However ,being an old fogy myself .....I still do enjoy home-brewing.

So do I.


Frank GM0CSZ / KN6WH north of Scotland