I am a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and every once in a while, an IEEE Spectrum Tech Alert pops up in my inbox. This morning’s email contained a link to the article, 9 New Suggestions For Bored Engineers. A couple of them look like great suggestions for amateur radio operators, too:
Get Your Vacuum Tube On: Unless you speak German, you’ll need to put Google Translate on your smartphone for this one, but it’s worth the effort. Franzis makes a shortwave radio kit that uses a single tube, and it’s a nice way to dip a toe into the world of retro-electronics. The tube is used in the radio’s receiver stage, and an integrated circuit takes care of the amplification. The cardboard box that the kit comes in doubles as a surprisingly sturdy case, with a little cutout that shows off the gently glowing tube. As mentioned above, the instruction booklet is in German, but Google Translate’s camera view option had little difficulty in transforming the pages into English. A good antenna and ground connection are important to actually picking up anything, but I hooked the radio up to my 20-meter ham stick dipole antenna at night, and was immediately able to find a couple of stations. Franzis doesn’t seem to have an official U.S. distributor, but I got the kit on eBay for $50, where it’s still available as of this posting.
Thunderbolts and Lightning: We profiled Joe DiPrima of ArcAttack last year—he and his brother make custom giant Tesla coils, and during performances they use the coils to emit lightning bolts modulated with musical tones. Starting this weekend, they’ll be hosting live shows from their home base every Sunday at 3PM, Texas time. People who watch live on Facebook will even be able to make music requests.
Fight COVID With a Pi: Raspberry Pi computers are so cheap, I doubt I’m the only one who has accumulated a small collection lying dormant in drawers or old projects. Now you can put those machines to good use with the Rosetta@home project. The project aims to model the 3-D structure of complex proteins by parceling the work out to volunteers running Rosetta software on their computers. In April, the client software was updated to run on the ARM-Linux hardware and software stack compatible with the Raspberry Pi, and the project is now looking for proteins that will bind to the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19.
There are several other interesting links, including a geiger counter kit, Commodore 64 games, and the BBC microbot.
They even give me a plug. The last item in the article is Get Ready to Go On the Air. It suggests that bored electrical engineers get an amateur radio license and includes a link to my study guides.