Funny story (at least I think it is.) When I first walked into the room where I was giving the talk, I thought I was in the wrong place. One reason for this is that even though I was about ten minutes early, nearly all of the seats were already taken. Also, a slide was being projected for the talk that had just preceded mine. I got halfway to the front of the room, turned around, and started heading back.
I realized then that I had to be in the right place, and all the seats were filled because they actually wanted to learn more about amateur radio! By the time, I started speaking there were people standing in the back of the room and sitting on the floor.
You can check out all the talks from HOPE XV on the 2600’s YouTube channel. The channel has videos from all of the HOPE conferences dating back to 1994.
Hi,
One of the things I see a lot when hams try to explain the amateurradio-hobby is that they focus to much on what we do (i.e. hardware), while we fail to explain what we offer.
For me, amateurradio is a technical / scientific hobby, that allows people to experiment with radio, radio-communication and radio-technology.
But, in the end, what the hobby offers is some very different. It offers
– the ability to learn and play around with radio-technology
– the ability to play around with technology that is very different from what most people do: what does a radio-signal look like, what does a packet look like, what does the radio-path do to a radio-packet, what technology is there to compensate for this interference and -at the end- still be able to extract the data from it
– learning science and technology tricks, like how to extract a signal from below the noise-floor (using WSPR, FTxxx,…), learning how to make a signal more robust to deal with interference, …
– for developers: a very different type of coding: DSP/SDR, embedded coding (like the firmware for a handhels radio with projects like M17 or OpenRTX), learning how to deal with errors in data you receive, …
– how to set up, manage, monitor and run infrastructure
– the challenge of doing things ‘just because you can’ (why else would you try to make a contac with somebody 1000 km away via the reflection of radio-signals over the trail of a meteor)
My experience with promoting amateurradio at hacker and maker events is that explaining that actually impresses people more then just some random PCB which -for an outsider- does not really say a lot, as it explains the ideas of what amateurradio is above, .. not just that what we do,
Good talk, good crowd, good questions. There is HOPE indeed for ham radio! Thanks for posting this.