Ashton in Makerfield Amateur Radio Club

[Mark R]

I am told these guys have just come into existance

http://aimarc.webs.com/

just round the corner from me.

cheers Mark

[Tedzed1]

Thinking of doing your "ticket" ?

To be honest I have quite often thought about joining one of my local(ish) groups,
I would imagine the theory and practical work would be most useful in
our radio hobby.

http://tamworth-ars.co.uk/

http://www.burtonarc.co.uk/index.htm

[Mark R]

Thought about it a few times Fred, but never really got round to it.

cheers Mark

[Skywave]

You've probably heard all this before, but I'll run through it, just for the record. (Yes, at this point, you are most cordially invited to yawn! )

Basically, Amateur Radio ain't what it used to be: the 'amateur' bit has all but vapourised. Long gone are the days when the vast majority of Radio Amateurs built their own transmitting, receiving and test gear. My hey-day in that arena was when the 144 - 146 MHz allocation was made available to Class-B licensees: and I had a great deal of fun, designing, building and operating my own kit.
These days, of course, I am allowed to transmit on all AmRad freqs., but somehow, the appeal just isn't there anymore. But I still like to experiment with bits of home-brew test gear - so a bit of the old spirit still remains.

Here's a brief anecdote to illustrate the above claims.
Today, whilst in Cheltenham, I popped into my favourite Radio & Electronics hardware shop for a tube of heat-sink compound.
"Don't stock that stuff anymore" came the reply, "don't get the call for it".
So I enquired: "Really? So what do people use for the TO-3 power transistors they buy from you?"
"Don't sell those anymore, either: no-one uses TO-3 cans anymore. No point in having stuff on the shelf that we can't shift."
Like it or not, you can see that retailer's point of view.
So I went to Maplins: bought some H/S compound there. My! It isn't cheap, either. But it was a 'must have' since I needed some to repair my network server: over-heating processor: the compound had dried up. That PC is working fine now.

'Amateur radio & electronics': Think about it, read about it, learn about it, experiment, build it, use it, repair it. Then you can say "That's mine: I did that. And I know how it works."

'Nuff said.

Al.

[Nick]

Here's my take on this - when I did my EE degree at Southampton, there were two related clubs/societies in the engineering department - the Radio Society & the Computer Club. Whilst their rooms were next to each other in the student's union building, they were semi-mortal enemies; the radio society hated the computer club because the computer club created lots of RFI and seemed to think of themselves as the future, and the computer club sneered a bit at the radio club as being too "Up themselves".

I was a computer club person - loved digital electronics, loved programming, though in those days the only "language" we had was Li-Chen Wang's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC that was published in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, now known as just Dr. Dobb's Journal, or simply DDJ - still around after 36 years!

The brave new world was all about 6800s, 6802s, 8080s and then the Z80. My thesis was on bit-slice processor architectures - I designed and built an 8-bit processor from scratch, including designing the instruction set, using AMD 2900-series bit-slice devices and ECL memory. It was fun!

The bizarre thing, as we now know with the advent of SDR and mobile phones, is that pretty much everything is now processor-based, even your washing machine, central heating, phone, car, fridge, radio, cooker, clock - you name it, its got a computer in it... If I went round our house, there would probably be many 10s, even a 100 processors of one sort or another there.

And this is where the threads of my point come together. From the 1920s to probably the late 1970s, if you were interested in electronics, that meant RADIO (and later, TV) - radio was the "brave new world" of that era - its where those of an EE ilk congregated - its the only place that you could go to be among friends...

I never did my Radio Amateurs License - I did think long and hard about it, even considered doing it a couple of years ago, but then though "why?", "what possibly could I contribute or could that give me?". The answer was clear; not a lot.

So, I'm not surprised that its a dying hobby - for many, especially with advent of a plethora of good micro-processors (Atmel AVRs, PICs and a 100 others), free compilers and development environments (GCC/Eclipse etc.), platforms like the Arduino (which I hate!) and the Raspberry Pi, kids are spoilt for choice.

I've heard purists in the AR community say that people don't do RF because its too hard. I believe that's an elitist excuse - it's not too hard, it's just most kids find it boring - the RF bit, if they need it to link two systems together, is a 5 or 10 quid stamp-sized card - many uPs now have radio/RF capability built it - RF has become commoditised - its just part of the equation, no longer the solution.

Yes, you will always need EEs who understand and design RF & analogue electronics, but it's now just a small part of the grander designs those kids have, not their sole focus, and we should all be glad of that - the horizons are now VAST.

My lab is fully stocked with 'scopes and spectrum analysers and Heaven-knows-what, and I actively embrace all things electronic, even, dare I say it, valves in amplifiers and radios, but there is simply NO NEED to become a radio amateur any more to access all that - instead of being at the apex of the pyramid from where it once ruled the planet, RF is now simply part of the chain - somewhere in the middle - and the mantle of really tough design and engineering has moved into the scary world of high-speed (GHz) logic design and software - this is a dark art, and the hybrid digital/analogue systems - interfacing to the real world - is now the challenge. SDR is a good example of this - a small amount of analogue/RF (not a lot) - a uP or a PC, and the grunt is in software.

...So I went to Maplins: bought some H/S compound there. My! It isn't cheap, either.

Nothing from Maplins is cheap - its a convenience store - you pay a premium for the the convenience. To be honest, I'm amazed that they are still around.

Like most EEs I know, I buy everything from Rapid, RS, Farnell and even eBay etc. (if you know what you're doing, you can normally avoid the P&P charges). FWIW, good heat sink compound is always expensive - the stuff used on processor chips in computers is also normally silver-loaded and is ELECTRICALLY CONDUCTIVE - be warned - it's different (normally) to the white silicone-based stuff that we (used to) use on TO-3 cans which is an electrical insulator - nowadays, of course, most use silicone-elastomer thermal pads - they are cleaner and their thermal and electrical characteristics are wonderful.