My dad used to be into scanning police conversations, and I recently found his old top-of-the-line 1994 scanner in an old box in our basement. I spent a weekend trying to fix it — taking it apart, trying to replace parts, etc. I eventually gave up in frustration, but before running out to buy a new scanner my wife suggested I ask to borrow one from a co-worker first.<\/p>\n
So I did. I put out an email to all the engineers in my office, and one of them lent me a nifty handie-talkie (a Yaesu VX-3R) and a giant instruction manual. Sure enough, I was able to scan, but was curious about the “PTT” button he told me not to push. Next thing I know I’m listening to net meetings over local repeaters! A few days later, I find myself reading the ARRL Technician textbook, and thinking “hey, this is basic high school physics!” Not so hard at all. <\/p>\n
I’ll be taking the Technician exam in a week or two, so I can buy my own HT. But my goal is to (probably) upgrade to General and put up an antenna somewhere, so I can use HF to chat with specific friends across the country who I only (just this week!) discovered were licensed hams.<\/p>\n
It’s sort of incredible — ham culture is like this ancient geeky brotherhood that secretly infiltrates all other nerdy hobbies. I’m discovering swaths of friends and acquaintances (gaming friends, Google co-workers, open source people) who all have callsigns, sort of a secret handshake. And reading about the culture in the exam textbook is fascinating — someone ought to write an ethnography of this group!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My dad used to be into scanning police conversations, and I recently found his old top-of-the-line 1994 scanner in an old box in our basement. I spent a weekend trying to fix it — taking it apart, trying to replace parts, etc. I eventually gave up in frustration, but before running out to buy a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions\/422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}