Short meme

[altivo]

From calydor:

The first time you communicated in real-time between continents, what was going through your mind?

It was an amateur radio contact with a station in Europe, using very little power and a simple piece of wire as an antenna. My thoughts both during and afterward were largely centered on the feeling that it was simply impossible. How can the amount of electricity needed to power a night light bulb be adequate to send a clear signal over 4000 miles? It still amazes me, and makes it easy to understand why demonstrations of both the wired telegraph and later wireless telegraphy were treated as hoaxes by so many people. It looks and feels like pure witchcraft.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep. Dig through that to GNU Radio and then to the various actual real live applications of software defined radio. The very concepts make my brain wilt, but apparently it does work. Brought to you by today's extremely high speed processors and computer hardware...

[megadog.livejournal.com]

Whereas I can remember using a "Piccolo modem" on HF radio circuits some 30 years ago - like modern stuff, this could give solid RTTY copy on a channel that to the human ear sounded like white-noise. Unlike modern gear, this 'modem' took up a good proportion of a full-height 19-inch equipment rack.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. You've been licensed longer than I. My first actual experience with digital radio started with packet around 1990. I didn't get into old-fashioned RTTY until some time after that, and wasn't really successful with it until 2000. ;p

So, I've only used a PK-232 hardware interface and more recently the various sound card based programs. The largest and heaviest equipment I've actually seen or touched was an old ASCI teletype "pedestal" machine with a 300 baud analog telephone modem in it. ASR-32? Someone gave it to me back in the mid-90s and it sat in the basement of the house for a couple of years before being passed on to someone else.