Bench Talk

Imagine bringing the Swiss Army knife concept into the engineering lab and applying it to development tools. Taking inspiration from Switzerland and its most loved products, a new multifunction lab tool emerges that can replace a number of test and measurement instruments. What does this mean for engineers, hobbyists, and students? Let’s take a look.

I’ve been out of ham radio for a long time, so recently I checked out what I’ve been missing. It’s even more than I expected and more fascinating now than ever before.

A few weeks ago I was able to talk with a guy in Mansfield, Texas, using Morse code. I nearly broke out in tears to be able to talk with another human being. He’s holed up in the Mouser warehouse, an ex-IT employee who has a little electronics experience but managed to hack together a Morse code set up. Turns out Boy Scouts really are prepared for everything. It took a while but over the course of a few days Tony was able to help me locate a shipment of electronics that had been shipped from Mouser to a home nearby, so I thought I would check it out.

“CQ CQ CQ. This is November One Hotel November Papa. Anyone got their ears on?” I ask the ether. Still, nothing but static. It’s been like this for months now. My stomach is grumbling but my desire to find someone, anyone, is too strong to breakaway from my radio. Not to mention the fact that those roaming monsters scare the heck out of me. Leaving the relatively safe confines of my ham shack is decidedly unappealing except for the annoying little fact that my food supplies are running low. Very low.

If you’re a ham and haven’t been active for a while, I have the just the ticket: Get involved with someone who just got the bug (no pun intended), and is ecstatic about making his or her first contacts. I speak from experience here.

A few years back I wrote an editorial in which I bemoaned the fact that thanks to the effortless ability to communicate virtually anywhere by picking up the phone (wired or wireless), fewer young people were interested in communicating via the ether, and amateur radio in general was not growing. This went over like a lead balloon with the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), which refuted my claim by providing statistics proving just the opposite. And they were right; it was growing, albeit slowly. So I was wrong and they were right, although I received 29 emails, some of which were several hundred words long, agreeing that it was indeed difficult to get today’s youth interested in amateur radio.

Let’s face it: When it comes to communicating, we’re spoiled. We can talk, text, or e-mail nearly anyone we want whenever we want, by simply picking up the phone -- be it wired or wireless. But ham radio can work when nothing else can get through.