KE9V.net

Demonstration by Ken, W3JK who is using a software defined radio to make a SSB contact — remote from the actual station location. This IBM laptop is connected via the Internet to the PC and Flex-Radio equipment in his shack.

Direct link to this video.

KA3DRR and K9ZW both reported yesterday on the Flex-Radio announcement of two new software defined radio products that will soon be offered.

As always, I have an opinion: I think this could be the most important new product launch in the amateur radio service in a decade. It will put software defined radio into the financial reach of almost every radio amateur. And if a significant number of us take that leap, it could be precisely the kind of paradigm shift that will usher in a new age of amateur radio.

Sound like too much hype?

Perhaps, but the future of the hobby is already intrinsically tied to software.

It’s the engine that drives all of our new radio equipment, from handhelds to top-of-the-line HF transceivers. It’s all about software, and until Flex-Radio came along, it was pretty much the exclusive domain of the uber geeks.

Flex-Radio shattered that ceiling with their popular and fully featured SDR-1000. As the SDR community evolved around that equipment, the geeks and the non-geeks worked together to develop more software and to refine the methods being used with the eventual result being the FLEX-5000 – another software defined radio that competes equally with HF equipment that sells for three or four times its cost.

Even so, the roughly $3000 base price for the FLEX-5000 has kept it out of reach of those whose discretionary hobby spending remains solidly below the $2K threshold.

The just announced FLEX-3000 will hit the market at $1599 (save $100 by pre-ordering).

The just announced FLEX-1500, a QRP version (1 watt) will hit the market sometime next year at $499.

The relatively small SDR community has managed to do some pretty amazing things and has literally reshaped the way modern HF communication is practiced in the short time it has been in play.

I find it difficult to even imagine where we will be with this technology in five years if SDR suddenly goes “mainstream” – but I have a feeling that we are about to find out.

I’m pre-ordering an FLEX-3000 – how about you?

Longtime readers may recall the snafu that caused me to lose my GMail account and 100Mb of personal email that was stored there about a year ago.

For those who don’t, here’s a quick recap:

Being a typical early adopter, I had a GMail account before most folks had even heard of GMail. In the sign-up process, I wanted my username to be my name; but with a common name like Jeff Davis, that was impossible. I went through every possible variation of my first name, last name, etc. with no luck.

And then I hit on jl.davis which was my first two initials, separated from my last name by a dot, and that magic incantation was accepted and I became a happy GMail user.

(A very important part of this story is that the username “jldavis” with no dot separator was not available – so we are left to assume there must have already been a user with that name.)

Fast-forward a few years and one day I received an email from the folks at Google telling me the “good news” about my GMail account – that now any dot variation on my username would work. In other words, if my username was ‘jeffdavis’, then mail sent to je.ffdavis or any such variation would be routed to me.

I have no clue why that would be considered a “feature”, but that was the news from Google.

At once I assumed this would be a problem since I already had a dot in my username, and sure enough, it was.

The next day I couldn’t log into my account. I received the error message that my username and password didn’t match and nothing I tried (like the password recovery routine) would work. I can only assume that by linking my account with another user, I would had to have cracked his password to gain access to the recovery process.

Emails and calls to Google were dead ends as the reply I received said simply that GMail was a free “beta” service and as such, there was no support available to deal with user problems. They cheerily suggested I open another account with a new username – after all, the service was free!

My solution was to purchase email service from Microsoft. By paying $20 a year I get more storage and no adverts in my email but more importantly, I get access to human service if there is ever a problem.

I’m regurgitating this old story because I just read about someone who very recently had nearly the same experience with GMail and it should serve as a warning bell to all.

I like Google. I like their search engine and all the cool tools they develop and make freely available to us all.

Heck, I even love GMail (yes, I got another account) but I will never be able to trust it for important emails again.

For that, I had to turn to Microsoft. Make of that what you will.

My home Internet service is provided by Comcast who also provides our CATV. Even so, I rarely ever log into my Comcast account online. But earlier this week I read news about some changes in service so I logged in to check and sure enough, there was email waiting for me from Comcast.

The first bit of news was that our unlimited Internet service will begin to be limited to 250Gb of data per month. Comcast says that’s more than generous when you figure it equates to:

• Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
• Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
• Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

It seems like a lot of bandwidth, but how am I supposed to keep track of how much I have used?

That little nugget wasn’t the only bad news. There was this:

As of October 25, 2008, the complimentary Comcast Newsgroups service, powered by Giganews, will be discontinued. This feature provided customers access to 2 gigabytes of newsgroup information on a monthly basis. After this date, these customers will no longer be able to access the Comcast Newsgroups service through Comcast.

After telling me that my bandwidth was going to get a limit, and my access to Usenet would be terminated, Comcast sent me yet another email offering to give me faster service for just $10 more a month.

Gee, I can’t wait to pay extra so I can exceed the bandwidth limit even faster.

Pat Condell lives in the UK and he offers his opinions on religion via his YouTube channel.

He has done so for about a year and I personally enjoy his opinions though religious people won’t like what he has to say or how he says it – so consider yourself warned.

His most recent video commentary, Welcome to Saudi Britain, was a complaint about the rise of Sharia Law in Great Britain. But it was a bit more than that – it urged watchers to sign a petition to the Prime Minister to stop Islamic Sharia Law from being used in the UK.

You can probably guess what happened next — it was banned by YouTube shortly after having been released based on “community feedback” from Muslim groups.

After some cajoling and further review, the Google folks decided to reinstate this latest video.

Looks like the cat is out of the bag — someone outside the fraternity has figured out that ham radio is an aging hobby…

With the Internet at the cutting edge of communications, amateur radio - the term refers to its noncommercial status, not the skill level of its practitioners - is turning a bit gray. The average age of the 659,000 licensed ham operators in the United States is in the 60s, according to the American Radio Relay League, a national association for enthusiasts, based in Newington, Conn.

The Framingham radio club has about 80 dues-paying members, but "maybe two or three" are younger than 40, said Gordy Bello, the club’s president. "That’s a major concern for us in the hobby. We go to the annual conferences and see the same people, but we’re all a year older."

Amateur radio will never be able to attract enough young people to replace all the oldsters who are going to fade out over the next decade. That fact doesn’t stop clubs and individuals from seeking a solution to the conundrum and I don’t think that it should. Heck, the band on the Titanic continued to play as the big boat slipped beneath the icy waters.

I admire the fortitude of those who stand firm in the fight, but for the most part they have overlooked the most obvious clue of how things like this work:

In the early days of radio, it was the youngsters who first embraced the technology and its possibilities while the older folks came along — grudgingly at first, and then at a faster clip when it became obvious that the field could be made profitable.

It simply doesn’t work the other way around.

Cool is the birthright of youth – and older folks will never be able to convince younger folks that something is cool; it requires youthful self-discovery to become a contagion to a generation.

Any possible solution will require recognition of this keystone principle.

An interesting article in today’s NY Times about the immediate effects of the credit crunch on small business. Several businessmen were interviewed but this one stood out (emphasis added):

“Michael Frome, 40, a partner in Fromeco Scale Avionics, says (sales) are way off. He and a partner lease space in a hangar in Sandy, Ore., where they and three employees build parts for remote-controlled model airplanes — not the balsa wood variety, but steel planes with wing spans up to 10 feet. Hobbyists buy them for $5,000 to $10,000 and often race them.

A month ago, Mr. Frome realized that the hobbyists, most of them men over 50 with six-figure incomes, had all but stopped buying the planes and replacement parts — including a new electronic device, developed by Fromeco, that logs flight data. Sales plummeted from a $1 million annual rate to half that level, and they are still falling.

Mr. Frome attributes the sudden drop-off to the sophistication of the hobbyists, whom he describes as conversant with Wall Street, investors themselves and shocked more than most by the current debacle.

“I think my customers are quickly reducing their discretionary spending to near zero and squirreling away money,” Mr. Frome said. “Fear and uncertainty grip them.”

There are obvious parallels between this specialized hobby and our own. It would be very interesting to know how sales of top of the line amateur radio equipment is doing at the moment.