[Nowhere Man]

I had an old Standard crystal controlled HT on 2m with a rubber duck antenna. One evening I managed a chat between San Diego and Santa Barbara (over the water path). The guy in Santa Barbara had a 22 element stacked beam.

I once talked 50 miles across Lake Erie and 20 to 30 miles into Ontario using an HTX-202 with a rubber duckie antenna and using the 1 watt lo-power setting. I brought up a few repeaters over there and participated in a Canadian ham radio net. I picked up Ontario PPD just below 2 meters in the 142 Mc range so I figured that if I could hear them, they can hear me. I was going to hook up the radio into the Explorer and use my 5/8ths Wave on the truck but it turned out, I did not need to.

[Myrddin]

Amateur radio has been a source of fun for a long time. I spent much time doing packet radio software development in the mid-80's. That became a solid foundation for doing the same work professionally for HP and UNISYS (CCI) when they needed UNIX kernel work done.

I've had even more fun doing things with mesh networking (OLSR) as infrastructure for my embedded systems work. That is something we should be cultivating as a means of providing data connectivity between the average folks should the government attempt to seize control. Think of it in terms of an emergency 146.52 simplex network, but tilted to keep the computer users inside a community connected in spite of loss of connection to higher tier internet backbones. Even resurrection of the old NETROM stuff would be valuable inside a community in an emergency services context.