DaveInDenver
Rising Sun Ham Guru
Nathaniel, you laid out exactly why amateurs have pushed the envelope (ham radio telephony became cell phones, ham satellites paved the way for satellite long distance, radio and DBSTV, hams tinkered with solid state as soon as they could, pushing the market for cheaper, better, more reliable gear, hams tinkering with APRS 15 years ago showed how real time GPS navigation and position reporting could work). But there's no point, people's minds are made up before they even ask the question. Just like UB's tongue in cheek posts about geeks in tighty whiteys, that's the silly imagine people get in their heads.
People don't realize that the guts of what a lot of military and commercial users get is pretty much the same stuff hams use equipment wise, not to mention that ham radio is much more than just two-way FM or a fella pounding out Code on HF. It's a wide open and interesting hobby. A guy at work picked up this neat DSP demo board (being a working EE has it's privileges, if you are geeky) and has been tinkering with software-defined radios. His laptop can listen to about half of the repeater outputs in Denver and with a little voice training can pick which frequency someone is talking on by tone matching. It'll then alert him if someone he wants to talk to is on. The only reason it can only do half of the outputs is it wasn't a very expensive board and it's got pretty limited bandwidth. No need to have your radios constantly scanning and hoping to hear a familiar call. Your voice will be recognized. He's also messing with different protocols and algorithms to bandwidth optimize. What's he's doing is very much essentially exactly the same as the JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System) that the military uses. Just one box that can be a UHF FM mobile, HF AM CW, VHF APRS packet machine or whatever else he wants it to be. A bunch of old timers pounding Code, my butt. His ham shack is head and shoulders more universally configurable than the stuff the cops and fire fighters are using. They often can't even talk to another municipality, remember the confusion at Columbine and the WTC? Denver Police could not talk to Jeffco Sheriffs who could not communicate to West Metro Fire.
Old technology. Hardly. Like you mentioned, in December of 1961, the OSCAR guys had a ham satellite in orbit just barely 4 years after the USSR launched Sputnik in October 1957 and less then 4 years after NASA launched Explorer in 1958. A bunch of volunteer hams trailed whole government backed space programs by only a couple of years. In fact, OSCAR beat large corporate sponsored SYNCOM satellites into orbit and were for all practical purposes the first true non-military (in that NASA was really formed as part of the Cold War space race, even if they were technically non-military) satellites into space. AT&T didn't even start tinkering with satellite communications until 1960 and COMSAT launched the first commercial satellites (EARLY BIRD) in 1965, 4 years after the hams had 2 satellites already in orbit and 2 more on the pad. In fact, at the end of 1965 OSCAR had 4 successful launches to the commercial world's one. Commercial satellite numbers didn't really overtake OSCAR until the early 1970s, which is why AMSAT was formed in 1969, to protect the amateur users from being pushed out by the market they'd shown was viable.
In total OSCAR and AMSAT have about 100 amateur built satellites or payloads on birds in orbit. Their success rate is every bit as good as Boeing, Loral, NASA, DoD and AFRL and for probably 1/1000th (or less) the cost per payload. A very recent and sophisticated AMSAT satellite (OSCAR 13) had just 235 pages of documentation and drawings total. We'll do that much paperwork for a single ASIC.
OSCAR and AMSAT:
http://www.amsat.org
APRS added GPS functionality in 1992, but was well established before that:
http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/aprs.html
Early cell phones, ham radiotelephony in the 1950s:
http://www.mercurians.org/april_2003/hams_wheels.html
People don't realize that the guts of what a lot of military and commercial users get is pretty much the same stuff hams use equipment wise, not to mention that ham radio is much more than just two-way FM or a fella pounding out Code on HF. It's a wide open and interesting hobby. A guy at work picked up this neat DSP demo board (being a working EE has it's privileges, if you are geeky) and has been tinkering with software-defined radios. His laptop can listen to about half of the repeater outputs in Denver and with a little voice training can pick which frequency someone is talking on by tone matching. It'll then alert him if someone he wants to talk to is on. The only reason it can only do half of the outputs is it wasn't a very expensive board and it's got pretty limited bandwidth. No need to have your radios constantly scanning and hoping to hear a familiar call. Your voice will be recognized. He's also messing with different protocols and algorithms to bandwidth optimize. What's he's doing is very much essentially exactly the same as the JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System) that the military uses. Just one box that can be a UHF FM mobile, HF AM CW, VHF APRS packet machine or whatever else he wants it to be. A bunch of old timers pounding Code, my butt. His ham shack is head and shoulders more universally configurable than the stuff the cops and fire fighters are using. They often can't even talk to another municipality, remember the confusion at Columbine and the WTC? Denver Police could not talk to Jeffco Sheriffs who could not communicate to West Metro Fire.
Old technology. Hardly. Like you mentioned, in December of 1961, the OSCAR guys had a ham satellite in orbit just barely 4 years after the USSR launched Sputnik in October 1957 and less then 4 years after NASA launched Explorer in 1958. A bunch of volunteer hams trailed whole government backed space programs by only a couple of years. In fact, OSCAR beat large corporate sponsored SYNCOM satellites into orbit and were for all practical purposes the first true non-military (in that NASA was really formed as part of the Cold War space race, even if they were technically non-military) satellites into space. AT&T didn't even start tinkering with satellite communications until 1960 and COMSAT launched the first commercial satellites (EARLY BIRD) in 1965, 4 years after the hams had 2 satellites already in orbit and 2 more on the pad. In fact, at the end of 1965 OSCAR had 4 successful launches to the commercial world's one. Commercial satellite numbers didn't really overtake OSCAR until the early 1970s, which is why AMSAT was formed in 1969, to protect the amateur users from being pushed out by the market they'd shown was viable.
In total OSCAR and AMSAT have about 100 amateur built satellites or payloads on birds in orbit. Their success rate is every bit as good as Boeing, Loral, NASA, DoD and AFRL and for probably 1/1000th (or less) the cost per payload. A very recent and sophisticated AMSAT satellite (OSCAR 13) had just 235 pages of documentation and drawings total. We'll do that much paperwork for a single ASIC.
OSCAR and AMSAT:
http://www.amsat.org
APRS added GPS functionality in 1992, but was well established before that:
http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/aprs.html
Early cell phones, ham radiotelephony in the 1950s:
http://www.mercurians.org/april_2003/hams_wheels.html
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