Thursday, September 07, 2006

Have to get this off my chest ............

REAL radio involves an antenna, a radio, a key or (shudder) a microphone.

REAL radio does not involve telephone lines or the Internet.

Thank you.

73 de Larry W2LJ

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:49 AM

    Larry, A BIG AMEN to that!!!

    73, Ned, W8VFM

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  2. Does this mean this blog isn't a part of REAL radio?

    Or, if we want to extend it a bit, seeing as without the large part played by telephone lines and the Internet in microprocessor development, your KAT2 isn't part of REAL radio?

    73, Mal VK3ZDD

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  3. Yes, that is exactly what this means. My blog is related to radio ..... but it's not radio.

    I don't understand your jilted disconnect of micrprocessors and radio. Microprocessors came before the Internet by they way. I never said that using a microprocessor or a microprocessor driven device took anything away from radio. Where did that come from?

    73 de Larry W2LJ

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  4. Oops. Sorry Larry, I didn't intend causing any disagreement - just extending the concept of real radio a bit. I understand you probably mean real radio only involves radio waves - fair enough. too.

    But to an expeditioner or ham in the bush petrol generators and solar cells are real radio.

    I've been involved in both radio and computers since the 1960s and over that time I've seen an amazing amount of argument about what REAL radio is and what it isn't - IRLP isn't real radio, and before that,FM and repeaters aren't real radio, and so on. If we keep going back then SSB wasn't real radio - only AM was. I still hear a few guys on the air over here in VK who don't seem to think transistors and ICs are real radio - it has to hum and glow in the dark. And as for Software Defined Radio - well!

    But things change, hey!

    Re. microprocessors - I know they came before the internet - I wish I'd had the net when I was exploring 8080s, Z80s and 6802s. But we wouldn't have done much with them without spinoffs from telephone technology such as the Kansas City Modem protocol which allowed us to store data on cassette tapes, and ASR-33 teletypes as terminals - all of which was a part of the beginning of bulletin boards and the internet.

    And much of this early work was done by radio amateurs, because for them it was extending their skills in exploration of new ideas.

    ReplyDelete