[Noisebridge-discuss] Amateur Radio at Noisebridge?

[Josh Myer]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Paul Suliin <psuliin at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Josh, what sorts of cultural things do you mean?  At the moment I'm
> studying for the exam using books provided by ARRL, so there's not much of a
> cultural aspect to that.
>
>
Mostly the jargon, so you can sensibly talk about radios and the weather on
internet-linked 2m/70cm repeaters.  Also, the thorough appreciation that
most hams are at a point in life where the most exciting thing going on is
the cure for their wife's foot fungus (true story, overheard on a local
repeater, probably via IRLP, even).

There are a lot of little rules in amateur radio.  Imagine noisebridge, but
without the anarchist/libertarian/common-sense consensus process.  Nerds
like rules, and, without a structure that makes it hard to create rules,
they will make lots of them.  Happily, very few of them are actually legally
enforced, but it's best not to piss off the community.  This includes stuff
like running digital over a CW frequency, etc.  (Elmers will say that
bandplans exist to conserve precious spectrum; if more than 10% of the band
is in use simultaneously around here, I'd be surprised.)

The ARRL books might actually cover this; I'm not sure.  The key thing to
always remember: don't piss off the Country Kitchen set, and you're good.

(All that said: I'm planning to get my General soon, and ordered the ARRL
Extra book.)

73 de KJ6ANM
--
/jbm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/attachments/20100822/b861eb77/attachment-0001.html>