I took a hiatus from active involvement in Amateur Radio from 1993 to 2008 to raise a daughter and a decade of writing independently about Broadband Wireless Internet Access.
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Imagine... A Demonstration of Amateur Radio
I heard an NPR report tonight about the meltdown of the cellular networks in Washington DC as a result of the record crowds present for President-Elect Obama's inauguration... and nearly everyone having (and trying to use) a cellphone.
It was comical listening to the description of the problem, especially knowing that access was barely half the problem - the other problem was the switching bottleneck. Another would be handling all the requests for IP addresses :-)
What would have happened if Amateur Radio had been there, providing a real-world example of Amateur Radio being relevant?
Something a lot of like highly localized Wi-Fi HotSpots (think 20' radius) all being fed by high-bandwidth links which are operating on (uncontested) Amateur Radio spectrum like 1.2 GHz using off-the-shelf Broadband Wireless Internet Access gear tuned to 1.24 - 1.30 GHz (60 MHz of spectrum there). A web splash screen briefly mentioning that it was being provided by Amateur Radio and you would have gotten a helluva lot of Blackberry and iPhone-toting techies to be really curious about Amateur Radio.
It would work gloriously.
But then... Amateur Radio wants to stay mired in the past - tube rigs, CW, contesting, analog voice repeaters occupying all VHF and UHF channels... all that.
Sigh...
73,
Steve N8GNJ
Posted by Steve Stroh on January 19, 2009 at 10:55 PM in Amateur Radio General Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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