Fun Ham Radio Weekend…
I spent today at a ham radio event called the Communication Academy. It is suppose to be focused on emergency communication topics, but any of the interesting things seem to have nothing to-do with e-comm.
First interesting talk was by Dr. Charles Simonyi, the local MSFT guy who went into space. He spoke about his experience going to ISS. There were somethings I’d never considered before with doing this, I think because you always get hung up on the $20M part. Since this service is run by the Russians, you pretty much have to have a working knowledge of Russian. (All the knobs, switches, etc in the ships are Russian obviously) I guess they give you translators for the training, but Charles spent 6 months learning Russian before going to Space City.
So considering that there have only been about 450 people who have gone into space since 1961, you’d think that being in a room with more then one would be a pretty rare event outside of NASA. Oddly enough I happen to be in a room with two today. Besides Charles, Dr. Bonny Dunbar was also attending todays conference.
The other interesting talk was on Cognitive Radio, which I have to admit took me quite a while to wrap my head around what it was. Think a network aware spread spectrum SDR radio, so the radio itself figures out on the fly based on all sorts of conditions where to frequency hop to find a open channel. I guess this is the new big field researches are working on, I don’t think radios really exist yet for a number of reasons. Just getting a A to D converter that would be able to sample enough spectrum for it to work is almost funny today. (We need a direct conversion from 1Mhz to 1Ghz A to D converter please)
http://www.museumofflight.org/display.asp?Page=050921DunbarAnnouncement