After Some Fancy Footwork, The Talk Goes Well
Last night, I was scheduled to give a talk on amateur radio at a meeting of the local section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Being engineers, I thought that I’d skip a lot of the preliminaries and launch right into some of the cool, new things about amateur radio, including PSK31, computer control and logging, antenna modeling, etc. I figured that I could snag them more easily by dazzling them with the cool, up-to-date technology. I even titled the talk “Not Your Father’s Ham Radio.”
Boy, was I wrong. Almost immediately, one of the attendees piped up, “Why don’t you start from the very beginning….” So, I did a bit of slide shuffling, and instead of talking about the fancy technology, explained some of the basics of ham radio and the licensing structure first.
I’m going to have to work on this presentation to include more of the basics, such as the purpose of the service and basic ham radio activities. At any rate, here’s the presentation in its current form: Not Your Father’s Ham Radio.
