The AM Forum

I played this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4unqE6iM5_Y) yesterday.  I have an account with You Tube, so I entered my username and password, and submitted a comment.  I basically said that the guy has an impressive pile of store-bought gear that he paid a lot of money for (or charged to his credit card), but this clearly demonstrates what is wrong with ham radio to-day. In all that array of gear there is not a single piece of radio equipment that he built himself - not even an antenna.  He just bought a bunch of stuff and connected it all together.  Hams have evolved into communicators/consumers, no longer builders/tinkerers/experimenters.

The comment appeared in the comments section, but a few hours  later when I checked to see if anyone had responded, the comment had been removed. But I notice the one about the Cobra and Midland is still there.

I suppose YouTube is like any other message board; moderators can remove anything as they see fit, for any reason.  The guy must not tolerate it very well when someone expresses anything other than adoration for his excesses and his ego. 

I could be wrong, but I thought members could delete messages themselves.

I agree with your post,though.

Don,
It's not YouTube it's the one who posted the video. I had the same thing happen to me when I commented how cber's waste their money on key-downs and suburbans with 5 high power altternators to generate jusice for their 5KW transmitters.

Fred

That's a pretty big "NEVER".

Darwin, Einstein and Jefferson had "opinions" that would have been dangerous to ignore.

The mark of educated and civilized people is the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff.  The internet is a goldmine of useful information but it takes intelligence to find it.

TV on the other hand is a wasteland.  There may be some useful info out there but it's not worth the energy to find it.

js

You are correct Jack, the problem is that many of the "educated" have a lack of knowledge or slanted information in many departments. 

I agree Don. However, I made the mistake of making the comment elsewhere about the insane prices that some people pay for equipment and d@mn near got tarred and feathered over it. So now, I just bite my tounge and enjoy what I have and let the others worry about what they have. I'm just glad that, for me at least, the questions of "why?" or "how?" equipment works is as much or more fun than just "buy it" and/or "use it".

Phil

<<<know the part about the right to bare arms?>>>

I bare my arms all the time in spring and summer  ;D ;D

I wonder if this guy knows he can change frequencies on each unit instead of having a separate radio for each band???

A case me thinks of an applicance operator having more money (or credit card debt) than common sense. ::)

This reminds me of the Direct Buy commercial where this Tony Gillotta introduces his Trophy Wife and then they show all of this expensive, overpriced furniture. ???

Phil - AC0OB

Phil,

You have an excellent attitude.  I spend more time on the bench than I do on the air although I usually have a receiver going to listen in on a QSO while I am working. 

I enjoy returning gear to operational status and I do want to spend more time building also.  I am about 6 years away from retirement and then I plan to catch up.

I have a friend who does woodworking and he has tons of tools, jigs, and gadgets in his shop and everything is spotless-not because he cleans all the time but because he uses his shop maybe 2 days a year.  He loves buying tools and finding storage for them but never uses them.  I have a lot of radios but I rotate my operation of them so that they all get their fair share of air time.

Rodger

I think he is a relatively new ham who is currently into contesting and operating above 50 MHz.   He has obviously gotten into the ham game with a lot of enthusiasm judging by the $$$ he's spent.  I certainly don't want to dampen his enthusiasm but I hope maybe one day he'll look around at all his stuff and realize that if anything broke he'd be totally dependent on some professional shop out there somewhere, and not like that feeling.   I didn't see any test equipment in the video; no oscilloscope for example.  After something breaks maybe he'll develop an interest in tubes and black wrinkle paint hi hi.   That's what happened to me.  All those black plastic boxes, when they break, you find yourself looking at little teeny tiny things on double sided boards and you have no idea what you're looking at and vaguely how it all works.  Manuals?   The JA gear is all covered in two or three separate manuals each, and the service manuals, if you can get them, are a pain to figure out.    The parts are all either teeny tiny or huge black slabs with 100 wires coming out of them.     Hello boatanchor.

Some of my best ham time is in the basement at my "bench" (my washing machine with a wood slab on top of it) smelling hot rosin solder and working on some project and listening to a QSO on a rig piped to a speaker over on the other side of the basement.   To me that's ham heaven.

That's why I despise computers....the sad irony, I'm writing this via a computer.

Guess I should clarify - I hate the culture which has evolved around the social use of the computer.

Today kids don't have the chances to build, to salvage and rip apart old TVs for their components to be reused in a home project. That's how kids would grow up to be engineers, inventors, repairmen!

What do kids do today? I watch what the kids do for hobbies here and even among many adults I know today, their hobby becomes tapping at keys, playing games, goofing off on Twitter or Facebook, or being digital pirates with music, movies, etc... things much worse too. It's affected the culture which kids grow up in, and in my opinion, it's not a positive effect.

And heaven help if you try to teach or show them something different, like building your own stuff from scratch? Most of them, they just roll their eyes mockingly. Only a rare few show any glimmer of interest.


4-5 hours can just fly by and it'll only feel like 45 min to me when I'm working on some circuit, got the soldering irons hot (I have 3 sizes, one small, one 260Watt Weller gun I got for Xmas last year, and one big one from the 40s that will solder to copper pipe while there's still water in the pipe), the scope and the radios are on and the power supplies are toasty warm!

73s
geo

Ehhhh, That's the one thing that's good about a hobby like amateur radio. You don't need to know which end of a slobbering iron to hold to enjoy this hobby. Some operators are just plug and play. Me personally, like everyone else here, I like to dig in and learn the electrical/electronics side with the older gear. The corntester in that video needs to get himself a much larger area to operate however. He obviously spent a ton of cash, but yet, keeps it all stacked up like cord wood.

I want to put that dish pictured at the end of the vid right on the roof of my house just to piss off the entire neighborhood.

Link
http://www.petesias.com/ham_radio.htm

Don

There you have it: the classic Appliance Operator with LOADS OF $$$$$.  No hard feelings on my part but it certainly is not my idea of "fun."

I do think it was small of whomever deleted your comments - free speech not withstanding.

Al

Unfortunately, he seems to have run out of money when it came to a tripod.

As a one time film maker, I have a very low tolerance for unedited footage that looks like a garden hose being squirted around.

js

This is true. I start to get a headache watching amateur crap like that for too long. Reminds me of the japanese super fast zoom in/zoom out technique.

All that equipment being advertised on Youtube makes for a perfect target for the unscrupulous.

Loved the setup but he is missing a Flex rig. Doesn't look any different then some guy who has wall to wall/floor to ceiling boatanchor rigs stacked and/or lined up and there are lots of them around.

I disagree, this is how network engineers and IT professionals are made.
kids today rip apart computers, install motherboards, build ip networks, homebrew linux webservers, map ports on routers, install operating systems, share out music.
they also have the ability to communicate with more people than you ever could on ham radio.
all this is done without the need for testing and a government license, which allows more kids to get involved.

that little nerdy kid with the thick glasses will someday be the person keeping that highspeed fiber network coming into your home, delivering everything from voice, data and movies/entertainment/news

  As well as willing manipulation, censorship of conflicting opinion etc. Witness the "Global Warming" e-mail expose'.

   Education is merely synthetic experience , often slanted and flavored to suit the "educator's" agenda or the message they are directed to support. Of course the mass media employs the same tactics for much the same reason. IE model rocket engines igniting over-filled Chevy truck's gas tanks with loose caps on trucks that are hit at twice the recorded speed . A little feat NBC almost got away with.

Wow..

I wonder if he is using all GFI outlets.

C

I wonder if it is a zero-land thing.  Check these out.

Unfortunately, this is the image of ham radio that will be left with a lot of web surfers who happen on to that site.
No wonder ham radio has been described as  "faintly embarrassing" (http://frrl.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/on-being-bob-sullivan-w0yva-amateur-radio-at-the-margins-of-society/).

http://wa0kgu.110mb.com/

Check out the interior of the car (http://jalopnik.com/5428800/ham-radio-car-sale-photos)

Kind of funny.  I have always admired W0YVA's restoration work.  He did a fantastic job on an HT20.  I imagine someone could have a good time photographing my place from a few carefully chosen vantage points.   I've seen some of those 10,000 rigs in a car or SUV at Dayton.  There used to be a website by hams that poked fun at the hobby by holding up these extreme cases for entertainment.  www.hamsexy.com but I guess they let the domain registration lapse because it's gone now.   They'd go to Dayton and take photos of these crazy rig jam packed cars and guys wearing metal hard hats with mag mount antennas on them, then put them up on hamsexy.com. 

A few years ago the Wall St. Journal did a front page story on ham radio.  They sent a reporter up to ARRL Hq. and she interviewed someone there.  Whoever it was, he took the reporter out to his car and they drove around while he operated cw mobile by tapping out code on a key strapped to his leg.  From a PR standpoint I thought that was about the most clueless thing ARRL could do.  Yeah we're normal people, we drive around sending and receiving telegraph code in our cars with cw keys.   

Rob,

The staffer was just trying to indicate that he was in the minority that didn't like licensing going code free  :)

W0YVA has done some incredible work and his Signal One newsletters have been extremely helpful to me in working through my CX-7B

Rodger WQ9E

All I can say is different strokes for different folks.

Everyone has different interests, whether related to this wonderful hobby of ours, or a hobby or interest completely unrelated to amateur radio.

I think it may be a bit unfair for any of us to be judgemental with respect to those interested in purchasing the latest state-of-the-art radio gear and connecting it all together via a LAN within the shack, operating VHF, etc. OK, this fellow's particular interest in the hobby is very probably something none of the members of this board would practice. By the same token, the ham shown in the YouTube video may very well view our aspect of the hobby as being provincial, retro-tech, and not related to his desire to utilize the latest technology equipment and integrating it all together.

Personally, I was impressed by his station.

You get the picture.

Just my 2 cents.

As the ancient Greeks would have said, "there is no accounting for taste".

73,

Bruce

The station was OK, but there is alot of stuff there that would work better if built rather than bought, and did not have to be forced to conform, or force the station to conform to available doo-dads. It looks more like a ham radio dealer test room, that is, there is no personality to it. I would be very bored except for wanting to see the wiring prints. He did say he asks if people want to come operate, but they don't. I suppose, where is the challenge when all you have to do is push a button. Like ALE. Or they might be intimidated. I like all band.. VHF is cool.

The Hamsexy website seems to be gone but there is a Hamsexy Facebook group for friends of Hamsexy with over 300 members and quite a few pictures.

The Electric Porcupine!

As for it being faintly embarassing, my friends and my colleagues at work do not think it is so silly because they dang well know I build and repair whatever I wish, something many have not learned how to do. I am always being asked technical questions and radio is only a part of it. I try to be a good example. Sometimes I fail but mostly I succeed.
(BTW it is always good when a design engineer at a prospective customer is a ham too)

Part of people respecting ham radio is when they understand that the better operators are accomplished across the several necessary disciplines required by the radio art today, not the oft portrayed narrowly focused nerds stuck in some hellish handy-talkie and orange vest paradigm with official tunnel vision.

With this in mind, that guy's station is impressive to non-hams, but would be even more so if he had a more linear layout and less obvious dark clutter. More like a brightly lit TOC or NCS with at least two or three really obvious positions and less like a crammed cubby hole with some gear two layers deep (notice the leenyar?) where the second chair seems to be for watching to too-obvious chicks on the big screen. I would have at least put local radar on it. On the other hand, he is apparently a corntester, and so, the cubby hole is what may work best for him. The bright side is that he is keeping the radio dealers in business. And it might be a place to hide from the XYL.

Like the Cadaverlac!  Now that is a real classy mobile rig!  BIG TUBES!

Just to clearly answer the question, Don, it probably was not "YouTube" the website that deleted your remarks.

When you, as an account holder, post a video on YouTube you can set whether people can comment and/or post "reply videos."  The account holder can further delete or reply to comments made.

Administrators at YouTube step in only when someone flags or otherwise "reports" a video they deem objectionable, or when someone claims a posting violates copyright.

I guess the guy is pretty thin-skinned to feel he has to delete any comment that offers anything other than envy and praise for his appliance collection. What's the point of having a comment section if the originator can delete those that he doesn't like? Wouldn't that be just like setting up this forum so that the originator of a thread could select the replies he wants to appear in response, and delete the rest?

I like that. How many times has a poster posted a specific query or problem needing to be solved and then having the thread wander all over the place and, either not addressing the problem, or having it buried in a ton of other threads that have no relevance to his/her original posting.

I have been on forums since the early 90s.  Thats the way of the land.  We get to talking and the post heads off..  No big deal

C

I wonder if he can "dip and load"  :o


tom - AB3FL

I was referring to the youtube guy again. Maybe they should get together.

I might be a "big deal" if you're the original poster with a specific issue that you would like to solve and you come here hoping for some useful input. There's probably nothing more frustrating to a poster, bringing up an issue topic, only to have the thread discussion wander away from the original point. It's even more frustrating, if 25 or 30 posts later, someone has some relevant information, but by that time, the original poster has moved on. It wouldn't be the first time a poster has posed a question/issue here, and then returning later, only to find thread ramblings that might only be remotely connected, if at all, to his original posting. It also wouldn't be first time that I've seen, after this experience, the poster posting the same issue in another forum. Sometimes a bit of common sense before making a post goes a long way towards some consideration for the original poster.

I dont think so.  It needs a lot of work to get it back on the road.  That's my recollection.

Al

".S. What does this have to do with the YouTube video?"

It was Peteys way of demonstrating how a thread can be diverted off topic. . . .

Hamsexy.com is still there and as sarcastic as ever.

73, Jim
WA2AJM/3

I liked the dual Heil microphoniums and the glowing stage mic.
A very visual type of shack.........maybe an RFOOLE
Seems big into VHF and above.
Must have a lot of money$$$

Fred

Actually a very impressive set-up.  Not everyone is in to home-brewing or restoring old gear, etc.  Besides that...the one that dies with the most toys wins!  :o ;D

73,  Jack, W9GT

Yep, they are back up.  Their server must  have been down or something. 

Or perhaps they got hacked.  I suspect that sight is as much a lightning rod as is a strapping AM signal on 75.