thinking of selling my PDP-11/23+

[Tony Duell]

> 
> On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 21:10 +0000, Tony Duell wrote:
> 
> > I should get active, I guess. What's put me off is that 99% of the hams I 
> > meet seem only interested by buying the latest black-ox transciever. I'm 
> > interested in homebrrwing, restoring boatanchors, tinkering, that sort of 
> > thing. The digital modes looked attractive at first until I realised that 
> > for most of them you use a PC running pre-written (and often not 
> > open-soruce!) software. No thanks. The sort of experimetnation that I am 
> > interested in is not done with black boxes.
> 
> Once again, you haven't looked very hard, have you?  There are plenty of

No, I haven't. I can't possibly read every mailing list/newsgroup/(paper) 
magazine that relates to all of my interests (which extend beyond old 
electronics). 

> open-source implementations of digital modes out there - I use both
> fldigi and gmfsk for PSK and RTTY modes, mostly.

The problem is that it's next-to-impossible to do a meaningful web search 
for something that migth not ecven exist (like an open-source ham radio 
related program). 

And printed magazines rarely, if ever, consider the open-source versions. 
I used to read a photographic magazine (until it went almost exclusively 
digital), when I was reading it, it kept on about how to do things in 
Adobe Photoshop and never mentioned GIMP. It never said which, if any, 
digital camareas could be used sensibly with open-source unix-like OSes.

I no longer read a (modern) electronics mag at all. The last one I kept 
reading was Elektor, I gave up because it described the (free as in beer) 
tools for some microcontrollers, never mentioend there were open-source 
alternatives. I must admit that's where I got my erroneous idea that 
the only way to use many of these devices was with a modern PC running 
Windows.

[...]

> If no-one around you is interested in homebrewing or restoring boat
> anchors, has it occurred to you that you might be living in the wrong
> place?  Here in Glasgow we have a thriving amateur radio community,

Oh, doubtless I am. But he cost and logistics of moving rather means I am 
stuck here for the near future.

> where most of the younger members (at 35, that includes me!  It's an
> aging population, sorry guys, but you know it's true...) are heavily
> into homebrewing and "experimental" radio.

You are very lucky. Again, perhaps I've not looked very hard, but I know 
of one group that holds local-ish meetings that in interested in hardware 
hacking, electronics, engieering, etc. That group is HPCC (!). 

-tony