said William Morder via tde-users:
| Sorry there, didn't mean to hijack your thread.
No problem -- my thread was OT to begin with!
| The mention of Commodore and Commodore Amiga, and using shortwave to | transmit data got me off on a tangent, a combination of nostalgia for a | simpler, stone-tools past, and a vision of future possibilities, how to | use stone tools in new and interesting ways. | | That was my reason for interest in using some small part of the radio | spectrum for internet: maybe limited in speed, only able to transmit | plaintext, email or text messages, but also its range is much greater | than wifi. AM radio signals at night, for example, in remote places, | without much interference, can be picked up many hundreds of miles | farther away than usual in daytime. Even FM transmission can travel over | pretty far distances, in the right conditons. | | Aside from ham radio and shortwave, I wondered what else might be | possible. | | E.Liddell's recommendation of ham radio seems the most viable way to | purse, at present. It's also a fun hobby all on its own, aside from the | potential of using it for internet. | | We might someday find ourselves in a situation where this could come in | very handy.
Not only could but does. Where I live, out in the woods, the power goes off fairly freqently, as it did for about four hours the day before yesterday. Which is why many of us have generators wired in to the house circuitry in a way that doesn't energize the power lines -- the power company sends a blast down the line to kill any generators in the circuit, because they're tired of getting killed by improperly attached generators. So there is a neighborhood radio network, which is a short-range class of broadcasting. I have a ham friend who is after me all the time to join it, which I've so far resisted out of fear and self knowledge: I might get into it and spend more money than I should cooking up an amazing rig. But I can see its utility, especially on those occasions when the power has gone out because of 18 inches of snow.
Of course, nowadays when the power goes out the first thing to do is turn on a broadcast radio to find out if it's The End Of The World As We Know It. (Assuming, without evidence, that it would be broadcast: many stations now get their canned programming over the internet and have automatic generators and would be on the air a week after the extinction of all life on earth, entirely oblivious. In the way that the robot voice in Commodore OS keeps chattering away long after the machine has otherwise locked up solid.)