Ham Radio - Amateur Radio
- Filed under: Ham Radio
- Date: Jan 31,2008
Ham Radio is what started it all for me. As a young boy, I loved walkie talkies. Most games I had with my friends involved walkie talkies. Over time I had accumulated tons of those fisher price handhelds that I incorporated into those childhood games of hide and seek, spy, WHATEVER. I must have been asking for those things every christmas because I had all kinds.
From the WikiPedia :
Amateur radio, often called ham radio, is both a hobby and a service that uses various types of radio communications equipment to communicate with other radio amateurs for public service, recreation and self-training. A participant is called an amateur radio operator, or a ham.
Amateur radio operators enjoy personal wireless communications with each other and are able to support their communities with emergency and disaster communications if necessary, while increasing their personal knowledge of electronics and radio theory. An estimated six million people throughout the world are regularly involved with amateur radio.[2]
The term “amateur” is not a reflection on the skills of the participants, which are often quite advanced; rather, “amateur” indicates that amateur radio communications are not allowed to be made for commercial or money-making purposes.
My girlfriend and I have been waiting for a while to reach this point.
I gave myself 1 year to have enough money to buy some cheap land in New Brunswick. For $10,000 I will have something VERY nice to build on. (Believe it or not) Today i’ve passed the $1000 mark, so i’m 1/10th of the way there after 2.5 Months. It’s a little behind schedule, but the land i’m looking at is closer to 5-6000$ so I just might make it anyways. 
Asterisk, is a FREE, opensource software to make your own phone system. It has been around for many years, and at this point has proven itself to be reliable and flexible. Asterisk allows enterprise level PBX solutions to be available to the average small business at a fraction of the cost of regular proprietary PBX systems that have been available on the market until now.
Keep in mind, these are just a FEW of the features that I think are really fun. This system has all the usual things phone systems have : Paging, conference calls, transfers, Music on Hold, Company Directory, etc … Until now, phone systems and voicemail systems were 2 different boxes that worked together, but are sold seperately. For the same price, this system has voicemail built in.
You may think i’ve been going on a little much about this, but it’s for a reason. Obviously, all office phone systems need to be connected to phone LINES (from the local telephone company) in order to be able to call any phone that’s not connected to your own system. Voip Phone systems are great. Voip Phone lines however, still leave much to be desired. Most offices computer networks run at ATLEAST 100 m/bits, the actual connection to the internet however is usually 6-7 m/bits. (Small / Medium sized businesses). Since Voip Phone lines are provided via your internet connection, i’ve often noticed it can get choppy during calls if the internet connection is struggling to keep up with other people’s internet traffic. Also, if your internet connection is lost, so are all your phone lines. Business owners tend to frown when that happens.
GeoCaching is essentially a real-life treasure hunt where people use a GPS to find hidden “caches” that are all over the world. This isn’t really a new game, so when I say “all over the world” it doesn’t mean that there’s a cache somewhere near you, and then you have to drive an hour to the next cache ; chances are, there are LOTS of cache’s near you. If you live in a major city, there ARE TONS of caches within walking distance.
