On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Michael Tondee <mat...@netcommander.com>wrote:
> Just one further piece of commentary on this since it was my post below > that started the discussion. I have no idea how "old" the critics of SDR > that I ran into yesterday were. Who knows? I don't want to imply that this > is some sort of old timers vs. new blood thing. At what point does one > become an "old timer" anyway? I'm 47 and I've been licensed since I was 15. > I just think that whatever these folks age were that they were genuinely > misinformed about what SDR is. I think you have hit the nail on the head. Perceptions include: 1. It uses the computer so it has something to do with the Internet. 2. It uses the computer so it must be difficult. 3. It doesn't have any knobs so how will I tune across the band? 4. It doesn't look like other radios so it must be totally different. And since my ordinary radio works pretty well, this new thing, being so different, must not work too well. > Now whether this was because of ignorance or stubborness and being > unwilling to accept new things, I really don't know. I really don't care to > argue with folks like that either way. I said my piece about what a great > radio I had and then when the criticism started flowing in, I tried to > correct some of the misinformation but then quickly gave up because it was > pointless. You would not have believed how long after I gave up and said "to > each their own" that they continued to badger and make comments like calling > it a "flexy screech box" and try to get a rise from me and I refused to > acknowledge it. That was the childish part of it. > Age doesn't necessarily matter, pick any subject and you can have childish > immature ignorant people in all age groups. > There is that part too. That part is not subject to education. Most of the ham community is interested but overwhelmed so that takes repeated exposure to get them to make the leap and understand. I think that a series of presentations to ham clubs would be the way to go. I wish I was going to be doing Field Day with the local club this year. I would set up two Flex stations and teach people to use them. As it is, I may get to operate Field Day in Dominica so I will operate the F3K in that case. (For those of you wishing to see where I will be, use Google Earth to see 15° 16.9'N, 61° 21.4'W.) But getting back to the topic at hand, one of my advantages is that I am teaching kids. This presents me with two key advantages: 1. they have no preconceived notions about how things *should* work; 2. they have no background at all so I get to start from scratch. It is interesting that, when presented with the Flex and the K2, it takes about 30 seconds for them to gravitate to the Flex. Being able to see the spectrum and identify the types of signals visually is a *HUGE* advantage. Now instead of incessantly tuning back and forth, fruitlessly hunting for someone calling CQ, we can just click on a signal. -- 73 de Brian, WB6RQN/J79BPL _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
