Maker Walt discussing something fascinating with Jeri Ellsworth, aka “Circuit Girl.” Photo by Tony KC6QHP
Here is a report on the 2013 Maker Faire by Tony Long (KC6QHP):
Another great Maker Faire is in the books, amateur microwave radio was well represented!
Thanks to the coordination efforts of Wayne KH6WZ, Brian W6BY, the 50 MHz and Up Group, the SBMS, and UC Davis, the “Not Your Grandpa’s Ham Radio 2” booth at the Maker Faire was a great success.
This year we shared a booth with UC Davis whose impressive student projects ranged from a radar demonstration, to video processing, audio sequencing, and mechatronics. Along with that, we had a 10/24 GHz SDR setup courtesy of Dennis W6DQ (on a big screen courtesy of Brian), some of Brian’s homebrew gear, Walt’s EM field demos and transceivers, and some of my stuff including a 10 GHz radio and beacon.
LA Times says that about 165,000 people were expected to attend this year, so at a minimum 10,000 people passed by our booth. Our raspy voices are an indicator that a great deal of talking was done! I personally interacted with a number of people who are really interested in amateur microwave radio and if even a fraction of them get involved or raise general awareness, I think it is a success.
Walt’s demos, owing in part to their elegant simplicity and visual nature attracted a lot of attention and interest. On Sunday night he took them to a post-fair get-together with the who’s who of the hardware hacking scene (Jeri Ellsworth, Ben Heckendorn, Diana Eng, Alan Yates and many many others). All were impressed!
Something I see very encouraging in the “maker” scene is a real interest in RF. This crowd includes a good deal of embedded systems engineers, talented software people, etc. There’s a real opportunity to make connections with this crowd and get more activity on the microwave bands.
As Software Defined Radios decrease in cost and become more open source, I predict massive interest in RF and likely in the microwave bands because of their large bandwidths. While they may not be interested in SSB mountaintop to mountaintop contesting (there will be those who are certainly), an increase in use of our bands will only help to further the cause of maintaining our spectrum to help further the state of the art.
I posted a gallery of pictures on Flickr: http://goo.gl/cAy3p
Tony KC6QHP”
Thanks for the report, Tony!
wayneyoshidakh6wz 