this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
303 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59366 readers
3871 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think smart phones are conventional communications. The are smart. They are still the "tech of tomorrow".
Smart phones use conventional communications to do very clever things. But those clever things are range limited and require specialised equipment. They also have absolutely no "hackability" without specialised equipment (easy to get, sure... But still pretty much single purpose)
AM is literally a couple caps, inductors, resistors (edit: and diode) then an amplifier (a couple transistors and resistors). And the range of lower frequency radio waves is (or can be) phenomenal.
It's just that it takes some experience to operate on these frequencies, and their bandwidth is limited.
Smart phones do away with the experience requirements, and trade higher frequencies & higher data rates for range (and I guess trade digital encoding for simplicity)
I see parallels to software.
People are nervous to "side loading apps" on their phone, but have no issues downloading and installing an exe on windows.
Smart phones give you the "this is how" kind of experience, and abstract away the sheer amount of technology they leverage. Which is amazing, and is what makes them smart!
But the underlying technology is phenomenal. And I feel it's a shame that the majority of people don't have any understanding of "installing an app" or similar (like calling internet access "WiFi".... 2 distinct things!)
Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level) and passes a test to acquire a license. Some of the equipment can either kill you or cause way too much interference potentially killing others indirectly
Not for nothing but I got my novice and tech license in grade school.
I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Looking back it was basically brain dumping (and learning code well enough to pass the 5WPM test).
Ended up getting 13WPM and general and advanced in 7th grade.
I still have my license, just renewed it a couple months ago. But haven't keyed up in maybe 15 years. Ain't nobody got time for that. I just got a little handheld transceiver on temu and haven't used it at all.
My local 2m is just old guys talking about Trump/conservative politics and their health conditions sadly.