William Gibson said that in Burning Chrome, first published in the July 1982 issue of Omni. I miss the old print version to the point of keeping an eye open for them in ephemera piles at swap meets. We practiced that phrase long before hearing it. Most of us didn’t see it first in Omni. We had to wait until his 1986 compilation of the same name hit the bookstores, but it wasn’t a revelation; rather an affirmation of what we instinctively knew. The phone company was not thinking of model railroad geeks when they dumped those old stepper switches at Eli Heffron’s scrap yard. Ham Radio operators have traditionally used surplus and salvaged military and consumer electronics to build their rigs. We still “dumpster dive,” but it now involves intercepting obtainium at the day job before it hits the bottom of the e-cycle gaylord box in the warehouse. After a few months your workshop starts looking like the beginnings of Dog Solitude. It’s a good thing. You never know when you might have to scratch that hacking itch.

I got my entry-level (Novice back then) ham ticket in the mid 1980s. Have been active on and off since then, mostly on. Before then I used 27 MHz. CB and 49 MHz. Part 15. These days I also use FRS for home stuff (house to back yard) along with a half dozen other families in town.

It’s a hobby. My activities include contesting, VHF/UHF+ weak-signal work, QRP, restoring/operating “green radios” (military surplus rigs), and occasionally getting involved in EmComm (Emergency Communications) through ARES. Some of that might be survivalist-oriented, but if you’re a self-identified “prepper” I’d rather not see you getting a ham license because most of you are insufferable ass clowns and it pains me to see you also identify as a ham operator in much the same way it pains me to see cop-wannabes involved in EmComm.

If you don’t want to get a ham license because you have no desire to get really into radio comms like a friend of mine from out West, then it’s cool, you’re cool, and we’re cool. Just like him, you got CB, FRS, and MURS radios to play with that will get the job done for your local comms with like-minded individuals. My friend REDACTED is a fellow survivalist who is a gunsmith and all-around outdoorsman. He don’t need a ham license, doesn’t want to get one, and his 2 watt FRS HTs and the Cobra 19 in his Wrangler do a good job keeping him in touch with his buddies.

If you’re a paranoid who thinks a ham ticket will put you on a database, then do both of us a favor and don’t get it. But still buy whatever you want, the more expensive the better, toss it in an ammo can, and make sure it stays in good condition so I can get a nice deal from your estate or a pawnshop later when you pass away or need some money. I prefer Icom and Yaesu, but if you can afford some nice late-model Motorola or Harris P25 rigs with AES by all means please buy them. FPP preferred on bands adjacent or on Part 97 allocations, and make sure you knock a digit or two off the end of the price when your spouse asks you how much you paid for it. Makes it easier for my friends and I later. If you’re buying the el-cheapo Baofengs don’t worry about that last part. If they wind up in a landfill it’s no big loss.

Yeah my handle was chosen because one of my first hacks involved freebanding my first rig: an Icom IC-02AT. Still have one and still occasionally use it. I’ve talked about, and waxed poetic about ham radio for survivalist purposes for a good 30+ years now. I’m done doing it under this masthead. You won’t see much Part 97 stuff in Cyber-Tek going forward. I’m moving it over to a blog under my callsign (IYKYK) where I can about the specific cool shit with those of you who are also on the air and don’t mind using your callsigns in the right venue (this isn’t it.) The prepper types can go do and say what they want. Not my monkey—not my circus. Em-dash deliberate.

If I know you through the Amateur Radio hobby, I’ll be sending you a URL. You can also send me an email and I’ll reply with the URL. Make sure you include your callsign.

In the meantime, there’s also other cool tech stuff to talk about on here, including Part 95 and Part 15 wireless stuff.

Baofeng Redux

I’ve bad-mouthed Baofeng radios quite a bit in the past, and the UV-5R deserves the hate for its crappy build quality. Newer models on the other hand are significantly better. My ham club has a member who is on a mission to get more people into ham radio and specifically VHF/UHF work. He sells some decent reasonably-priced gear at hamfests across the region. He found these really nice, fairly rugged $10 UHF 30 channel HTs that are not only suitable for Part 97 ops, but also for LMR and GMRS work. Thirty UHF channels is enough for a whole region’s worth of linked repeaters, simplex frequencies, and a GMRS/FRS frequency for interoperability with the UHF Part 95 operators. They’re made by Baofeng under the Alervites label. Here’s the Amazon link. (The link is Affiliate. I get a cut.)

Software is free and runs under Windows. You’ll need a Baofeng programming cable which is easy enough to get ahold of. These radios are dirt simple—power/volume knob, ptt button, and two function buttons for changing channels. That’s it. That’s all you need. No donking around with menus when you need to do something.

What do we use them for? Hamfest intercoms and microwave liaison work. We got a simplex frequency we use at hamfests for chatting and on mountain tops when aiming dishes, and a bunch of wide-area linked repeater networks for when simplex won’t cut it. The radio is bright orange so you can’t lose it on the ground, and so it can serve as a visual recognition device. It’s cheap so if you do lose or break it you’re not out a lot of money.

They’ll also work just fine on GMRS or UHF LMR business band (Part 90). GMRS license is only $30, and the whole family can operate under it. GMRS also interoperates with FRS. If you run under Part 90 you can use the encryption feature on these radios. Don’t know what it would cost to get a low-power or itinerant LMR license, but then everyone who you say works for your “business” can run under your license using encryption.

Last nite when I was writing the previous article I had the WS1040 running a search on the CB band. I have the receiver attached to a 20” telescoping whip antenna and sitting on a windowsill. That ensures I hear either very local signals or very strong skip signals like those yahoos on Channel 6. Didn’t hear much except for one signal, someone requesting a radio check on Channel 19. I didn’t hear a reply to him, the setup was not designed for range on these frequencies, but someone did reply to him because I heard my anonymous CBer thank the more distant inaudible station.

Channel 19 is not a known local channel around here. It is a common highway channel and we’re a couple miles away from CT-8. The anonymous CBer probably picked Channel 19 because that’s the one channel most people are familiar with, and probably the one you’d most likely get a reply on if you are close to a highway.

Here is the important thing. Someone somewhere nearby set up a rig, a radio communications device. They made a test transmission to confirm that it worked, and got a reply. That anonymous dude had done more than most “preppers” by actually setting up his radio and making sure it works instead of buying it and tossing it in an ammo can for the end of the world. Dude didn’t even know what the local channel was, but he knew enough that a call on Channel 19 near a highway would get a reply from some working man in his Freightliner hauling a load that’s due on site the next morning.

Spent a little time this afternoon stream-side at one of my common field locations. A dead end closed roadway about 1800 feet long that parallels a local river. The road makes a great test bed for part 15 devices. Park at the gate, fire up the emitter, and take a walk with an Icom IC-R5. Today however, I was scouting for locations where I might find the Black Sand as part of the ongoing lo-tek radio experiments. Quartz, silicon, copper, lead, ferrites. You can do all sorts of lo-tek experiments with them, but they also make up the computing machine.

I remember the first time I saw one of the machines. Neighborhood kid’s dad had one form work. It was a Commodore PET. Loaded programs in through a cassette tape player. Had a few programs, including an artillery game. Took forever to load it in. I remember seeing him type in a few lines of BASIC. A few years later we started seeing the machines in displays at Caldor, Sears, Service Merchandise, all over the place. I was 14 when I got my first one, a Timex Sinclair 1000. Was a late Christmas present because they sold out everywhere the summer before Christmas when they were released. Worked with it all of a year or two before I upgraded to a Commodore VIC-20, and shortly afterwards an Atari 800XL. Meanwhile we had Apple IIs, IBM PCs, and a DEC PDP-11/70 at school. When you saw the word READY followed by a blinking cursor you knew that the whole magilla was in your hands, and the only things stopping you were the limitations of your own knowledge, the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, the capabilities of your hardware combined, and financial constraints.

I remember when the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were released. My friend Jim (aka “Outland”), the SYSOP of Milliways BBS in New Jersey, clued me in to the articles about them in Byte Magazine. Byte was the bomb back in the day. We couldn’t afford a 68000 machine until a few years later when I came across some 68000 CPU single-board computers at my local electronic/industrial surplus place at the bargain price of $40 each. They had a rudimentary at best OS on them, but by then we had accumulated information on program in assembly, and had learned how interesting and useful single board computers and embedded systems were becoming.

That was another thing that the mid 1980s produced. Around the same time Commodore and Atari were producing their 16-bit microcomputers, a guy named Steve Ciarcia in Connecticut had developed a powerful 8-bit Z80 compatible machine that fit in a lunch box. He called it the SB180 and the example for his article, Part 2, was actually built into a Fraggle Rock lunchbox. You can see the whole history here. Never got one, but it’s gonna be one of those things that I’ll find at the bottom of a box of circuit boards at a swap meet for $10. I might even get it since it’s far enough away from the i.MX28 boards I wrench on at the day job to not seem like work. Embedded systems continued to grow as a specialty niche parallel to general purpose computing, and many of us followed it through magazines like Circuit Cellar Ink and Nuts and Volts.

It was in Nuts and Volts during the early 1990s where I first saw mention of the Parallex BASIC Stamp. Finally, an embedded system using a language I was intimately familiar with. Bought one, and over the course of a weekend designed the Cheesebox that was in Cybertek Issue #12 before it was anywhere else. Great little widget that BASIC Stamp. Would probably still use one over an Arduino if I had a choice, despite what everyone else might say. It’s about what you can do with the machine instead of the choice of the machine itself. You make with what you’re comfortable and good with, or in some cases what you can afford.

I was messing around with whatever surplus and scrap single-board computer systems I could scrounge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Dude out of California who was on OSUNY gave me a few that ran FORTH. Didn’t want to learn a new niche language at the time, and gave them to a fellow hobbyist who lives up county. Things changed about 20 years ago with the Arduino, the bar to entry for learning the machine got lower and lot of artist and other non-technical creative types could get in on the action. This fit right in with the “You can create art and beauty on a computer,” and “Computers can change your life for the better” aspects of the hacker ethic. Yet, quite a few people in the scene who should have known better dismissed the Arduino as a toy for “hipster hackers.” Not that anyone actually doing something cared. That’s the important part. They became gods of the machine. Deus ex machina forged by binary in their own image.

AI has lowered the bar to machine godhood yet again. People bitch about it. They can bitch all they want. Much like the so-called experts in the 1970s shit-talking early personal microcompuers, and then 30 years later with the Arduino, the people who are actually doing things don’t care, and will continue to do amazing things with the new machine tek. You can be a godawful complaining ass clown if you want, but Dii machinae sumus.

Meanwhile back in Dog Solitude, Sector 4173 of the New England Confederation, Interzone I have been taking a step or three back in time. As a matter of principle I avoid anything resembling what I do with at the day job. I previously mentioned my search for the Black Sand. Wildflower had the privilege of living seaside where you can mine it easy off the beach. I have to look around a little bit for it, but minedat.org has given me some clues.

The bottle deposit in Connecticut has gone up to 10 cents now, making it worthwhile to keep the things around for a periodic trip to the recycling station. The crew of Dog Solitude can easily accumulate 100 bottles over the course of 2-3 weeks, and there’s a recycling station in Torrington right across the street from a Goodwill. It’s not a great Goodwill as far as those places go. During normal hours it’s got local crazies and asshole pickers going through the book selections with their phones. At 30 minutes to close on a Saturday nite however it’s tolerable and I still occasionally find something there. Dropped off 10 bucks worth of bottles and cans at the recycling station, went across the street, and got lucky. One of the rarer Forrest Mims books was on the shelf for 3 bucks. Twenty six years ago Radio Shack offered an electronics learning lab with two books done by Mims. You could only get the books if you bought the kit. That makes them pretty uncommon on their own. Had come across Volume 2 in an obtainium lot without much thought about Volume 1. Found Volume 1 last Saturday at the Goodwill. A picker probably overlooked it because it doesn’t have a UPC bar code on it for them to scan. There was also an EE text or two on the shelf. I left them there. Too much like the day job, and I stick to DIY. Haven’t found a kit at a reasonable price yet, but I’ve got enough parts and solderless breadboards that I don’t need one.

The way things are going, if you’re gonna be putting together your own Dog Solitude you’re gonna have to look at going to places like Wal-Mart, Goodwill, Savers, Home Depot, Lowes, your local hardware store, and other such to see what you can find and work with it.

(This article first appeared at https://ticom.nicheof.one/p/how-lo-tek-can-you-get.) Join the cult! h/t .)

Here are some pieces of Galena and Pyrite. Both can be used as detectors in crystal radio sets. These pieces were bought at rock shops, but both minerals are common rock-hound finds in the Northeast and elsewhere, as shown on the maps to the right. What we have here are the first makings of a radio receiver that you could literally make with local rocks dug out of the ground. If you visit https://www.minedat.org you can search to see if Galena, Pyrite, or any other mineral is/was found in your area.

This is an old variable capacitor which I think was salvaged out of a junked antique radio. I’m not sure because the construction is simple enough for me to think that it might have been homemade. It was made by sandwiching a square of plastic insulating material between two metal plates. The capacitance of the device varies with the distance between the plates. It’s another swap-meet find from one of the many junk boxes you find under seller tables. That’s where the good, cheap stuff is. While usable as is, it also serves as a good example template for when you want to roll your own components for simpler radio experimentation. Yes, such a thing is possible.

This is one of the late Dave Wildflower’s home-brew crystal sets. The detector is a piece of Galena set in a copper pipe cap. The tuning capacitor and coil are all home-brew. He used a Radio Shack Amplified Speaker for the audio. You can watch the radio in action here:

Wildflower found a lot of info on building crystal sets on the Internet. One of his favorites was The Boy’s Book of Crystal Sets which you can download a PDF at https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Bernards-And-Babani/Bernards/126-Boys-Book-of-Crystal-Sets-v12.pdf. This one is small and worthwhile enough print out. There is one that’s even better though, but you’re gonna have to go and buy a copy online.

The absolute must-have book for primitive radio experimenters is H.P. Friedrichs’ Voice Of The Crystal – How To Build Working Radio Receiver Components Entirely From Scratch. This book will show you how to build a working crystal radio receiver from junk parks you can find anywhere. Friedrichs’ web site is one you need to visit. There is a wealth of information on there. This copy of the Engineer’s Mini-Notebook – Communications Projects has seen some things, but it’s one of the less common ones that you’ll find in the wild. I discovered this one in the bottom of a junk box at a swap meet with a few other piece parts. While not as stone tools and bare hands in project content as Voice Of The Crystal, it has a lot of simple, functional projects that use common discrete components.

⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡

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Your benefits include everything on the shelf at Gumroad, gratis -

https://litchfieldhillspress.gumroad.com/l/everything is the link.

It should be setup so that you should get notified when something new is added, and you should be able to get the new publication gratis as part of your original purchase. Note keyword should. If it doesn’t, please let me know so I can fix it. Even so, you can still download stuff individually.

There are also some free PDFs up on the nominal main site at https://cybertekzine.neocities.org/. That’s public domain stuff Gumroad doesn’t allow me to put up on the shelf, even for free, since it’s not mine.

Here’s the important part, the Gumroad discount code.

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TL;DR – It was hot as phuck, dead as Marley (but hopefully planning some chain-clanking and imminent future visitations), and I still walked away with finds and more Federal Reserve Notes than what I started with. This swap meet proved that even on a bad night in Bangkok the world can still be your oyster (cue Murray Head).

The weather report had predicted the three Hs: hot, hazy, and humid. The important part was that the dreaded thunderstorms are not due until later tonight. So far NOAA has gotten it right. The lack of morning heavy weather however did nothing to improve attendance of both buyers and sellers at today’s meet. On a normal outdoor swap here you’ll see anywhere from 350-450 linear feet of sellers.

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https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf

Even Bradbury got it wrong.

Techie Swap-Meet#

• The Vintage Radio and Communications Museum of Connecticut will be holdi…

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URL is https://litchfieldhillspress.gumroad.com/l/dysto8

Or if you already haven’t d…

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Yeah, they were talking about me.

After the story came out I actually gave the author a chance to have a chat, conside…

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https://www.well.com/ - The original Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. Real names only. $15 a month. No ads or other crap…

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Here are the numbers:

01, 47, 80, 81, 93. You know where your loca…

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• We used to get everything from Radio Shack back in the day.

• Everyone now has to slap an Arduino or Raspberry Pi on a project, even if it doesn’t need one.

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