Ham Radios Technical Culture

Download or read book Ham Radio's Technical Culture written by Kristen Haring and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of ham radio culture: how ham radio enthusiasts formed identity and community through their technical hobby, from the 1930s through the Cold War.

Download or read book Radiophilia written by Carolyn Birdsall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century ago, the emergence of radio, along with organized systems of broadcasting, sparked a global fascination with the 'wonder' of sound transmission and reception. The thrilling experience of tuning in to the live sounds of this new medium prompted strong affective responses in its listeners. This book introduces a new concept of radiophilia, defined as the attachment to, or even a love of radio. Treating radiophilia as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, it unpacks the various pleasures associated with radio and its sounds, the desire to discover and learn new things via radio, and efforts to record, re-experience, and share radio. Surveying 100 years of radio from early wireless through to digital audio formats like podcasting, the book engages in debates about fandom, audience participation, listening experience, material culture, and how media relate to affect and emotions.

Download or read book Vulnerability in Technological Cultures written by Anique Hommels and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-03-21 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Novel technologies and scientific advancements offer not only opportunities but risks. Technological systems are vulnerable to human error and technical malfunctioning that have far-reaching consequences: one flipped switch can cause a cascading power failure across a networked electric grid. Yet, once addressed, vulnerability accompanied by coping mechanisms may yield a more flexible and resilient society. This book investigates vulnerability, in both its negative and positive aspects, in technological cultures. The contributors argue that viewing risk in terms of vulnerability offers a novel approach to understanding the risks and benefits of science and technology. Such an approach broadens conventional risk analysis by connecting to issues of justice, solidarity, and livelihood, and enabling comparisons between the global north and south. The book explores case studies that range from agricultural practices in India to neonatal intensive care medicine in Western hospitals; these cases, spanning the issues addressed in the book, illustrate what vulnerability is and does. The book offers conceptual frameworks for empirical description and analysis of vulnerability that elucidate its ambiguity, context dependence, and constructed nature. Finally, the book addresses the implications of these analyses for the governance of vulnerability, proposing a more reflexive way of dealing with vulnerability in technological cultures"--

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture written by Ivan Gaskell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

Download or read book Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio written by Danny Gregory and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2003-03 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To an outsider, the world of ham radio is one of basement transmitters, clunky microphones, Morse code, and crackly, possibly clandestine, worldwide communications, a world both mysterious and geeky. But the real story is a lot more interesting: indeed, there are more than two million operators worldwide, including people like Walter Cronkite and Priscilla Presley. Gandhi had a ham radio, as do Marlon Brando and Juan Carlos, king of Spain. Hello World takes us on a seventy-year odyssey through the world of ham radio. From 1927 until his death in 2001, operator Jerry Powell transmitted radio signals from his bedroom in Hackensack, New Jersey, touring the worlds most remote locations and communicating with people from Greenland to occupied Japan. Once he made contact with a fellow ham operator, he exchanged postcards known as QSLs cards with them. For seven decades, Powell collected hundreds of these cards, documenting his fascinating career in amateur radio and providing a dazzling graphic inventory of people and places far flung. This book is both an introduction to the fascinating world of ham and a visual feast for anyone interested in the universal language of graphic design.

Download or read book Ham Radio For Dummies written by H. Ward Silver and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Respond to the call of ham radio Despite its old-school reputation, amateur radio is on the rise, and the airwaves are busier than ever. That’s no surprise: being a ham is a lot of fun, providing an independent way to keep in touch with friends, family, and new acquaintances around the world—and even beyond with its ability to connect with the International Space Station! Hams are also good in a crisis, keeping communications alive and crackling during extreme weather events and loss of communications until regular systems like cell phones and the internet are restored. Additionally, it’s enjoyable for good, old-fashioned tech geek reasons—fiddling with circuits and bouncing signals off the ionosphere just happens to give a lot of us a buzz! If one or more of these benefits is of interest to you, then good news: the new edition of Ham Radio For Dummies covers them all! In his signature friendly style, longtime ham Ward Silver (Call Sign NØAX)—contributing editor with the American Radio Relay League—patches you in on everything from getting the right equipment and building your station (it doesn’t have to be expensive) to the intricacies of Morse code and Ohm’s law. In addition, he coaches you on how to prepare for the FCC-mandated licensing exam and tunes you up for ultimate glory in the ham radio hall of fame as a Radiosport competitor! With this book, you’ll learn to: Set up and organize your station Communicate with people around the world Prep for and pass the FCC exam Tune into the latest tech, such as digital mode operating Whether you’re looking to join a public service club or want the latest tips on the cutting edge of ham technology, this is the perfect reference for newbies and experts alike—and will keep you happily hamming it up for years!

Download or read book The Modem World written by Kevin Driscoll and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story about how the internet became social, and why this matters for its future “Whether you’re reading this for a nostalgic romp or to understand the dawn of the internet, The Modem World will delight you with tales of BBS culture and shed light on how the decisions of the past shape our current networked world.”—danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens Fifteen years before the commercialization of the internet, millions of amateurs across North America created more than 100,000 small-scale computer networks. The people who built and maintained these dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. From ham radio operators to HIV/AIDS activists, these modem enthusiasts developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. The Modem World tells an alternative origin story for social media, centered not in the office parks of Silicon Valley or the meeting rooms of military contractors, but rather on the online communities of hobbyists, activists, and entrepreneurs. Over time, countless social media platforms have appropriated the social and technical innovations of the BBS community. How can these untold stories from the internet’s past inspire more inclusive visions of its future?