[OZAPRS] the lost art of building it ourselves

[Darryl Smith]

CGU are not too bad on home built stuff. They have people who are employed
with experience with insurance of home-built aircraft! Granted a home
built
will cost in excess of $100,000 for a decent one, and take 2000 hours to
build, but even so.

Darryl

-----Original Message-----
From: ozaprs-bounces at aprs.net.au [mailto:ozaprs-bounces at aprs.net.au] On
Behalf Of Damien Gardner Jnr
Sent: Monday, 6 August 2007 11:08 AM
To: VK / ZL APRS Users
Subject: Re: [OZAPRS] the lost art of building it ourselves

I guess there's a lot less experimental building going on than there
used to be, but personally, for my 4wd/bike, I can't use a homebuilt
gadget..  If I ring the NRMA and say 'oh, btw, I've just added another
accessory', I need to be able to give them manufacturer, model, serial
number, and the cost to replace..  They get kinda picky when you go
'well I built it myself, but there's about 20 hours and $200 worth of
parts..'  It's hard enough explaining that a 'CB' (seriously, they don't
have 'ham radio equipment' in their list, all transceivers are
apparently CB's) is worth $1500, let alone trying to find a category for
home-built radio gear..

At home in the garage is a different story.. - If the garage gets
knocked over, the gadget would be covered as stock on hand under my
business insurance.

Cheers,

Damien

VK2DGJ/VK2TDG

-----Original Message-----
From: ozaprs-bounces at aprs.net.au [mailto:ozaprs-bounces at aprs.net.au] On
Behalf Of Matt Howard
Sent: Monday, 6 August 2007 10:27 AM
To: ozaprs at aprs.net.au
Subject: [OZAPRS] the lost art of building it ourselves

I lament the motion towards plug-and-play / off-the-shelf technology
that is apparent today. It seems if the product doesn't do what we want
out of the box, we just dismiss it as not useful. Once upon a time
amateur radio was a leading light - paving the way for the commercial
world in the use of new technology - today we seem to have gone from
leading lights to luddite consumers - unable to take basic components
and craft a system that meets our needs - experimenting, testing - now
we just plug it in, power it up and we are happy.

 

We can move to higher speeds, all we need to do is create an
appropriately configured system that will support this requirement for
amateur use - hardware, software etc. It all currently exists in the
commercial world, just needs a few tweaks and then of course, all the
current systems we have need replacing. And that is where we stop.

 

Matt Howard

VK3XIL

 

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