During last year's fall
season, VE7CA (Markus), VE7BDQ (John) and myself were getting prepared to
venture into the nanowave world....that part of the electromagnetic spectrum
that lightwaves of various wavelengths call home.Over the course of many months, I had become intrigued by the lightwave experimentation being done by amateurs in the UK and particularly those being done by Roger, G3XBM. Like many of the UK builders, Roger had been building and testing simple low-power LED lightwave transmitters along with simple receiving systems. It was fascinating to follow his progress thanks to his daily blog (read his '481tHz' optical postings here) which documented every detail...both failures and successes. Even though not amateur radio per-se, to me it represented the best of what is so wonderful about our hobby and experimental homebrewing in particular. Unknowingly, Roger had me hooked and eventually I started to seriously contemplate building a lightwave system.
Now.... just having a lightwave system would not be much fun without having someone else to talk to. My first challenge was to find someone, preferably another ham, with whom I might be able to communicate once I had a system built and....they would need to be a homebrewer as well since none of this stuff was available 'off the shelf '. I contacted Markus (VE7CA), a very skilled homebrewer and sent him the series of Radcom lightwave articles. I did the same with John (VE7BDQ), another ardent builder and the main motivator (although he never knew it at the time) in me becoming hooked on ham radio as an early teenager. Both immediately called 'all-in'....our nanowave project was off and running!
Hi Steve. Well certainly looking forward to part 2.
ReplyDeleteYears ago, I guess in the 1980s when I was still a new teen ham, a guy I knew from the local community was playing with lasers and modulating audio. I'm not sure if he had many people to talk to either, but I suspect he found a couple of people. At that time laser pointers weren't really out yet I don't think but he scrounged some parts from barcode scanners I believe (in true ham fashion).
I never got into it as an interest but I've kind of seen it as a very underutilized mode.
Trying to get back into the blogging mode! Lots to catch up on.
73, Bert WF7I
Hi Bert - good to hear from you again. Hope you are settling into the new house and getting ready for the fall radio season!
ReplyDeleteI wish there were more interest in lightwave stuff around Vancouver but so far it's just the three of us.
Steve / 73