Experimental Avionics

weirdjim said:
You have NO IDEA what getting a ham radio license and putting a 2 meter transceiver in your aircraft will do. In most of the midwest, at altitude they will bring up repeaters from four states around. GREAT for cross country AND for getting local information and/or meeting fellow hams as you land for fuel or overnight. Sometimes an invite to stay in the spare bedroom as you go across. Pilots and hams have the same sort of bond ... I'd do ANYTHING for a fellow pilot OR ham that landed and wanted overnight lodging ... even if it meant a pup tent in the back yard with a sleeping bag if I didn't have room in the house ... and generally a home-cooked meal in the deal.

Met a lot of great friends that way. Of course, there is the off jerk, but that is rare in these two communities.

But the Missouri family that cooked my wife and I a rack of smoked ribs twenty or thirty years ago went WAY above when we shut it down in the Ozarks in a horrendous thunderstorm will be with me forever.

Jim
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Cool Story Jim. Thanks for sharing. Good point not many 2-meter antennas that high, range has to be phenomenal.
 
NordicDave said:
Cool Story Jim. Thanks for sharing. Good point not many 2-meter antennas that high, range has to be phenomenal.
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I've had fun explaining to a few CFIs why you can hear CTAF traffic from a couple hundred miles off on some days and not others.
 
WeirdJim, Your kits rock!!!!!! I still have an almost ancient one of your 4 place intercoms that occasionally gets used when a student has an airplane without intercom.
 
DaleB said:
There seems to be a good deal of overlap between the ham and pilot communities. The overall demographics are about the same... overwhelmingly male, old and white. :: shrug ::
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Away back when I started RST Engineering (Kit Avionics) and when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I did a very serious study (out to one sigma) and found that a pilot was also into ham radio, or photography, or sailing. 90% probability that the pilot was into one of those other three categories. And the split was nearly equal -- 30% into at least one of these three. and 20% that they were into at least one of the others.

That sold it to me. Having a 30%+ market share of selling my stuff to pilots that knew which end of the soldering iron got hot was enough to launch the company.

I wonder ... if I had the time to do it today (I had two years back then when I was in a job that I loathed and I had most of the day on the job when nothing was going on) I wonder what those other categories might be...I wonder. And we had absolutely no internet or search engines back in 1972. I wonder how I pulled it off at all...
 
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