What’s your goal with this project?
I don’t understand the question. Goal? Project?
I think the “fly your ham rig to someplace interesting” is the sensible answer here. But I didn’t get into any of my hobbies for sensible and practical reasons.
I recently got my uncle's old Hammarlund shortwave receiver. I used it more than 50 years ago as a young teenager, and the amateur bands then were jammed with CW and voice. Now I can find almost nobody there anymore. Did the internet spoil all that?
I have some insight into this. I bought a ham radio book and studied a bit when I was a kid. Dad and I were going to get our licenses. But then I got more into computers instead, and my “nerd hobby” became computers instead of radio. So I grew up hacking the games I found on the family computer (many of which were written in GW-BASIC, including a lunar lander simulation that my EE uncle taught me how to modify to show more variables to make the game easier), demanding my parents buy Turbo C++ for my birthday so I could write more complicated and faster-running compiled code, splurging for shareware disassemblers that came on floppy disks in the mail, and so on.
By the time the Internet became a household thing, I was already deep into it. My science fair project one year, probably 8th grade or thereabouts, was a comparison of different algorithms for playing Tic Tac Toe, written in C that ran in Minix on a 286-powered laptop (if you want to cut off circulation in your legs) that Dad gave me. I asked for debugging help through IRC. The WWW was in its infancy and the most use I could find of it was using Yahoo!’s categories to find websites to try to learn weird languages like Old English.
I think that having been born as little as 2 years earlier would have tipped the scale the other way. If we didn’t have a home computer at the age when I started to become a nerd, I would have had spare time to learn Morse and get my amateur radio license and would have been trying to solder together an HF rig from Radio Shack parts instead of learning how to write code.
Location may have been another factor. The nearest Radio Shack was hours away, in the same town as the nearest bookstore with a computer section. So I came home with books on anything from BASIC to C++ and from flight simulator programming to fuzzy logic. I could spend hours at home studying the books and writing code without having to travel to get any parts, whereas the radio hobby would have required more trips to bigger towns.
But easier would be to have a headset with a hard wired cell phone adapter, and tap into that.
The Lightspeed Sierra has a hard wired cell phone adapter and came with a 4-conductor cable with 1/8” plugs. That’s what I tried initially, but obviously the FT-60 isn’t wired the same as a cell phone.
