By the beginning of 1990, on the heels of the Santa Cruz earthquake and before moving over to the Sun Microsystems lab in Silicon Valley, I was trying to build energy for the upcoming adventure by finding others to form a technomadic community. This went out to my Nomadness mailing list: FROM:  Steven K. Roberts,…

Read More

by Steven K. Roberts N4RVE 73 Magazine January, 1990 Inexpensive and portable spectrum analyzer. There’s nothing quite like the frequency domain for revealing what’s going on in a system. Down in the slow-moving mechanical world, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analyzers are used to determine the resonance characteristics of structures and to help predict failures. In RF…

Read More

Now you can easily explore ham radio’s most fascinating on-line forum! Back in the late 1980s, the amateur radio packet community was well established, though the tools were “thin” in the sense of being slow, difficult for newbies, and not exactly useful as a deep archive. This was an era when competing online services were…

Read More

This is a book review of Computing Across America (by Steven K. Roberts, shown in the photo above at age 1), focusing on the author being an adoptee who tracked down and reconnected with his biological parents back in 1980. The reviewer makes some very interesting observations, and this was published in a newsletter of…

Read More

by John Przybys Las Vegas Review-Journal November 26, 1989 Like any wanderlust-stricken traveler, Steven Roberts meanders along the highways and byways of America carrying with him all of the equipment he needs. He’s got a tent. He’s got a sleeping bag. He’s got a portable stove. He’s got a recumbent bicycle with seven computers, a ham…

Read More

Around the time the Winnebiko II was starting to give way to the Winnebiko III… before it was even called BEHEMOTH, I landed in Silicon Valley and began getting to know some of my online correspondents. One particularly interesting new friend from that epoch was Daniel Burdick, also a geek obsessed with recumbent bicycles. He…

Read More

Back in Ohio, in the early eighties, one of my best friends was Frank Feczko, shown in the photos above and whom you can meet in Chapter 2 of Computing Across America. He was involved in lots of my entrepreneurial projects, and I often ended up at their house for dinner… getting well acquainted with…

Read More

In 1989, I was passionately in love with the OSCAR 13 satellite, as well as laying the groundwork  for use of the Microsats from the new version of the bicycle. My KLM crossed-yagi antenna array had to be aimed at the right spot in the sky to work the birds, and I used what was…

Read More

A view of Steven K. Roberts N4RVE’s book. Review by Alida M. Jatich KA9KAG 73 Magazine November, 1989 “Suburbia is not a place; it’s a state of mind… You live in suburbia when the cycle of work and play becomes dangerously unbalanced in favor of work.” (Computing Across America, page 3.) If you’re like me, there…

Read More