Articles by SKR Archives - Page 3 of 13

During my extended layover in Santa Cruz and Soquel, working on the third bike version (eventually named BEHEMOTH), I spent a lot of time relaxing on the spectacular beaches in the region… textile and otherwise. Somewhere in there I made friends with some folks at Lupin Lodge, and enjoyed a few visits in exchange for…

by Steven K. Roberts N4RVE 73 Magazine February, 1990 This is not a normal equipment review. There are no lab test results and no objective comparisons between this unit and anything else on the market. My new ICOM 725 did not arrive with a 73 product-review assignment attached, nor have I really given the issue much…

This is the third and final part of my little series about wireless networking in InfoWorld, and like the others (packet radio and cellular data), it fell directly out of a subject dear to my heart. I was an avid amateur radio satellite user, as well as being deeply involved in packet radio. This article…

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…

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…

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…

These magazine articles from the early phase of BEHEMOTH development are kind of a treasure… I had not yet started posting the details to a mailing list, and there aren’t many documents that go into detail about the system design. My series in 73 Magazine was very liberal, editorially… so I was free to ramble…

Technology UpdateVariation on X.25 Communication Provides Viable Alternative to Fragile Information Links By Steven K. Roberts InfoWorld June 26, 1989 Dataspace. For some it has become home — a not-land of beings whose locations are no more relevant than their alma maters. For others, Dataspace is a vaguely perceived substrate for electronic mail and on-line information…

Steven Roberts, author of Computing Across America, has traveled across the United States on his “Winnebiko II,” a 54-speed recumbent bicycle equipped with a cellular phone, a modem, a ham radio station, a fax machine, a TV set, CD ROM navigation libraries, a satellite earth station, a 286-based computer with more than 4 megabytes of RAM,…

Transceiver from a spectrum analyzer and tracking generator? Here’s a glimpse of a hacker’s shack before SDR. by Steven K. Roberts N4RVE 73 Magazine January, 1989 This is an interim of sorts — a time of misleading stability between bouts of nomadness. It’s a respite from tire itch, a chance to develop a pot belly…

Articles by SKR

A Matter of Perspective – South Bay Naturist News

The Icom IC-725 – 73 Review

Orbiting Bulletin Boards, Networks in the Sky – InfoWorld

The Spectrum Probe

The Portal System – 73

Instant Track – 73 Review

Packet Radio and High-Tech Nomadics

Packet Radio: Networks Without Wires – InfoWorld

On the Road with Laptops and Cellulars – InfoWorld

The Hacker’s Shack