“The time required to complete a task is inversely proportional to the number of words required to express it.” — The Roberts Law of Creeping To-Do List Complexity ABSTRACT:   This is the complete design for a microprocessor-controlled, environmentally sealed 8″ video turret with two cameras, remote or autofocus, zoom control, sun damage protection, 450-degree azimuth…

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For a few years, I fed the Microship project with speaking gigs… sometimes with the help of Keynote Speakers bureau. This was one that they found me, and it was unusual… 11 half-hour talks in a booth on the show floor. That was quite relaxing compared to a standard keynote, and led to lots of…

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by Fred Maia W5YI Report November 15, 1991 I first met Roberts a few years ago at the Dayton HamVention where he was selling autographed copies of his book which detailed his bicycle jaunts across the country. He had a booth right across from mine and I got a chance to periodically chat with him……

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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This was the first piece in my Computer Currents column, and I loved it… the readership was at a perfect level for my tales of radical new technomadic tools, and I could write without translating. I invited readers to get in touch directly through a variety of email pipes (see closing paragraph), and hundreds did……

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