I’m sitting here actually pondering on why I even bother to make any effort any more.
I’m not writing this as a reflection on the forum and users, but in general regarding radio and the Internet generation.
Sure, I’m not about to abandon my hobby interest and unavoidable legacy tech interest left over from the past - that’s a still relatively undiscovered country still very much there to be found.
But I do find the distinct lack of motivation to seriously learn and understand, beyond trendy ‘maker’ street cred on YouTube interest, very depressing.
The art of ‘what can I do with this’ is alive in ways, but the motivation to discover ‘why…why…why’ the things actually work and why things often in today’s highly ISM radio centric are so sensitive and yet easily ruined by a simple ignorance driven mod is almost a concept people buried alive when all you need do is go mimicking a video demoed how-to published by someone with barely any actual understanding because their wonderful project was a warmed over bit of copied mimicry and their source was just as bad to start with.
One really good example - the shed load of ‘how to boost WiFi/Bluetooth’ by grinding off the PCB track driven elements and soldering a pigtail to the remaining ‘ends’. I mean, screw the fact there’s impedance matching RC/LC circuits that matched the n ohms impedance trace to the 50ohm nominal gnd and ant pin breakout on the transceiver chip. The kind of ignorance that makes their so-called improvement a joke because they actually worsened things before their cack handed retrofit and lost the real gain they could have found rather than the firefly glow result of gain found they are so proud of.
Then you’ve the mob who, based on ‘its got the right wires’ cack handedly order spares or replicate driven elements from a transceiver with such and solder them on to the now floating old wires on the mod-victim, and any improvement they get (nil to ■■■■■■ all, barely actually getting to unity gain at best typically) is got more by blind ignorance happenstance luck than anything. And what happens, we get parrot fashion versions and half of those are DOA because the idiot mimic couldn’t even follow the brain-death instructions properly.
And don’t even get me started on the ignorance of the ‘modulate a gpio pin’ crowd who merrily mimick what was always just a proof of principle, make their own Tx’s badly, where the concept of filters and out of band suppression never even registered on their radar. But they are quite happy to go whacking a cheapo high gain RF amp onto it, and the quality of some of the usual suspects there are as dubious or dire as the Tx they are boosting.
I mean, I’m not out to encourage them, but they could at least learn the concept of why RF design isn’t the stuff of preschool mentality pritt stick construction where you learn nothing but it looks nice in a rats nest, solder explosion lo-tech cyberpunk inspired way.
It’s that sort of garbage, which sadly is forming the basis of cheap and cheerful ‘educational’ radio/RF project materials that makes me despair. Haven’t we already got enough QRM from the modern gadget and cheap-■■■ IOT etc stuff without adding half-assed zombie butchery level additional garbage?
You wonder why things don’t really pan out, radio wise, well in part you can level part of the ultra high noise floor train wreck on FM modes to those jokers and their quick-win commercial gadget manufacturers and their fake ■■■ EMC compliancy claims as very guilty as ■■■■ in their contributions.
What point is there in trying to educate people who’s mindset is ‘everything on YouTube is pure gold correct and pure genius’ based?
I’m wasting no more time on people, just like I won’t be having anything to do with IOT commercially when we get back to normal-ish in the world. After all, the IOT world people are actually interested in is the cheap-■■■ quick win garbage I’ll have no part of.
I quit and it’s a bad day when I decide that.