What exactly do I do all day?
Interesting question - I get it quite a bit now that projects with Open Engineering have subsided a bit and since I stopped working at my last job. I am still working on some projects internal to OE and for another client. Hopefully Matt and I can update the Open Engineering website sometime to reflect some of the cool projects or ideas we've had in the past.
I was making some updates to my portfolio today, and I realized that I have hardly any information on what I like to do. Sure I list them, but that doesn't really explain what I'm about. To be honest I feel a little scattered on what I like to do. It seems that there are so many cool things in the world, especially on the technology and engineering side. Why should I have to pick and choose which ones to be involved with?
Of course the flip side of that is that it would make me go insane if I tried to research and experiment with all the nifty cool projects and ideas that I have from day to day. Living with Matt doesn't help either - he's much worse (better?) at coming up with interesting ideas and theories. And no I'm not slamming Matt. We have some really bizarre conversations about hacking Roombas and how to incorporate a treadmill with World of Warcraft...among other things. I wonder when people talk about having a special 'bond' with their spouse if that qualifies as the same as the bond Matt and I have regarding 'hey wouldn't it be cool if...' conversations. Especially when the 'hey wouldn't it be cool..." thing ends up with something that blows up or involves fire. Ok the fire thing is probably just me. :D
So to fix my conundrum...I'm making a master list of projects/learning experiences that I want to do. Hehe some of these will probably be neverending projects or interests...but I'm willing to give it a try. Ok here we go.
Amateur Radio stuff:
Oh my, ham radio is composed of so many different opportunities for experimentation. I think that's what I like about it the most, that we as hams can basically do whatever we want for our own inventive purposes. Since taking all those fun, yet beat-your-head-against-the-wall-because-they-are-freaking-hard classes in RF, antennas, and microwave circuits I really want to do some more hands on stuff. That's where ham radio comes into play.
In EE 414 (microwave circuits class) my team and I built a fully fuctional 1.2 GHz amplifier, oscillator, and filter. That class went so fast I feel that I didn't learn as much as I wanted to. I can say the same thing for the antennas class I took, EE 417 for the curious. There were so many great articles in this month's QST about microwave stuff. All the way from theory to actual circuit/antenna construction. So now that we have a real house and a real ham shack I want to set up a microwave station. Doing EME (Earth-moon) or satellite communications sounds really cool. I would really like to try my hand at doing more microwave circuit design work.
Also doing some work on digital communications, espcially in the 802.11b bands (2.4 GHz) sounds cool to me too...
OMG this is too long...I'll add more later. Besides we need to install the D700 in the HABET recovery van now.