Maker Faire

[W3WN]

Anyone familiar with what a Maker Faire is?

There's one coming up in Pittsburgh next month. A member of my club suggested last night that we "do something" at it, as a demonstration of Amateur Radio.

Deadline to submit is the 15th, so we don't have a lot of time to put a demonstration (and related proposal) together.

The concept is intriguing, but before we kill ourselves throwing something together, it would be nice to know what we're looking at.

Dankashen!

[ab1ga]

You'll get up to speed the fastest by going to the web site for Make magazine, a picture is worth a thousand words.
In essence Make is dedicated to homebuilding good stuff, from electronics to trebuchets.

My personal opinion: typical ham radio demo is too lame; the people who go to these Faires _build_ stuff, and kits don't count!

Now doing a live demo on how to convert a microwave oven to a moonbounce station, that'd work.

73,

[K7SGJ]

You'll get up to speed the fastest by going to the web site for Make magazine, a picture is worth a thousand words.
In essence Make is dedicated to homebuilding good stuff, from electronics to trebuchets.

My personal opinion: typical ham radio demo is too lame; the people who go to these Faires _build_ stuff, and kits don't count!

Now doing a live demo on how to convert a microwave oven to a moonbounce station, that'd work.

73,

Or a trebuchet into a punkin chucker, or visa versa.

[ab1ga]

I love the punkin' chuckers!
:)

[W3WN]

We discussed this at last night's meeting.

General consensus is that we want to do this... but whatever we do, we want to do it 'right'. And with only a few days for a proposal deadline, and about a month after that to get something arranged, insufficient time.

So a small delegation from the club is going to go the the Faire, get an idea of what's involved, and THEN come up with a plan for the next event.

In short, we're going to do it right, not half-assed.

[K7SGJ]

We discussed this at last night's meeting.

General consensus is that we want to do this... but whatever we do, we want to do it 'right'. And with only a few days for a proposal deadline, and about a month after that to get something arranged, insufficient time.

So a small delegation from the club is going to go the the Faire, get an idea of what's involved, and THEN come up with a plan for the next event.

In short, we're going to do it right, not half-assed.

Wow, you going to give ham radio a bad name. :shhh:

[ab1ga]

Wow, you going to give ham radio a bad name. :shhh:

Nah, I think they're going to call up the ghost of ham radio past.

The people attending the Maker Faires are precisely the same sorts of people who embraced the new radio technology at the beginning of the 20th century. The flame of homebrew burns on in them.

Happy Making, 'WN.

73,

[W3WN]

Well, let me pose this then:

For those of you who are familiar with the Maker Faire concept & participants... what do YOU think would be a good demo / presentation of Amateur Radio?

And it can be more than one thing... a display, something hands-on, maybe a simple kit build... but what else?

I'm thinking that a demo of an SDR radio (think: SoftRock) connected to a laptop, showing off digital modes, would be pretty neat. BUT, that in & of itself would not be sufficient -- so what else could we do?

[NQ6U]

A home-brew rig, of course, either a totally high-tech digital DSP wah-de-doo-dah or something with tubes. There's a large faction of retro-technology fans among the Maker crowd.