Hello from Stillwater, Oklahoma

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WB5AGZ
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Jun 14, 2021 3:47 pm

Hello from Stillwater, Oklahoma

Post by WB5AGZ » Thu Jun 17, 2021 1:56 am

My name is Martin McCormick and I am retired as of March of 2015
but worked as a Systems Engineer for the network operations group
of the IT Department of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater,
Oklahoma which is in the geographic center of the 48 contiguous
United States.

I've been an amateur radio operator since around October
of 1969 and have had the same call sign WB5AGZ through every US
amateur operator class from Technician to Extra class which I
have had since 1988. I think I know less now than I thought I
did when in high school, studying for the General Class exam in
the Fall of 1969. Gaining more knowledge about a particular
topic accentuates what one doesn't know and sometimes doesn't
know he or she didn't know it.

It wasn't until the early seventies that I began to learn
how digital audio could possibly work and today, here we are with
digital audio where it all starts plus digital compression and
various forms of multiplexing such as TDNA or Time Division
Multiplexing (TDMA) and Code Division Multiplexing (CDMA) in
which DMR uses them both.

mathematicians theorized that the analog world could be
digitized as far back as Babbage and Ada Lovelace and there were
attempts to handle secure communications as far back as World War
II with 2-meter tall racks that did the encoding and decoding but
A DMR or P25 radio you can hold in one hand outruns those
room-filling vacuum-tube monsters any day and we are alive to
benefit from all we have learned in the last 100 plus years.

In all humbleness, I am not a professional engineer but
was one of those folks who got degrees in other fields and then
discovered that I liked computers and had a small knack for making
them do what was needed at the time which is how I ended up in
the last 25 years of work riding herd over unix boxes and
engineering programs and scripts to help my coworkers do less
donkey work and more of the stuff one needs working brain cells
to do. It was mostly lots of fun and they payed me to do it.
Wow!

Martin

User avatar
F1RMB
Posts: 2518
Joined: Sat Nov 16, 2019 5:42 am
Location: Grenoble, France

Re: Hello from Stillwater, Oklahoma

Post by F1RMB » Thu Jun 17, 2021 4:38 am

Welcome Martin.


Cheers.
---
Daniel

VK3KYY
Posts: 7481
Joined: Sat Nov 16, 2019 3:25 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Hello from Stillwater, Oklahoma

Post by VK3KYY » Wed Sep 06, 2023 1:50 am

WB5AGZ wrote:
Thu Jun 17, 2021 1:56 am
My name is Martin McCormick and I am retired as of March of 2015
but worked as a Systems Engineer for the network operations group
of the IT Department of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater,
Oklahoma which is in the geographic center of the 48 contiguous
United States.

I've been an amateur radio operator since around October
of 1969 and have had the same call sign WB5AGZ through every US
amateur operator class from Technician to Extra class which I
have had since 1988. I think I know less now than I thought I
did when in high school, studying for the General Class exam in
the Fall of 1969. Gaining more knowledge about a particular
topic accentuates what one doesn't know and sometimes doesn't
know he or she didn't know it.

It wasn't until the early seventies that I began to learn
how digital audio could possibly work and today, here we are with
digital audio where it all starts plus digital compression and
various forms of multiplexing such as TDNA or Time Division
Multiplexing (TDMA) and Code Division Multiplexing (CDMA) in
which DMR uses them both.

mathematicians theorized that the analog world could be
digitized as far back as Babbage and Ada Lovelace and there were
attempts to handle secure communications as far back as World War
II with 2-meter tall racks that did the encoding and decoding but
A DMR or P25 radio you can hold in one hand outruns those
room-filling vacuum-tube monsters any day and we are alive to
benefit from all we have learned in the last 100 plus years.

In all humbleness, I am not a professional engineer but
was one of those folks who got degrees in other fields and then
discovered that I liked computers and had a small knack for making
them do what was needed at the time which is how I ended up in
the last 25 years of work riding herd over unix boxes and
engineering programs and scripts to help my coworkers do less
donkey work and more of the stuff one needs working brain cells
to do. It was mostly lots of fun and they payed me to do it.
Wow!

Martin
Your username is now WB5AGZ

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