#613 – It's a Keyzermas Miracle!

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released December 18th, 2022. Episode 613. It's a Kaisermis miracle. Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Jeff Kaiser: And this is Jeff Kaiser of MightyOhm.com. It was the night before Kaisermis and all through the house.

Chris Gammell: The Dave didn't show, but we gave it a shout. We don't know where Dave is, but Jeff and I are excited to be starting out the Kaisermis celebration here.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, thanks for having me once again.

Chris Gammell: Yes. You know what, Jeff? Jeff, this is a great yearly tradition we have here at the Amp Hour. I've had people ask me, are we doing Kaisermis? The answer is, of course, as long as I remember to ask Jeff. I remember to ask. It wasn't last minute this time. I was pretty proud of that.

Jeff Kaiser: Here we are. Yeah, thank you. I think last year it was like less than 24 hours of notice, but this year... Oh, I'm pretty sure it was like less than 24 minutes of notice. Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. Yeah, it was like really last minute. But this year I had a week to look forward to this.

Speaker ?: A whole week?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure you have prepared slides and notes that we can reference. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: You turned to slide 47. We'll talk about what I did in the month of the second part of April. Yeah. Well, what's new, man? What's going on? What is going on? I was thinking about that in the week leading up to the show.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. You actually were thinking about it. Yeah, that's...

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, a little bit. Let's see. This year went by fast. I don't know if it felt that way for you, but I think this year, maybe more so than the previous couple of years, really went quickly for me. And, you know, I feel like...

Chris Gammell: Why did things go slowly the prior two years?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, you know, we had a lot of stuff going on in the past three years. We've had a lot of stuff going on. But I feel like this year, just because I was able to do a little bit more travel and was able to resume things that I'd kind of been putting off for a while, I think this year felt like it went a little quicker than 2020 and 2021. And I was thinking back and it was like, yeah, you know, I did a lot of stuff. Sometimes it's hard to remember kind of what I... What was I spending all my time on this year?

Chris Gammell: I lean a lot on Google Photos, if I'm being honest. Like, oh yeah. I mean, because, well, here's the thing. Like now, especially, like I take photos every single day of a certain tiny person, right? That's... Oh, right. Part of my life. Right. But I think even still, like, I actually often, in a very selfish way, I always take photos of my prototypes. I'm very like proud. I'm like a proud papa of prototypes in addition to a child. And, you know, it helps to kind of like actually like benchmark throughout the year where you are. Yeah. And the nice thing with when you do that is usually you can type into the search box because it's got all the AI running on your images. You can just type in like circuit board and it mostly knows what circuit boards look like. And then you can just see those.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I completely understand what you're saying. And I actually, this year I put together a calendar for my wife. One of my Christmas... Don't tell my wife, but one of my Christmas gifts to my wife is a calendar. That has, you know, things that we did this year because we did a bunch, a little bit of travel. More than we have recently. And so I actually did that thing where I went through a year of photos. And I'm one of those people that I don't take just one or two photos. Like there's usually... Like if I'm clicking the camera, it's like click, click, click, click, click, you know, try to make 10 photos and hopefully a couple of them turn out. And then I never delete anything. And so going through a year of photos, it's like a huge volume of photos. But I did that thing and I was like searching for our cat and I was searching for trips that we had done. And the AI search thing actually does work pretty well. So I can tell you some of the highlights of the year having kind of gone through that.

Chris Gammell: Okay. All right.

Jeff Kaiser: And so, yeah, this year for me, there's a few things that I did this year. But one of the things I did is after not really doing much for, well, since I moved to Seattle, I've been in Seattle now in the city since 2018. So since 2018...

Chris Gammell: Wow, that long, huh?

Jeff Kaiser: I know. Yeah. Time really flies. Like I've lived here about as long as I lived in the last place I lived, which was Redmond, you know, coming up to the Pacific Northwest. And so while I was living in Redmond, I always had a really modest amateur radio setup. And I had an antenna in the backyard and we had a bunch of really tall trees because Redmond has a lot of trees. Like there are a lot of trees, like big trees in Redmond. And so I had a wire that I'd thrown up into the trees. And so I was doing some ham radio stuff at that time. And then when we moved to the city, it was like, oh, yeah, I've got to take all that down. And then I never set things back up until this year. So this was the year that after a hiatus of, a few years, I got back into ham radio and actually put up a pretty, you know, simple antenna in the backyard. And the first thing I did, actually, before I even set up the antenna, the first thing I did is I sold all of my old radio gear, which is maybe not what you would think you would need to do to get back into ham radio. No, no, no. But it turns out...

Chris Gammell: That's clear, not the gruff. That's just hard.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, I had all this stuff that I'd been like, you know, carrying through several moves across the country. And it was like, good stuff. But now this year, I think within the past year or so, it's actually a pretty exciting time for amateur radio, because there's a lot of new stuff out. And there are these new... I think they're mostly software defined radio radios, which have become super, super popular in the past couple years. And so I sold my old boat anchor, you know, 1980s vintage radio that I really didn't enjoy using. It was just old and... Greg Charvat drove all the way to Seattle and came and got it. So I listed it on eBay, I sold it, and then I used the money from selling that to help offset the cost of a shiny new radio. And I bought one that's, I think, pretty popular right now. It's a radio made by a company called ICOM, which, by the way, I think their North American sales office is like 20 minutes from my house, which is cool. It's in, I think, Kirkland. So it's here. I used to drive by their building on the way to work every day, because it was off of the 520 freeway. You could see it. And then I think they moved. But anyway, so there's a little bit of a local connection, which is cool. But ICOM makes a couple wildly popular radios. And one of them is the IC705, which is a portable, small, kind of a, it's a low power, super portable radio that has a lot of features, but it's pretty easy to just throw it in a bag and carry it around. And there's a lot of trade-offs involved with buying a radio like that because of the low power. But it is an awesome radio once you learn how to use it. I set it up at home. I've also traveled with it. And that radio is what has gotten me back into ham radio.

Chris Gammell: It's an interesting form factor, too. So like you said portable, and I was like, I was wondering, is it, it's not a handheld? And it kind of looks like really a handheld. It looks like the faceplate of like a car stereo.

Jeff Kaiser: Yes, it does. It's kind of a weird form factor, actually. I mean, it's kind of a weird radio. How thick is it, though? It's like, it's like three inches, three inches or so. Interesting. They're showing it in a backpack as well as like an optional backpack. Yeah. So that, and people have gotten into backpacking with these. So I've used this radio at home. I've used it camping. I've got a cup holder mount that I can use to put it in the car. And so one of the things. Oh, I thought you meant you put the cup onto the radio.

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. It's the other way around. I get it.

Jeff Kaiser: So the radio goes in the cup holder because it's pretty small. And so for me, the thing that's made me interested in this has been that. So currently, ham radio has these cycles that are caused primarily by the behavior of the sun. So there's these sunspot cycles, which kind of cause propagation in the HF or the high frequency bands. Those are the bands below, I don't know, 50 megahertz. The propagation in those bands is heavily affected by solar activity, like sunspots and things happening and like geomagnetic things on earth and stuff. So this is like, you know, really big picture things that are happening in our solar system affect whether I can talk to somebody in, you know, from point A to point B using these radio wavelengths or frequencies that are below 50 megahertz. And right now in 2021, we're in what I would consider to be a pretty good part of the cycle. I actually don't know if we're on the way up or the way down. Somebody that's more into this stuff would know, but I can say that I've been.

Chris Gammell: I'd like to say we're in 2022 currently. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It's 2022. Just wanted to make sure we level set for all the listeners. And also maybe just in case you got a little stuck.

Jeff Kaiser: So in 2022, we're in a good place in the sunspot cycle.

Chris Gammell: Give us a feel for this too.

Jeff Kaiser: So like, okay, good, good means what? Good means that with a relatively simple setup and a relatively simple antenna that I can set up a station here in Seattle and I can talk to somebody. And by talk, that's actually, it's a little more complicated than that. It's probably using like a digital mode, which is more efficient in terms of communicating further using less power. But anyway, I can quote unquote talk to somebody that is halfway around the world on just like five or 10 watts of power, which is that that's like the thing about ham radio that to me at least is what makes ham radio interesting. Because you've got this really, in a lot of ways, crude station. Like it's not like I have a giant tower with antennas on it and stuff like that. I have a very simple antenna, which is set up in my backyard, which is not more than 15, 20 feet off the ground. You know, really, really simple. And with just a few watts of power, I can make a radio contact easily to Japan, for example. But also, if conditions are right, to South America, to Europe, to Australia, New Zealand, you know, islands in the Pacific. Europe is hard from here, at least from the Pacific coast, because it's just there's a lot to go through to get to Europe. But if conditions are right, you can make it work. And the thing about the solar cycle and sunspots and propagation is that, you know, you are basically beholden to this ability to propagate a radio wave from point A to point B. If the radio wave doesn't want to go there, I can't make it go there. Like I don't have enough.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I was going to say, how directed is this? Right, right, right.

Jeff Kaiser: So that's the thing is you've got to be very flexible about it because you're basically, you've got, you're bouncing signals off of the ionosphere. You know, they're going up into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. They're bouncing back down. And due to the relationship of the height of the ionosphere, you're making sort of this triangle, right, where you're bouncing the signal up. It's going from you. It's bouncing up. And then it's bouncing back down.

Chris Gammell: Single bounce or multiple bounces?

Jeff Kaiser: It can be single. It can be multiple. And it can also be kind of weird blends of stuff. And if stuff's close, it's not even doing that. It's actually propagating in other ways. But it's complex. And so because of the ways, the mechanisms by which this stuff works, if the solar cycle is at the wrong time, like in a few years from now, you're not going to be able to do nearly as much of this. Like it's just not going to work. And you might have to have a much bigger transmitter or you might have to have a much bigger antenna or frankly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, then you're going to be crying. You're going to be like, where's my boat anchor? You know?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Charmada would be laughing all the way to the bank.

Jeff Kaiser: So I think it's really cool just the transient nature of this stuff. Because even within a 24-hour period, this stuff kind of comes and goes. And so there's certain frequencies that work well during the day. And there's some frequencies that work well at night. And so anyway, 2022, the year that we are currently living in and the year that we are recording this podcast.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, probably.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, assuming that you believe us, that is a good year. It is a good year for ham radio because not only are the propagation things happening and things are good from a propagation standpoint, but there's also all of these really cool, relatively new software-defined radios like the ICOM IC705, which is what I have, that are allowing people to get on the air. And there's also the other part, which is that there are these digital modes, you know, laptop-based applications, which allow you to communicate further and to communicate with less power and a more modest station because you're encoding the data that you're transmitting into a digital transmission that has error correction and things like that. So you're not like grabbing the microphone and talking so much as your keyboard to keyboard, which works much better for these low-power stations. And I think it's a lot of fun.

Chris Gammell: That's super cool. Huh. Well, when you said you took this in camping too, like, do you have just like lower expectations or are you trying to just kind of talk domestically then? What's the, I also see on the site that there's like a battery, like a five watt transmit through the battery sort of thing.

Jeff Kaiser: So it depends. So there's a, there's a, you know, to be honest, my home station is so modest that my camping station is almost identical. So for me, it's just a little bit worse.

Chris Gammell: Can I find a bigger tree to chuck my antenna over?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, so that, so they're actually, yeah, that's a good point. So the things that you get when you're camping that are better or worse. So on the worst side, you can't plug into 110 AC. And so you're usually very power limited. So you've got batteries. In my case, if I run this radio on its internal battery, I automatically lose half of my transmit power because it only transmits five watts if it uses the internal battery, which is kind of annoying. I need to build a battery pack so I can get around that. But you don't have unlimited AC, which is also an issue for your laptop too, because if you're running a laptop, you got to be able to charge it.

Chris Gammell: You should just get one of those monster, like batteries that have the inverters on them.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, so, well, people do have all these crazy setups. And you can get these big lithium iron phosphate batteries, like power tool batteries.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, I lost mine in an airport in Europe because they said, no, that's too big.

Jeff Kaiser: See that? And yeah, I'd like to build one that is the biggest you can fly with, I think is a good goal. Because it's still, you know, it's big enough, but it's small. Well, you can just buy those too, you know, just, you know, yeah. Sure, but where's the fun in that? That is a good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry. So anyway, so you've got limited power, but generally a lot of other things are better. You're generally not around other stuff. Like you're more in a clearing, so you've got less buildings around usually. And you might be in a place that has lower RF noise, which makes a big difference, actually. Oh, interesting. You're in a place that's quiet. So like I went camping a couple times this year. I went to Crater Lake National Park, which is a great place to do ham radio because you're kind of at elevation and there's not a lot around there. So even with a pretty bad antenna, you can hear a lot.

Chris Gammell: And then I also... Well, and also if Goldeneye is to be believed, then the antenna actually rises out of the lake.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, no, I haven't seen that. Is that really a Goldeneye thing? Is that Crater Lake?

Chris Gammell: No, that wasn't Crater Lake. Sorry. That was actually a satellite dish down in Puerto Rico. It was a real place. Oh. But it was never actually underwater. Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Jeff.

Jeff Kaiser: You got me all excited about that. I was going to like, go watch that movie.

Chris Gammell: I'm sorry. No, it was... So it's a real satellite. It's a real satellite. Unfortunately, a place that just collapsed.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, Arecibo.

Chris Gammell: Because it was a band... Was it Arecibo? The place that collapsed?

Jeff Kaiser: Arecibo is the one that collapsed. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. It was that. So... Okay. And then, you know, they said... They filled in a shot, a very poorly done, not even CGI shot, that there was a lake there and then they drained it and then... Mm. And then you know what happened next. You know.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Okay. So camping, lower noise because there's less stuff, less man-made stuff around. And usually you've got better propagation because there's just less obstructions, less buildings and things around you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: And so I found that camping, you can actually make just as many international contacts because you can hear better. And if you have an antenna that you can get at least a little bit off the ground, you've got a reasonable chance at transmitting so that, you know, people, stations far away will hear you. And one of the trips I did this year is I went to... Where was it? Out on the Washington coast to Cape Disappointment. It's an aptly named place for a campground. Oh, no. So Cape Disappointment is, you know, one of the most westerly parts of Washington State. And it's out on like a piece of land that juts out in the ocean. And so you're surrounded by salt water. You're like right on the ocean. Like you can walk to the water from where the campsites are. And so I set up a station there and it was amazing. Like just being there at the ocean because salt water enhances propagation as well. So you've got your little station right on the beach. And you know...

Chris Gammell: What's the mechanism there?

Jeff Kaiser: I think it's the conductivity of the ground. Huh. So if you set up your antenna, you're above like... Salt water makes a pretty good ground plane. And so that just enhances... It reduces the ground loss of propagation, I think. I'm not a full-fledged antenna engineer. But I think that it enhances the conductivity of the ground such that in certain types of propagation are enhanced.

Chris Gammell: So would that have helped like Marconi when he was like going over the Atlantic? Yes. Versus like going across the US sort of thing?

Jeff Kaiser: Yes. Big time. Yeah. Ocean is good. Ocean's good. Especially like a vertical antenna that's right on the ocean. Not like a short distance, but like where you're almost at the water, which is what I was, works really, really well. And one of the other things I did... So two things. So first of all, for this whole camping at parks, ham radio thing, there's actually a big sort of contest, I guess. It's called Parks on the Air, which is a way of incentivizing ham radio operators to like get out there and do stuff. It's what you do is you make it a contest where you can get points. Go outside. Well, I mean, you laugh about it, but it's actually been wildly successful. So because now you have a reason to be at this place, right? It's like, oh, okay, I can go to a campsite and it has to be like a state or national park. But if you're within the boundaries of that park, now you can get points for like every contact that you make and people are kind of in it to win and you can get these like certificates and stuff. And there's no real, I don't think there's any real big prizes, but it's sort of a matter of pride to say, I've done this X amount of times. And so I think that's caused a lot of people to be interested in operating from parks. And so now you've got good propagation, you've got great radios that are very capable, very portable. And now you have a contest, which is incentivizing people to do this. And so all this has kind of come together in the year of 2022, which is this year, to make it such that a lot of people want to get outside and actually do this kind of stuff. So I've done that now. I've participated in this POTA contest a couple of times and the bar is pretty low. Like you just need to make 10 contacts in a single day. And I think it might be like a UTC day. So it's a little confusing, but you've got to make 10 contacts, you know, in a short period of time and then you qualify and you get, you know, whatever points you get. But the other thing I did, and I'll keep this short because I know I'm rambling. The other thing I did is...

Chris Gammell: Jeff, we didn't like your stories. We wouldn't have you here. Like this is just how you communicate. We all know this.

Jeff Kaiser: So the other thing I did while I was out on the Washington coast is, I don't know if you know this, but one of the biggest kite festivals in the United States occurs out in Long Beach, Washington, which is on the Washington coast. And it's funny. Washington coast is not a well-traveled place. Like Washingtonians don't go to the coast very much.

Chris Gammell: Like Marchy, right? It's not like, it's not like beaches, right?

Jeff Kaiser: It's cold and rainy and gray, like most of the time. And so I think it doesn't have quite the draw that like a lot of places with beaches do.

Chris Gammell: It's not Long Beach. Long Beach out of California, rather. No, no.

Jeff Kaiser: It's not that Long Beach. This is a different Long Beach. You'd be really pissed if you woke up in the wrong, Long Beach.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: But the cool thing about this Long Beach is that A, you can drive on it, which is cool and unique. Oh, that's nice. And that was actually a lot of fun. And then B, they have this enormous kite festival. And I'd have to look up the name.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure it's something I could look up too.

Jeff Kaiser: It is the Washington State International Kite Festival. So it's like a big deal. And I had been meaning to go for years and years because I'd heard about it years ago. And it's one of those things where this particular location on the coast has a pretty steady breeze. Like it's reliably fairly windy there. And so it's a really good place to fly kites. And as a result, it's become, you know, over like, I don't know, 20, 30 years, it's become a destination for like serious, like really serious kite flyers. And so people will come from outside the US. And this was the first one that they had done since COVID. And so it was huge. Like it was enormous. And that's the kind of thing that you have to see this. You have to see it to really appreciate what it's like to have like hundreds of really, really big and especially like varied kites flying. And so we went out there for this festival. And then I was like, hey, I'm into amateur radio and kites are cool. And what if I tried to fly a antenna on a kite? Because now I'm at the ocean. I'm where the saltwater is.

Chris Gammell: Somebody's Ben Franklin in over here.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, totally, totally. And I have to say, I live to tell the tale. I did not get hit by lightning, although that is definitely a risk of doing this.

Chris Gammell: Yes, yes.

Jeff Kaiser: But fortunately, the weather was good. And I actually attached a wire to a pretty big kite and flew it up and made a bunch of contacts. And it was super, super fun.

Chris Gammell: That's great.

Jeff Kaiser: So yeah, I guess this year more so than any year in the past, like a decade, I guess I did a bunch of ham radio stuff. So this has been for me the year of ham radio. So interesting.

Chris Gammell: And what is, you know, ham radio, it's interesting. It's so there's like the, you know, the people are interested in these new modes and you hear that kind of stuff. And I hear people like you be excited about it. Then I hear people complain about the old geezers that are like just grumpy. Big problem.

Jeff Kaiser: Big problem. Yes. Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And so like, I can never really tell where it is, if it's just lingering, you know, like it seems like, you know, and then, and then you go to like conferences and people are all excited about getting their, their license. I'm like, that's great too. I don't know. It's always, it seems kind of the dualistic in that way. I don't know. The grumpies and the excited.

Jeff Kaiser: It's, it's complex. I mean, I, I struggle with this a little bit too, because like, I'll get really excited about a facet of ham radio and then, you know, you'll be operating and having a great time. And then you'll make the mistake of like joining a Facebook group for people that are really into it. And you're like, oh no, this is not, these are not my people. This is not. And I think it's just, it's kind of like any hobby that exposes you to just the general population. You know, you get, you get like all sorts of people that are in it for all different reasons. And I think the important thing with ham radio is that a lot of times it's the operating stuff that's the best. Like, you know, you'll have all the community that's around that. And a lot of times it's great. And people have been really friendly and welcoming to me just in general. But then you also get sort of like the forwards from grandpa level, like just, you know, people that are, have very different beliefs about a lot of things than, than I do that. I kind of just avoid. And I found that like the community surrounding can be a little bit more prickly. And there's a lot of like emphasis on following the rules and almost obsessive, like having to do the right thing. And I have to say that.

Chris Gammell: You said, you said operating. What's, what's the alternative? So you said, I'm really into operating. I think that's the way to go. But then what's the alternative?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, the alternative would be to just become really engaged in the community that's surrounding the operating, you know, because you've got, you have like the actual, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So you've got the, you have the actual being on the air, making contacts. And even that has different flavors.

Chris Gammell: The doers and the talkers. And even though they're doing is talking. Exactly. Right.

Jeff Kaiser: So that, and honestly, people have bad experiences with people on the air too, because you'll be, you know, if you tune to certain frequencies at any given weeknight, you will hear people and it's like a joke, but it's so true. You'll hear politics. You'll hear people, old guys complaining about their health problems. You know, you'll get the whole thing. And there's kind of frequency ranges that are famous for that, like especially the lower ones, like the, the ones that have more. Like the local, the local, the local propagation. Yeah. Like the, the lower in frequency you go generally, the more local the communication is. And by local, I mean like within the U S. And so if you go down to those low bands, you're probably going to hear people in parts of the country that you're like, I, I have very little in common with this person and I'm not enjoying being in a conversation with them.

Chris Gammell: I'd like to do an international contact, please.

Jeff Kaiser: So, yeah, I mean, yeah, really. Like, so then you pop up to a higher frequency, you get to a higher band that has better propagation outside the U S or even within the U S. And I have to say, I've had a lot of great interactions with people in the U S. And that's one of the great things about these new digital modes too, is that it's not so much a conversation as it is. My station shares its location and it shares a signal report, you know, how good of the signal from the other station I'm receiving. And then you exchange that both ways and then you're done. And one of the really popular modes right now is called FT8, which I think is the most popular digital mode in ham radio right now. And it's like a keyboard to keyboard, very scripted. And a lot of people don't like it because you can't say, Hey, how's the weather? Or like, how are you? You don't, it doesn't have that like keyboard kind of typing communication, but what it does allow you to do is just have a very good, no nonsense. Like, and the, and you know, you might ask, why would you do this? Like, why is this interesting?

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, I think you're even taking my lines now, man. Come on. I was going to ask that. Why, why would you do this?

Jeff Kaiser: Why would you do that? Because if you're me and you're into what I'm into, the novelty is in, can I make a contact that meets certain minimum criteria with a station that is really far from me using my very modest station, my very modest antenna. It's really about, can this station that I've built, is it able to establish a communication and exchange some minimal information with a station that is 2000 or 3000 miles away? And it turns out that I think that's actually pretty interesting and there's no politics and there's no, you don't get any of the negatives really. And it's funny because people-

Chris Gammell: Really removing the people from the scenario. That's what we're trying to do here.

Jeff Kaiser: You know, it's, that's, it's true. And it's not true. There's a lot of levels of this because there's a lot of skill, even in, you would think that there's no skill in this, but there's still a lot of skill because there's, okay, it's this time of the day. What frequencies should I be transmitting on to best use my setup? Right? Because if I try to use the wrong frequencies, as we've seen with propagation, it just doesn't work. Like I can't talk anywhere I want to at any time of the day. So it's like, okay, it's-

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What's the most you can do at the least that you have, right?

Jeff Kaiser: Exactly. Based on your knowledge of like, okay, at 3 PM local time, I should be transmitting on 21 megahertz or whatever it is. And that is the channel where I'm most likely going to have communication into Asia, which for me is, that's like the thing is I'm on the gateway to the Pacific, right? So if I try to talk West, if I pick the right time of day and the right frequencies, I can talk to Hong Kong. I can talk to Japan. I can talk to, you know, stuff that's out that direction because that's kind of based on where I'm located. That is what works best for me. So I think it's really cool. It's just amazing to be like, hey, this radio transmits like less than 10 watts and I'm able to make a contact that's like over 3,000 miles away. And you're like, how is that even possible that that works? But it does.

Chris Gammell: It's also kind of nice. It's like from a people perspective, you know, when there are people, there's like, there's always people out there doing the same thing, you know, like that's- Right. It's kind of reassuring and they're into the same thing. And, you know, so you're going to have some things in common, even if you don't have, you don't need to have everything in common.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, yeah. And so there's these, there's a website called QRZ, QRZ.com, where when you make a contact with somebody, you can type in their call sign and usually you can see their picture and a picture of their station if they've decided to post it and maybe a little bit of information about them, like what their hobbies are. And it's really cool to do this for people around the world. And, you know, I make a lot of contacts to Japan just because of where I'm located again. And Japan is one of the easiest countries outside the U.S. to make contacts with because of the geography and all that stuff. And that's been true for me, even when I live down in the Bay Area too. It's like, you're on the West Coast, you're going to have great propagation to Japan. And it's so cool to go on this website and you get to see like what this person looks like and what they're into. Like, what is the, what does their station look like? Is it crazy? Like they have, you know, a wall covered in awards and equipment and all this stuff. Or is it just somebody like me that just has this tiny little radio and you get, you know, all different, all different kinds. So, yeah, I think the people side is interesting and it's kind of, it's like a lot of hobbies. You know, I've seen this in other hobbies that I'm into as well. You kind of, you pick your people and you just kind of ignore the ones that are, you know, that are too far from really what I'm, they have different goals or they're just, you know, maybe they're not fun to hang out with. And you just are like, yeah, you know, you guys are into this too, but this is not my thing. I'm going to hang out with my people. I'm going to find my niche within this enormous hobby. And I'm going to, going to push that. I'm going to work on that part of it.

Chris Gammell: Jeff, I just looked myself up on QOZ. Where is it? Yeah. My license expired.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh no.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: And it probably shows your home address too. It's a big privacy issue.

Chris Gammell: No, it shows my PO box back in Solon, which is great. Yeah, no, I'm not doing that.

Jeff Kaiser: So you let your license expire.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I guess so.

Jeff Kaiser: So your call sign has maybe been like recycled or maybe you could still get it back.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I wonder. I bet they hold it for a little bit.

Jeff Kaiser: Nobody probably wants it because the ones that they give to new hams now are pretty long and they're not like desirable for people that are applying for. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Mine's pretty cool, man. KD8RND. RND? That is a pretty good one. That is a pretty good one. It was just random. I mean, there's no, it was just luck.

Jeff Kaiser: It's that D on the front end that probably makes it, you know, because it's got that one extra letter. So that's going to, somebody that's going for a short call would not get the one with the extra D at the front. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. Yeah. Oh, well. Mine's been very underutilized. Give me, give me a price range. If I was going to go buy, I'm not going to go buy one, but if I was going to buy an IC705, what would I be paying roughly?

Jeff Kaiser: They're kind of expensive. It's like a $1,500 radio. So yeah, I mean, that's the thing. That's why, like I said, step one is if you've been into this hobby before, you sell all your old stuff. You're like, you got to raise funds to buy the new one. Yeah, exactly. But there's another radio, which is the IC7300. And by the way, there's like other brands too. It's just ICOM is kind of, they're, they're maybe the most popular. People probably argue about that. But the IC7300 is the one that really, I think, brought ham radio back. And it came out a couple of years ago or maybe more. It's probably been out for three years, at least. That radio is maybe more like $1,200 and you can get them sometimes with rebates and stuff that bring them down to around a thousand bucks. The 705 is a tough one because it's more expensive, but in some ways it's less capable. So you have to really want the, in my case, it wasn't so much the portability as I wanted the fact that it covers all ham radio bands from like from 1.6 megahertz up to 400 megahertz, which is a pretty big, like not all radios actually do the VHF and UH stuff at the high frequency end. But there's also, so this is ignoring the, there's also been a bunch of, low cost. I think mainly Chinese radios that have come out in the past year or two that are also like super, super popular. And I'm less familiar with those just because like I kind of picked my camp and I'm like in that camp and I'm still learning that stuff. But I know that there's some other brands that are out there that are making lower cost radios that generally are very capable, but usually have like a subset of the features of like the big fancy ones, like, like the icon. I know those are very popular. So I think that if you were like, Hey, I only want to spend $600. I think that there is an option for you there. It's just, it would be a different radio.

Chris Gammell: You just got to go do some research on Facebook groups and you'd be great.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't know that you need, need to necessarily need to do that. Reddit's actually a pretty good source for information. There's a lot of hands on Reddit. And there's also like a bazillion YouTube videos and you know, you got to kind of like separate out.

Chris Gammell: Oh, gear channels. You got to be careful with gear channels. You start watching one of those. You'll be like, you know what? I need every radio. Did you know this? Yeah. Yeah. That's the worst. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: It's, I think that you wonder like, why do I keep coming back to this? Because I think that the thing about ham radio is it's, it's back to that whole thing about it's like ionospheric physics and atmospheric physics. And like that part is unchanging, you know, kind of, it gets better and worse over the years. But like, there's always this interesting part about it, which is just because it's part of how the earth and our solar system works. I think that's what keeps me going back to it. And so the equipment changes, but kind of fundamentally, if you can find something within that, and honestly, there's like completely other directions you can go with it too. Like you could do only local communication where you don't care about what's happening with the ionosphere because you're not using it for your communication. There's a bunch of digital stuff. There's like all these different avenues. But for me, it's that whole like, oh, you know, it's kind of like a door opens between two places that are really distant. And then a couple hours later, that door closes. And no matter what you do, you cannot open that door again until the earth is ready to let you open the door. I think that... Cool.

Chris Gammell: Now I feel like really claustrophobic, actually. Yeah. That's great.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Sorry, man. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That is...

Jeff Kaiser: Alan Wilkie is... Alan Wilkie is a good person. If you follow him on YouTube, he is always doing cool ham radio stuff. And I feel like he's much more on the cutting edge than I am. And so he... I often look to his channel for inspiration and I'm always like, oh, what gear does he have that I should have? You know, like antenna analyzers and stuff like that. Like he's way ahead of me on all of that stuff. And so usually he's a person I would go as like a trusted source for, you know, what's cool and what are people doing that's interesting in ham radio right now.

Chris Gammell: Cool. That's great. What's going on in the old professional Mighty Elm world? Are you still doing consulting?

Jeff Kaiser: You know, I haven't done much consulting this year and the kit business has been gangbusters. So there's this little thing that happened this year with Ukraine.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: And people at the beginning of the year or maybe like March, April timeframe got really worried about like instability in the world and the possibility of, I guess, like a nuclear meltdown or nuclear war. And what I noticed... Well, I mean, they were shooting up all of the power plants. Yeah. Right. I mean, like that's... For good reason. Right. Yeah. People were freaked out.

Chris Gammell: Good reason that they were worried, not that they... Good reason that they were attacking. Just so we're being clear here. Yes.

Jeff Kaiser: What I noticed was that I was kind of minding my own business and all of a sudden the demand for Geiger counter kits, which is something I know something about, that kind of went through the roof. And I had one of the wildest years that I have ever had since I've started doing this kit business. And so there were months this year that I was building kits as fast as I could build them, which has happened in the past, but this year was like more in a shorter amount of time. And it was kind of everything I could do to just try to keep stock and keep things going. And so I spent a good chunk of the early part of the year through the summer kind of recovering from that and trying to like rebuild stock. And of course, on top of that, you've got like the semiconductor supply chain. I was going to say, because everything is awful right now.

Chris Gammell: You also have some AdMail parts on yours, right? Like some old dip AdMail. Although the dips weren't as bad. I remember people saying like, oh, you should even switch to the dips because those are actually still available.

Jeff Kaiser: I totally agree. So one of the things that's funny is that everyone complains about the supply chain. And in fact, I was just talking to a friend of mine yesterday. Do you know like the open, or not necessarily open, but the modular synthesizer thing is like, you know, there's a lot of little companies that are making these modules for your rack style synthesizer. And 2022 has seen a lot of those guys close. And a lot of them have been complaining about supply chain issues being like, you know, and it's like the thing that I think is the most irritating, which is they're getting the same stuff that I've seen, which is supplier tells you it's going to be six months. And you're like, okay, I'll make it work. You know, I'll find a way to make it work. And then six months go by and they're like, oh, actually those parts are never going to come. You're never going to get those parts. And to like that thing about having to wait those six months to get that answer. That is like, it's makes it almost impossible to run a small business if that is how your suppliers treat you. And it's disgusting. It's like awful that this is how this happens.

Chris Gammell: We should, we should have like some kind of rule where it's like, so I will give you my money, a chip company. Yeah. I will actually give you the money up front. You can hold my money for six months. You can earn interest on it, which until recently didn't matter, but now you'll actually earn interest on it. However, if you stiff me on the six month timeline, I get to kick you in the shin as hard as I can. Straight to jail.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you.

Chris Gammell: Actually, you'd be surprised. Straight to jail. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: So anyway, I guess I was talking to him about this and, you know, this is a way, in my opinion, that the pandemic has kind of disproportionately hurt and impacted small businesses because they're the guys that can't deal with this. You know, if you're Apple, you're like, I've got allocations, you know, whatever dudes, or, you know, you complain about the billion dollars that you lost, but that was like not the first billion dollars you were making in 2022. So you're like, ah, whatever. But for the small guys, it's like a huge devastating thing. And so several of these small modular synthesizer companies have closed their doors for, for me, back to what you were saying, I use a lot of through hole parts. And so I've been mostly insulated from this because I haven't seen the same issues. Now, granted, I just checked yesterday and there are components in my bomb that are giving me like November, 2023 dates, which is, it's kind of funny that now I'm like, ah, that's pretty normal, you know, especially if it's just like two or three components in the bomb, you're like, I'll find a way around it. And in my experience, at least I've been on the side where I placed that order. And then three months from now, I get an email from Mauser saying, hey, your parts are here. And you're just like, what? Like, how did it go from a year to like, they're here now suddenly, which is, again, just kind of shows you how, what a sham, that whole supply chain is just so bad. But yeah, so anyway, I have not had quite the same level of problems with component sourcing. And so I've been able to keep things going.

Chris Gammell: I am surprised. I know this is going to, this is going to sound very ignorant. I am surprised they're still making dip components. Like, of course they are. Me too. But like, but like the fact that like, I guess in my mind, I'm like, well, they're giving you a date, but that's just like when they're going to find the stock somewhere, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably we find a new warehouse every two, three months. And that's when we give the date for.

Jeff Kaiser: They still, they still have like 2022 date codes on them.

Chris Gammell: So I believe it. Yeah. No, I mean, like they are definitely making them right. There's yeah. And they wouldn't be making them if there wasn't money for it. And you know, like obviously doing for it outside of just Jeff, right? He's not the only one who is buying these components.

Jeff Kaiser: Right. Although sometimes you do wonder, I mean, you do wonder when you order a couple thousand micros, you're like, how many people are doing this? Like, am I like the one? No, I bet government.

Chris Gammell: Cause that's the thing. If I bet they know exactly who the, you know, I bet it's a power law distribution. And I bet the, if the, you know, if that short head at the top of that distribution, if it's not the U S government or some like industrial company that supplies a hundred thousand a year, then they're just going to shut it down. But if it's not, then, you know, or if, or if it, you know, it hits their process different, but surely there's, you know, there's business folks doing these calculations internally. Like what's the cost of keeping this going? You know, how much different is it from our other lines? Is it worthwhile to keep it? You know, is the marginal cost worth it? Like, blah, blah, blah. Like, and like the answer is yes. And that's great.

Jeff Kaiser: I see parts get discontinued all the time. And parts, a couple of parts have been discontinued in my bomb and I've done like lifetime buys. You know, I have like boxes and boxes of discontinued components that are just kind of keeping things alive because you're like, it's easier to do that than to do redesigns every time something goes obsolete. But one of the things I've done a lot of this year, aside from the kit business, is I've been restoring and repairing test equipment. That's, I've done a lot more of that this year than I've done previous to that.

Chris Gammell: I want to hear about that, but I have to ask about the one component you've talked about in previous years, because you said, actually, there's always this one component that's tricky with the kit business. And then you tell me where you source it from. And I'm thinking, this isn't going to be a problem, a thing anymore. So you always say the Geiger tubes, you source from Russia.

Jeff Kaiser: Right, right.

Chris Gammell: So how'd that go?

Jeff Kaiser: Not good. Not good. Okay. No. And I think that's, so again, talking about these synthesizer companies that are closing, one of the things that I think, and I think this is kind of well known at this point, but running a small business in electronics right now is really, really hard. Because you also have not just the supply chain stuff, parts like not showing up when they're supposed to, but you also have the time investment is, for me, at least running my business has gotten much, much more time consuming this year than in any year. Prior to that. And that's because of things like tubes. It's like the Geiger tubes. It's a lot harder to get that stuff now than it has been at any time. I think almost any time leading up till now. And so I've been able to get them. I have contacts that are still, thankfully, are safe, you know, are able to ship things out of the country. And things have been okay, but it has been really difficult and it's been stressful. And, you know, there are times I had a shipment that went missing this year that, like, I have no idea where it is. It's just gone. And that's actually the first time that that's happened in, like, 10 years of doing this. Like, something just disappeared. And the worst part about it was that it disappeared in U.S. customs. So, anyway, I've been able to source components, including tubes. It's not great. Like, I don't, you know, I do think about how much longer can I keep doing this? Because it's not just that it's gotten a lot more expensive to operate, but it's also, like, I spend so much time now dealing with component availability. And it's even, like, stupid stuff, too. Like, ESD foam. Like, that black foam that you put ICs into. Literally, on DigiKey, the foam that I've been using now for a few years went from $20 a sheet for, like, I don't know, it's not 4x8. It's, like, 3x4 or something like that, which is a lot. Like, that's actually really expensive. That same sheet is now, like, $57 for that same sheet. And not only that, the cost to ship that sheet from DigiKey has gone, I think, up by about a factor of two. And so, if you think about, if you divide that down to the cost per kit of that little 1x2 inch square foam, or it's not even, it's, like, 1x1.5 inch square foam that goes into each Geiger counter kit. But it's, that is the kind of thing that's going to run me out of business. Like, and that's the thing that I lose sleep over, is, like, that stuff. It's actually not the resistors. It's not the microcontrollers, although you'd think.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: But those prices have increased, but not at the levels that I'm seeing for, like, the other stuff, like packaging. Things like stuff, you know, packaging, like boxes, has gotten more expensive.

Chris Gammell: Just, like, inflationary type stuff, too, right?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Tape. Like, tape. Like, stupid stuff. So, anyway, things are, I think, going pretty well, all things considered. Like, I've managed to overcome a lot of issues this year, and I think this year is probably going to be one of my biggest years that I've had since I've been in the kit business. And so, I mean, I'm happy about that, obviously. It's been good, but it's kind of for the wrong reasons, right? It's, like, because of this global instability, and people are worried about their safety, right? So, it's not a good feeling. It's, like, being successful for all the wrong reasons. And so, anyway, it's been a stressful year as a small business owner, and, yeah, I can totally understand why.

Chris Gammell: Let's get back to boring. Is that what you're saying? Let's get back to a boring year, please. Boring is good. Boring would be good. I've got some contacts to make, you know? Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Boring would be good. And I feel, you know, for people that are doing a lot of new design, I don't know how they are doing it. Like, I don't know how they're able to continue.

Chris Gammell: I've been talking to people about, we just did a training through work, and I talked to some folks, and they're like, yeah, you know, we're just trying a lot of new parts, and so I need to learn a lot of new ecosystems, that sort of thing. And I feel like on the micro side, which is, you know, pretty central to a lot of designs, and especially with, like, more and more peripherals getting pulled into designs and into chip sets as well, that it's just, like, you just get bounced to a lot of different ecosystems, and you have to be fast on your feet, which is tough, right? I mean, that's really tough to do, especially if you're getting, like, shuttled into an ecosystem that maybe isn't as well supported as you're used to. It's like, eee. So, I feel for people, too. But that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, how is the... Okay, so, sorry. I cut you off on the test equipment.

Jeff Kaiser: Yep.

Chris Gammell: You are now the proud owner of 8753. I think that happened actually last year still. So, you are the adoptive parent of my old DNA. Yeah, well, thank you for that. By which I mean you bought my child from me, in that analogy.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But you took much better care of it.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I'm still doing work to it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah? Okay.

Jeff Kaiser: So, one of the things is, if you collect old test equipment, you'll realize that, like, if you put up a bunch of shelves and you fill... And by the way, this stuff is all, like, really big. And so, it takes up a lot of space. And so, one of the things I did this year is we converted our guest room into, like, an equipment storage room. Which... Guests hate it. Surprisingly, I got... My wife went along with... Because she kind of saw how I was impacted by, like, I didn't have any visible floor space in my office. I couldn't see the floor. Yeah. And so... But now guests come over and they're like, the worst.

Chris Gammell: They're like, Jeff, your bed's so uncomfortable. Like, yeah, you're sleeping on all HP equipment. And... That's right. That's right.

Jeff Kaiser: So, one of the things I did is I put up a bunch of shelves. It was, like, a major effort. You know, get all this stuff off the floor, which is, like, the worst place to have equipment. Because it gets kicked and it gets dirty and all this stuff. So, anyway, I put this stuff up. And then I'm looking at all of it and going, all of this stuff needs to be repaired in, like, some way. And so, the 8753 is in good shape. So, this year, I did a bunch of work to it. I put in an LCD screen because the CRT was getting kind of weak on it. It was starting... Getting to be kind of hard to read the CRT because the intensity was going down, which is just, like, old age, you know, typical CRT stuff.

Chris Gammell: It's going to happen to all of us, actually. You know? All right. So, it goes. We're all going to become... Maybe your eyes need a little replacement there, too. You know?

Jeff Kaiser: So, I put in an LCD kit. I upgraded the firmware to the latest. And that reminds me... So, one of the things that happened this year was that Agilent, like, took down a bunch of websites that were hosting, like, vintage test equipment information. And I'm still pissed off about it. And I think there was, like, a bunch of drama and politics internally. And I mentioned this to Daniel Bogdanoff about, like, hey, is there anything you can do? And he, like, looked into it, and I think it might have been one of those things where he was, like, whoa. Like, that's a mess. I'm not going to turn it over to a 10-foot pole. So, nothing ever happened. But, anyway, finding firmware images for vintage V&As has gotten, like, way, way, way harder.

Chris Gammell: Now you're downloading from shady, like, forum posts. Well, totally. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Or you're, like, posting on the message boards being, like, hey, does anyone have firmware, blah, blah, blah, for this thing? And, like, fortunately, there are a lot of people who are really obsessive about maintaining these things. And so, like...

Chris Gammell: Right. But that doesn't last forever, right? I mean, that's the downside. Yeah, I know. I know. Is that it's, like, when, you know, everybody kind of gets off the internet or, you know, people are aging out, it's just, like, it's not going to be a thing anymore. So...

Jeff Kaiser: And so I... And that's actually part of what's kind of kept me in it. Because I actually feel like right now, this stuff is getting much harder to maintain. Because it's breaking a lot more. And also, the information, like the websites and stuff are, you know, the 1990s GeoCities websites are going down. And so a lot of the information is being lost. And so I actually have kind of been... There's some urgency behind, at least for me, getting equipment that I've kind of always wanted and then getting it working. Because I feel like every time I get one of the Ziziki, like, part discontinued notices, I'm like, ah, crap. Like, I'm not going to be able to get the parts I need. Like, through whole giant radial capacitors and stuff are going the way of the Dodo. And so, anyway, where am I going with this? Your 8753 has a problem. No, no, you're 8753. Your old 87, your former 8753 has a problem, which is that it has a mechanical step attenuator inside. And you can find videos online on YouTube of people repairing these. They have these tiny, tiny, tiny little O-rings inside that, like all rubber parts, like eventually go bad. And so I need to pull the whole thing apart because the step attenuator is not reliably switching anymore. And it's actually still usable because once you get it into a certain state, it'll kind of stay there. But this is kind of getting back to what I was saying. Like, I have all this HP equipment and like all of it needs work. And so I wouldn't recommend this hobby for anyone who's not like really serious about it. Because, man, is it so much work to try to keep this stuff going.

Chris Gammell: Okay, let's test this against something Jeff said earlier in the show. So is it better to go and sell all this stuff and buy something new?

Jeff Kaiser: I would say no. Interesting. Okay. Because, why would I say that? Because the new stuff is not as good as the old stuff. So this is kind of like, should you sell your 50s Cadillac so that you can buy a brand new Toyota? Like, you can and functionally it'll probably do a lot of the same things, but it's not going to be the same. Interesting. About the ham radio. So, yeah, I mean, I think, hmm. It feels different.

Chris Gammell: I mean, like, it feels different, but it's not completely clear how it's different.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that if I was doing this and I relied on this for my income, as I guess I do in a way, like this old equipment, I've actually used it for contract work. And it has certainly been very valuable. But if it was something I was doing every day and I was relying on this equipment to, like, you know, do my nine to five job and it needed to work and I could afford to replace it, I think that I would probably go for something newer. So, like, if I was at a big corporation, I would not have the patience because, like, no one at a big corporation is, like, recapping the power supplies in their oscilloscopes. Right. That's not a thing people are doing.

Chris Gammell: They sell it to someone who does that professionally and then that person goes and does it and sells it. That's right. Yeah. It was like secondary market.

Jeff Kaiser: That's right. That's right. And so, but for me, why do I do it? Well, it's because if I'm willing and able to spend the time on it, I'm rewarded with an instrument which is usually better engineered than the new stuff sometimes. Or at least it's like, it represents different compromises. Right. Okay. So, yeah, it weighs, like, 80 pounds, but it also has, like, better dynamic range than anything that's, like, you know, until you get really expensive.

Chris Gammell: So, explain that then. So, what is the difference between the old and the new? So, the old has discrete components or higher quality components or the new one has architecture where they just shove it into an A to D or an IQ. Well, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, that's definitely a thing. And that's actually true. So, now we'll tie the ham radio stuff with the test equipment stuff. Yeah, yeah. So, all new ham radios that you buy today or most of them are software-defined radios. And so, they have made the compromise that they've gotten better integration, lower power, lower cost, and they do as much digital processing in silicon as they can. Right. So, the RF comes in. It goes to an A to D really quick. And then it goes into the DSP. And then everything is DSP after that. And so, that gives them the ability to make a very interesting, you know, well-performing radio at a relatively low price. However, that whole architecture of going RF antenna to A to D with no analog filtering or minimal analog filtering means that those radios are extremely sensitive to things like out-of-band interference where you have like a strong signal that's away from the signal you're trying to receive that actually overloads the A to D and jams you basically. And they are way, way more sensitive. So, that's actually a specific example of a way in which new radios are objectively much, much worse than radios that were made in the 80s or the 90s. And so, that's a place where we've kind of as an industry, into the ham radio industry, they've made this trade-off for us. And they've said, hey, well, sorry, guys. These are just not as good. We know better than you do, but also money. And they make this trade-off.

Chris Gammell: I think money is a big thing, right?

Jeff Kaiser: They make this, well, sure, but they also make this trade-off knowing that most ham radio operators don't need that extreme interference rejection, that they're fine having the lower. But it's not everybody. And so, if you live on like a mountaintop where you've got a big transmitter or like in LA where my friend lives where he can't use his radio because it gets overloaded by like all the transmitters that are around him.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. LAX alone will do you in.

Jeff Kaiser: And that sucks for that guy. Yeah. And so, anyway, test equipment is kind of the same way where, yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a lot more digital processing now that's done in silicon that's replacing analog. And I think that that, like, for example, I got a demo not that long ago. The company will remain nameless. But I got a demo of a vector network analyzer from a company that's well-known that makes kind of generally less expensive test equipment, although this was actually pretty expensive for what it was. And I compared it side by side.

Chris Gammell: I will be able to guess who this is by the end of the story.

Jeff Kaiser: I compared it side by side with the 8753. So, the 8753 is a classic HP vector network analyzer from the 80s, right? It's old technology. Or maybe the 90s.

Chris Gammell: Yours is the early 90s, I believe.

Jeff Kaiser: Sorry, 8753D, I guess, is 90s. But they'd been making them long before that. There was the C and the B and the A. So, anyway, it's kind of like an old design. But it is pretty good performance. And so, if you compare it side by side with this new VNA...

Chris Gammell: Newfangled. Newfangled.

Jeff Kaiser: You'll find that the new VNA actually has much, much, much worse dynamic range, especially below like 2 gigahertz. It had a bunch of spurs and it was just like kind of yucky looking below 2 gigahertz. And so, it clearly was not able to deliver the same fidelity of measurement below 2 gigahertz as this 1990 whatever VNA from HP. And I think that's really where I feel like we kind of lose something by just grabbing the latest and greatest. Because truthfully, if I got like a state-of-the-art Keysight VNA and I spent, you know, a quarter million dollars, I could get something that functionally is like better in every way. But if I don't want to spend the quarter million dollars, it's actually kind of hard. Like if I wanted to spend $10,000, then you're like, oh man, I got to make these compromises to get something that can kind of do... It doesn't do all the same stuff. Like maybe it's okay for like a lot of day-to-day tasks. But the HP stuff, I mean, the thing about it, I'm a sucker like for... And it's true of like for cars and for other things. Like I love...

Chris Gammell: Things that break down.

Jeff Kaiser: I love things that you look at like vintage HP gear. And it's true of Tektronix and Keithley and whatever. But vintage HP gear, I'm more familiar with because that's kind of been my world. You look at this stuff, you take it apart, and it is incredibly well engineered. And it's also, you get to know it at a level where you're like, ah, like, okay, yeah, it's incredibly well engineered. But man, they really sucked at doing this thing. Like especially there's ways that you disassemble this equipment that you're like, oh God, like this was not made to be serviceable. You know, like this is awful trying to take this stuff apart. But by and large, you look at it and you get to see the fruits of the engineers who worked for a company that, especially at that time, was like at the top of its game. Like there was no better company at doing this than HP in the 90s. This is like the glory days for HP. And don't get me wrong, they still make great stuff. But there's a moment in time which is represented by this aesthetic of this big, heavy, boxy test equipment that is just like so, it's so much like function over everything else. Like it just works really well. It's not beautiful. It's not pretty. I think it's elegant, but it doesn't meet modern definitions of like, it's not like sexy equipment. It's like an elegant 80 pound gray box. Yeah, gray box that makes a lot of fan noise and is really loud and has like a horrible disk drive interface and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, I think that there's something. So I read a book kind of a long time ago and I think it might have been like Bob Pease's book. He had that book about analog design that came out. Troubleshooting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Troubleshooting analog circuit.

Jeff Kaiser: I think it was Bob Pease's book in which he talks about kind of his career and how he got started. And I think it was Bob Pease that when he was in college, he was forced to repair test equipment. And because he couldn't afford the real stuff, like he had to fix broken stuff in order to put his lab together. And if it's not Bob Pease, you'll have to forgive me, but I think it's Bob Pease. And one of the things that he says in this book is that there is no better way to learn about electronics than to repair old test equipment. Because it forces you to learn how it works. And the stuff is not easy. Like, like I have to say, after spending a lot of this year, like working on a bunch of stuff and fixing a bunch of stuff, it is very, very difficult. And it stresses everything. Like it stresses your tools. Like you have to have the right screwdrivers. And like there's all these weird bits and things for taking stuff apart. It's there's a lot of manual dexterity. You got to have a really good soldering setup. You got to have a really good de-soldering setup. You got to have access to components. Like it takes years to put together a lab that is capable of, I would argue, you know, disassembling, repairing and assembling something like an E753 without screwing it up, you know, without like breaking it further by disassembling it. And that's kind of been a thing that for me was a priority. I wanted to get to that point where I could work on this stuff. And I haven't fixed the E753 yet because I fixed a bunch of other stuff that was easier kind of leading up to it. But I've also learned a tremendous amount. And it's been stuff from not just circuits, but how to test circuits. Like how do you look for ripple and power supply rails? And, you know, it turns out it's not so easy to do this stuff sometimes. But also like how hard do you tighten screws before you strip them? And like what which screws are the most strippable? Like what are the ones that you accidentally strip the most? Well, for me, they're sheet metal screws, I think, are the worst. And you learn to have an appreciation for that. So I would argue, you know, I agree with Bob Pease about this process of taking apart and repairing vintage test equipment is a great way to learn that you're actually not very good at it and that you have a long way to go. And so for me, that's kind of been a process that I've been going through this year. And I feel like I've learned quite a lot for it.

Chris Gammell: You know, Jeff, you've actually said test equipment so many times. You know, it actually activated the EEV blog forum and it lit up so brightly that it actually called Dave to the show. And now Dave is here.

Dave Jones: I have materialized.

Chris Gammell: Kaiser is a miracle. Kaiser is a miracle. Oh, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: We knew we were going to go through a show without a miracle. It is a Christmas miracle. That's right.

Dave Jones: I've been here all along. I was just waiting for a mention of vintage test equipment to come into the IVA. But that reminds me of my first job, actually. Well, it wasn't my first job, but my first job in the seismic industry, actually. Have I told this story before?

Chris Gammell: My first day working in the seismic industry. Certainly you have. Go for it again, Dave. Yeah.

Dave Jones: But my first day working in the... Sorry for being late, by the way. That's fine. I just... Yeah. Calendar didn't remind me. And these guys started without me. Oh, well. Sorry.

Chris Gammell: Unbelievable. Hey, man.

Dave Jones: Unbelievable. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm a family man now.

Dave Jones: Anyway, yeah. My first day on the job and working in the seismic industry, I turned up and they go, oh, you're headed out to Ritalme because we need you to fix a charge amplifier that's broken down on the... In the test rack or whatever. And I went, what's a charge amplifier? And they went, you'll find out. And sure enough, my first day on the job was going out to repair this charge amplifier in this acoustic test system. And I had no idea about acoustics and charge amplifier. You know, okay, it's an amplifier that amplifies charge. But that's about as far as I knew. You think I ever learned about charge amplifiers at uni or studying anything? No. Like, you know, I never used a charge amplifier. I never seen one.

Chris Gammell: You went out, you know, a charge amplifier youngin' and came back a charge amplifier man. Yep.

Dave Jones: I came back a gray beard veteran that day. That's what I'm saying. Oh, boy. Yep. And one of the old graybeards out there just, you know, I'm speaking metaphorically, put his, you know, arm around me. Let me tell you about charge amplifiers. Sonny. And yeah, it was, yeah, you learn a lot by not only fixing them, but also actually designing them and designing test systems and, you know, to use them and stuff like that. So, yeah, that was another decade later.

Chris Gammell: Dave, before you got here, Jeff was mentioning the, you know, the Agilent shutting down the site. I do wonder, shutting down a lot of the resources that were available for like old testing.

Dave Jones: Whoa, hang on. What? What are they shutting down?

Jeff Kaiser: So, Agilent, sorry, Keysight, has had a website for users of the PNA and VNA, like the vintage VNAs, like the 8753, which Chris sold. Oh, it's a forum. Is it? Well, no, no, no, it's a, it's a webpage. It's like a fairly simple webpage, but it had things like app notes, manuals, but most importantly, firmware images for some of the classic gears with like change logs for the firmware versions to tell you what changed between the versions. And then also CalKit. So the VNAs have CalKits that have CalKit definitions. And for whatever reason, I think like internal politics, Keysight pulled the plug on it this year. And I, I don't know the full story, but I know that that stuff is just gone. Like some of it got archived by the Wayback Machine. But the thing is like, it didn't go deep down and like archive the firmware images. And so a lot of that content just got lost. And so I kind of made a stink about it because I'm a user of like the 8753, which falls into this category of like vintage discontinued unsupported VNAs. And there's a lot of these out there. Like the 8753 was very, very popular and successful. And there's also the 8720 and like the 8510 and blah, blah, blah. So there's all these 8000 series HP VNAs, as well as the PNA, which came, I think in the 90s. That is kind of like, it's not just unsupported, but it's also like they kind of turn off the lights. Like they shut the doors and turn off the lights. It's like Chris was saying, like the problem is that information is just going to be lost, you know, because you've got the engineers who worked on that stuff who are still around, but they're not going to be around forever.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I think even users aren't going to be around forever.

Dave Jones: They're actually shutting down the website. What are they?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, the website went away. And I think, again, it's like complicated. I don't know the reason. I think it was run internally as like a kind of an unofficial like side project by like a particular engineer at HP and then Agilent and then Keysight. And I think it just eventually.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but if it's officially on the site, why would you?

Jeff Kaiser: I think there were web hosting costs. And I think from my recollection, Keysight no longer wanted to pay to keep the site going. But it's probably, there's probably more to it than that. There's probably more to it than that.

Dave Jones: Oh, seriously. Oh, I'll put it on the EEV blog forum. I've got three servers.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Come on. This is ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: I just wonder about like, you know, like so like stuff like that. It happens, right? I mean, like it sucks, but it happens. And, you know, hopefully there's resources on forums and similar people can have it out. But like, you know, how does that end up then impacting, you know, like this experience you guys are both talking about of like fixing. Actually, I also got started fixing test equipment because I was working at a place where I was just kind of trying to fix stuff as well. And like, you know, like if you don't have that experience then, and if there aren't resources then to go and dive down that path and fix stuff like then, you know. Yeah. It's kind of like, I mean, it's a tough thing for people getting started, right?

Jeff Kaiser: It's hard. And I think you look at the test equipment companies and obviously they would rather that you use the new stuff. Like they're like, why are we spending time supporting equipment from the 90s? But there's still a ton of this equipment around. Like it's everywhere. It's pretty easy to come up with an 8753. You know, there's a ton of them on eBay. I think there's a ton of them in labs everywhere. And I think it's bad. I think it's really tragic because this is equipment that I think is exceptionally well designed. It's fairly maintainable. Like it's getting harder, but it's still the kind of thing where you can go in and replace capacitors and like solder parts. It is somewhat repairable. It's typically extremely well documented. The service manuals are usually until they got into that clip bullshit. Like they were fairly well documented. You could actually get component level information. And so you've got a lot of the ingredients there to keep this stuff running forever. But then they pull the plug on the website and like, oh, you need that firmware revision because you don't want to run like, you know, this old crappy firmware on your 8753. Like, nope, you now need to find that somewhere by talking to somebody. So, yeah, I think it's upsetting. And I get why it's not a priority to the company. But it's also like this is part of their legacy and history. Yeah. I mean, these are iconic instruments.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but you hand it over. You just don't just get rid of it. I would happily devote the resources and the service space and the cost to keep that stuff going. Like, this is just insane. Is there any like official and did they make like an official announcement or anything?

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, there was an official announcement on the web page, which is now gone.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. And it basically said like announcements gone.

Jeff Kaiser: And the way that they did it actually was particularly troublesome because what they did is they added the announcement to the website saying like by May 1st or July 1st or whatever it was, this content will be gone. But then in the process of doing that, they took down some of the content. And so some of the content was immediately gone. And that was where I got into trouble because I was looking for firmware images for the 8753 and I couldn't find them because they were already gone. And then the rest of the P&A stuff went, you know, a few weeks later. So it was like, you know, it had been online, it had been on the site for like 20 years, 30 years. And then all of a sudden, boop, it's just gone within a few weeks. So, yeah, it was a shitty thing to do, shitty thing to happen. I don't know the politics. I don't know what happened inside. I don't want to get anybody in trouble inside Keysight because I know there are people that I think tried to keep this running forever, but it didn't work out.

Dave Jones: Was it like a fancy-pantsy website or was it just like a list of files? No, right. It was just a HTML list.

Jeff Kaiser: I mean, I can send you a URL to it. The Wayback Machine grabbed a lot of it and you can see it's just like very, very bare bones.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but the Wayback wouldn't have grabbed the binaries and stuff like that. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. That's why it's upsetting.

Dave Jones: Come on. No, I'm going to have to get to the bottom of this and I'll see if I can revive that on the EEV blog server.

Chris Gammell: That's just... Sweet. Yep. Jeff, what else is on your shelves of things to be fixed yet?

Jeff Kaiser: So I still have some dynamic signal analyzers, which we talked about last year. You know, we'll talk about next year. Don't worry about it. You've got time. Those are still... I have one literally sitting right next to me that is like the chassis had a big crack in it. And so I had to take it all apart. It's one of those giant... I think they're like System 6 or something chassis that HP used in the 90s or the late 80s. It's a... What is it? A 3562A. I can't see the nameplate is like the wrong way for me. But I've got one of those that I'm actually fixing up to sell because one of the other things is I'm trying to downsize. Just got way too much stuff. So I've got a 3562 I'm trying to sell. Then I also picked up... You know the MDAs? The 53-310As? They're HP. I think they're like late 90s. They made them into the 2000s. They are really fancy frequency counters that have CRTs. They're capable of... Yeah. So the 53-310A. It's a modulation domain analyzer.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Right. Oh, yes. Yes.

Jeff Kaiser: So I picked up a couple of those not that long ago. And one thing for anybody that ever shops for them, they are all broken. Like you will never buy one that is not broken. And they'll be broken in a number of ways. But the most common way... Mine were broken in a few ways. But the most common way is that HP used like the crappiest power supplies possible in them. And they are all... The capacitors are all leaking. Like you won't know that they're leaking except that the rails will drift out of spec. And as soon as you take them apart and start replacing capacitors, you'll see there's this 1,000 microfarad cap that they used like 20 of. They are all leaking. Like all of them. 100% of them are leaking. And a lot of them still test in spec, which is like how... I don't know how that works. But anyway, they have really bad power supplies. And so if you ever pick one up, it probably has... Like it should be recapped immediately because it's going to destroy itself if you just let the electrolytes sit on the board. So I had two of those that the PSU was bad. And then I've also been fixing some other issues with them and doing like some upgrades too. Like you can get options for them and unlock them in software and stuff like that. So and doing firmware updates. So those are here. Hoping to sell one of those. I'm really... It's funny. One of the things... I don't know if you've noticed this, Dave. But with test equipment, if you fix one, it's like way easier to do it again. And so I've noticed... And also once you're shopping for equipment, you're like, ah, you know, it takes you six months and you find one. And then for some reason, one shows up the next day.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Shoot.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't need two of these, but like the price is right. And so one of the things I've done this year, which probably shows me is like a true test equipment hoarder, is that I don't buy just one of something. I usually end up with two or three of them. One for parts. And then, well, yeah, hopefully it's like a catch and release program, except all I've been doing is catching. There's a lot of catching and no releasing happening here. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: You know, our father's generations, they did this and then the cars just sat rusting in the yard. Yeah, that's right. And now they sit rusting in a, you know, a nice temperature controlled lab. So that's like a hybrid.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, so one of the things, one of the motivators of this is that I worked on a contracting project last year. And it was one of those things where you come into the program, there's like a huge crisis and it needs to be solved like yesterday. And one of the things about test equipment is that a lot of times you can't just get it at a moment's notice, especially if it's something weird, like say like an MDA, for example. Like if you just were like, hey, tomorrow I need to have an HP MDA. Yeah, good luck. You'll end up spending like $2,000 on one because you have to buy it from one of those test equipment dealers and probably still needs the power supply to be recapped. Right. And so one of the things I realized, and this goes for like EMC stuff too. There's like these EMC high pass filters that are pretty common. But if you just try to buy one, you'll spend three times what they're worth because people tend to hang on to them, which I'm guilty of. And so what I've started doing is for things like that, if I see one, especially if it's really cheap, I'll just buy it and be like, hey, now, now I have that thing. Because if I get on one of these projects where the problem needs to be solved yesterday, the last thing you need to do is to be looking for test equipment, right? That like, it's a major drag to have, because the thing is with vintage stuff, it could take like six months.

Chris Gammell: How do you know you need that thing though? How did you know you needed that? You have to be good at guessing. To be good at guessing. No, no, no. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what this thing is still. So you got into this project. You know that you needed a modulation domain analyzers or something like it to do this function. Right. So what did you do the first time? Did you already have access to one at a company?

Jeff Kaiser: What did I do the first time? What do you use this thing for? I don't know what this is.

Chris Gammell: What the hell is this thing?

Jeff Kaiser: The first time I may do without it, I was able to use an oscilloscope instead and just use like frequency counter function on an oscilloscope. And I was able to use, Tektronix has a really nice FFT on their new, they're not new anymore, but they're six series. Oh yeah, you're probably like modern. They have that really nice FFT.

Dave Jones: Modern scopes have made this obsolete. It's basically, you can do jitter analysis on it of clock signals and stuff like that. Exactly. Exactly.

Jeff Kaiser: So now you can do this stuff with big fancy scopes, but I'm not going to have like a tech six series scope just sitting around here, right? It's like way too big of an investment. And so that's the kind of thing where you can rent it if it's something that you're needing for a specific project. But this kind of gets back into why do you collect all this weird old equipment? And I don't have to explain this to Dave. Because someday, that's the answer? No, no, no. It's because this stuff, much like repairing old equipment, sort of forces you to learn how equipment works. The older stuff, it sort of, it helps you learn. They tend to come at things from a different angle. And so like, yeah, you can do this with a modern scope, but it's not going to be quite the same thing. And if you have like the old piece of equipment that was sort of the category leader in this area, kind of like how the 8753, like a category leader in like kind of lowish cost VNAs, you see how they do things. And it actually makes you a better engineer because you're like, okay, I get it. I understand the philosophy behind, like the MDA is a weird piece of equipment. It's a strange piece of equipment. It's kind of like, why did they design this?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Donkeys years ago. I never saw anyone use it. I don't think, I think I powered it up once and, you know, it's like, oh, look, I can measure the jitter and stuff, but.

Jeff Kaiser: Very good for specific things.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the problem. Don't go further. That's the problem. Tell us what that is. What is it? Like modern, modern scopes and modern test equipment has, because it's all digitized now and everything else. It's got huge amounts of processing and you can just, you know, throw processing and software and sampling power at a problem these days. Whereas back then you needed specific instruments. Now, Rhys, if I asked you, okay, where we have this clock, I need you to measure the jitter on it. How would you do it? Right. You, you wouldn't think of a modulation domain analyzer.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So that is like a use case.

Jeff Kaiser: Or another, another good use case is, so say you need to know the settling time of a frequency source. So you have a frequency source, which changes frequency periodically and it doesn't do it instantaneously. It takes some time for it to change frequency and then sort of drifts onto, like it goes out of lock and then it comes back into lock. The MDA is the instrument that would allow you to see that on a graph versus time. Because what it, what the MDA does is it's a device which plots frequency versus time. So unlike an oscilloscope, which is voltage versus time or a spectrum analyzer, which is frequency or sorry, wait a minute. No.

Dave Jones: So amplitude versus frequency. Sorry.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Amplitude versus frequency.

Jeff Kaiser: The MDA, it is, I need to actually look at the front panel because it has like a little diagram of this. So, so the MDA is frequency versus time. Uh, and so it's sort of like in between, uh, oscilloscope and a spectrum analyzer and allows you to do unique things like characterize oscillators. And you can see how oscillators settle and drift. And you can also use it to look at phase noise and to look at, uh, how noisy frequency sources are. And, and the thing about the MDA is that they are capable of very, very, very, very precise measurements, like kind of ridiculously. Like if you take a GPS disciplined oscillator and you connect it to an MDA, you can get like parts per billion frequency accuracy out of it. And it'll actually show you on the display, like how your oscillator is performing in like a parts per billion kind of a way, which is pretty impressive. Like it's kind of this crazy thing. And so that's like, not everyone's going to have an MDA just on their shelf, but when you need one, it's it. Yeah. You can do a lot of the same functionality with a new scope, but probably not exactly the same thing.

Dave Jones: This is why we had one at the companies I worked at the HP 5373, a modulation domain pulse analyzer minimizes the design and testing effort for radar systems and enhances design efforts for EW, E-Lint, IFF, and related equipment and components. If you know half those acronyms, then you're way out of this. The analyzer mentions modulation and carrier frequency on pulsed RF signals. So if you're like, as I said, like a pulsed radar signal or a sonar signal, like a pulsed underwater sonar or something like that, that actually pulses off and on. You need to know the recovery time and the on time and the settling time and all sorts of, you know, things like that. And yep. So this will. That makes sense. We'll measure envelope parameters such as pulse width and PRI, peak envelope power, percent amplitude modulation, jitter, and more. Woo. Now I want one.

Chris Gammell: Dave's going to buy one now, Jeff. Now you have to say.

Dave Jones: Now I'm going to buy one. I'm going to recap it. And yep. I'm just going to have a sit in there. I'm looking for some work.

Chris Gammell: No, Jeff, a sucker's worn every minute. You could try it. You could offer a ship one to Dave in Australia.

Dave Jones: If you care about your radar chirp linearity, this is the kit for you.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I sure do. I think that they were not successful in the marketplace. So they tend to be very cheap. Like you can find them.

Dave Jones: Oh, I'm sure you can pick them up for nothing. Yeah. Because no one wants them.

Jeff Kaiser: They're just, they're kind of weird. And I think they're, they have limited, you know, application. But it's a great tool for like anywhere that you would use a frequency counter. It allows you to plot the frequency counter versus time. So you sort of see a more graphical view of your frequency counter readings. And then they do a bunch of other stuff too. Like they can do interval between two edges. You can measure within like picoseconds and stuff like that. So, and there's different options and things like that. But, but.

Dave Jones: They've got support for MS-DOS 6.2.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, there's a, there's a phase noise toolkit, which actually reprograms a PLA or an FPGA inside the MTA and like runs alternate firmware on the device and then has a host side application. And I think somebody on the EV blog forums was trying to reverse engineer it so that you could run it on Windows, a modern Windows operating system. But people that are fans of these are really into them. And I'm a sucker for anything like that, but it like has a following like, oh, you can get these things kind of cheap. They're relatively unknown and they have like a strong following, but mark my words, they are all broken. Like all of them are broken. Even the ones that are sold as working are probably broken.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's great. That is nice to have like a good fan base. Cause that also means you can have a built-in support network. You can always go and, you know, kind of tap, tap the network and ask questions.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Never buy test equipment where you'd know nobody else has it. It'd be this rough, you know?

Dave Jones: But it's one of those things they're so obscure. They risk actually dying on eBay and places like that because people who find one in some auction lot somewhere, or they got, you know, some warehouse find or something. And then they do, you know, first thing they do is they eBay search history of, you know, if this thing's sold before, what the heck is it? How much is it worth? And they find none. Then it's like, oh, why bother? There's no market.

Chris Gammell: No market has been made.

Dave Jones: There's no market. Yeah. There's no. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Interesting.

Dave Jones: So no. Anyway, but as the eBay sellers, they all know, look to search for the history of it. And this is how, you know, you can be amazed at how old test gear can actually retain their prices is because they have a history and ongoing history of people willing to pay those sorts of prices. So, and they see that and they put that minimum on it. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: That's one of the problems with buying new stuff is that unless it's by one of the big three or whatever, you're not going to get your investment back if you have to sell it. So like that, that's the thing. Like it's actually funny if you were to buy like a vintage HP V&A, but one of the really famous ones, if you were to sell it five, 10 years later, I think you'd probably get exactly what you paid for it. Yeah, I know. Exactly. If you were to buy one from like a new company, but it's like a third tier, you know, maybe one of the more discount companies, you're probably going to get a fraction. You might not even be able to sell it because it's just too obscure. Like no one knows to search for that particular instrument.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's not the hot thing. It's not. Yeah. And it's, yeah.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: One of my favorite ones, go search for a secondhand locking amplifier. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh yeah.

Dave Jones: Those are like, you know, fairly obscure bit of kit, but they maintain their value. Like there's, like there's no tomorrow.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah. Anything that Stanford research.

Dave Jones: Oh, Stanford, Stanford research gear. Yeah. I know.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I think their whole, because people know that that stuff is worth a lot of money and it's, I think that's actually further enhanced by the fact that they still make them and they still make the same design that they made 20 years ago. Like they haven't changed.

Dave Jones: No. And they're all through whole parts and you can get the service manual for them and yeah, yeah. It's great. Oh, four. And I got one 490 bucks. Oh, that's a bargain. Wow. That's a really old model SR510. Okay. With the analog meter on it and you know.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Wow. There's a digital locking amplifier, a Saluki. Who's heard of a Saluki brand? 17,000 Canadian bucks. Sorry. That's 17,000 Aussie bucks. Buy it from Canada. A Saluki. I might add that to my secret eBay. Jeff, do you have a secret eBay search term spreadsheet?

Jeff Kaiser: No, I do not. Oh, I do. Maybe I should.

Dave Jones: I have one with all like obscure brands and what they do. All these obscure brands so that I know to, you know, if I need something.

Chris Gammell: Tips and tricks of hoarders everywhere, folks.

Dave Jones: I got this extensive spreadsheet. With brand, you know, these obscure brand names you've never heard of.

Chris Gammell: You know, guys, this is a sickness. Yeah, I know. Totally. It's fine, but I'm not sure we should impose this on other people.

Dave Jones: Jeez, I'm liking the look of this Saluki.

Jeff Kaiser: I think that while we're chatting about this, we are driving up the price of used test equipment.

Chris Gammell: That's always the problem, right? You know, we're making the market as we speak. You know, this is probably the problem. Yeah. Jeff, what does 2023 have in store for you?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, that's two years from now.

Dave Jones: So now I'm just adding this to my list. Just adding this brand to my list. Go. Don't mind me. I'm just updating my spreadsheet live.

Jeff Kaiser: I have no idea. Yeah. Let's see. I think I'm still so focused on 2022 that for me, the holidays are usually a busy time for the kit business. And actually, it hasn't been as busy as I had hoped. So it's been a little bit slower this month. Sometimes January is a big month for me too, because I think kids are home from school, building projects, you know, college kids are looking for something fun to do. And a lot of times I've sold a bunch of kits in January, but things have been...

Chris Gammell: You know, most people who are doing last minute shopping, that's when they usually buy the Geiger kits.

Jeff Kaiser: In January?

Chris Gammell: No, no, no. I mean, right before that, right before Christmas, I think. So you've still got a couple of days. We still have a few days left. Panic buyers.

Jeff Kaiser: I still have kits in stock. So yeah, I think Adafruit ran out, but I still have kits in stock. And I've still, I've been selling on Amazon and that's going okay. So I still have kits on Amazon if anybody wants to check out something fun to build over the holidays. But yeah, I honestly, I don't know. 2023 is kind of a blank for me right now. I think I'm very much like in the moment, just trying to get stuff out the door, get stuff done. Usually I kind of am like this until January, and then I get to take a deep breath after I restock some stuff. Then it usually gives me a moment to kind of collect myself because my busiest season is usually around the holidays and then usually in the spring too. And then I usually have a really slow summer. That's kind of been the pattern that I've had over the past several years now. So we'll see how next year goes, but I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to get components and tubes to do the kits. So we'll see. I'm going to try to keep it going.

Chris Gammell: Jeff, you say that every year and the miracle keeps happening.

Jeff Kaiser: I constantly am exceeding my expectations. Like, you know, I'm able to get parts. It's just the ability to get parts is like, it feels a bit tenuous sometimes, but I've been able to make it work so far. So I'm going to keep trying to do that.

Dave Jones: Have you considered going into the Geiger counter tube making business? I reckon there's a good niche out there for somebody to make new ones.

Jeff Kaiser: You know, perhaps. I've thought about it.

Dave Jones: What's actually in them? How do they work?

Jeff Kaiser: Well, so they're a tube that has an electrode down the center and then it has a conductive outside wall. Yeah. And they're filled with, I think it's like something close to a panning mixture of helium and neon. And then I think they also have some other gases like chlorine to quench. Because once you start the avalanche, it needs to stop as quickly as it started. Because that determines your dead time and then your sensitivity.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes, of course. And then hence the pulse rate and et cetera. Exactly. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. And so you want to have as low capacitance as possible. And then you also want to have this mixture which extinguishes itself automatically. And so I think they add halogen gas. I don't know exactly what's in there. Like nobody says exactly. If you look at some of the old books from like 100 years ago, they're a little more open with what their mixtures are. But they're also not making things that last for like a million cycles. So I'm not sure what the modern guys are doing. But yeah, I have thought about it. I mean, truthfully, the market is not super huge. Like I don't sell a ton of stuff that makes me feel like there's this big untapped market for Geiger tubes. But maybe. I don't know. I think if the price was right, maybe.

Chris Gammell: You know what you got to do is I think this detecting neutrons, like, you know, you got to switch to whatever is going to, I guess it's still neutrons.

Jeff Kaiser: Neutrons are the new, the new. Oh, yeah, that's right. So what was, what was the news last week? I missed it. I heard something happen. We have fusion now. Is that the thing? Like all of a sudden after like.

Chris Gammell: Well, we've had fusion. So many years. The news was.

Jeff Kaiser: We have like net positive fusion now. No, not really.

Chris Gammell: Not really. It's not like, I mean, it is and isn't, right? So basically it was two mega jewels at the wall and they put that, they shot 190 some lasers into a pellet and well, not into the pellet around the pellet. And then basically it caused the fusion to start for like a very, very small fraction of a second and it output three mega jewels. So that's like the short line story. But the thing they don't say is that the, it took 200 mega jewels to make the two mega jewels out of the lasers because the lasers are really old. And so they did get net positive in this case. They have done that before.

Dave Jones: For that very, very brief period. Not including all the amortized cost of energy to.

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah, definitely. Definitely not like this is not power plant stuff. This is like taking the next step. And this is different than. So last week, two weeks ago, we had Zach for Dean back on the show talking about Commonwealth fusion systems where he's working a startup in the Boston area. One of many fusion startups that is still doing the tokamak, the magnetic style fusion. And that's an alternative path towards the same goal. So, so this is actually behind that, you know, in terms of research, in terms of like progression, but still, I think it's, I think it's exciting. It's just like, you know, they were trying to tamp down.

Dave Jones: I can't, no, I don't agree. I think it's exciting in that. I think it's just, it's just a psychological barrier. It's like breaking the sound barrier. It's like, sure, sure.

Chris Gammell: But it's kind of like often these are, these are momentum. It's not even equivalent to that. These are momentum based things though, right? So it brings more focus. It brings more dollars.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but where's the exponential growth going to come from, right? You can't, we can't just keep doing this little linear growth we've had for the last 50 years. It's research, Dave. We've suddenly reached, yeah. It's research. Where's the pathway? Where's the pathway to exponential growth, right? We need orders and orders and orders of more magnitude energy out than what we put in.

Chris Gammell: Hey man, hey man, it's Kaizumanns.

Dave Jones: Let's not fight.

Jeff Kaiser: It's not fight. No, no, no.

Dave Jones: I'm looking for a fight.

Jeff Kaiser: When I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego in the late 90s, there was a fusion project that I think was supposed to be a really big deal. And it got canceled the same quarter that I had the primary researcher as a professor for one of my classes.

Chris Gammell: And that was just like drinking on that.

Jeff Kaiser: That was like a broken, broken man. I remember it being like people being, you know, talking in hushed tones. Like, why is this guy so pissed off? And it was, yeah, his fusion project got canceled and UCSD never built a fusion. But I remember UCLA, I think, had one. And it was one of the magnetic style. I think I went and saw it.

Chris Gammell: Focomax have been around for a very long time.

Jeff Kaiser: So, anyway, don't take a classroom professor.

Chris Gammell: They're all incremental changes. So Dave's not excited about incremental.

Dave Jones: And that's why I'm saying it's never going to happen. If you go for incremental improvements, you're never going to get there. I'm calling it now. You are never going to get there. You need an exponential ramp up. You need some weird technology that amps up.

Chris Gammell: Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, okay.

Dave Jones: You're not going to get there incrementally.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, I think people want that. It's not like they're saying, oh, well, we could have exponential, but we're going to have the linear one. I think that this is the best that they can do. And I mean, yeah, you could ask yourself. Which is great. Should we be doing this?

Dave Jones: No, I thoroughly support the research, but don't ask me to get excited about it. This is the best they can do. Oh, sure. That fusion's imminent.

Chris Gammell: You know what? Your excitement, you don't have investment dollars, so you don't have to get excited.

Speaker ?: Right.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, there's the question of, like, why was this particular observation chosen to be, like, the media thing? And, you know, maybe it was the hungry science press that wanted a story. Because they're like, oh, we haven't talked about fusion in a while.

Dave Jones: It was the hungry researchers who needed their next grant. Yeah, maybe somebody did grant.

Chris Gammell: You know, it was interesting, though. Like, during the talk, they showed one chart. And it was, you know, it was like an experiment. They're charting. I don't even know what they're charting against what. Fusion. But basically, it was. No, it was one of the reactions that was happening. And it was like, it basically looked like an IV curve. And I was like, oh, I know what that looks like. You've made a diode. That's right. Yeah, exactly. A laser diode.

Dave Jones: So it's diode in, diode out.

Chris Gammell: I don't know.

Dave Jones: Get it?

Chris Gammell: Diode in, diode.

Dave Jones: Diode, laser, diode in, diode. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, diode. I get it.

Dave Jones: I'm here all week.

Chris Gammell: Well, we are not, because we've been going an hour and a half. Uh-oh. So what should we leave Kaisermist with? What are the tidings of Kaisermist for the year to come? What else should we talk about, guys? We got like two minutes left. What else should we talk about? Anything? No?

Dave Jones: Do you have a pick and place machine yet?

Jeff Kaiser: No. And I don't have any printed circuits either.

Dave Jones: All right.

Jeff Kaiser: I don't. Why should I have a pick and place machine? Is that a thing now? Is everybody getting a pick and place machine?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Really?

Jeff Kaiser: I don't really need a pick and place machine. I am a pick and place machine. That is the correct answer. That is the correct answer. You do not need a pick and place machine.

Chris Gammell: That's right.

Jeff Kaiser: I was talking to somebody at one of our hardware happy hours who uses a toaster oven to do his reflow. And that's also something I don't have. And I was like kind of ashamed that I've never done toaster oven reflow at home. I think that puts me in like a... I'm a little bit behind the curve there. But I've always used a hot plate and hot air and soldering iron. Like I've never... I haven't done enough dual-sided stuff to need the reflow oven, the toaster oven. So I think I need that before I have the pick and place.

Dave Jones: Well, you don't need dual-sided. You just need regular SMD to do reflow. Just need single-sided, Jobby.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, but you don't need a toaster oven if you're going to do single-sided because you can just use a hot plate, which is, I think, easier. There's no like air currents to worry about. I think hot plates are easier than... Don't you agree?

Dave Jones: No, I don't think they're as controlled as I even... Oh, they're super controlled.

Jeff Kaiser: They're super controlled. I feel like I can get a hot plate within like a degree. And I mean, yeah, you have the connectivity through the board to consider. But like you just keep inching it up like a degree at a time until you get it to where you want it. But for big, complicated boards, I could see it being a thing. Or if the board has like a lot of vertical, like tall components on it, then yeah. You're going to have like temperature gradients over the components and that could be a problem. But for like short stuff, like SMT, you know, ordinary components, hot plates work. I think hot plates work really, really well. Because you can actually get your microscope on top of it and watch it while it's reflowing, which you can't do. Oh, yeah.

Dave Jones: No, which you can't do in an oven. Yeah, exactly. It's hard to see inside an oven because, you know, you're peering through this little, you know, glass thing on the front. And it's like, oh, I can't see the components in the back. Are they going? Oh, I can't see it. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: So I think I would do the hot air or sorry, the reflow oven before I would do the pick and place machine at home. And I'm not even at the reflow oven stage yet.

Dave Jones: Okay. Maybe next year.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah, maybe 2023. I don't know. I feel like it's going to be a while for that. But if I was doing a lot of one particular board, I guess I would maybe think about it. But they take up so much room. One of my friends just recently sold an entire pick and place line because it takes up way too much room. Like he had like the big, big machines. And it was like a huge amount of space. And they're loud and annoying to deal with. And so he decided, you know, I'm going to use contract manufacturers to do all this. And I'm not going to do it in my shop anymore. And I can totally understand it because who wants to spend hours of their day programming like bad 90s CNC stuff in DOS?

Chris Gammell: This is really great because this means two things. One, we know Jeff doesn't listen to the show. And two, he pretty much said all of the reasons Dave should have heard. Actually, he did hear me saying on the show a couple weeks ago. But, you know, it's like, you know. But Dave's gotten there too.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, so my resolution for 2023 will be to listen to the pick and place episode of the AMSR. Just the one episode. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other one, yeah, okay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, 52 weeks until the next recording. So, yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, it was nice knowing you all. Probably my last time being on the show. It's the last Kaiser.

Chris Gammell: You were coming back whether you want to or not.

Jeff Kaiser: I'll have my eyes will be held open with toothpicks. Or my ears, rather. And it'll be like the amp hour will be piped in. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Just tiny little piezo speakers that we've hot glued into your ear canal.

Dave Jones: So how many of these Christmas episodes have we done? The three of us. Is it 10?

Chris Gammell: Eight, at least. I don't know. I don't think it's been 10.

Dave Jones: No, because we've been doing the show 11 years, have we? Is it 11?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: 12 years. 12 plus 900. I feel like it could be 10. It could be 10. Because I've lived in Seattle for 10 years now. It could be 10. Because we've probably been doing it about as long as I've lived in Seattle. Wow. But maybe it's like nine. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: I'm not sure I've properly tagged all the fans. Yeah. I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven tagged as Kaisermis. But maybe others.

Jeff Kaiser: Oh, so you were right. This is eight. Or there's a couple that are. We'll just. Those have been forgotten about.

Chris Gammell: Now I'm looking at this fantastic art that I've done in the past.

Dave Jones: Now he does. If you don't know, Jeff, Chris does all his art using the power of AI now.

Chris Gammell: AI, yeah. Oh, really?

Dave Jones: Yeah. He generates all the artwork for every show with AI. So we can try and what keywords are you going to try and use for the AI this time?

Chris Gammell: I mean, maybe I'll like put Jeff inside of like an old HP equipment box. You know, like the prompt will be like a man driven crazy by leaking capacitors inside a large gray metal box or something like that. And we'll just see where it takes us.

Dave Jones: What AI image engine are you using again?

Chris Gammell: I'm using Mid Journey these days. Mid Journey and Open AI. Yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: I feel like you need to be more ambitious though. It needs to be like Kaiser as a piece of test equipment or like, you know, you got to go big. Oh, we can try that. You got to go really big.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting. You know, I've been really disappointed with the faces. I was trying to make a Christmas present for a relative where I like, I got all these old photos and I like uploaded them and you know, there's a lot of cool things you can do. But like, if it's not like a, if it's not like a pristine individual, like photograph of one person, and even then it's still not that good. So like, it's, it's basically like inspired by these photos that you upload. It's not actually like using them or I'm using it improperly. One of the two.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. What was the book about AI that came out a couple of years ago? And it was basically the whole, the whole conclusion of the book is like AI is bad. AI is terrible. And it's because of exactly that, that you show it, you show it all these images and it's like, it doesn't see anything. Like it's just like patterns of color and light, you know, it's like, it has no idea. It's like when you show it text and then it just like gives you back gobbledygook. Like it doesn't comprehend any of that. Like maybe it can fake comprehending it if you show it enough of this stuff.

Chris Gammell: But yeah.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, it's getting better generally. Oh yeah. I don't know.

Jeff Kaiser: It is. It's getting like scarily better, right? Like this year, that's actually, that's probably like 2022, right? 2022 was the year that AI was, went from like, ha ha ha to like, holy crap. Like it, I feel like that's probably one of the biggest changes that we've seen.

Chris Gammell: I, I, I have been, I've been amazed at some of the things that have popped out. It's not been, like I said, nothing with human faces, but other stuff that like come out of it. Like I've been using it for blog art and stuff like that. And it's just, it's, it's unreal. Like I'll send you guys.

Dave Jones: Oh, if I was doing a book, I wouldn't bother hiring someone to do some artwork. I'd just spend a day throwing in random words into an AI art generator and then it pops out and it's all royalty free. And I think, isn't it?

Chris Gammell: That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all licensed like that. I mean, whether, whether or not it should be, there's a lot of debate about that, but.

Jeff Kaiser: The images that you provide, do they become a part of it? Like, does it, does it suck up that data? Does it like eat them? I'm sure it does.

Dave Jones: Surely.

Jeff Kaiser: I'm sure it's probably. You've lost all rights to those images. Yeah. Those images are no longer yours. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Interesting.

Chris Gammell: Weird times we're living in guys, but who knows, maybe within, you know, a year from now, we'll be like, oh yeah. Remember when the AIs didn't re fix all our test equipment too, or fix all the, do the hot plate reflow, you know? So who knows?

Dave Jones: Yep. I watched a movie last night, which had a Katie sack off in it. It was a Mars one. God, I can't even remember the name now. It was, I actually fell asleep. But it had to be.

Chris Gammell: You were some of the worst movies, Dave. You really are optimistic. You always go after the Mars movies and you're very optimistic. And I'm just like, that is a hot pile. I could tell just from like the, the stuff you share on Twitter and elsewhere, you know?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I literally fell asleep watching it, but it was about, and they sent an AI robot to Mars to investigate why the last human mission actually crashed. So they sent this AI robot thing and it, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: It fell in love with the alien that was there. Yeah. I know that. 50 shades of red is called. So I have to try to get that in the body.

Dave Jones: Oh boy.

Jeff Kaiser: Well, thank you so much for having me on the show. As always, it's a pleasure.

Chris Gammell: Thanks for coming back, buddy.

Jeff Kaiser: And yeah, thank you.

Chris Gammell: I hope we get to see each other sometime this year. I don't think we saw each other this year.

Jeff Kaiser: No, I don't think we did. I didn't make it to any conferences this year. I don't think. So yeah, I've been kind of laying low.

Chris Gammell: I'll have to come out to the Seattle Hardware Happy Hour maybe. Oh yeah. Maybe that'll be the fix.

Jeff Kaiser: We have a great time. It's always a great, it's a great group of people. We're very like, you know, dependable. Like every month we are wherever, you know, we go all bounce back and forth and it's a great, great group of people. Enjoy that a lot. So yeah, you should come and check it out.

Dave Jones: I just added a link to, I did a Christmas soldering. I told the AI engine to generate Christmas soldering and it's came up with a pretty lame looking, I don't know. It's not even soldering. It's using a screwdriver, I think, instead of soldering. So it's, I just set the link. Can you see it?

Chris Gammell: I can see it. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's like, nah, nah, fail, fail. I'm sure that's it. That's not a soldering iron, right? Is that a screwdriver? What the heck is that? It's too low resolution for me to.

Chris Gammell: It's like a fairy wand. Yeah, I don't know.

Dave Jones: I don't know. Yeah. No, no. It's a fail. Wah.

Chris Gammell: All right. Well, until next time, Jeff, happy Kaisermis. We'll see you next year.

Jeff Kaiser: Yeah. Happy holidays to both of you. And thanks again. It's a great chat. Thanks, mate. See ya. Bye.

Jeff Kaiser: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye.