#57 – An Interview with Alan Yates - Recondite Radiation Raconteur

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: I'm Dave Jones from the EEVblog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell from Chris Gammell's Analog Life. And I'm Alan Yates from, well, pk2zy.net.

Dave Jones: Hey, Alan, how you doing?

Alan Yates: G'day, mate. Pretty good. How are you?

Dave Jones: Excellent. Fantastic to have another Aussie on the show. I'm outnumbered. Yes.

Chris Gammell: I am outnumbered. Yeah. All right. Bring it on. I love it. Bring on the American jokes. Come on. Let's hear your best. What do you got?

Dave Jones: No, we'll just sneak them in there and see if you buy it. Don't worry about that.

Chris Gammell: All right.

Dave Jones: Alan, so if you don't know Alan, Alan is a fellow Sydney. Who doesn't know Alan? Come on. Everyone knows Alan. Everyone subscribes to his tweets and his blog. Yep. And his YouTube channel does some great videos these days. Some epic length videos. Yeah. Tell us about them, Alan. Tell us about all the stuff you do.

Alan Yates: All the stuff I do. Well, I don't know. Where to start? I'm a geek by trade. Lately, I've obviously been doing a lot of radioactivity stuff, but ham radio operator, so RF is another thing that I've been playing with. My day job, I'm a software engineer, although lately a R&D hardware plus software kind of guy. Oh, yeah? Well, yeah. It's a different kind of a job for me. For many years, I've been web, kind of web monkey software guy, but I was brought on at Netcom, which is an Australian hardware company. They do various 3G and router-based products that I've been doing the hardware and software for. It's an interesting...

Dave Jones: And for those who don't know Netcom, they're a famous Australian company who developed one of the world's fastest modems back before you were born, Chris, I'm sure. That's right. Yeah, the famous Netcom modems. It did what? I think it did 19,200 bits per second back in its day, and it was like twice as fast as anything else.

Alan Yates: One of the first 19.2 modems.

Dave Jones: That's right. They did a lot of the early research into advanced modem technology and stuff like that, and it was a big success story. Netcom's a huge Australian success story and all that sort of stuff. And what happened?

Alan Yates: Well, yeah. For a while, they went on to buying stuff rather than developing it themselves, but they've got their groove back. They've invested heavily in R&D, and I'm part of that investment, I suppose you could say. Yeah. Awesome. Goodbye. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So you were doing software before that. You said like some web programming stuff? Yes. How did you make that transition?

Alan Yates: Oh, well, that's a long story. Straight out of uni. I decided to start my own internet service provider company, and I did that for quite a few years until it got to the point where it was invest and go the DSL route or do more web and software kind of things. Because along the way, because you had to do everything, and I did marketing to building everything, and I got pretty good with software. So a lot of people were, please do my website for me back in the day when that was actually cool and you could make some money out of it. Yeah. Yeah. So I jumped into that for a while. Worked for a lot of different companies. Worked for AAPT, Xerox, you name it. Did the Sydney Festival one year. Actually, the year 2000, that was right to the Olympics and everything. That was a fun time. But eventually, come last year, I was a bit sick of doing that, and I wanted to look for something else. And I thought, well, you know, for years I've been into hardware in one form or another. Why not do something that sort of spans the gap between software and hardware? Because I can do bare metal programming. I've been a C programmer for years, and I thought, awesome. Let's try that out.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Thank God. Because when you said one year, I was like, holy crap. Did he learn all this stuff in one year? Holy crap. Holy crap. I'm going to feel really dumb right now. All right. So the hobby stuff goes further back, but you're just starting to get into the professional side of doing it full time.

Alan Yates: Yeah. One of my first toys was a light globe and some alligator clips and a battery that my dad got for me. So I've been a bit of a hardware hacker for years. Nice. Nice. Beautiful.

Chris Gammell: So how has that transitioned? I mean, like, so do you still come home at night and work on hobby stuff? Or is it, that always seems to be the tough thing. You know, people say, don't do your hobby as a full time job because you'll start to kind of regret the hobby. Have you felt that or is it kind of the opposite?

Alan Yates: It's kind of the opposite. See, for 10 years I kind of did my hobby being an ISP, you know, all the software and hardware bits and pieces that were associated with doing that. That was my hobby. And that can be tough. I mean, it can be particularly tough because you can never get away from it. When you work for yourself, you know, you don't have strict hours, you don't have sick leave or anything like that. You either work or you don't. And you work like crazy for yourself probably more than you would for any employer. But I do have other hobbies. I've got, you know, pyrotechnics and things like that to fall back on if I ever get bored. But so far it's been great. It's been very busy, but that's just one particular project that we've been doing at the moment.

Dave Jones: Well, that raises an interesting question. I mean, Chris, who's going around saying that you shouldn't do your hobby for a full time job?

Chris Gammell: I've heard that a couple of places recently. Yeah, really? I wish I had a source.

Dave Jones: Well, I reckon they're just not passionate enough about it then.

Chris Gammell: Maybe that's possible. I mean, but I mean, it is easier to burn out that way. I think it's because I wrote about burnout a couple of weeks ago because I'm starting to... Right. I've been working a lot. You're starting to burn out, are you? I'm not burning out per se, but I mean, it's just possible. If you do the same thing over and over again, not even the same thing, but the same field. You know, like Alan, if you were just doing ISP stuff, right? If you didn't have ham and everything else that you do, you'd start to burn out, I'm sure, right?

Alan Yates: Oh yeah, absolutely. No, I hear you there, Chris, because after doing it for so many years, it's one of the reasons why I jumped ship to more software-centric and then also this latest jump to bare metal programming, I guess you could call it. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, you've got to have some change. I mean, I alternate between my hobbies anyway. I tend to go through one, I don't know, probably because I'm a bit crazy. I fixate on one thing for a year or two and then I jump to the next thing. At the moment, it's radioactivity. Maybe, you know, before that it was, I don't know, they were the last hobby wars and before that it was pyro and it's just the way I am.

Chris Gammell: Okay. So, pyrotechnics. I actually didn't have that on the list. I haven't seen any of this stuff. I mean, maybe I need to go back to some of your older YouTube videos, but what were you doing? Were you blowing stuff up? I'm guessing this is blowing stuff up. That's what everyone

Alan Yates: calls it. Yeah, basically. Let's be honest about it. All right. No, I was, yeah, it was, well, yeah, when you're younger, I think every kid, particularly every boy likes to play with fireworks and blow stuff up. It was banned. Unfortunately, they banned, yeah, they banned him here in Australia. It was banned at a time that I was kind of just getting old enough to get, you know, really into it as an art form as well as a technical hobby. So, I carried on illegally for a fair while and then I ended up being licensed. I am actually a licensed pyrotechnician. I can put on displays, although I gave up on doing that because it's quite expensive with all the insurance that you need and, yeah, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I mean, yeah, it's wonderful. You put on awesome shows and, you know, the crowd loves it, but with all the regulations and it's just, it's a mugs game, I think, but there's some guys out there that are dedicated. They do it every day because they love it and, you know, but I'm happy to help them out.

Dave Jones: That's why I do electronics every day and I don't, I can't ever see myself burning out of electronics regardless of how much I do it. It's always, yeah, oh, you know, I've got other interests and other hobbies as well, but, you know, I'm always doing something with electronics, whether it's, you know, whether it's just reading a forum or doing something, you know, I'm always involved with it and always have been for 30 plus

Chris Gammell: years. So, I mean, that's a pretty, pretty broad thing though, too. Like even Alan said, you know, he's been bouncing from radioactivity detection to RF to digital to analog to programming. That's a big field right there. So, I mean, I was talking about this. It's almost infinite. If you, if you, so say I just did analog all day, then I came home and I did analog all night, right? And, you know, working at my bench, that would start to get boring. I mean, I've been doing some other stuff, but that's what, that's what I really meant. I mean, right. Okay. Electronics is a big field. You know that Dave. Yeah, absolutely. It's massive. So when you say pyrotechnics though, so I think pyrotechnics, I think about, you know, like triggering and firing off, you know, prefabricated fireworks, right? So yeah,

Dave Jones: rockets, everything else. That's exactly what I think of as well. Okay. So is it that,

Chris Gammell: or is it also like controlling flamethrowers and that, because that's what I really want it to be

Dave Jones: in my head? Or is it actually building your own fireworks themselves, actually packing the powder

Alan Yates: in there? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It was building my own. Right. I can imagine that would be, yeah, quite an art and fun. It is. It's a, it's an interesting, well, you know, coming together of, you know, basic hand tool skills, you know, being able to build something from scratch and also the, you know, the chemistry and the physics and it was quite an interesting hobby. I guess I'm a sucker for those kinds of technical hobbies. That's why I do, you know, ham radio. I don't, although talking to people is great, I don't do that as much as I probably should. I tend to be a digital mode guy and I, you know, one of the reasons I got my ticket was so that I could legally, you know, transmit and build my own equipment and again, the electrical part of my, my hobby. But I guess, I don't know, I just, everything that I do is about studying how the universe is and, and using whatever it's got while ever I'm here to, to play with it. Cool. That sounds pretty nasty.

Dave Jones: So has the ham radio, you're, you're, you know, you're into the ham radio field here in Australia. Is it, is it dying in terms of people talking to each other, like actually over the radio anymore? Is that dying off or is it more, you know, or is it still out there? Are people still, you know, spending hours a day just chatting to each other?

Chris Gammell: I believe it's called chewing the rag, right? Yeah. I've been reading my book.

Dave Jones: Right. Chewing the rag. Okay. Indeed.

Alan Yates: It depends on the age group. I think there, there's a lot of older gentlemen.

Dave Jones: I thought there was only one age group for ham radio. Sorry, but that's.

Chris Gammell: No, there's old and older. Come on.

Alan Yates: Right.

Chris Gammell: And there's also old at heart, right? Yeah. Right.

Alan Yates: There's some of us stuck in the middle, I think, that aren't quite old enough to be old yet, but yeah. And there's a lot of obviously new people, particularly with the foundation license that's come along that allows people to get on with, you know, with less technical skill while they learn more about amateur radio and it gives them a chance to try it out. That's probably.

Chris Gammell: So could you explain that to, I've never heard of, I don't know the Australian difference. I hardly know anything about American stuff so far. I've been busy, but in the U.S. there's three, three licenses, right? There's technician, there's general, and then there's extra. So is it paralleled in Australia?

Alan Yates: We don't really have an extra class anymore. We have like the full calls pretty much. They are unlimited, I think they call it now, unrestricted. I can't remember. It's been a while. I got my license a fair few years ago now, and the rules have since changed. You needed Morse code when I first got mine to get the, what you'd call the general. We no longer need that. If you've done the full amateur operator certificate of proficiency, which is like the detailed theory plus regs, you get everything. Okay. They don't really have the novice anymore. They're more concentrating on this. The foundation call, which is sort of a really basic introduction of, you know, building blocks. This is kind of how a radio works, and it gets people interested in it. It was aimed, obviously, at youth to get new blood into the hobby. You could get on with limited technical skills, but it also gives you a huge incentive to upgrade because you get very little bandwidth. You can't do a lot of power. You can't do certain modes. I think you actually can't even do digital modes unless they're built into your radio. So, yeah, it's very, again, I'm not 100% up on the regs because I've never had to have that restriction myself. I did the AOCB straight off and became, well, originally it was called a limited call. That's why I'm a Zed call because we weren't allowed to operate on certain bands, but now we're allowed everything because the force has been removed as an international requirement for ham operators.

Dave Jones: Right. Interesting. So, how much are... So, can you tell us more about this radiation stuff you've been working on? Oh, I'm not done with ham yet, Dave. You're not done with ham? You're a ham sponge, you are.

Chris Gammell: I am. I just want to know, I mean, like, have you transmitted it outside Australia much or... Oh, yes. How much...

Alan Yates: Yeah, particularly when I was younger. I actually started the whole RF craze, I suppose you could say, back in the days when CB had that sort of second peak. You know, I was obviously too young to get the first one where the whole... Yeah. Yeah, smoking the bandit. Back in the 70s. Yeah, yeah, I missed that one, but the second peak right before it kind of died, I was on board with, and that got me interested enough to actually... That's when I got my call sign, so... And then, yeah, I've obviously spoken to people all over the planet. 20 metres is probably the best band for that. I tend to use PSK31, which is a digital mode where you can, you know, keyboard chat to someone, which works quite well with weak signals.

Dave Jones: That works well over the internet, I've heard.

Chris Gammell: That depends on the day, Dave. I mean, we've had some of our own issues here, so... Yeah, we have.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That must be hard now, because really, you know, communications is so instant and available to everyone now via the internet. Yeah, the... Do you guys get the feeling, well, what's the point anymore? It's like...

Alan Yates: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I guess it must be hard, you know, especially if you're just talking or you're just chatting or something like that. You know, I can sort of appreciate the ability, okay, yeah, I've built, you know, a circuit that interfaces to a radio and I'm transmitting, you know, and I'm not using the internet and it's all great, but surely the, you know, you must go, oh, that's great, I've done it, move on, you know?

Alan Yates: Well, ham radio is many things to many different people. I mean, some people enjoy the contesting, you know, trying to rack up as many contests as they can, as many contacts as they can in a limited period. Oh, right, yeah. Some people just enjoy the rag shoe, right? They want to talk to their friends. Certainly, you know, if you turn on a receiver and listen to 80 metres, you'll hear people that have been talking to each other for 25 years and will probably still be doing it right up until they die, you know? Right, yeah. There's guys on the back of their tractor talking to their wife and things like that. Some people just enjoy using it as an alternative mechanism and because it's, you know, it's just different and I think there'll always be people that will enjoy that. There's also people like me that enjoy it as a technical hobby. We probably spend less time talking on it than we do, you know, designing transmitters, receivers or completely unrelated things. Have microcontrollers and the internet and, you know, the general mobile phone and all that really removed the reason to have it? Yes or no? I don't know. A lot of, there's a lot of creativity and a lot of, a lot of things that I suppose we still need that place where people who have, you know, an interest in RF can go and practice their skills, I suppose you could say. I don't think it'll ever die. I mean, it is in terms of numbers, yes, absolutely. Unfortunately, it's regressing. A lot of people as, you know, natural attrition people die, they pass on. But for the younger generation, I think it's an awesome hobby and I think it'll always be around until they pry the spectrum from our cold dead hands, you know?

Dave Jones: Our cold dead hands, yes. Charlton Heston style.

Alan Yates: Absolutely.

Dave Jones: I had an interesting email, actually, a week or two back. Chris, you might know of this. It didn't really make the news here, but the, in San Francisco, in the BART system, which is their underground tube system, they decided to shut that down during, during a community protest thing. They'd organised this protest. Somebody, I don't know, what was it about? Somebody got shot on the, on the subway or on the BART system or something. I don't know, something like that. Anyway, they were organising this formal protest and the, and the people who run the BART, because it's a private, it's not a government run thing, I think it's a privately run train system in San Francisco. They decided to actually disperse the, you know, actually not, you know, to make sure this, this protest didn't get out of hand. They actually shut down the mobile phone system in all the tunnels and everything. They, they, they actually deliberately shut down the phone system. And, um, anyway, I got, and it pissed off a lot of people that made the news saying, oh, you know, you can't do that. It's unconstitutional and all sorts of rah-rah, um, which you'd obviously get from doing such a stupid thing, shutting down the phone system. But I got an email from somebody who said, could I design something that, uh, was independent of the internet? We're too reliant upon, well, you know, too reliant upon the phone system and the internet and everything. Can I design something so that we can actually talk to each other over the span of a couple of kilometres, you know, and stuff like that. What is it? It's something. I know, it's, it's like, it's, it's a walkie talkie, you know, and, uh, but, but there's other, you know, but because it's underground, then, you know, uh, you've got that line of sight, that, um, thing, unless you use very long, very long, uh, wavelengths, right, Alan? You'd know more about this. Long wavelengths for penetrating, um. Yeah, like speleophones and

Alan Yates: things like that, where you can, for caving, you can go right down to LF and they go right through hundreds of metres of rock. But again, rock and stuff like that. Yeah, the antenna required is a bit of a problem, you know? It's a bit of an issue, yeah. Can't you go to

Dave Jones: some sort of newfangled fractal antenna or something like that? Fractal antenna. You know, yeah, but it's still got to be, you know, a hundred metres long, right? Is that the...

Alan Yates: Oh, we'll probably get sued if we talk about that. I remember a chap who used to defend the name fractal antenna with, with all his might, but... Oh, really? Oh, well, we have

Dave Jones: no fear on the amp hour here. Yeah, fractal antennas, if anyone doesn't know, they're what used in phones these days. It's, you know, when phones used to have antennas sticking out of them and they don't have that anymore? Um, yeah, it's because of this antenna and fractal antenna technology. Um, where basically the concept is, if you, you know, with a basic antenna, you need X amount of wavelengths, say it's a metre long and you, you need a one metre long, but there's, you know, half dipoles and other things, but we won't go into that. But yeah, let's say you need something a metre long. Well, you can make a much smaller antenna by making it a fractal shape, like, you know, like the, the edge actually, like a big zigzaggy type thing. And you can fit that same one metre. A zigzag, huh, dude?

Alan Yates: Well, you know, come on. You can only cheat the laws of physics so much, unfortunately,

Dave Jones: Dave. So much. But anyway, you can fit, you know, that equivalent wavelength antenna, equivalent sensitivity into a tiny little, you know, package, you know, like, like a centimetre square or something like that. Yeah, I have awesome respect. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but yeah, it works on the fractal technique that there is no boundary, you know, there is, you know, when you keep zooming in on a fractal, it's, you know, there's an infinite amount of definition and detail in there. And somehow, yeah, fractal antennas work the same way. So, um.

Alan Yates: Yeah, I'm not sure about the physics myself, but.

Dave Jones: I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure of the, the practical implementation. I know there are limits. I'm not, I'm sure you can't just etch, etch a little zigzag track as I, as I said onto a PCB, but. Yeah. Um, but I, I believe it works on a similar concept, so.

Alan Yates: Uh, nowadays we have all kinds of computational electromagnetic programs that let you design stuff and, you know, they take care of the plastic that's around it. And we obviously at Netcom, where there's people that build antennas for us and they, uh, they design it. Oh, okay. And then, you know, you build the real thing and you find it doesn't quite work as is. And some guy goes in with an exacto knife and trims the edge of it. It does work, you know? So there's still a certain amount of art in making antennas. Multi-band antennas in particular, when you have to wrap them around all of what's inside a cell phone, it's, uh, it's a bit of a black art, but, uh, there's a fair bit of science as well.

Dave Jones: Yep. I, I actually believe you can buy them. You can actually buy these commercial antennas. Yeah. You see here, I'm right. I'm Googling fractal antenna and you Google it and you get these lots of funky, they almost look like, you know, like actually fractal images. Yeah. They go figure, you know? Um, so yeah, it's really neat. It's really neat technology. And that has allowed, um, you know, to get them to get really high sensitivity, high sensitivity antennas in these crazily small spaces. And what helps if you go up in frequency too, of course.

Alan Yates: That's the big thing that helps them is that you're up at multi-gig frequencies where you can, yeah, you know, your full, full antenna is only a centimeter anyway. Yeah. Right. A couple of

Dave Jones: centimeters weight length, but yeah, but still apparently the, from what I, I read a bit about fractal antennas quite a while back and yeah, apparently they actually improve the sensitivity over a standard antenna as well, you know? So, um, yeah, but there's a, I, I'm sure it's not, it's a bit of a blackout, but I'm sure it all, you know, eventually meets the laws of physics. So, uh, yep. We certainly aren't, uh, even, even, even, uh, Scotty from, uh, Star Trek couldn't beat the laws of physics. So, yeah. I won't try and do my Scottish impression. Yeah. Nah, I won't do it. I'll spare everyone. Uh, Alan, real, uh, real quick before we get back

Chris Gammell: to the radiation thing, the, uh, because Dave said black art, I saw an article this week again, another one about analog, cause I, you know, I'm a big fan, fan of analog. Uh, no, we didn't know, but basically moving to the dark side of digital. I'm just wondering if you've ever done, no, come on. Uh, I mean, do you have a lot of experience in that kind of area? I saw, I saw an article about analog, at least on the chip side of things in, uh, in San Jose, at least there was a Mercury news article and, uh, and just how, how they're paying people no matter where they are basically. So that's like a, you know, you can work wherever you wanted to kind of thing. I don't know if you had any analog experience or anything like that. No, no, not really. Um, yeah, I'm a

Alan Yates: beginner at most things electronic. Uh, you know, I know how to bias a transistor and that's about it. All else from there on, I got to the point where I could probably design a dodgy op amp. So I'm happy that now that I could design a dodgy op amp, I can go and use one that someone's designed for me. Uh, I've, I've tried to always stick with discrete transistors because I thought that I learned more that way, but, uh, also it's very hard to get stuff done if you spend the entire day building,

Dave Jones: yeah. Yeah. That's why I abandoned discrete transistors. Yeah. Back in the eighties or something. It was just, yeah, you know, like, yeah, you, you, you sort of learned about them and then you realize, well, the ICs are much better, you know, it's just, uh, there's some

Chris Gammell: benefits sometimes. I mean, it depends on the project, but, uh, from the educational point

Alan Yates: of view, right. You know, I love working with discrete stuff because it's just, it's, it's bare, you know, bare metal again. The bare metal programmer part of me comes out, I suppose, in the hardware field. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. And a lot of RF stuff, the circuits are that simple anyway that you can build them quite practically. You just dead bug away and at the end of the day, you've got a working receiver, right? And it's only got six or seven things in it, so.

Dave Jones: Well, you can build an FM transmitter with one transistor. So, you know, it's, uh, it's certainly eight rocket science. Although how it works is quite evolved. If you actually go into the, you know, the physics of how it all works and, you know, you could write a whole PhD thesis on how a, how a single transmitter FM, single transistor FM transmitter works. Yeah, absolutely.

Alan Yates: So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, what are, what are some other builds you've done, like, for, uh, transmitters and stuff like that? Do you do really involved builds or are they smaller kind of, uh, like piecemeal kind of builds?

Alan Yates: Uh, nowadays, uh, I have little time to do big projects. I mean, the biggest thing that I've done for a while is obviously the, the triple five contest. That was several weeks. Ooh.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that was, yes. If people don't, if people don't remember, uh, Alan won the triple five, well, won an aspect of the triple five. He, he, he won the Aussie prize. Actually, he won several prizes. Didn't he?

Alan Yates: Yes, I did. Um.

Dave Jones: You greedy person. Yeah, I did feel a little bit bad about that, actually. It was well deserved.

Alan Yates: I thought that, uh, that, that other chap that did the pong, uh, the collision game thing, I thought that was pretty awesome too. Oh, yeah. And there were so many other great projects. I mean, it must have been really hard for the judges to pick, to be, to be honest, and all of the work.

Dave Jones: That's why I didn't get involved.

Alan Yates: Well, you got somewhat involved.

Dave Jones: No, you really didn't. Oh, yeah, yeah. You didn't do much at all. I did. No, I didn't do much. But, uh, yeah. Because I knew how much work it would be judging that thing. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: No, it was great. So, how'd you come up with some of those? That was, that was, I mean, that was one of my questions, just, what, what the, what the hell were you thinking, man?

Alan Yates: Yeah, it was insane, wasn't it?

Dave Jones: Come on. It was only, what, 110 triple fives or something?

Alan Yates: Yeah, 110, something like that. No, it was, it was one of those things, I think, years and years ago, like, from back in the 50s, I saw an article on, uh, on building, sort of a similar machine, but it was made out of neon bulbs and diodes, and, and I thought, so

Chris Gammell: remind, can you remind people what it was, just so people have a context to what you're talking about?

Alan Yates: All right, the, the big project that I did for the triple five contest was, uh, calculating on adding machine. It's basically a, a decimal accumulator with, uh, nine decades all built using triple fives. Uh, the other smaller project that I did was a spectrum analyzer using, uh, triple fives for the, the time base and the log amplifier. But the, uh, yeah, the, the adding machine was, uh, I think the thing that made it kind of special was using a, uh, an old Decadic dialing mechanism to, to dial in the numbers. Yeah. That was, uh, a bit of an inspired guess that I came up with. I thought, you know, Decadic, it's a Decadic adder. Yeah, why not? I can use the pulses from those, uh, those fantastic old mechanisms to drive it. Conceptually, it's quite a simple machine. It's just, uh, a lot of work to put it together. It's the same building block over and over and over again.

Dave Jones: It was all about the build really, because yeah, such concepts are quite simple. You know, I, I thought that your, uh, RF, you know, your RF one was a bit more technically, technically advanced. So, so it's, you know, it's all about the build really.

Alan Yates: Yeah. I know. I agree. Yeah. In terms of the amount of effort required, absolutely. It was, uh, it was a good project. The, uh, the RF one though, uh, I was quite proud of that little, uh, little spectrum analyzer. I mean, it's, it's a very simple machine. It does, I mean, it's a toy, but it was something that I had, uh, been thinking about for many years. I was originally going to build it discrete, um, and, you know, seven or eight transistors or something, but the triple five made it quite easy, and it was, so it's a fun little thing. I mean, it's in a tin and I, I use it all the time. I actually use it as a band monitor because it's quite good for showing me all of HF, you know, like basically almost DC up to about 20 megahertz. I can watch all of HF and I can see when the, you know, the propagation, when the ionosphere is active, you can see all the broadcast channels, um, the shortwave bands being active. And I use it for that pretty much daily. Hmm. That's, that's pretty great. So it's not really a toy then? Well, it's a toy as far as, you know, spectrum analyzer instruments go. I don't think, uh, Alligent's gonna, Agilent's going to, you know, buy it off me or anything, but it's, uh,

Dave Jones: yeah. And the tin and everything, I don't know, man. Speaking of contests, um, the winner for the Touchstone contest has been announced. Has it not, Chris?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. And it was the, uh, the one you called, Dave.

Dave Jones: It was the one I called. There you go.

Chris Gammell: I mean, honestly, it was the one who, the only one who told us that he had submitted something.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, granted. Yeah. I didn't actually look at any other entries, but I just thought that one should win straight off the bat because it was, ta-da, a triple five timer. Oh, yes. Built using an op amp.

Alan Yates: The 18 hertz oscillator one?

Dave Jones: Yes. Yes. Yeah. 18 hertz. And all he, and he confirmed that. All he, I called that as well. All he did was build it and then turn down the frequency until he met the current requirement. So that's, that's genius in its own right, you know? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's great. So thoroughly deserving winner. Sorry. I forget who actually won it. I forget the name. Eric something. There you go. You're on the ball.

Alan Yates: Congratulations, Eric.

Chris Gammell: Bet it, Eric.

Dave Jones: Eric. Yes. Well done. It was a thousand bucks or something, wasn't it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Nothing to, nothing to sneeze at there. So.

Dave Jones: No. Excellent. I, I think he mentioned, uh, uh, in a forum or somewhere he mentioned, uh, no, it was in our amp hour comments from last week. Yes. He mentioned what he was going to spend the money on or something. So. Hmm. Well done. I love it. Definitely. Triple five again. It will, it will give a win. It's unbelievable. Are there any other ones like that? I mean, that are that ubiquitous. I can't, I can't say the word. I'm hopeless. Ubiquitous. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. I screw it up every time.

Chris Gammell: So Alan, did you, did you, there was someone in the contest that did like radiation hardness stuff on a five, five, five. I think it ended up being kind of not, I don't think it worked, but did you ever, did you ever look at that stuff? I mean, for, do you do rad hard stuff when you, when you do radiation testing or are you doing it just for detection?

Alan Yates: I'm just doing it for detection. I basically, you know, expose the die and irradiate the heck out of it and see what happens. Uh, I couldn't do that with a triple five. One of the things I actually wanted to do for the minimalist entry, which I never got around to, I ran out of time, was to take apart an old triple five and probe the die and maybe use one of the output transistors or something because they're big enough. But, uh, yeah, I didn't have one that I could take apart. Unfortunately, I didn't have any nitric acid or anything to etch one away. So yeah, that never happened. Next time.

Dave Jones: I should probably mention what my entry was going to be.

Alan Yates: Yeah. Okay.

Dave Jones: Should I? I don't think I've ever mentioned it. Um, yeah, I was going to enter just for fun, not to actually win a prize because I was, wasn't really, you know, I couldn't enter really, but, um, not, not to win a prize, but I actually, uh, I built this thing up. My, my idea was to build a self exploding triple five time. So you actually hook up, you hook up the circuit, you apply power and it blows itself up. It blows a hole in the, in its own chip. And you know, Dave, freshmen in college have been doing that

Chris Gammell: for years and it doesn't have to be a five, five, five, seven 41. You know, two, but this

Dave Jones: one does it itself. It uses the timer capability and it actually blows itself up by, I worked out a configuration where it might possibly do it. And I tried it and I was able to kill the chip, but it didn't smoke or blow a hole in it. Like I was hoping for it. It actually blow too quick. The internal die would blow too quickly. And, um, yeah, it'd kill itself. Sure. Um, so yeah, I claim it to be the world's first functional self-destructing triple five timer circuit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Get yourself on some no fly lists with the U S government to never log back in again.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So yeah, I was hoping to either get some smoke out of it or, um, and, and I, I, I, I'm sure that if I did it, people would have gone, Oh, but I can do that by hooking two 40 volts across. Yeah. Yeah. You know, but yeah, that, that wasn't the point. The point was to actually have a real circuit that timed itself and actually blew itself up. Anyway, I thought it was cool, but it didn't. Yeah. It wasn't spectacular at all. And I killed my 1970. What was it? Five vintage triple five timer chip. Oh, that was stupid. I didn't even realize I picked one out of my bin and thought, Oh yeah, it's a triple five timer. Whack it in there. And I, then I realized it was a very rare 75 vintage or something. Oh, I know. Sorry. All you triple five aficionados out Yeah. No, it's like having, it's like smashing a Ferrari or something, you know, all the other Ferrari owners, you know, just.

Chris Gammell: Are there really people that care that much? I don't, I don't think there's that. I, well, I don't know. Maybe never know.

Dave Jones: People are passionate about these sorts of things.

Chris Gammell: I guess so.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Anyway, Alan, tell us more about the radiation stuff you're working on. So I, I haven't seen your videos on that yet. I haven't seen your work on that. How's it work? How do you

Alan Yates: detect radiation? Oh, there's a bunch of different ways. The, one of the simplest is just really a tin can with a bit of wire in the middle. It's a, it's called an ion chamber. Basically when particle or, you know, quantum electromagnetic radiation interacts with the, the air inside the can, it produces ions, which produces a very small current, which you can measure with a FET. Yeah. It's a simple thing. There's a great, great website, techlib.com, which Charles Wenzel runs. Um, yep. If you're interested at all in, in radioactivity and detection thereof, using stuff that you can just throw together, you should go to that website. It's pretty awesome. Um, cool. I've done, you know, much the same thing. I've got counting chambers, uh, and one of my latest ones uses a, uh, pin diode, which is a, an idea that's been floating around for years. You know, uh, gamma rays are, you know, just like light, really. They're, they're electromagnetic radiation, but they're just much higher frequency. Yep. So when they interact with, um, with a semiconductor, they produce, you know, pairs of, of holes and, uh, electrons and they can get accelerated by an electric field across the semiconductor and they produce a small current and you can even have avalanche photodiodes, you know, which work with pretty much the same way as a Geiger counter does in a lot of ways. Yeah. So there's, all of the, these circuits are on my website. Actually, I haven't documented the photodiode one yet. Um, the Burkhard Kaneki, I think his name is, he's a, is a German chap. He's been doing some work on that, uh, of late and, uh, I got the inspiration to start playing with it from, from him, even though I'd seen over the years, there's been many articles. I think there's a Maxim, um, application note about doing it as well, which is quite good. There's a, there's a whole bunch of resources out there on the net about it, but the, the little one that I built sits on top of a nine volt battery, um, plugs into a, one of those little thumb counters that you can, you know, count people walking through a gate or something with just to, like a Geiger counter just counts the events basically. I built it because it was, uh, it's very cheap. Like, you know, photodiode's what, 50 cents or something compared to a Geiger tube, which, well, thanks to Fukushima is now about 20 bucks or more for the tiny little useless ones you get on eBay up to like $200 for a decent one.

Dave Jones: Oh, really?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And they're like, aren't they, uh, seeing a lot of counterfeits now and busted ones that

Alan Yates: are broken on them or, yeah, it's terrible. Uh, and people selling ion chambers that are, you know, zero to corpse meters that you, if you get a movement out of the needle at all, you're probably already dead, those kinds of things. So yeah, there's a, unfortunately, yeah, whenever there's any kind of stuff like that happens or the creeps come out of the woodwork and try to flog off these old civil defense meters, but yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I hate that. Yep. So what got you into this? I mean, so you said that the German guy, you know, kind of got you interested in it, but was, was there like a reason that, was it because of Fukushima that you got started in this or because of just personal interest?

Alan Yates: Personal interest, really. I've been interested for, for many years. It's kind of the, I actually started before the Fukushima thing, um, happened. I've been, it's, you know, another part of our, our world. You know, it's a natural thing that people don't really see because we don't have any ability to detect it ourself unless it's at such a high level that it's actually cooking you. But if you're, um, yeah, yeah, the rocks all around you, um, potassium chloride, which some people use as a salt substitute, there, there's plenty of things in this world that are significantly radioactive and like, yeah, potassium, potassium 40 in bananas, um, and salt substitute, there's uranium and thorium in many rocks, uh, granite tabletops, for example, um, rate, natural radon in the air. I know whenever it rains, I can see increases in the background levels of radon around here. I mean, I kind of live on a sandy sort of an area and I think there's, so.

Dave Jones: I thought you were going to say like, you live, I thought you were going to say like, you guys have got nuclear dumps everywhere. Isn't, uh, Simpsons a documentary, you know? That's right, yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, radioactivity is one of those. Wow. 35 minutes in to make a yank joke, huh, Dave? That was, you guys have been wasting time. Yeah, I held off. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it was a waste. You know how there's a, a, a, is it a merisium? Merisium. Yeah. Merisium? Is that a, yeah? Yes. Is there an os, os, osseisium or anything like that? Or?

Dave Jones: No, because we're not arrogant enough to name an element after ourselves.

Chris Gammell: I'm just saying, so no, no elements named after, uh, Australia? That's what I'm...

Dave Jones: We aren't arrogant yanks. So that's what we're saying here. No, sorry. Okay, all right. Yeah, just wanted to make sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, because I saw, Alan, you're doing testing with some of that stuff, right? You, like, pulled out of, like, uh, smoke detectors, is that right? Uh, yes, just don't tell the NRC that, but, um...

Alan Yates: Oh, no, I didn't say that. Most, most of the ionization detectors sold here in Australia have a small amount of americium in them. I think it's about 37 kilobectwheels or something. It's 0.1 microcurie, I think, in the US speak.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. What was the other unit?

Alan Yates: I didn't test the unit. It's basically... It's like hertz for random processors.

Chris Gammell: Huh. That's really cool. There you go. Microbe?

Alan Yates: No, that's one... It's like one event per second, so I think there are about 37,000, uh, events per second. They emit alpha radiation, which is very ionizing, which is what they use in the smoke detector, obviously, produces, again, small current. It's an ion chamber inside the smoke detector, and when smoke gets in there, it changes the amount of current being passed. There's a special IC that picks up the changing current and triggers the...

Dave Jones: So could you hack... Oh, sorry. No, no. Please continue.

Alan Yates: That was pretty much it, actually.

Dave Jones: Oh, I mean, could you hack a smoke detector as a, as a, um, counter?

Alan Yates: Uh, I've... As actually a guy you can count on. Probably not, no. They operate at fairly high ionization levels. Um, americium is a very good ionizer. Right. But the actual chip... I looked at the, um, the data sheet for several of the chips that are used in them, and unfortunately they don't really lend themselves to it. Even though they've got an excellent front end, most of the interesting electronics is hidden away inside the chip. You can't really get access to it. There's a number of particularly good... Oh, that's a shame. Yeah, there's a number of good JFETs you can get. There's, uh, the 2N4117A. It's got very low leakage, and obviously there's a lot of great... JFET of the week. JFET of the week. You might have some trouble getting them, because I bought a whole bunch of them recently and kind of emptied out the file. Oh, sorry. Element 14 now.

Chris Gammell: 2N4117. You, you, Aussies, and you're double this, double that. It's just... 2N4117.

Chris Gammell: 117. Yep, the A version. Is that right?

Alan Yates: You can get it.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. You've got... always got to get the premium spec A version. There's also... And regardless of what part it is, you know, if it's an op amp, yeah, give me the A spec version.

Chris Gammell: Bloody oath. Yeah. Unless it's a... unless there's a B out there, which is then improved on the A.

Dave Jones: It might be an improved version, which is 0.1% instead of, you know, 1% or something. Yeah. Oh, boy. Should we get onto some news?

Chris Gammell: What was Alan saying about the 2N4117? You said you could build a front amp.

Alan Yates: They're almost ideal for it. There's also a lot of op amps nowadays, obviously, that have, you know, femto amp-level bias currents. Yeah. They're pretty much... yeah. Yeah, they're crazy. They're perfect. You know, one device and you've got yourself a pretty reasonable detector. It's great for science fair projects and things like that. Even some of the low leakage, particularly high gain transistors you can get nowadays can do it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I've seen the app notes on some of those. The LMP7721, that thing's a... that's a killer part. I don't know if National's going to keep that around, but we'll see. We'll see when National gets finally swallowed, but it's...

Dave Jones: Yeah, when's that happening? I haven't heard a peep out of that.

Chris Gammell: Last time I talked to someone, they're kind of, you know, they're taking their time. They got a lot of legal stuff to work out, but... Right. I'm sure they'll get there.

Dave Jones: Speaking of companies being bought or sold... Sold. HP will get on some news. It's only been 45 minutes. Whatever. That's the teletype. The... EEV blog... The amp-hour teletype. Sorry. Wrong show. Yes. Yeah, I get confused. I've got a massive number of shows I work on, too. Yeah, yeah. It's binary, you know. HP have announced that they plan to reinvent the company. I'm using the quote marks. And they're getting out of the computer business. They want to sell off the computer aspect of their business. And they want to buy... I can't remember who it is. They're buying some wank word company.

Chris Gammell: Oh, a software company, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. Who specialise in some wank business. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Anyway, you can go see the news report for yourself. And the shares plummeted on the announcement. They absolutely nosedied. Because if... As if HP weren't doing bad enough already under their new CEO. I forget his name. Who cares? They all suck, right? And they've been driving HP into the ground for decades. Anyway. And, yeah. They plan on reinventing... Getting out of that and getting... They no longer want to be in touch with the consumer or something like that. So, you know, they no longer want to deal at the consumer level. They're at the big business, you know, ether type level. Well, they want to... Where they somehow make money out of, yeah, something. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They don't want to play with consumer margins. That's what it really is.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. They don't want to chase the race to the bottom, you know, and all that sort of stuff.

Chris Gammell: I don't get what's left, though.

Dave Jones: What's left? I don't get what's left.

Chris Gammell: They make computers...

Dave Jones: That's what nobody else knows either.

Chris Gammell: You know, like, there's nothing left there, right?

Dave Jones: Well, if you read an interesting article by Bob Cringley, who will link in, one of my favorite IT industry bloggers. Yeah, it's a very interesting article. And, yeah, what's left, basically, of HP. So, there ain't much. They don't have much place to go at all. They don't have many options. And a lot of the companies which they could buy to, you know, actually help them, you know, actually do things again are all being... Have already been gobbled up. So, there's very few of those to do it. So, they're in deep shit. Apparently, they've, you know, Bob Cringley, who's, you know, very noted in the industry, is saying that, well, they've left their run too late. Yeah. And, you know, pretty much, yeah, they're going to need a lot of luck to get out of this hole they dug themselves. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That was actually... I really like that article, the Cringley article. Yeah. So, he wrote about stuff that I'm really interested about, like the days when Bill and Dave were there, right? Yeah, that's some good stuff. Al, have you ever read about any of that stuff? The HP days back when they were hot shit or anything?

Alan Yates: Yeah, back when they made real equipment and they were an instrument company as opposed to PCs or whatever they do nowadays.

Dave Jones: Yeah, as opposed to a consumer company. Yeah. Yeah. And there's an awesome story in there. Sorry, go for it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. Well, I just, I mean, I've always liked that, you know, like reading about like how they did, just how they were so good at making new stuff, you know? And I don't know about you guys, but like I've been kind of reading about this stuff a lot lately. There's a, you know, I talked about Dan Pink on here before and just kind of like creativity and all that stuff interests me, how that kind of stuff happens. And one of the things in here, it really caught my eye. They had Friday afternoons to do whatever the hell they wanted to. Yeah, Google time. Yeah, Google time.

Dave Jones: That's just awesome. I still think Google invented that, right? With their 10%, you know, employees can spend 10% of their time on other projects. And no, HP invented that way back, you know, decades, many, many decades before Google come up with the concept. I'm not even sure Google was the first modern.

Chris Gammell: There's 3M after HP because they talk about sticky notes, right? Yeah, I'm sure there's lots of other companies. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And anyway, yeah, they'd have Friday afternoons off and you could work on, not only work on any project you wanted, but you had an open slate to go get anything from the Agilent storehouse at all. So if you wanted to take home some weird chemical or material or, you know, a million dollar bit of equipment to work on your project or something, no problems whatsoever. Whatever. Yeah. You did it. And yeah.

Chris Gammell: I sent this to a friend and in the article they talk about whatever you need, right? And one of the stuff was Magnetron or a barrel of acetone. And someone I sent it to says, what the hell do you do with a barrel of acetone?

Dave Jones: Well, obviously you're not creative enough.

Chris Gammell: I guess so. Maybe it's, maybe it's, I'd get on the no-fly list at that point, I think. You know, like me and Dave sitting on the no-fly list together, right? Yeah. Yeah, damn. Like, yeah.

Dave Jones: But that's brilliant. So that's how they used to operate back in the day. And that's how a lot of their innovations came about because of the people taking Friday afternoon. You know, the entire company would just, you know, go and work on weird shit on Friday afternoons. Fantastic.

Chris Gammell: And do you guys have that at your company? I mean, do you have that kind of set in? I hate to, I'm loathe to call it like innovation time, but like it's almost what it is, you know, like the, like a time to really sit down and work on something different.

Alan Yates: Unfortunately, not in a formal manner at the moment yet. It'll probably kill me for saying that. But no, I think it's, we are given quite a lot of latitude with what we do. But it's a great thing about actually my boss, you know, he's a technical person himself, obviously. And he understands that you need to be allowed to have, you know, your creativity. You know, they don't try to be too prescriptive about how you do anything. They trust you as a professional to do things the right way. It's a little bit easier for me because I'm actually in the R&D department where we do crazy stuff, you know, brand new things with, and they understand that maybe 50% of it, you know, won't work at all and it'll just never sit.

Chris Gammell: 50? Jeez. That'd be fantastic if 50% of your shit worked.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. That's true too, unfortunately. They had the same thing at Altium, really, but once again, like Netcom, it wasn't formal, you know. It was just, yeah, you can, if you want to work on your own shit, work on your own shit as long as you get your other work done. Yeah. We don't care, you know. They actively encourage you to work on your own stuff in company time. And so, yeah, it was good.

Chris Gammell: I was reading about that today. Apparently there's an actual term for that. It's called bootlegging.

Alan Yates: Bootlegging.

Chris Gammell: Really? Yeah. So some people call it like skunk works and that kind of thing, but it's technically called bootlegging. There's a wiki article. I'll put that in there.

Dave Jones: I'm sure there's many names.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure it's different in every country as well. Yeah. There are a bunch of German names they put in there too.

Dave Jones: Well, here we call it a foreign order project. Oh, yeah? So if you're working for the foreign order department, then, you know, so you would, so if you go into the storeroom and you're asking for a part and they say, who's it, what, what, what's it for? You know, you've got to give like a project number or something. You go, oh, it's a foreign order project. And, you know, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Yeah. Fine. That's, yeah. Nice. I love it.

Chris Gammell: I like it.

Dave Jones: Oh, brilliant. Are there any, if any, if anyone out there has, if their company has anything formal like that, please leave a comment. We'd love to hear more about that. We'd love to hear about it. More news, shall we? As we've got 10 minutes left.

Chris Gammell: I guess so.

Dave Jones: Let's get into our segments here on the NBOW.

Chris Gammell: This one doesn't really seem like news to me. This one here.

Dave Jones: No, it's not. I put it up here anyway. There's an article in EE Times about how shock horror China are undercutting someone. But who are they undercutting? Well, they're undercutting themselves, basically. They're undercutting Taiwan.

Chris Gammell: And all the Taiwanese listeners write in to Dave. Yeah. That's right in to Dave's email address. He said it. I did not. Thank you. I understand the difference.

Dave Jones: Technically, China owns Taiwan, right? I don't know. I don't know my international politics. But it's like China now own Hong Kong again, right? That's.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They're like a separate government, but they are. Right. Yeah. But technically, they're. They're closer to China now than they are to Britain, which was previously there. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Who are we talking about there? Hong Kong or Taiwan?

Chris Gammell: Hong Kong.

Dave Jones: Right. Oh, yes. Hong Kong was a British thing. You know, it was a British colony or whatever. But yeah, they had to hand it back. They formally handed back. So now Hong Kong is. I thought it was 100% Chinese. Am I wrong? Chinese owned. If owned is the word. Yeah, I'm going to stop here. I. You know. Yeah. We're out of our depth again. Just like with cars, right? Yeah. Oh, boy. Anyway. I. Yeah. Anyway. There's a news article that's the instrument company. Goodwill. They're. You know. They go under Instec as well. So they're Goodwill Instec. I don't know what they call themselves. Depends which country you buy their gear in, right? Sometimes they're branded Goodwill. Sometimes they're branded Instec. Anyway. They make some, you know, reasonably, reasonably good quality middle of the range test gear. You know, oscilloscopes and function gens and stuff like that. And yeah, they're being undercut by at least, by up to 50%. By the, by Chinese companies who are selling ripoff products. Shock horror. Sorry. But this is news apparently. Don't blame me. Blame EE Times. So there you go. They've been undercut by 50%. All right. Which is crazy because Taiwan, you know, a Taiwanese company should already have, you know, they should be already able to produce really cheap products. But somehow Goodwill are being undercut by the one hung lows. I just thought it was funny. I'm sorry. No. Yeah. That's just undercutting, undercutting, right? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's just that, you know. There's another option, I guess. I mean, you, you could build your own now, right? I mean, that's kind of, it's not cheaper, but it's something you can do.

Dave Jones: Build your own what?

Chris Gammell: You could build your own scope. Yeah. I mean, there's the, there's the DSO Nano and now Heathkit's coming back. It's a toy. What about Heathkit? They're coming back.

Dave Jones: Yeah, they're kits. They're going to produce another hobby scope. I know the Heathkit scope was big back in its day. But anyway. Yes. Yes. Heathkit are back. I haven't, what's, what's the news there? Actually, I haven't read the article. All I've heard is that Heathkit are back.

Chris Gammell: They're doing, you know, like some beginner kits. I think they're kind of building back up the brand name, but I mean, Alan, Alan, did you have one of those when you were younger? No, I missed out on that, unfortunately.

Alan Yates: It's kind of the wrong generation.

Dave Jones: Heathkit was, yeah. Well, and Heathkit was an American thing. I don't even think you could buy them here in Australia.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting. Okay. I don't know. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't think anyone's selling it because we had our own local kit and, you know, industry, you know, Dick Smith kits and J-car kits and stuff like that. Yeah, Electronics Australia and Silicon Chip. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Oh, this was even before Silicon Chip. Cool. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, we sort of had our own industry because there wasn't the huge international, you know, communication and trade thing like there is these days. You know, the world is one big place now. You know, it doesn't, you know, anyone can get anything with a credit card. You know, back then you didn't even, really, you didn't even have credit cards, let alone to buy something from overseas was impossible. You know, it was next to impossible to buy something from an overseas company. So, yeah, you had to have your own local industry. That's how it worked. So, okay. But the world's changed now. It's all different. FedEx. Oh, there's a doorbell. I might have a delivery. It could be a new secret, super secret product that I'm not allowed to talk about.

Chris Gammell: But more likely Dave parked on his neighbor's lawn. Right.

Dave Jones: That would mean that I actually go somewhere in the car. I don't do that anymore. I'm housebound.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: That's my new life. Yeah. I sit here, I play with my little boy and I tinker with stuff and I waste my life on the internet.

Chris Gammell: There you go.

Dave Jones: It's great.

Chris Gammell: Alan, I was going to ask you about, you know, get off my lawn mentality. Is that a ham station all to its own? Is there like just old cards saying, get off my lawn? Yeah, unfortunately.

Alan Yates: There are some people that believe they own a particular part of the spectrum. And yeah. Yeah. There is the get off my lawn. What are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. That happens. But it's. Oh, really? Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: Well, because they've been doing it for 30 years.

Alan Yates: Most people are fairly good.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Some new whippersnapper comes along and says, hello world.

Alan Yates: Most people are pretty good human about it though. I mean, you know, Australians were pretty hard to piss off anyway.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But what about when you reach a US guy that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Starts talking about, you know, George W. Bush and how good America, how fantastic America is. And yeah, that's when you tell.

Chris Gammell: Boy, you have us pegged, Dave. I got to say, you got us pegged, buddy.

Dave Jones: Oh, yanks. Ah. Yeah, we do. We love poking yanks, don't we, Alan? We do.

Alan Yates: But we've got our own, you know, craziness too. We're not quite as patriotic, but we've got some pretty strange traditions here.

Chris Gammell: Oh, let's hear of some that maybe Dave hasn't told us. Are there any electronics based ones? I don't know. Yeah. Oh, geez.

Alan Yates: You're putting me on the spot there. I don't know. I haven't really been in the electronics industry long enough to tell you about that.

Chris Gammell: Okay. All right. Well, how about this? I actually had this on the list. I mean, I wanted to just kind of, I mean, we're kind of starting to run down on time, but just to kind of get your general take on this. I'm interested in the electronics industry in Australia. You know what? You've seen. We've obviously heard Dave's opinion over and over and over. No. Yeah. No, we have, Dave. It's true. And we love it, of course. But yeah, Alan, what's your take on it? I mean, what have you seen and what do you think the future is there?

Alan Yates: Well, I mean, obviously, we don't make anything here anymore. It's all done in China. But yeah, that's economic realities of things. I think we design. I mean, that's not entirely true. There's plenty of stuff that we do here. But it's more niche market-y kind of things. But certainly for PCs and things like that, yeah, no way can't compete in that kind of area. But for the creative things, certainly for some of the wireless products that I'm doing, I don't see anyone else doing anything like that. I think it's a bright future. We've got a great economy. The rest of the world's kind of tanking at the moment, which is an opportunity for us. But I'm...

Dave Jones: Namely someone. Who's that? The United States of America.

Alan Yates: It's a double-edged sword as well because as our dollar goes up, as an exporter, that makes you less attractive, which is a big issue.

Dave Jones: Yeah, because we're a huge exporting country. And yeah, there's a lot of... You know, people are losing their jobs at the moment. Just yesterday, last night, you know, a big mining company just, you know, sacked 1,000 people because they're... You know, because the Australian dollar's too high. And, well, they can't make their compound at 15% annual profit, you know. Shock horror. Dickheads. Ah, boy. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Hate business. So you think from the creative perspective, though, and the niche kind of electronics industry... Niche. Niche. Niche.

Alan Yates: Niche. Yeah, I think that does... Yeah, there will always be people with great ideas. Unfortunately, in this country, it has not always been as well-supported as it could be. And that's, I think, a political and a cultural failure that quite often we have to go overseas. But we're becoming more, you know, self-supporting in some ways, particularly as the rest of the world is perhaps not as there to help us as they have been in the past.

Dave Jones: Yep. But there's really, apart from component manufacture itself, in the electronics industry, there's really nothing we can't do here. As, you know, as with most countries, probably, you know, because the components, right, they all come from China or the US or US companies, you know, that manufacture in China or something like that. So, but, yeah, so apart from the base components, we can do pretty much anything here. Sort of board fab and board assembly and all that other stuff, right? Yeah, it's just a matter of, you know, scales, you know, economies of scale and that sort of thing. But as Alan said, if you're working in a niche industry, you know, there's a premium you charge for that sort of thing. And you can afford to make stuff here and sort of keep everything here. So, yeah, it's.

Chris Gammell: So, it's almost transitioning to like a European style. Like, because, I mean, that's how a lot of, you know, German companies are and even British companies, you know, like there's a lot of, there are a lot of electronics companies over there. They're just. Yep. They're not the massive companies that they used to be in the 60s and 70s. Well, once again, there's no component.

Dave Jones: There's no component manufacturing in Europe, right, as far as I'm aware of. Or there's very little.

Chris Gammell: Well, there's some chip stuff. But, yeah, less passive. No passives.

Dave Jones: Well, there's fab. You know, there might be fabs in Europe, right? But they're all owned by American fab companies. No, ST's over there. They're all owned by TR. Oh, ST. Oh, of course. No, ST's over there. And AMD's German.

Chris Gammell: Oh, okay. I mean, there are European chip fabs. But, I mean, I agree totally on the packaging and then the passives, you know, like if you don't have that stuff, you're going to be out of luck, right?

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: And you can't make everything using ST parts or something, you know. Or AMD parts. So, you know, you need all the other stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But, yeah, anyone who says Australia is going down the toilet in terms of electronics manufacturing is just an idiot, really. They don't know what they're talking about. It's, you know, it's never going to die. There's always those niche industries. And that's what it's always been because we've never had the full manufacturing. Oh, we used to make our own capacitors, our own transformers. We used to make our own vacuum tubes. Our own resistors. AWA. Yes. Yeah. But we're talking. Oh, yeah. Yeah. AWA. That's in the Australian electronics doco. The history of how that company failed in Australia. And that was the end of the golden age of electronics in Australia and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's in the doco?

Dave Jones: It's in the doco, yes.

Chris Gammell: The one I actually don't believe in that documentary anymore.

Dave Jones: Right, because it's so long in coming. Come on, Carl. I know he's listening. He's in Kuala Lumpur at the moment or something. Jeez, he's like on a plane every two days. He's so busy. You know what's going to happen now?

Chris Gammell: You know what the problem's going to be? He's going to hear this and be like, oh, got to interview Alan. Sorry, Alan. Right.

Dave Jones: Okay. Sorry. The project's delayed even further. Thanks a lot. There's always someone new to interview. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. Anyway. So, yeah. It's not going to die. It's just, it's always been niche. It's always been fairly, fairly niche-y. You know, ever since the 70s onwards. You know, back in the 60s, it was a bit different. When we manufactured our own TVs here and our own tubes and everything was discreet, you know, so you could manufacture your own capacitors, your own resistors and your own possibly even transistors here. I don't know. Yeah, small-scale transistors. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, and your own vacuum and your own tubes, as Alan said, and your own CRTs and stuff like that. So, yeah, we could manufacture an entire TV here, but now it's different. You know, now it requires, you know, to make anything, it requires a microprocessor, which needs a, you know, a $5 billion fab. So, yeah, it's not like any, you know, someone here can start up their own company and start making their own microprocessors. It's just not going to happen.

Alan Yates: So, unfortunately. This is your whole chips at home argument, right? You'll know what... Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Alan Yates: It all comes back.

Chris Gammell: All right.

Alan Yates: Well...

Dave Jones: Yeah, another crazy yank. All right.

Chris Gammell: Final note, Alan. Yay or nay?

Dave Jones: Yay or nay?

Chris Gammell: Yay or nay on the chips at home? On the chip maker. I think we just have to ask it as a... We don't need to get into it. Just see yay or nay.

Dave Jones: Oh. Yeah. And let me frame the question. The original question was, will it be... Is it possible in the near term and will it be a revolution?

Alan Yates: Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it going to be a revolution? Nah, not in your life.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Thank you.

Alan Yates: There's no way you can compete with, you know, billion dollar fabs and doing the kind of feature sizes that they do. It's just... You're not going to do that in your bedroom. But could someone make something, you know, like a... LSI? No. No way. But could someone build a couple of transistors? Yeah. Maybe.

Dave Jones: Or even a small micro that kind of sort of works? Yeah. Possibly. But...

Alan Yates: Yeah. It's not going to be efficient. It's going to be leaky as hell. It's going to be huge. You could do it for fun. Yeah. Maybe make a ring oscillator and look, it oscillates. But yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's about as far as... Well, I'll go as far as saying somebody will actually make a simple microprocessor. Somebody will actually be able to get down, you know, a hundred micron feature size or something. And they'll be able to do...

Chris Gammell: You guys messed up the argument here.

Dave Jones: Like a four... No. You go back to episode one, dude.

Chris Gammell: You're supposed to say yes or no. You're supposed to say yes or no. So he said no. He's basically saying no. He's saying no. You're right. You're right. That's a no. It's okay. I'm going to call nationalism on this one. I got to say. You always stick together.

Dave Jones: It's a total no, dude. It's okay. It's all right, guys. Anyone with common sense knows anything better.

Chris Gammell: It's okay.

Alan Yates: As much as we like... All right. Well... You know, little transistors and oscillators and stuff. I mean... Oh, we love it. It's awesome. It's a hack. It's an awesome hack. But yeah. Nah. I would love to be in the diamond age where you have matter compilers and you can build whatever the hell you like. But yeah. It's not going to happen anytime soon.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Alan Yates: All right.

Chris Gammell: Nationalism.

Dave Jones: Are you ever going to give up, Chris? No. Dude, you're just digging your grave even deeper.

Chris Gammell: Good. Good.

Dave Jones: All right. Fair call.

Chris Gammell: Send out a sandwich.

Dave Jones: You live in the land of the free. Yep. You can do it. You like.

Speaker ?: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gammell: Alan, thanks so much for being on the show. Yes.

Alan Yates: Thank you, Alan. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks for inviting me.

Dave Jones: Yeah. No worries. First fellow... Not only fellow Australian, but a fellow Sydney blogger. Awesome. And we haven't even met yet. We haven't even caught up.

Alan Yates: We should one day.

Dave Jones: How many other electronics bloggers are there in Sydney? Well, there's John from Tronic Stuff. He's not quite in Sydney. He's up the coast somewhere. We should have anyone one day. I'm sure. Yes, we should. All right. There you go. Open call. All right. Well, that'll just about do it. We're seven minutes overtime. Oops.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right, guys. Well, we'll catch you next week.

Dave Jones: See you. See you later.

Alan Yates: Thanks. Thanks.

Dave Jones: And that's a wrap. Huh. Huh. Thank you.