7R: "Check out Adruinos, Raspberry Pis, and the "maker" community."
The "maker" community?? Can you elaborate? Sounds interesting!
Charlie
Sorry, I missed this. The "maker" community is all over the place. It need not have anything to do with radio, but it
can have a lot to do with radio if we wish it to.
It is a set of emerging technologies that allow one to do all sorts of things. Basically, take anything you like and add a low cost circuit board to it. That circuit board can, in turn, be whatever you need it to be.
Imagine what we could do back in the mid to late '70s when you could create a simple interface card and hook up any gear you liked to the personal computers of the era.
It is all of that and more. It allows tinkering at all kind of levels and it allows even very simple computer programs to control all kinds of devices.
You want to have a Morse code keyer? There's a four dollar Arduino out there which can, with only a little bit of code and a few discrete parts, becomes as good as any keyer there ever was.
Want to do remote operations? Well, that's off the shelf these days, but one of the products, the MFJ one,
uses a Raspberry Pi, which means in principle a "maker" could create the product themselves. Because a lot of "maker" projects have a Raspberry Pi at the core of it.
You interested in automatic antenna switching or any other kinds of switching? There are maker projects you could invent that do that sort of thing.
You interesting in robotics? There's a metric ton of that stuff out there, waiting to be found.
See "Microcontrollers for Ham Radio" on this very site.