SolderSmoke is the story of a secret, after-hours life in electronics. Bill Meara started out as a normal kid, from a normal American town. But around the age of 12 he got interested in electronics, and he has never been the same.
To make matters worse, when he got older he became a diplomat. His work has taken him to Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, the Spanish Basque Country, the Dominican Republic, the Azores islands of Portugal, London, and, most recently, Rome. In almost all of these places his addiction to electronics caused him to seek out like-minded radio fiends, to stay up late into the night working on strange projects, and to build embarrassingly large antennas above innocent foreign neighborhoods. SolderSmoke takes you into the basement workshops and electronics parts stores of these exotic foreign places, and lets you experience the life of an expatriate geek. If you are looking for restaurant or hotel recommendations, look elsewhere. But if you need to know where to get an RF choke re-wound in Santo Domingo, SolderSmoke is the book for you.
SolderSmoke is no ordinary memoir. It is a technical memoir. Each chapter contains descriptions of Bill’s struggles to understand (really understand) radio-electronic theory. Why does P=IE? Do holes really flow through transistors? What is a radio wave? How does a frequency mixer produce sum and difference frequencies? If these are the kinds of questions that keep you up at night, this book is for you.
Finally, SolderSmoke is about brotherhood. International, cross-border brotherhood. Through the SolderSmoke podcast we have discovered that all around the world, in countries as different as Sudan and Switzerland, there are geeks just like us, guys with essentially the same story, guys who got interested in radio and electronics as teenagers, and who have stuck with it ever since. Our technical addiction gives us something in common, something that transcends national differences. And our electronics gives us the means to communicate. United by a common interest in radio, and drawn closer together by means of the internet, we form an “International Brotherhood of Electronic Wizards.”
Check this new app on Google Play Software Defined Radio. Supports the following hardware: HPSDR Atlas based systems using Metis. HPSDR Hermes... Read more
All about the 2019 Dayton Hamvention. Bob, Gordo, Don and George are back from Dayton to talk about their experience in Dayton for the 2019 Hamvention... Read more
Photo:ARISS 25 watt JVC-Kenwood D710GA at Hamvention 2017 – Credit John Brier KG4AKV The ARISS website reports on progress towards flying new amateur... Read more
“Space Weather this week has gotten extremely busy with a new M-flare player on the Sun. Region 2665 has already fired off two M-class flares, a... Read more
Ham Radio Deluxe 6.4.0.794 Released The first release of Ham Radio Deluxe for 2018 is now available for download. Please download it from the Download... Read more
UKRAINIAN DX CONTEST 2015 RULES Sponsored by: Ukrainian Contest Club (UCC) Date & time: The 1st full weekend of November (in 2015 it will be on 7-... Read more
Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) reports it has met a major milestone and now is “one giant step” closer to flying its new int... Read more
The crew of a sailing vessel that foundered on a reef in the South Pacific in early May was safely rescued, thanks in part to the alert ear of Maritim... Read more
The FCC has opened a brief window for public comment on recommendations approved by the World Radiocommunication Conference Advisory Committee (WAC). ... Read more
Let me show you how to write a DMR codeplug from scratch and how to import contacts into the software with the N0GSG Contact Manager Read more
Recent Posts
OpenHPSDR Radio – Android App
Dayton Hamvention Review – Ham Nation 403
New Ham Radio Equipment for International Space Station
Massive Sunspot Launches Big Solar Storm at Earth: Solar Storm Forecast 07-15-2017
Ham Radio Deluxe 6.4.0.794 Released
UKRAINIAN DX CONTEST 2015 RULES
ARISS Moves Closer to Launching New Radio System to Space Station
Maritime Mobile Service Network Responds to Mayday Call from Stranded Vessel
ARRL Supports No Change to Table of Allocations for 45.5 – 47 and 47 – 47.2 GHz Bands
How to Write a DMR Codeplug / N0GSG -Ham Radio 2.0: Episode 58
Warning: file_get_contents(https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/fastbutton?url=https%3A%2F%2Fqrznow.com%2Fsoldersmoke-global-adventures-in-wireless-electronics-free%2F): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found in /home/qrznow/public_html/wp-content/themes/goodnews5/framework/functions/posts_share.php on line 151
