Parachute Mobile: Taking Ham Radio to New Heights

You are 100% right. Nothing we did qualifies for a patent or a Noble Prize. We just made stuff and had fun. Unless I got it all wrong, Maker Faire isnt a peer reviewed science conference, it's about making cool fun stuff. Our work may have some practical applications, especially the GPS/physio telemetry gear my team mates Mike Pechner NE6RD and Scott Miller N1VG made. It would be a good addition to ejection seat technology which currently just has a dumb locator beacon on 243.0MHz and no data on aircrew physical condition.

As for hedonism vs humanitarianism, I am not as bad as you may think. I have done serious humanitarian work including a year as a VISTA volunteer working with impoverished sharecroppers in the South. I have also established and endowed a scholarship at UC Berkeley in the College of Engineering with a preference for under represented students. I dont see the need to tie either of my favorite hobbies, skydiving and ham radio, to humanitarian work and question the real utility of trying to do so.

You took a very soft swipe at us and there is no bad blood at all. I do see your points. Come out and join the fun on one of our future Parachute Mobile missions. We will be jumping at the Byron DZ on Oct 16 2010 in conjunction with Pacificon 2010.

www.pacificon.org

The jumps will have live video from the jumper as well as telemetry, voice comms and HF data beaconing which will be processed by distant receiving sites to map ionosphereic propagation paths.

www.parachutemobile.org

Regards,
Mark

In a time where NASA communicates with a couple of probes that have left the solar system, one wonders what the particular attraction for a HAM is to prove that they can communicate from some remote island on this planet. I don't get it. It proves absolutely nothing technically, for all of the pieces, communication, aviation, parachuting etc. are fairly standard technical procedures.

It pretty much sounds like the equivalent of someone making a cheese and ham sandwich while riding a unicycle on the Place de la Concorde.

I am not trying to be particularly skeptical here... but I am really looking for an explanation why people are doing these things, when, with the same effort and roughly the same equipment, they could do some very serious humanitarian work. Which many HAMs, by the way, do. I would have loved to hear about that.