About

What’s this all about?

The primary idea behind Signal Lounge is a place for people to meet projects. We originally had two main audiences in mind:

  • People interested in technology experimentation with a will to get involved. You don’t have to be the creative type to contribute – projects listed here are looking for all sorts of volunteers to get involved with different levels of knowledge, experience and time available. Hopefully everyone can find something to suit.
  • Experimenters looking for a wide audience of people with a will to get involved in their projects. Need some more humans with wireless/software/DSP/whatever skills to help on your project? Need to gather up some willing beta testers with common interests? Need to find someone to set up a test receiver for the other end of your wireless modem project? This is a place you can advertise those needs for volunteers.

Signal Lounge is focused on experimentation and modern interesting stuff in amateur radio.  Some may say that amateur radio has become a hobby of ‘appliance operators’ and that the pioneering work of yesteryear is gone.  A secondary mission here is to counter this perception and highlight amateur projects that are pushing boundaries in radio technology. Trying to convince a doubter that Amateur Radio is alive and well in the 21st century? Point them at this place and show them a wide range of projects with worldwide cooperation…

The dream is to attract and develop a community of technically competent individuals with an interest in furthering the state of the art.  The bulk of the community will probably be people with more interest than time but gathering such individuals into a community provides a resource pool for experimenters looking for assistance in testing their ideas, deploying remote equipment, doing the legwork of larger scale testing.  The site provides a ‘menu’ of interesting projects that individuals can look into for themselves.

Gathering these threads together will hopefully provide some cross-fertilisation of ideas and inspiration to the community.

Inspiration…

A couple of articles that inspired my thinking in creating Signal Lounge are below (with kind permission of the authors). I encourage you to have a read of these and see where it takes your thinking!

Centenary Rethink