We will pay of course in due time, but you meant that of course. Complacency has a cost.

Or, you will not go to space today.

In Sweden too, at least a generation back or two, it was like this.

The US digged itself in pretty well.

Probably not at a power level which really matters?

Waves can propagate in very unpredictable ways and create unintended consequences. It's better be safe than sorry is very applicable here.

Even a ~1W radio can go a long way, even in a city. So, yes, think of the spectrum.

1W is a fairly massive amount of power though, a typical small DIY project will output a couple of mW. So unless you very explicitly start amplifying it after your oscillator there most likely will not be too much power radiating out unless you hook it up to another stage or a directed antenna (which gives you a passive way of boosting the radiated power by concentrating the output on a more narrow angle).

Yep, you're right. However, since Walkie-Talkies' power is around that level, I thought it'd be a good example to build upon.

Regardless of the power level, thinking about spectrum and trying not to create harmful interference is important IMHO. I live in a place where listening FM in stereo mode is impossible due to interference and radio transmissions around me. Even Wi-Fi cannot penetrate beyond next room.

We've looked how spectrum looked here with a listen-only SDR. It wasn't pretty. My friends' exact words were "Dude, that's not what I see at home. This is some serious traffic."

WSPR managed to transmit data at 150,000 Km/W [0], so yeah, unfiltered transmissions are a pain in the ass for the rest no matter the power.

http://wsprnet.org/drupal/node/5089

Radio waves travel for long. I remember getting local AM radio tunes 100 km away from the border of my province where in theory the radio is being set for.

Broadcast AM radio stations here use hundreds of kW of output power.

This is a bit bashed GPIO pin on a 3.3V microcontroller that has a max current rating of 12mA per pin. Even if that piece of wire used as an antenna here were capable of loading the pin up to its max output, it'd be something around 0.004W - and in reality it'll likely be an order of magnitude or two lower than that. That's at least 8 orders of magnitude less power, and even allowing for the inverse square radiation power pattern, this this is only gonna be detectable at single digit meters in all likelihood.

This _is_ a bad idea, spectrum noise and interference wise, but it's unlikely to have enough power at either its intended transmit frequency any of its nasty harmonics to make it outside the rooms it's in. You probably might not want to take this to hospital with you, or on that camping trip near the radio telescope, but I wouldn't think twice about firing this up in my home workshop...

Consider also how much electronics around us which leaks harmonics all over the place without any modifications.

It’s like embedded software. DOS is basically bug free at this point. If there are bugs in DOS, they are known.

ANY bugs will be in the application.

Or misconfigured CONFIG.SYS.

Or some clash with a TSR (sidekick?)

People are not average. How big is the spread?

Sort of agree, it's enough if they could at some point. If they keep an ear to the ground about how things work and what's possible, that goes a long way.

> Sort of agree, it's enough if they could at some point

Managers are the last people I'd want to learn on the job this heavily - they can't start from not knowing coding if they want to manage engineers.

Just to clarify, I meant that if they at some point knew how to code, that goes a long way to understand the mindset. It doesn't matter as much if they could code their way out of a paper bag if you put them in front of a modern toolchain.

A general doesn't need to know how to fly a fighter jet. But it helps if they stay up to date on modern tactics.