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HamInfo came out of a desire to a) be useful, b) answer questions about Amateur
Radio, and c) geek out severely. The idea came to me when my partner Maggie showed me
a Linuxcare bootable CD-ROM business card -- a REAL CD-ROM cut down to the height of
a business card. The sides are rounded, and there's a hole in the middle, but it sits
in the center of your computer's CD tray (there's a shallow niche there that it fits just
perfectly) and works like any other CD. These disks hold a whopping 50 megabytes in a
very small space!
I have collected a bunch of ham radio information -- a theory tutorial, a Java-based sample testing program that should work on any Java-enabled browser, Morse code trainers, and other useful Ham software. It has sections for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It also contains several works of literature, including two complete books about ham radio practices -- "The Art and Skill of Radio-Telegraphy" by Bill Pierpont N0HFF, and the entire text of "Calling CQ" by Clinton B. DeSoto, the adventures of pre-WWII amateur radio operators.
I am not selling this disk. Instead, I "burn" them on my computer's CD-RW drive, and carry them around with me in my purse. When someone has asked me about Amateur Radio, and expresses a desire to get started, I give them one of these disks. It has everything they need to get either their Technician or General-class license. (I haven't included the Extra testing pools yet...they weren't available for the Java-based testing software at the time I compiled the latest version of the disk.)
I will be updating this disk regularly. If you have a favorite piece of software -- freeware is the best sort, though I have included some shareware when it was the BEST available -- or some piece of useful literature I have not already included, please feel free to submit it for inclusion! I will consider each and every submission. The only thing I ask is that you should actually have the right to submit the piece -- if it is literature, you should be the author or copyright holder. If it is software, you should have distribution rights. (Most freeware or shareware is ok to distribute, provided you don't charge.) If you see a piece of literature that you do NOT own, but *know the email address of the author*, I will contact that author and ask for permission to include it. So you can see what I have included so far, here's the Table of Contents.
For your convenience, I'm using a hosted "guestbook" to hold submissions. If you put it on the guestbook, others can see what you've suggested, and I won't get a dozen suggestions for the same thing.
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If you or your club would like to pass out HamInfo disks, I would be glad to supply you with the current ISO-format image file. Right now, the file is over 23MB in size, so I am not offering it for download from this site...I don't want to abuse QSL.NET's hospitality! So, if you want to get into the HamInfo act, send me a QSL card (for my book!) and a SASE with at least 2 units of postage on it. I will burn you a disk and send it off to you. You can then use that disk as a "master" to make your own copies. If you *wish* to donate $1.00 to defray the cost of the CD (that's actually less than I pay for them), I would appreciate it, but at least at first I won't require it. Send to:
Gwendolyn S. Patton, NG3P
163 N. Whitehall Rd.
Jeffersonville, PA 19403
If someone wants to offer me between 25 and 50 MB of online space I can link to, I would be happy to store the latest version of the image file there for download, but it probably won't be as up-to-date as the physical disk, simply because *uploading* the image would be a major task!
I bought my business-card disks from CD Media Corp. They also sell labels, jewel-boxes and sleeves.