[MRCG] Field Phones at MRCG 2018?

[Mark J. Blair]

> On Mar 25, 2018, at 22:41, Steve H. <1tron.engineer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Mark,
> It would be interesting to see the projects you’ve got going. I’d be interested in playing with the switchboard but don’t have any phones to use with it.

If I bring the switchboard again (I brought it last year, and bought it the previous year, from Richard Mollberg's estate), I'll also bring my EE-8. I had it up and running in the NCO club, but there's only so much fun you can have with a switchboard connected to a single phone through 5 feet of wire!

My more recent projects have been in a weird fusion of my military radio and vintage computer hobbies. One of my recent (and ongoing) projects is a mid-1990s handheld message terminal (presumably for tasks such as calling in fire missions). It's based around an embedded 286 PC running MS-DOS out of ROM. It boots, and includes configuration and self-test utilities, but I haven't seen any signs of its original application software out in the wild. So I dumped its ROMs and started working on disassembling them, in hope of figuring out how to access its built-in modem hardware in order to maybe make the thing talk through a radio again one of these days. That project isn't very far long yet, but I might bring the terminal for display. If anybody actually wants to hear about this sort of stuff, I might be able to throw together an off-the-cuff talk about what I've done with it so far.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/