I've always had several hobbies at the same time... when I was a youngster, I was really into microbiology. I even made a portable case for my Lysco Student Microscope so I could take it out to a large swampy pond near our house and study the tiny creatures in the water, seeing how many I could catalog. I still have that scope today! But I wish I had kept all my "lab notes" - I was only 9 or 10 so I think they'd be really fun to see again. Then in my teens, I got into ham radio (WN7AWK) and also astronomy. I built a 1.5" refractor with lenses from Edmond Scientific Co. and later upgraded to a 6" reflector. I even built my own motor drive for it. I'll never forget the look on my Dad's face when he first saw Saturn with his own eyes! He was a crabby man and didn't much like me but that was one of very few moments where I made him smile - and my home-made motor drive kept the planet fully in view for him to see for 10 minutes. In the 80s I taught myself programming in BASIC, C++, and C64 machine code. I wrote TONS of programs, and built a complete weather station (all the sensors too) using a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III programmed with a full suite of graphical displays of the sensors. I used every single last byte of storage for the code! I even wrote a serial driver for a surplus printer, since I had to use the parallel port (with an input multiplexer ADC). The only time in my life I ever wrote a driver! In 1984 I took up photography (Zone System student and eventually teacher!) with my own darkroom I built in our house. Took THOUSANDS of BW photos, and many hundreds of 4x5 shots on an Omega 45D that I also still own. By 1987 I started shooting weddings, and by the time I shut down in 1992, I was doing 35 weddings a year on the weekends - it was a GREAT "side job" and paid a lot of bills. I finally burned out on the "wedded blissful" and shut it down. I kept a couple commercial accounts for another 2 years, but got out entirely by 1995 My computer nerdiness led to building robots in the early 90s, using cast off IBM PC motherboards and parallel printer cards for the IO (remember PEEK and POKE?!). I could buy the motherboards for $5 and the cards for $1 at the surplus computer store and did TONS of things with them. I built 5 different robots all using old PC parts. Lots of fun! The early 2000s I took up free-lance writing and had a blast! I landed a 57 week column contract for a newspaper in NY on a very specific historical project related to the area where the paper was based. Long story as to how all that came to be- but I had a lot of fun seeing my name in the "By Line" week after week. I also landed the cover story for the November 2002 CQ magazine, with a 5000 word interview with rocker Joe Walsh WB6ACU - flew down and took all the photos right in his house! What a thrill that was... These days, it's mostly just ham-related stuff - with the sub-hobby of putting some old radio on the air and setting about yet another Nostalgic Worlked All States, or on lesser rigs, what I call my "CCC" or "Contact Century Club" where I make and confirm 100 contacts. Gives me a never-ending challenge. So let's talk about YOUR other side hobbies, especially those of a technical nature Dave W7UUU
Like you Dave, I dabbled in astronomy. Similar to modern ham radio, there has been so much technological advancement with telescopes- GPS tracking, stacking software for astrophotography, better lenses, etc. I need to get back into it. It is also more affordable than ever!
Outside of radio I am a long time computer nerd. My dad was the Director of Technical Services for an education Co-Op so I grew up around computers. Through most of youth it was third hand Macs that had been decommissioned from the schools and were going to be IT waste that I used, when I was 12 Dad and I built my first PC which I still have in my closet though I am not sure if it would still boot up. He told me to learn how to dual boot Windows and Red Hat 7.1 (This was before RHEL). I ended up being involved with the Heart of Texas Linux Users Group as a high school student and went to a tech college to learn "Computer Networking & Systems Administration" in what was at the time the "Unix Specialization" program. Over the years I have built a number of machines, both professionally and for fun. My coding skills are lacking, I know a bit of python from my past years working support and services for the company I am with but am a bit rusty since moving on to Project Management. I was never a coder type, I am pretty decent with Linux Administration but probably mostly considered old school LAMP skills these days, I have done some stuff with Docker, again within the framework of our software. I still run Linux at home, but I don't get down into the weeds that much anymore. I am not so sure I could still call it a hobby because I don't do much outside of what most people do. I used to dabble in Photography, that can be somewhat of a technical hobby, I have owned a couple of different Digital SLRs, and a few Point and Shoot cameras over the years. It is a hobby that I hope to get back into at some point but right now excess money is going into the "Stuff for home" bucket which we are really hoping to buy either at the end of this year or early next year. Not taking on anything new at the moment but plenty of overlap between radio, computing and photography is on my bucket lists.
Did astronomy way back. Had an old Edmund 3" f10 Newtonian. Built an 8" f8 Newtonian, eventually sold it. I think the mirrors were A. Jaegers, as was the German equatorial. Wish I still had that mount ... Built like a tank! Had a Bausch and Lomb 4" Schmitt-Cass for a while, sold it. Built a Dob mount for a purchased 6" f5 Newtonian. That one got damaged over a couple of moves. Currently have some little Newt I found at the town dump. Need to mount it somehow, someday. Other than that, theoretical astronomy. I have a bunch of old Excel spreadsheets that simulate the motion of the solar system. Some implement the computer-generated ephemerides of JPL or the French IMCCE. Some are my own computer-generated models. One does a full-blown numerical integration something like the DE series from JPL, although it never worked perfectly. Something about the small relativistic correction to gravity was off. Good job if you followed all of this paragraph... I don't think it's a very widespread hobby!
Well these may not be "technical" in the strictest sense....combat shooting; raising and training horses from birth through sale at 2 years
Have had a number of hobbies over the years not all would fall into the "technical" hobby realm. I guess the one that would come close would be racing radio control 1/10 scale (mostly electric) cars. Not much technical in the radio sense but in the mechanical sense. We raced on a banked concrete tri-oval track and setting up the car i.e. shock and tire selection were all very important aspects of the hobby. In the 80s we were charging the heck out of nicad battery packs in a very short time and discharging them in even less time. A nice feature at the track was computer lap counting and timing using a transponder affixed to the car. It was in some ways as costly as ham radio, depending on how elaborate your set-up. Even back then it was not unusual to spend $80.00 for a tire with the correct grip. We raced mostly on the weekends the rest of the week was spent rebuilding the cars and getting them ready for the next race. A fun hobby. Then there was breeding and showing small animals, but that's another story.
When I retired two years ago (I was a research physicist with the Navy) there were still a number of research ideas I had over the years, that I never had time to pursue seriously. So I am working on some of those in my spare time. Analysis & modeling projects with MatLab or Maple. I have other non-technical hobbies. But I'll save those for whenever someone starts a "What Other NonTechnical Hobbies ...." thread.
So I hereby nominate YOU to start that very thread in this brand new forum!! Please do Who knows? It could be legendary and run for YEARS! I really LIKE this new forum Dave W7UUU
