Prudent Survival: Magic In The Air: An Invitation To Amateur Radio by Darius Redmond

The magic has always been there. Right now, passing through the room you are sitting in, there are signals. Voices. Mathematics made invisible. A global fellowship of operators reaching across oceans on nothing more than a piece of wire and the willingness to try. You just needed someone to show you how to listen. Prudent Survival: Magic in the Air is not a technical manual. It is an invitation. It answers the one question that every licensing manual forgets to answer first: why would anyone want to do this? Inside you will find the answer. The physics of a sky that bends signals around the world. The art of the antenna. The Morse code that outlasted every prediction of its death. The satellites built by volunteers in garages. The moonbounce. The astronaut on the space station who picks up the microphone and talks to whoever is listening. The emergency operator who becomes the only voice out of a darkened city when every other system has failed. The new operator who presses transmit for the first time, hears silence, and then hears something that changes everything. Read more