[qrp-l.org] Ham Spaces?

[Jason Milldrum]

Hi Guys,

I follow a ton of RSS feeds in my Google Reader every day, a few of
them being the Make Magazine blog and Hack-a-Day. A concept that I
often see mentioned in both of these feeds is one of the "Hacker
Space" (No, not "hacker" in a bad sense, but one who likes to tinker
with electronics). This is a place where a group of like-minded
individuals who like to build stuff can come together in their own
shop. Since many of us don't have the room or resources for a
full-scale shop, I can see the appeal of such a place. Here's a story
in the Boston Globe about once such place called Willoughby & Baltic:
<http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2008/10/04/make_it_or_break_it/>

Here's the Willoughby & Baltic web site:
<http://www.willoughbybaltic.com/home/index.php>

The membership fee for Willoughby & Baltic is $1000/yr, pretty steep
for the average tinkerer. However, these places are geared towards
artists who use electronics, industrial machinery, etc. in their work.
That's actually really inexpensive if you use it to make your living.
There's a similar (but much bigger place) called TechShop that's
opening up in Portland (<http://portland.techshop.ws/>). I believe
that their membership fee is also about $1000/yr. There are also
similar places springing up in many of the larger US cities. Here's a
few more links to peruse:
<http://www.nycresistor.com/>
<https://www.noisebridge.net/index.php/NoiseBridge/>

So I ask you to ponder this idea from the amateur radio angle. Until I
just moved into my new house, I have been very restricted in my
ability to operate on the HF bands due to living in a series of
apartments/townhomes. I'm in my early 30's, so I suspect that there
might be a significant portion of hams my age and younger who face a
similar predicament (not that there's a ton of hams my age and
younger, but I'll talk about that more in a moment). With our
wonderful credit crunch, it's going to get quite a bit harder to get
financed for a house in the foreseeable future. And if you can get
into a house, with all of the new subdivisions having strict HOAs and
CC&Rs, it's not going to get any easier to put up an effective
antenna. A "Ham Space" where one could come to operate the in-house
equipment or sit down with a good solder station and oscilloscope to
work on your latest kit with a few other friends could be a real
winner of an idea. Imagine being able to peruse the library for an old
back issue of QST or to have a really good place for local club
meetings. The pooling of resources, the fellowship, and the
opportunity to get on the air more could give ham radio a real shot in
the arm. It might give us a chance to get some more of those mythical
younger hams into radio.

At the risk of diverging off of the topic a bit, let me tell you of a
previous experience that was similar. When I was a fresh-faced
know-it-all idiot straight out of high school, I helped a friend build
and open a shop that sold hobby gaming stuff (wargames, collectable
card games, etc.). One thing that we wanted to do differently was to
have a section of the store dedicated to letting customers play the
games together. More than 50% of the floor space was devoted to this
concept, which would probably make most MBAs go crazy because of the
square footage that didn't produce income. However, we were
successful, and I believe that a lot of that had to do with the area
that we provided for people to come together. The synergistic effect
was a huge boon for the store, as well as for our community of
customers. We held open time for games, tournaments, classes, etc. I
believe that strong analog could be drawn with the ham spaces idea I
outlined above.

Of course, there would be quite a few considerations if you wanted to
try this, such as covering your liability, how to pay for the
operations, etc. I think it could be done for significantly cheaper
than $1000/yr membership fee if you had a large number of donations to
get things started. I would certainly we willing to chip in some
excess test gear, QRP rigs, and time if we had something like this
locally. If I had a suitable space, I would be tempted to try to get
something like this off the ground myself.

So what do you all think? Is this a crazy idea, or something worth
serious consideration? I'd love to hear some input on this, so please
speak up. Thanks for allowing me to ramble on, I can't believe how
much I just wrote.

73,
Jason Milldrum, NT7S
=====
Amateur Radio Station NT7S - <http://www.nt7s.com>
NT7S Blog - <http://www.nt7s.com/blog>
qrp-l.org Flickr Group - <http://flickr.com/groups/qrp-l/>