BridgeCom Systems SkyBridge Hotspot Review | Hacker News Reader

BridgeCom Systems SkyBridge Hotspot Review

k0lwc.com

13 pointsRFTinker10 comments

It's $300; articles that offer a glowing review but no pricing tend to be adverts in disguise. I have nothing for or against the product, it just seems odd that they talked about what great value it was while omitting that rather crucial detail.

One of the subheadings "Is the SkyBridge hotspot worth the money?" but didn't mention the cost?! How strange.

As far as I understand it, this acts as radio-to-internet voice bridge. Unless I'm misunderstanding the point, this is not why I got into amateur radio. For me, the whole point was direct communication with no necessary infrastructure. That's the magic of radio.

The magic of ham radio is it can be whatever you want it to be.

You might want to gatekeep a bit less and let people enjoy what aspects of radio they find interesting.

>You might want to gatekeep a bit less

I agree with that 99% of the time.

radio-hobbyists are a group of people that need to have some level of gate-keeping so as to prevent the commons from peeing in the pool.

Every time a new practical way of using radio networks has popped up, the numbers of people in conflict or violation of FCC regulations put into place to keep the network usable has skyrocketed.

So, as much as i'm against gate-keeping in a general sense.. letting people enjoy 'what aspects of radio they find interesting.' sits on the back burner for myself when compared to 'let's have a network that everyone can use without stepping on toes.'.

>let people enjoy what aspects of radio they find interesting.

Unless, of course, the person enjoys malicious activities that ruin the spectrums for everyone; then it's absolutely accepted that the person should be reprimanded by whatever governing FCC-like body is in the area, you know, gate-keeping.

All this isn't to say anything about ham/net bridges, it's just to point out that some communities actually do benefit from a level of gate-keeping. Radio is one of them.

Oh yeah, not endorsing law breaking in any way or form, following the laws is very much a think everyone should be doing(for the communal reasons you called out among others).

Gatekeeping is holding up one aspect of the community as more valid than another and I've seen it drive away many people who would be active or interesting members of the hobby(they usually go over to the ISM bands where there isn't any stigma about what is "legitimate" ham radio uses).

Maliciously accusing someone of gatekeeping is surely as bad as gatekeeping itself.

I described why I got into radio. To provide a perspective on the hobby and what it can do.

I never said others shouldn't do whatever they want to do.

I'd ask that rather than assuming malicious intent, give your comment another read from a different perspective and see if you can understand how someone might see it as gatekeeping.

(If you kept the first sentence but dropped the last 3 the post takes on a much different meaning).

Could these be installed in a car, i.e. for off grid wilderness trips etc?

As far as I understand it this is the opposite of that. In other words it only works if you already have internet access. You can use it to talk over the internet with your radio from within your own home wifi.

AREDN is basically trying to do what you want, within its limited coverage. You could install an AREDN mesh node in your car.

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