The big advantage of ham radios over FRS is repeaters, which greatly increase your ability to contact somebody in an emergency if you are hiking. Of course, this depends on a repeater being line of sight.
It seems a lot could be accomplished with a tethered probe. A tether solves a couple of problems, namely power and data retrival. Granted, a tethered probe is unlikely to climb or fly.
I was an electronics technician in the Navy and concur with their excellent training. The NEETS series is great, I have the entire set in hard copy and still refer to them from time to time.
This book has some very out of the box thinking to dramatically lower launch costs through downsizing and mass production. I actually bought a couple dozen print copies of this book to give away before the author made the PDF freely available. One of the authors used to give away buttons that said: "Want Lower Launch Costs? BUILD MORE ROCKETS!", which actually inspired my username.
The standard text on the matter is "Rocket Propulsion Elements", by George Sutton. Another recommended reference is "Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines" by Dieter K.Huzel and David H.Huang.
Also: during the 90's, Wired published a fiber map, and at that time, there were seven different fiber networks in place within a quarter mile from my house. For over a decade ISDN has been a little over a thousand feet away, but the provider won't connect without charging several thousands of dollars to run line and install a repeater, despite the tens of millions of dollars the state and feds have given them to roll out rural broadband.
I live in a rural area and also pay $80/mo for internet. This gets me a 160 KB/s unmetered connection, which has been the best available for about a decade, unless I want to spend a lot of money or suffer cripling bandwidth caps. Millions of dollars have been awarded each year during this time to deploy rural broadband in the state. Areas serviced by small, local ISPs have fiber to the door, but unfortunately, I'm serviced by a big, nationwide ISP thata just sucks up all that money and never delivers. I can hardly wait for Starlink or one of the proposed competing satellite constellations to come online.
Before it was reprinted, a buddy was going through hard times and to help him out, I bought his hard hard-cover, near mint copy for the going rate at the time: $500.
The thing that most impressed me about the install was the experimental hardware detection. I had a list of all she system hardware and the installer only missed a single component. Even then, it was an alternate recommendation.
My first Debian was also Slink, installed from a box of floppies onto a 486. Had to use rawrite to put the disk image onto the floppies. That box of floppies is still around here somewhere, though the 486 is long gone.
> I just finished reading Solaris for the first time, and it was mind-changing.
I have heard Solaris refered to as being mind-changing before. What was it about Solaris that impacted you so much?
After first hearing about Solaris decades ago, I finally got around to reading it upon learning of his passing. I must have missed something because it didn't strike me as living up to its reputation.
This is a link to the actual GitHub repo. Scopetrex is an open source clone of the Vectrx vector console, with hard to obtain components replaced with modern counterparts. Uses an O-scope for a display.
> I want fast, reliable telecommunications everywhere I go.
Don't leave the city then. 5G has very limited range and doesn't work in rural areas where there aren't enough customers to provide needed geographical coverage.