Those who know me would say this is by no means a complete list…
Since a very young age I’ve always been interested in how things worked. Now that I have the space and funds (but maybe not enough time) that has evolved into making my own things.
Amateur (ham) radio provides a convenient and practical outlet for making electrical devices as well as enabling several other hobbies. I first got involved with amateur radio in college, discovering the local club at the club fest they throw at the start of the semester. I immediately found out when the next license exam was (helpfuly organized by the local club) and tested and achieved all three levels of certification in one session. I was assigned the sequential callsign AC0QC but now go by the vanity callsign NV1K because the original call was very long in morse code and I kept tripping up while trying to say it aloud.
My favorite aspects of amateur radio are mainly the experimental ones. I love QRP digital modes, seeing how far I can talk with just a tiny amount of power (my claim to fame is currently central Iowa to Estonia with just 5 watts). I also like using amateur radio with other hobbies like first person video (FPV) transmitters for quadcopters and amateur weather ballooning.
This started as merely a seredipitous meeting of my fire department having a need at the same time that I was learning Flutter app development. I’ve seen grown it into a larger app that is fully cross platform (Android/iOS/Web/Desktop) and capable of many things: automated scheduling, data driven form collection (equipment checks), real time notifications (live incidents), and data analysis (after action reviews).
A project that I worked on in college but has captured my imagination ever since, utilizing various different electrical principles to detect and quantify cosmic rays. This started as a simple project just utilizing blacked out photodiodes capable only of capturing cosmic rays that directly hit the substrate but I’ve since experimented with much more advanced methods like scintilation panels with fiber optic readouts to solid state photomultipliers capable of counting individual photons.