Zoom crazy

[Alex Fraser]

I took a ham test at the FCC HQ in downtown Baltimore.  It was around 
1983 or so and I was moving up from Novice.  I think I only had 1 CW 
contact, I just wasn't good at it.  So I came out of the FCC office and 
walked over to the Maryland Science Center where the BRATS (Baltimore 
Radio Amateur Television Society) had a station set up.  Part of the 
station was a Amateur UHF TV rig, tubes IIRC.  So John W1??? was manning 
the station at the time and he set me up on a chair facing the camera.  
I called CQ a couple of times and oh my goodness somebody came back to 
me, whereupon I dropped the mic and just stared!  I recovered (with 
prompting) and soon was chatting away.  I can't remember the guys call 
sign, but he was called "Glenn Bernie Bernie" as his station was in 
Glenn Bernie and his name was of course Bernie.  I had a number of ATV 
(Amateur TV) contacts over the years often working through the BRATS ATV 
repeater, which covered most of Baltimore.  I had old B+W security 
cameras with tubes  in them, wow those were the days eh?  We used to 
dream that one day we could all talk over little hand held TV stations...

Now we is in the future and you can connect with lots of people all over 
the country with a handheld device.  I my self being old school prefer 
my desk top with a duel screen monitor setup at 3 or 4 cameras.  I've 
been running 2 Zoom sessions a week with some old college friends.  It's 
small enough to be fun. Just recently I happened upon some cool software 
that will work with Zoom via a virtual camera setup.  It is called OBS 
Studio and it allows you to switch scenes in and out of the stream 
including text overlays, split screen and play recorded files.  It 
really is fun.  It is open source which means a no cost download and 
ain't that hard to learn https://obsproject.com/

I'm working on a little show to show a waterfall screen of a radio 
contact.  It might even wow my old buddies, probably not, Old dog and 
new tricks...