Podcast is Live

I had a weird journey toward making a podcast. I never really thought about doing one, after all, what would I talk about? I had a hard enough time making videos I was genuinely interested in.

But I did have a problem: My PC Speakers were picking up errant noise from the motherboard and graphics card. The built-in audio-output of the motherboard would have a low buzzing noise when I was doing CPU or graphics intensive tasks, and it was getting annoying. So I started researching external USB sound devices that could utilize the Left/Right balanced line inputs to my speakers.

At first it was simple, but with covid-19 sequester, one’s research can take a real rabbit hole. This led me to the RØDECaster Pro mixing deck.

This is a bit of overkill just to have clean PC audio to speakers, but I liked the idea of it and was just moved to get it.

After folks saw it, they asked me “when will your podcast be out”.  You see, this device is intended for podcasting primarily, and perhaps streaming secondarily. It’s not meant to just be a USB audio out, which was my original intention.

So I got to thinkin’… what could I podcast about. For about a month after having this, I still had no ideas, but I did play a lot with the features in web conferences like using the sound effects, recording different sounds sources, and using it with streaming. In the end, I thought, why not, let’s try a ham radio podcast.

That night, toward the end of July, a thought popped in my head before going to sleep: I should call it Hamdom Thoughts. I used to have a blog long time ago called Random Thoughts, and I wanted to talk about what was going on in all of hamdom. I bet no one gets it, but why not.

The next morning I signed up on anchor.fm and began the process of recording a quick intro trailer to get the distribution set up. It took about a week, but all major platforms were reporting search availability for AD6DM™ Hamdom Thoughts. Google Podcasts seems to take the longest to get its index updated, but all other services saw the episode almost immediately.

We’re now on Episode 3. I did a first episode about Digital Modes & Mystery Stations, then interviewed 2 SOTA hams who I admire.

Let’s see where this podcast goes. It could burn out like my videos, or electronic music, or photography before that, or even my writing before that. But for now, it is a connection point for some cool people, and it strengthens the word about ham radio.