I had a very similar childhood in the US.

I sat at a booth and played with coloring books while my mom worked in a restaurant’s kitchen, dad’s work was seasonal and very irregular. We didn’t drink the tapwater in our little town because it didn’t smell right and even came out discolored a few times; instead we’d drive to springs where a bunch of other people got their water too.

Imagine going back in time to 2015 and showing this article to someone.

I don’t know much about photography, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but would something like focus stacking help with this?

That is to say, make the lens less of a bottleneck so you could benefit from a higher resolution sensor.

I see

In your opinion is there anything useful we can do with that part of the radio spectrum as those stations switch off, or are those frequencies going to be silent in the future? Will they be turned over to hobbyists maybe? (or would the power requirements be too high at those frequencies?)

Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.

I don’t know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I’ve wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.

I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.