Ham radio websites might be my favorite genre of website. Their design is always a throwback to the internet of my youth, and they almost always have tons of interesting technical content.
It's interesting how simple advertising is as well.
> Please Support My Advertisers!
Some jpegs. No js, no moving shit, just logos, some text, some call to action in a banner format. That's it.
Also:
> A random number generator determines which company's Banner Ad will go in a particular position*. I wrote the code myself and it is very simple and foolproof.
> I do not collect page traffic or link click statistics for advertisements. Your website server statistical analysis is a much better reporter of inbound links from RF Cafe than I or anyone else can provide.
Nice.
> Banner Plan: $400/month
I count 22 advertisers, so there's obviously lots of incentives for advertisers to work with this site. Good for them, and nice to see it can still be lucrative for what I believe to be a single person operation. Quality content still matters.
While I agree with the sentiment, the world of Internet advertising just doesn't run like that at this point. The current advertisers all look like they're in the RF equipment supplier, which is probably, all things considered, what we'd probably call a niche. I would totally prefer things to be that way, but having compared to major ad networks, in the eyes of advertisers, doing things this way mostly mean throwing away that sweet sweet analytics data and some control. There's just very little incentive for most businesses past a certain scale looking to advertise to do things this way.
It's a niche website, and they're advertising for people who are interested in that niche. I do hands-on work with RF sometimes, and I learned of at least two new-to-me companies with products that relate to the space I operate in while just poking around the website for a few minutes.
This isn't stuff that I want to buy for me to putter around with at home. It is instead stuff that I can use to solve problems for clients; things that be quoted as a part of a larger-scale job.
Like the advertising that supported the trade rags of yore, there's definite function to this very deliberate style of ad placement that probably isn't worth trading for that sweet sweet analytics and some control.
These weren't random ads for dick pills, Raycon headphones, or NordVPN. It is instead all highly-targeted and industry-specific.
It's remarkable in that I saw the advertising at all since I've been blocking ads on the web for as long as we've had a web to advertise on.
But I did see these ads. I noted some of them. None were garish or distracting. I took no action to block them.
If he's trying to offer ad placement for companies who want to inform people like me of the stuff they sell, and I think that he is, then: His method completely nails it.
I don't disagree at all, and as I said, I'd love for this approach to still be more of a thing. My point was more that it's taking an ever shrinking proportion of the advertising pie, cause your typical marketing people are more interested in targeting to as large a targetable audience as they can, meaning these smaller sites aren't even on their radar. They speak in hit and conversion rates. For niche markets however, as you said, there's visibly still an audience, so hat off to him for still offering that kind of space.
Even though there are so many packed buttons and links it seems to like a vastly superior design compared to modern websites. I don't know if it's me being used to this or if we went wrong somewhere.
Funny, I entirely disagree. On one hand, the design itself is heartwarming because it's old internet. Also, once you navigate into the topics, things are neatly organized, and there I agree with you. But the content on the main page itself lacks a common thread, no idea where i'm supposed to read or what belongs together.
I'd say there is a pretty common thread for it, but man is it a mishmash of interests, which really makes it charming.
It's certainly not focused. Sure this site is about RF, but the owner decided they'd throw in basically all their interests into one website. I mean, it has crossword puzzles and a jokes page :D
This is the site to send someone to who wonders "What was the internet like before Web 2.0".
20W is a lot to pump into a piece of coax if it's not going to an antenna. Besides usually the practice is to simply put the signal handling equipment at the antenna, or down convert to a lower frequency like an LNB does.
I would imagine it's more for a local microwave link. Microwave antennas have huge gain due to their directionality so 20W can do a lot. And you are limited to the horizon anyway.
RF always had a reputation of being a black art. There was a brief time in the late 2000s where RFIC design was the top paying field for EE grads.
With the rise of Meta, Google, etc paying CS grads 500k etc, now it's quaint and hilarious, if you check r/chipdesign, the millenial RF practitioners still think you need a MS/PhD minimum to get a grad job.. Fellas, there's not a single Stanford EE grad that still wants to work in your field... and half the RFIC designers went took their MATLAB skills into "Data Science/ML".
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