Amateur Radio for EE Students
My thoughts - WWU
LinHT isn’t notable for that particular implementation (or org, or group of developers). It’s indicative that Amateur Radio is finally beginning to innovate again in the radio frequency domain, not just the domain of “audio passband of existing radios / modes”. Notably they cracked the “reasonable TX power issue” (well, will very soon, from what I’ve been told).
Another conclusion is that my campaign of trying to make the case for existing repeaters to do something more useful than sucking up a repeater channel allocation and basically doing nothing… is at an end. Nothing productive has come of that campaign. In its place, the “network progressives” among us are going to start doing heterogeneous mesh networks - AREDN, (new) SuperPeaters, IP400, even Net/ROM (yeah, I was surprised it’s still alive too). With all the tools we have now, all of that can be knitted together in networks.
This actually helps as I’m doing to do some extended writing about how Amateur Radio could contribute to a college EE program thanks to my local Western Washington University starting a new EE Department. So apologies if some of this doesn’t make sense, I’m “thinking with my fingers” as I compose this.
As for the specifics of your talk, the interesting projects that they could contribute to:
I attribute this basic knowledge to Phil KA9Q but in radio regulation, advanced receiving techniques are “free”. Even under severely constrained transmit conditions (like very low power), if you have a powerful enough receiver or transmit robust modulations, the data rate or distance achieved can be way beyond what was thought possible. Two examples are WSPR and the “passive bit flips to correct single bit errors” technique in Dire Wolf.
If you want to know how communications will be in the future, watch how folks (and the infrastructure) communicates in The Expanse series (Prime Video). That is the most realistic depiction I’ve ever seen - lasers, tight beam, radio, deferred / queued comms, seamless interaction, no “addresses” - the system just knows and synchs, stealth (no ack required) communications, high bandwidth, etc.
GNU Radio is kind of the seed corn of anything interesting. One thing that’s lacking is there’s no good consolidated information about all the various Amateur Radio flowgraphs - that would be nice to have.
GNU Radio soon won’t be GNU Radio as we knew it. v4.0 will have a new license that will make it much more attractive to use in mainstream new radio systems.
“Plastics”… then “Computers”… then “Internet”… then “Cellular”… then “AI”… now “radio”. Radio is now so fundamental to our daily lives we don’t see the forest for the trees. We need more radio technologists, especially those skilled with GNU Radio. See my story in a previous ZR about no unemployed / available folks that have GNU Radio experience - they ALL have good jobs.
Get an Amateur Radio license. It’s a formality but it gives you the ability to experiment with GNU Radio modes on additional spectrum that woks better than, say, 902-928 MHz.
When they get involved in Meshtastic (as they inevitably will, or already are), look at the fundamentals of the radio layer. Understand the impossibility of scaling when using a single frequency, and think outside the box of being able to use muliple frequencies.
Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum is an overlooked radio technology that has enormous promise as Ukraine has discovered with their drones.
Learn to look at the overall spectrum with SD receivers / spectrum analyzers and notice the huge portions of spectrum that aren’t actually in use and perhaps...
If you get a good idea for some experiments, make good use of FCC Special Temporary Authority and Part 5 Experimental licenses to do some experimentation.
Learn to document and publish your results - somewhere where other people can find it. Don’t put it on a website that will fade into oblivion, or Github which is owned by Microsoft and will eventually be enshittified (it’s in their nature). And don’t publish somewhere like QST that’s hidden behind a paywall. Put it somewhere like The Communicator where everyone can read it and it will live on in perpetuity in archives.
AI will impact telecommunications profoundly. Second by second decisions about spectrum to use, network routes to use, message format (compressed? Encrypted over an insecure path? Anonymized?) Just as AI is creating entirely new drugs, it’s going to create entirely new radio modes.
Learn to use historical resources like DLARC and other archives to see some challenges that occurred in the past, that were poorly solved with the knowledge and technology of the era. For example our current “hard” partition of portions of spectrum is entirely the result of 1930s receivers being unable to deal with interference from “unwanted” transmitters. Now, we can do so, and we could do a lot better. For example, if a user is primary (like, say, a US Navy carrier) they can transmit an ID that says “I’m US Navy” and anyone (who isn’t US Navy) who hears knows that they shouldn’t be using that portion of spectrum for an hour or so once they heard that.
Lastly, attached are the slide decks for my two recent talks at ZRDC and Pacificon.