2024-07-26 — Irrational Exuberance About Amateur Radio - Four Data Points, New Distance Record Claimed for 802.11ah (Wi-Fi HaLow) on 902-928 MHz (33 cm) Band, WSJT-X SuperFox Verification is Flawed
Radio Amateurs in the Workforce: There are companies actively supporting ham radio. For example look up DL0RUS and DK0RUS. Even more important are the informal ties between hams in the workforce: We not only drill holes into hierarchies. Ham spirit also helps otherwise.
One example: Years ago I had a customer who did quite some electronics development. The engineer responsible for the measuring equipment had was a ham and gave me access to some of the equipment after hours. I also learned a lot from him.
Alexander - I hope I haven't given the impression that there's currently no recognition of Amateur Radio in industry. I'm trying to encourage the OVERT recognition that Amateur Radio experience is valuable, to the point where maybe recruiters (and job applicants) start factoring in Amateur Radio experience in jobs involving radio technology. This used to be assumed, that (again, citing Phil Karn KA9Q) folks in the hiring chain were Amateur Radio Operators and thus looked for relevant Amateur Radio experience in job applicants, or actually sought out Amateur Radio Operators that had done relevant Amateur Radio projects. I know of many such win/win hiring... but those stories are from decades ago now, and my impression (and it's only that, an impression) that such preferences aren't happening nearly as much because of that outdated perception of Amateur Radio (Grandpa in the basement...).
One thing I've noticed about the "legacy" ham is that they've mostly abandoned the VHF+ bands. Oh, they have their hotspots and code plugs, but for many, since the end of the Morse code requirement, amateur radio is about HF and building up a log file.
If there's an overarching sub-theme to ZeroRetries it has to be VHF+ is cool. It might be an interesting study to run your blog through an AI model and have it analyze the content based on VHF+ or HF stories. My guess is that there'd be no contest. This isn't a bad thing either. One of my personal goals over the next few months is to get the locals back on VHF. We have a great resource available, lots of existing infrastructure, and lots of silent spectrum. I'm happy to take a bit of the blame for that too. As life has taken away from the hobby I've stopped volunteering to help out with the club repeater, and rarely participate in the roundtables I do hear from time to time.
This motivation has led me to update my HT to a Kenwood TH-D75 (after selling off older radios that individually do what it does, it's basically a wash). There are so many things that it gets right, and a few glaring things that it gets close to right but misses the mark just enough. There's sort of a CAT control. There's sort-of a USB sound card interface. There's sort of a Bluetooth sound card. There's sort of... well you get the idea. But if I'm Kenwood, looking at the total market for this radio, why should I put in a big investment at building a radio that goes way beyond what's out there now? Most hams are balking at the list price, immediately taking it out of the running. Especially when your use of an HT is as a device that only has to communicate to the other side of the shack.
Meanwhile the SDR guys are building lots of hardware and ignoring the software. All the projects I come across are hardware: LimeSDR, the RFNM, even the older devices. The companies just get them working with GNU radio or Soapy and open up the kickstarter. That's fine if you're working on your masters thesis and need hardware, but for most hams, we don't have the background to figure out the advanced calculus necessary to build a QAM demod in GNU radio (or the need). We need something that gets us something cool that doesn't take 6 months to develop (just to send signals from one end of the shack to the other).
The "close but no cigar" TH-D75 is just frustrating enough to inspire me to build something. I spent most of last year prototyping a drone that could find RFI using an RTL-SDR dongle and RPi CM4 (and chronicling my (lack of) progress over at https://gvaviation.substack.com) That project fizzled out when the funding dried up, but I think I can salvage some of what I learned to cobble together a RPi based hybrid radio based on a CAT interface capable radio and RTL-SDR dongle. Pick up where the NW digital guys left off, this time with much more of a focus on software that hams can actually use with whatever 5W+ tranciever they have and a cheap dongle for a full-duplex radio. The hardware is simple. The software though, not so much. But the software is the whole point. And when good software is available hams will use it (usually... N1MM, FLDigi and WSJT-X come to mind). Right now I'm just in the tinkering stages, but now that I've settled into my new job I should have a little more time in the evenings to tinker a lot more. For now just figuring out what it should look like it is the goal. Will it have a waterfall display? Does it really need one? Touchscreen? Web GUI? Endless possibilities or strict limits?
I'm thinking more of an "App Store" style approach, where developers have a decent API and tools available and users have a trusted place to find modules and modes to add. Like cellphones it should have a basic set of modes and uses out of the box, and a common GUI/interface so that developers won't need to reinvent the wheel every time. And of course a more layered "OSI model" approach to modems, applications and peripherals.
Pipe dream? Absolutely. Battery hog? Yep. Way beyond my capabilities? For certain. But hams shouldn't be building radios that meet the requirements of first responders or the general public. We're fine with hauling around LiFePO batteries in backpacks. We're happy to stab ourselves in the armpit all afternoon with foot long antennas. We deal with cables and wires all the time. Duct tape and zip ties are part and parcel for amateur radio. And if it gets some traction? Well, then we work on the hardware.
Ready - Wow, lots to unpack there, so I'll do this in a series of comments. I think that "next generation Amateur Radio on HF, such as true Software Defined Transceivers (that are hackable / changeable by users), is largely a solved problem from the hardware perspective. The sBitx is a great example - https://www.sbitx.net. And getting a Software Defined Transmit signal up to reasonable power levels (power amplifiers) at HF frequencies is "easy" and reasonably priced. Thus development of Software Defined Radio for the unique conditions of HF - narrow channels, noise, rapid fading, shifting usability of the various bands over the day / night cycle, etc. are all now firmly in the software development realm. Being a largely solved problem, HF gets a bit less attention in Zero Retries as next generation Amateur Radio than VHF / UHF / Microwave.
As for VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Radio, there's a lot of work to do from the hardware perspective. It's a "solved" problem for the UHF band when you combine a Software Defined Transceiver with one of the power amplifiers from KH6HTV (https://kh6htv.com/products/) - those amps can be driven to full power from the very low power outputs of a typical Software Defined Transceiver. That's a good proof of concept, and can thus be, finally, a proof of concept for the viability of a UHF Software Defined Transceiver. But it's expensive, and a bit clunky, but there's no more "rocket science" involved in creating a real VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Transceiver like what the NW Digital Radio UDRX-440 would have been.
As for software for both HF and VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Transceivers... aye, there's the rub. We still haven't figured this out yet. Software to make SDTs easy to use is a "fertile area of research". While I can see the utility of a waterfall display for casual browsing of HF, it's maddening that so much of interpreting what you're seeing is left to the wetware of the user. Why can't we see a waterfall that's confined only to the assigned frequencies of the various Amateur Radio bands, and why can't the radio (or computer) do some of the heavy lifting for us in viewing that waterfall like automatic simultaneous decoding of the various signals that are being received, and "tagging" the various signals as known callsigns (and alerting if a favorite callsign is received anywhere within the receiver's bandwidth)?
That's why I have high hopes for local AI to help with this and make HF a lot more user friendly without making effective use of HF into a weeks or months long self education process.
And there's SO much more we could be doing on VHF / UHF. One of the most exciting developments is ka9q-radio; imagine a graphical display of all of the repeaters in your area and there being a checkerboard display of all repeater frequencies, and when you click on one that turned green you could quickly get all the relevant info on it - modes, location, distance from your location, signal strength, recent users (if it's a digital voice system with digital callsigns used), etc. Or if you come back into your shack and see that your favorite repeater was used in the last hour and you can click on it and replay the conversation so you're up to date on all the recent "watering hole" conversations.
Not-quite-like HF Software Defined Transceivers, the hardware of VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Transceivers isn't quite a solved problem so that we can move beyond the hardware and focus on the software. We need to get better VHF / UHF / Microwave SDTs, and I have hopes that some small, agile, hungry company will tackle this. I've seen some interesting potential companies in places like Poland, Latvia, and Ukraine that might be up to building such a unit.
As for GNU Radio... oh my gosh... that's like the early, Wild West'ish days of Linux versus UNIX, Windows, MacOS, etc. We really need a GNU Radio set of modules that are highly optimized for Amateur Radio - GNU Radio for Amateur Radio (Dummies). We need some kind of website that you can choose, mix and match the various modules that you want to use - what user interface, what data modes, what level of development (beta? fully released?), etc. There was supposedly an attempt to do that (an ARDC grant) but either that work didn't actually happen, or ARDC hasn't gotten around to releasing a report about the outcome of the grant / funded work. But yeah, I think that GNU Radio will ultimately end up as the defacto operating system of the next generation of Amateur Radio software, running on Software Defined Transceivers.
Another is the NodeRed-hamradio groups.io board. They're doing a lot of interesting shack automation work and getting all the disparate models and devices to work together. Much of what they're doing is geared to remote shack operation but if my home station was a little more elaborate I'd be using a lot of the flows they've developed. Something I'd like to incorporate into my SDR as well, and provide hooks into the radio for developers to use NodeRed for GUI and controls.
A lot of the work is already done, but all independently. That's what I might be able to contribute, a way to put a bow on the package so that it appeals to hams. Putting a web server onboard could potentially make the whole thing work over a web browser, including web audio and video if that's what's called for. Sure, another resource hog, but for single user operation it wouldn't be that bad -plus you can leverage the client PC/phone processing power too.
As for portable-ish radios, this mania for smaller... ARGH! In my opinion, Motorola developed the perfect form factor for a portable radio in their MX product line - https://rigreference.com/storage/uploads/rigs/154/6252/motorola-mx360--5a2c5f0689b817.94533624.jpg That was still handheld (you needed a big hand, like my big paws) but it was big enough to have enough room for lots of electronics, a big battery, and a display and some controls. It was also a sturdy enough form factor to be able to have a bigger, sturdier antenna which (still astonishing to me) is largely an afterthought of most portable radios. I have a bunch of MX radios, not that they'll ever be used (they used crystals, if memory serves) but I really love that form factor. Now we have powerful, compact batteries, we have displays, and we can even pair them with our (all display, keyboard when needed) smartphones. I think we're getting a lot closer on portables with the ComJot CJ-1 - https://tait-radio.com/comjot-cj-1/. It's not really a SDT, but at least it marries an open source OS with a portable radio.
I'm a little partial to this small tablet, the Seeed Studio ReTerminal (https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-CM4108032-p-5712.html). It includes both the 40 pin GPIO and their own expansion bus, designed for mating custom hardware packs on the back. Not exactly pocketable, but for sure will fit in a pack as easily as a KX-2. And with a phone GUI option might not matter that it isn't on your belt. Their reference design expansion pack (E10-1) has space for a couple of 18650 cells, PCI and M.2, and includes cutouts for SMA connectors/antennas. And the expansion bus is published and free to use. it will even power over Ethernet
Again, the hardware is here, just need the software to drive it.
Radio Amateurs in the Workforce: There are companies actively supporting ham radio. For example look up DL0RUS and DK0RUS. Even more important are the informal ties between hams in the workforce: We not only drill holes into hierarchies. Ham spirit also helps otherwise.
One example: Years ago I had a customer who did quite some electronics development. The engineer responsible for the measuring equipment had was a ham and gave me access to some of the equipment after hours. I also learned a lot from him.
Alexander - I hope I haven't given the impression that there's currently no recognition of Amateur Radio in industry. I'm trying to encourage the OVERT recognition that Amateur Radio experience is valuable, to the point where maybe recruiters (and job applicants) start factoring in Amateur Radio experience in jobs involving radio technology. This used to be assumed, that (again, citing Phil Karn KA9Q) folks in the hiring chain were Amateur Radio Operators and thus looked for relevant Amateur Radio experience in job applicants, or actually sought out Amateur Radio Operators that had done relevant Amateur Radio projects. I know of many such win/win hiring... but those stories are from decades ago now, and my impression (and it's only that, an impression) that such preferences aren't happening nearly as much because of that outdated perception of Amateur Radio (Grandpa in the basement...).
One thing I've noticed about the "legacy" ham is that they've mostly abandoned the VHF+ bands. Oh, they have their hotspots and code plugs, but for many, since the end of the Morse code requirement, amateur radio is about HF and building up a log file.
If there's an overarching sub-theme to ZeroRetries it has to be VHF+ is cool. It might be an interesting study to run your blog through an AI model and have it analyze the content based on VHF+ or HF stories. My guess is that there'd be no contest. This isn't a bad thing either. One of my personal goals over the next few months is to get the locals back on VHF. We have a great resource available, lots of existing infrastructure, and lots of silent spectrum. I'm happy to take a bit of the blame for that too. As life has taken away from the hobby I've stopped volunteering to help out with the club repeater, and rarely participate in the roundtables I do hear from time to time.
This motivation has led me to update my HT to a Kenwood TH-D75 (after selling off older radios that individually do what it does, it's basically a wash). There are so many things that it gets right, and a few glaring things that it gets close to right but misses the mark just enough. There's sort of a CAT control. There's sort-of a USB sound card interface. There's sort of a Bluetooth sound card. There's sort of... well you get the idea. But if I'm Kenwood, looking at the total market for this radio, why should I put in a big investment at building a radio that goes way beyond what's out there now? Most hams are balking at the list price, immediately taking it out of the running. Especially when your use of an HT is as a device that only has to communicate to the other side of the shack.
Meanwhile the SDR guys are building lots of hardware and ignoring the software. All the projects I come across are hardware: LimeSDR, the RFNM, even the older devices. The companies just get them working with GNU radio or Soapy and open up the kickstarter. That's fine if you're working on your masters thesis and need hardware, but for most hams, we don't have the background to figure out the advanced calculus necessary to build a QAM demod in GNU radio (or the need). We need something that gets us something cool that doesn't take 6 months to develop (just to send signals from one end of the shack to the other).
The "close but no cigar" TH-D75 is just frustrating enough to inspire me to build something. I spent most of last year prototyping a drone that could find RFI using an RTL-SDR dongle and RPi CM4 (and chronicling my (lack of) progress over at https://gvaviation.substack.com) That project fizzled out when the funding dried up, but I think I can salvage some of what I learned to cobble together a RPi based hybrid radio based on a CAT interface capable radio and RTL-SDR dongle. Pick up where the NW digital guys left off, this time with much more of a focus on software that hams can actually use with whatever 5W+ tranciever they have and a cheap dongle for a full-duplex radio. The hardware is simple. The software though, not so much. But the software is the whole point. And when good software is available hams will use it (usually... N1MM, FLDigi and WSJT-X come to mind). Right now I'm just in the tinkering stages, but now that I've settled into my new job I should have a little more time in the evenings to tinker a lot more. For now just figuring out what it should look like it is the goal. Will it have a waterfall display? Does it really need one? Touchscreen? Web GUI? Endless possibilities or strict limits?
I'm thinking more of an "App Store" style approach, where developers have a decent API and tools available and users have a trusted place to find modules and modes to add. Like cellphones it should have a basic set of modes and uses out of the box, and a common GUI/interface so that developers won't need to reinvent the wheel every time. And of course a more layered "OSI model" approach to modems, applications and peripherals.
Pipe dream? Absolutely. Battery hog? Yep. Way beyond my capabilities? For certain. But hams shouldn't be building radios that meet the requirements of first responders or the general public. We're fine with hauling around LiFePO batteries in backpacks. We're happy to stab ourselves in the armpit all afternoon with foot long antennas. We deal with cables and wires all the time. Duct tape and zip ties are part and parcel for amateur radio. And if it gets some traction? Well, then we work on the hardware.
Ready - Wow, lots to unpack there, so I'll do this in a series of comments. I think that "next generation Amateur Radio on HF, such as true Software Defined Transceivers (that are hackable / changeable by users), is largely a solved problem from the hardware perspective. The sBitx is a great example - https://www.sbitx.net. And getting a Software Defined Transmit signal up to reasonable power levels (power amplifiers) at HF frequencies is "easy" and reasonably priced. Thus development of Software Defined Radio for the unique conditions of HF - narrow channels, noise, rapid fading, shifting usability of the various bands over the day / night cycle, etc. are all now firmly in the software development realm. Being a largely solved problem, HF gets a bit less attention in Zero Retries as next generation Amateur Radio than VHF / UHF / Microwave.
As for VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Radio, there's a lot of work to do from the hardware perspective. It's a "solved" problem for the UHF band when you combine a Software Defined Transceiver with one of the power amplifiers from KH6HTV (https://kh6htv.com/products/) - those amps can be driven to full power from the very low power outputs of a typical Software Defined Transceiver. That's a good proof of concept, and can thus be, finally, a proof of concept for the viability of a UHF Software Defined Transceiver. But it's expensive, and a bit clunky, but there's no more "rocket science" involved in creating a real VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Transceiver like what the NW Digital Radio UDRX-440 would have been.
As for software for both HF and VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Transceivers... aye, there's the rub. We still haven't figured this out yet. Software to make SDTs easy to use is a "fertile area of research". While I can see the utility of a waterfall display for casual browsing of HF, it's maddening that so much of interpreting what you're seeing is left to the wetware of the user. Why can't we see a waterfall that's confined only to the assigned frequencies of the various Amateur Radio bands, and why can't the radio (or computer) do some of the heavy lifting for us in viewing that waterfall like automatic simultaneous decoding of the various signals that are being received, and "tagging" the various signals as known callsigns (and alerting if a favorite callsign is received anywhere within the receiver's bandwidth)?
That's why I have high hopes for local AI to help with this and make HF a lot more user friendly without making effective use of HF into a weeks or months long self education process.
And there's SO much more we could be doing on VHF / UHF. One of the most exciting developments is ka9q-radio; imagine a graphical display of all of the repeaters in your area and there being a checkerboard display of all repeater frequencies, and when you click on one that turned green you could quickly get all the relevant info on it - modes, location, distance from your location, signal strength, recent users (if it's a digital voice system with digital callsigns used), etc. Or if you come back into your shack and see that your favorite repeater was used in the last hour and you can click on it and replay the conversation so you're up to date on all the recent "watering hole" conversations.
Not-quite-like HF Software Defined Transceivers, the hardware of VHF / UHF / Microwave Software Defined Transceivers isn't quite a solved problem so that we can move beyond the hardware and focus on the software. We need to get better VHF / UHF / Microwave SDTs, and I have hopes that some small, agile, hungry company will tackle this. I've seen some interesting potential companies in places like Poland, Latvia, and Ukraine that might be up to building such a unit.
As for GNU Radio... oh my gosh... that's like the early, Wild West'ish days of Linux versus UNIX, Windows, MacOS, etc. We really need a GNU Radio set of modules that are highly optimized for Amateur Radio - GNU Radio for Amateur Radio (Dummies). We need some kind of website that you can choose, mix and match the various modules that you want to use - what user interface, what data modes, what level of development (beta? fully released?), etc. There was supposedly an attempt to do that (an ARDC grant) but either that work didn't actually happen, or ARDC hasn't gotten around to releasing a report about the outcome of the grant / funded work. But yeah, I think that GNU Radio will ultimately end up as the defacto operating system of the next generation of Amateur Radio software, running on Software Defined Transceivers.
One project that's inspiring me is the Scratch Radio from Myrid RF. Unfortunately it seems to be abandoned, the GIT page is 6 years old.
https://wiki.myriadrf.org/ScratchRadio
Another is the NodeRed-hamradio groups.io board. They're doing a lot of interesting shack automation work and getting all the disparate models and devices to work together. Much of what they're doing is geared to remote shack operation but if my home station was a little more elaborate I'd be using a lot of the flows they've developed. Something I'd like to incorporate into my SDR as well, and provide hooks into the radio for developers to use NodeRed for GUI and controls.
A lot of the work is already done, but all independently. That's what I might be able to contribute, a way to put a bow on the package so that it appeals to hams. Putting a web server onboard could potentially make the whole thing work over a web browser, including web audio and video if that's what's called for. Sure, another resource hog, but for single user operation it wouldn't be that bad -plus you can leverage the client PC/phone processing power too.
As for portable-ish radios, this mania for smaller... ARGH! In my opinion, Motorola developed the perfect form factor for a portable radio in their MX product line - https://rigreference.com/storage/uploads/rigs/154/6252/motorola-mx360--5a2c5f0689b817.94533624.jpg That was still handheld (you needed a big hand, like my big paws) but it was big enough to have enough room for lots of electronics, a big battery, and a display and some controls. It was also a sturdy enough form factor to be able to have a bigger, sturdier antenna which (still astonishing to me) is largely an afterthought of most portable radios. I have a bunch of MX radios, not that they'll ever be used (they used crystals, if memory serves) but I really love that form factor. Now we have powerful, compact batteries, we have displays, and we can even pair them with our (all display, keyboard when needed) smartphones. I think we're getting a lot closer on portables with the ComJot CJ-1 - https://tait-radio.com/comjot-cj-1/. It's not really a SDT, but at least it marries an open source OS with a portable radio.
I'm a little partial to this small tablet, the Seeed Studio ReTerminal (https://www.seeedstudio.com/reTerminal-CM4108032-p-5712.html). It includes both the 40 pin GPIO and their own expansion bus, designed for mating custom hardware packs on the back. Not exactly pocketable, but for sure will fit in a pack as easily as a KX-2. And with a phone GUI option might not matter that it isn't on your belt. Their reference design expansion pack (E10-1) has space for a couple of 18650 cells, PCI and M.2, and includes cutouts for SMA connectors/antennas. And the expansion bus is published and free to use. it will even power over Ethernet
Again, the hardware is here, just need the software to drive it.