Soldering Irons and Software

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The activity of amateur radio revolves around experimentation. For over a century the amateur community has designed, sourced, scrounged and built experiments. Big or small, working or not, each of these is an expression of creativity, problem solving and experimentation.

For most of the century that activity was accompanied by the heady smell of solder smoke. It still makes an appearance in many shacks and field stations today, even my own, coaxed by an unsteady hand, more and more light and bigger and bigger magnification, I manage to join bits of wire, attach components and attempt to keep my fingers from getting burnt and solder from landing on the floor.

I've been soldering since I was nine or so. I think it started with a Morse key, a battery and a bicycle light with a wire running between my bedroom and the bedroom of my next door neighbour. In the decades since I've slightly improved my skill, but I have to confess, soldering isn't really my thing.

My thing is computers. It was computers from the day I was introduced in 1983 and nothing much has changed. For reasons I don't yet grasp, I just get what computers are about. They're user friendly, just picky whom they make friends with.

When I joined the amateur community, it was to discover a hobby that was vast beyond my wildest imagination, technical beyond my understanding and it was not computing. Little did I know.

Computing in amateur radio isn't a new thing. For example, packet radio was being experimented with in 1978 by members of the Montreal Amateur Radio Club, after having been granted permission by the Canadian government. In 2010 when I came along we had logging, DX-clusters and the first weak signal modes were already almost a decade old.

Software Defined Radio has an even longer history. The first "digital receiver" came along in 1970 and the first software transceiver was implemented in 1988. The term "software defined radio" itself was 15 years old when I joined the hobby and truth be told, it's a fascinating tale, I'll take a look at that at another time.

When I started my amateur journey like every new licensee, I jumped in the deep end and kept swimming. From buying a radio, to discovering and building antennas, from going mobile to doing contests and putting together my home station, all of it done, one step at a time, one progressive experiment after another, significant to me, but hardly world shattering in the scheme of things.

Now that I've been here for a decade I've come to see that my current experiments, mostly software based, are in exactly the same spirit as the circuit builders and scroungers, except that I'm doing this by flipping bits, changing configurations, writing software and solving problems that bear no relation to selecting the correct combination of capacitance and reactance to insert into a circuit just so.

Instead I'm wrestling with compilers, designing virtual machines, sending packets, debugging serial ports and finding new and innovative ways to excite transceivers.

For example, today I spent most of the day attempting to discover why when I generate a WSPR signal in one program, it cannot be decoded by another. If that sounds familiar, that was what I was doing last week too. This time I went back to basics and found tools inside the source code of WSJT-X and started experimenting. I'm still digging.

As an aside I was asked recently why I want to do this with audio files and the short answer is: Little Steps.

I can play an audio file through my Yaesu FT-857d. I can receive that and decode it. That's where I want to start with my PlutoSDR experiments, so when I'm doing this, I can use the same audio file and know that the information can be decoded and that any failure to do so is related to how I'm transmitting it.

Back to soldering irons and software. In my experience as an amateur it's becoming increasingly clear that they're both the same thing, tools for experimentation, with or without burning your fingers.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB