Over on Hack-A-Day Jenny List (G7CKF) has a really nice article about ham radio and homebrewing. She truly has The Knack: She got her start in radio electronics at age 9 when her parents gave her George Dobbs's Ladybird book.
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/21/a-few-of-my-favorite-things-amateur-radio/
One of her paragraphs really seemed to capture the SDR-HDR conflict that we so often joke about:
The age of the homebrew RF tinkerer may be at a close, at least in the manner in which I started it. Nobody at the cutting edge of radio is likely to be messing around with discrete transistor circuits in the 2020s, unless perhaps they are working with extremely exotic devices up in the millimetre wavelengths. It’s all software-defined radios, opaque black plastic boxes that deliver a useful radio experience on a computer but that’s it. No more homebrew, no more tinkering.
Whew, good thing I'm not on the cutting edge. It sounds kind of sad. Oh well, that leaves more discrete transistors for us to tinker with.
Jenny's Profile on Hack-A-Day:
[Jenny List]: Contributing Editor and European Correspondent
Jenny List trained as an electronic engineer but spent twenty years in the publishing industry working on everything from computer games to
dictionaries before breaking out and returning to her roots.
She grew up around her parents’ small farm and blacksmith business in rural England, so making (and breaking) things is in her blood. Countless projects have crossed her bench over the years, though these days you’ll find her working with electronics and in particular radio, textiles for clothing and costume, decrepit classic cars, and real cider from first principles.
When she’s not writing for Hackaday she works on language corpus analysis software, designs and sells amateur radio kits, sits on the board of Oxford Hackspace, and is a freelance electronic design engineer and programmer.
- Hackaday Articles
- Hackaday Profile: Jenny List
- Twitter: @Jenny_Alto
- Personal Website: Language Spy
Jenny could be a good fit as a contributor to "The Repair Shop" TV series. :)
ReplyDeleteI think being sdr only is delusional. I will never submit to the new world order way of thinking. If everyone goes sdr,why the hell for the exams? why the hell we have parts suppliers? hmmm? yea i recognize the sdr is an instant gratification for hams that dont know stuff,but it took hams to design them. if you scrape away the transistor technology and decide to just focus on sdr, you are dumming yourself down big time. anyone can cobble together some premade boards to make an sdr transceiver,but try it with good tried and true technology of the transistor and fet.just my own opinion.
ReplyDelete73
ac9xh
sdr is nice,but its coddling to the instant ham examers who studied 5 days and walah got my license. sdr is a joke. its nice for alot of stuff but to turn your back on the current technology is ludicrous.Im an engineer and i would rather have a well built fet and transistor rig compared to an sdr made rig that puts out multiple inner mod signals,noise,etc
ReplyDeleteJIm from ohio