https://hackaday.com/2021/12/11/has-diy-become-click-and-buy/
Is it really homebrew if you buy a bunch of already-stuffed PC boards and connect them together?
Is it really a homebrew receiver if 90% of the components are inside one chip?
Is it really homebrew if most of the signal processing is done in your computer (that you definitely did not build)?
The comments below the article are interesting. There we see some of the same arguments used by ham radio operators who are more inclined toward click-and-buy. They argue that since none of us are making our own resistors and transistors, we are ALL therefore click-and-buy people, so we should just get over it and pull out the credit cards. Some commenters carry this to extremes and ask if the real homebrewers are out there mining the copper for their wires.
The debate seems to spill over into the software area: One person asks if it is really DIY if you are using software libraries that contain code written by someone else. Or to be truly DIY should you write all of your own code in assembly language?
There is one very insightful comment about hams who are inclined to disparage the homebrewing that they did in their youth. We often hear this: "Oh, I used to build my own gear, but now-a-days I just buy commercial transceivers -- they are so much better." As if homebrewing was a folly of youth, something that they grew out of (and up from) as they became able to afford the latest ham radio appliances. As if homebreweing were a regrettable thing that was done only out of necessity. This is, I think, sad.
I think I'm a lot closer to the traditional concept of DIY than I am to click-and-buy. I still prefer LC oscillators to Si5351/Arduino combos. I prefer traditional filter rigs to SDR rigs. And I prefer to make my own crystal filters. I don't like to use ICs unless I really understand what is going on inside them (so I can be comfortable with an NE602 or an LM386, but I'm not comfortable with a CPU chip that may have millions of transistors in it). But I am not homebrewing my own transistors nor am I mining copper.
What do you folks think about this?
Posts
Hi Bill :
ReplyDeleteWe all may rationalize our behaviour. Some people practice all or nothing thinking.
For electronics DYI, some love to design circuits & others enjoy making kits, while still others fashion amazingly beautiful cases and make beautiful circuit boards to place in them.
It's all good. We've got room for everyone.
For me, homebrew provides a good reason to use my test equipment! I love measuring stuff Some of my test gear is homebrew - but lots of my gear are appliances too.
Component-level electronics is just plain fun. I love working hard on a design and then feeling happy when you realize your goals.
That's why I do DYI.
It took me 6 weeks to make a guitar preamp
https://qrp-popcorn.blogspot.com/2021/12/ga-50-inspired-guitar-preamplifier.html
I learned so much while doing it. The learning is another big part of it. By the way, I love ICs -- especially low noise op-amps! Homebrew crystal filters are also fun + instructive to make, I agree with you.
Why and how we DYI seems deeply personal.
Best to you DYI builder!
Bill,
ReplyDeleteI've had many of the same comments along the lines of "sure you built it, but did you DESIGN IT ALL BY YOURSELF?" No, I had some help from legal team at Marconi, Armstrong, Colpitts and Hartley (LLC).
I've been thinking about your aversion to "magic black boxes", and I think that the reason I am so comfortable with microcontrollers is that I do understand them at a fundamental level. I've spent an entire profession career working on and with them. It is probably no stretch to say that I understand computer architecture better than many of EE colleagues understand RF circuits and components - EG your comments about wanting to know how mixers "really work" vs some folks only wanting to know how they behave. As far as software goes - I would no rather write an FFT library from scratch than I would try to build my own transistor from scratch. I "could" do the former but not the latter. When I took over the code for my version of the SimpleSSB - I poured decades of experience into making the code modular and extensible while taking maximum advantage of all the good work that had come before - and I will gladly challenge anybody that tries to tell me that is not a homebrew radio controller!
There are limits to what any of us can know - and sometimes when we ask the next level question, we find out it really is "turtles all the way down!"
I'm delighted that I have found a group of like-minded individuals who really do want to understand how something works and not just that it works. And with help from you and Pete and a decade of SolderSmoke I have come to understand the fundamental truth - "If you know stuff you can do stuff!" (IBEW)
73,
Dean
KK4DAS
Indeed Dean. I think the guys who ask "But did you design it yourself?" reveal in their question that they have never designed nor built anything. All builders know that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. No one sits down with a pencil and says, "Hmm, how would I build an oscillator?" No, they look in the books at Pierce, and Hartley, and Colpitts or Arduino Si5351 designs, and off they go. Similarly, no one re-invents the superhet every time they build a rig. Howard Armstrong did that for us a long time ago. So we all take bits of circuitry from others. But then, with those ideas and circuits, we build rigs. We homebrew.
DeleteI really admire your software skills. I wish I could do that. But I recognize my limitations and my comfort zone, so I stick with HDR. If most of the SDR hams were doing what you are doing, I think there would be less of a question about whether what they do is homebrew. But unfortunately most of them just send their credit card number to a 7300 dealer and wait for the FEDEX box. If it breaks, they complain bitterly and send it back. This, I think, fosters a relationship to the "radio" similar to the relationship that I have with my I-phone: not deep. There is no soul in that little machine. 73 Bill
All of civilization has been built on the creation, adoption, and perpetuation of ready-made implements--language (words and grammar, etc.), tools (to extend the hand's ability to manipulate matter), processes (step-by-step ways of making something), machines (articulated systems of tools), social arrangements (governments, orderly exchange, and customary manners), and ways of understanding (religion, philosophy, psychology). 99.9995% of what we are and what we do is the work of millions of people over tens-of-thousands of years. This is what it means to say: "When you know stuff, you can do stuff."
ReplyDeleteThe only real quibble left, then, is over the 0.0005% an individual brings to the table him or herself. A poet, for instance, didn't invent the words he uses, but instead puts them together (with all the baggage of their denotations and connotations) into something unique--or at least impressive:
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time . . . 'tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
It was a poetry of sorts when Howard Armstrong took something he hadn't invented and indeed had to purchase--an Audion tube--and applied it to a purpose for which it had not been made. It's worth noting that its inventor--Lee de Forest--didn't claim to know himself how the tube worked, "it just did." It would be a few more decades before the thermionic workings of the triodic tube would be fully understood and improved upon by adding more grids, indirectly-heated alkaline-coated cathodes, and so on. And so it goes with everything. If hand-fabricating and fully-understanding every piece that we employ to make something useful (or fun, entertaining, enlightening) is philosophically or ethically required, we'd all freeze to death or starve. Anyway, who would we think we were? Gods?
Given the five ten-thousandths of a percent that is truly *mine*, I think something more modest is in order. I make what I can, buy what I must, and I try to keep the meanings of "can" and "must" realistic. If I buy and use, for instance, an adjustable buck-boost power supply module for my discrete-component mic amp, am I being "untrue" to myself and my sense of self-reliance? Naw, I'm just being practical and modest. I want a variable Vcc for that amp as a means of controlling its gain. Though there are other ways of doing so, I want to try this one. I vaguely know how a switching supply works, and I could dig in to learn how to make one myself, but at what cost? Days? Weeks? Well, it took me ninety seconds to find one on Amazon, and $3.95 to buy it. I had it two days later, and I got right back to work on my BITX40 refit (I bought *that* module, too, straight from Hyderabad). Anything else would have been disproportionate and vain.
It's worth noting that integrating small "store-bought" systems--IF transformers, crystal filters, Si5351s, SBL-1s, and LM386s--is not a trivial matter, nor one that can be done without "know[ing] things." It's made worse when the small system wasn't intended for your current application (radio, computers, etc.). Even when they are, impedances, signal levels, noise figures, Vcc requirements, and a widely-varying array of other considerations have to be juggled and worked out. It's hard enough such that failure is a real possibility, and in fact there aren't many who even attempt it. Personally, as a matter of private sentiment, I think this is a shame. I also think when "appliance" operators do little more than whip out their credit cards for all-store-bought equipment then they're also deciding to reduce the 0.0005% to 0.00045%. In the end, I don't blame them for anything. Sometimes even that tiny percentage is just too burdensome. Life is already hard, and sanctimony in any pursuit is always obnoxious. --Todd K7TFC
Labels rarely bring out the best in people.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to encourage building, encourage it in any form that brings joy and tempts people to the next level.
If you want to have them and us tribes, argue about whether someone’s creation is “truly” homebrew.
I spent my life in innovation. There are few rewards for doing the same thing over and over. Am I a true home brewer because I make a less capable radio by not making clever use of an AD831 mixer board instead of an NE602? Or am I an innovator because my mixer no longer folds up like a cheap suit on Field Day?
Can’t homebrew be a big tent, where people have fun creating what they find interesting?
Isn’t the prime directive to have fun, without crapping on other people’s fun?
To me if you create something you can’t buy, I’m happy to embrace it as homebrew. Everything else is just an exercise in I’m better than you😜
Hello Ray Reedy! But seriously, FB Scott. I really enjoyed looking at your QRZ.com page OM: https://www.qrz.com/db/ka9p
DeleteAfter visiting it I felt the urge to cut a hole in my roof too!
We have built a lot of the same kind of stuff: Phasing receivers, HROish rigs, novice nostalgia. Wonderful.
I never criticize anyone for calling something "homebrew," even when I think it is not really homebrew. To each his own. This is a hobby, this is for fun. But sometimes, when I tell a guy about my homebrew rigs, you can almost feel the tension from the other side. Then comes the anti-homebrew micro-aggressions: "Well, I suppose it sounds OK FOR A HOMEBREW RIG." "I'd do that myself if I weren't so darn busy and important." "Yea, but did you DESIGN it?" "Oh I used to do that when I was a kid, but I grew up and got a credit card!"
"Hey, OM my kilo-buck SDR waterfall shows you 14 Hz off frequency. Maybe you should adjust menu item 765b!" (Just last week I guy told me I was 14 Hz off. I was running a homebrew VXO-controlled sideband rig with pieces of tape on the front for the frequency readout!). You know what I mean.
Hope to work you on NRR in March. Keep melting solder OM. 73 Bill
Another thing comes up when we try to describe a homebrew rig: people EXPECT 1) a complete schematic, 2) a PC board and 3) a BOM if not a bag of parts. In other words, they expect a kit. But there is a big difference between kit building and homebrewing. 73 Bill
DeleteI wonder if "expect" is quite on frequency here. In the QRP ecosystem, there have been and still are many kits available--most of them offered by radio clubs such as Four-State, NorCal, NJQRP, and TAPR, but also by many FB hams such as Diz, Rex, and Hans. Aside from kits, QST, QRPQ, and Sprat have been publishing schematics and BOMs for decades, and a lot of Hams have built those rigs. It may therefore be closer to zero beat to say that people *assume* a "homebrew" has been built from a kit or published materials. Of course an *assumption* is one thing, an *expectation* another. I would consider an expectation distasteful, an assumption not.
DeleteRegarding the differences between kit building and homebrewing, they exist but I personally don't know how big they are. I suspect they're on a spectrum. If at one end of the spectrum lies all-store-bought gear (which still has to be cabled together and set up, after all), the other end might have beer-can capacitors and transistors salvaged from burned-out CFLs. And, like most of the Ham bands, the homebrew spectrum ought not be channelized. You can operate anywhere on the spectrum, and within its extremes there's only relative position.
Just my two cents . . . okay, more like 5 cents, but I don't carry pennies. --Todd K7TFC
I've been thinking about the homebrew vs. kit-built thing. I think we have the answer right in front of us. No one considers a Heathkit HW-101 to be a "homebrew" rig. It is a kit, a Heathkit. An HBR-13 receiver is a homebrew piece of gear. There is a difference.
DeleteI don't think "expectation" is an exaggeration. Some folks are quite miffed to when they learn there is no board and no BOM. 73 Bill
Well, those who are miffed should be told to kiss your plate chokes--on your DX-100. They'll get what's coming to them.
DeleteBTW, you sure are an early riser! I'm a night owl, so it's just bedtime for me here in Oregon's Silicon Forest.
There is room in the hobby for everyone!
ReplyDeleteInteresting discussion. I posted to the H-A-D one paragraph from the above blog post. But I added: "To each his own. For most of us this is a hobby." Hack-A-Day kicked off this discussion. I was just commenting on my own thoughts and preferences about homebrew. Others will have different views. But for me, plugging in a board, downloading some code, or "customizing" the menus on an expensive transceiver is just a LONG way away from the kind of analog, discrete component, Hardware-Defined homebrew radio that I prefer. I think there is value in building with your own hands as much of the radio as you can. To use the H-A-D terminology: "More DIY, Less Click-and-Buy." But hey, YMMV. Whatever floats your boat. It is, after all, a hobby. 73 Bill
ReplyDeleteBill, I think homebrewing is a journey of learning more and more, simply for the joy of learning. I build something new into my next radio everytime, just to try it out and see. I love to learn, thats why i homebrew.. Ed KC8SBV
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm somewhere between, I prototype using 'modules' like Si5351 breakout boards but move on to my own PCBs if I am interested and satisfied enough with the outcome or there's no readily available module.
ReplyDelete