Here's a reminder of how long this took: When Bob KD4EBM alerted me to the ARRL announcement that 15 kHz of the 60 meter band had been "liberated," I turned to my blog and found articles talking about this possible change way back in 2017. Oh well, better late than never.
Here are a couple of references from the SolderSmoke blog and one from the BITX Hacks blog in which Don ND6T shifts the BITX40 module's bandpass filter to 60 meters.
I reached into my junk box this morning and found the digital VFO I was using way back in 2017. I may turn to Don again for help in getting the VFO segment to work.
I got a chuckle about the FCC power limit: 9.15 watts ERP. Wow, such precision! Can you imagine the FCC breaking down a radio amateurs shack door after, perhaps, measuring 9.16 watts ERP? BUSTED!
I came across this channel yesterday -- there is a lot of FB homebrew content here. And it is partially in the Malayalam language of Kerala state in Southern India.
That is a question we get fairly regularly when we tell the other fellow that our rig is homebrew. I often get the feeling that the question stems from a certain insecurity -- the guy who asks it may feel a bit insecure because the "rig" he is running is completely commercial and his only role in its production was to flash a credit card number.
But lately I have been reading through Jim Williams' wonderful book "Analog Circuit Design -- Art, Science, and Personalities" and I can see that there may be something to this question.
It was the chapter by Barrie Gilbert that made me think more about this. Barrie is the legendary designer for whom the Gilbert Cell is named. This circuit is at the heart of the NE602 chip that many of us used to build our first "Neophyte" receivers and other homebrew rigs. Barrie's chapter is entitled "Where do Little Circuits Come From." Uh oh.
Barrie grew up in the post-war United Kingdom. He father had been killed in a German bombing raid. As a kid, he built crystal radios and, with his brother, "shortwave sets" on softwood bases. He used a TRF receiver that employed Manhattan-style construction. Barrie, it seemed, was one of us.
But then, he suddenly seemed more advanced. He wrote:
"Later, I began to build some receivers of my own but stubbornly refused to use circuits published in the top magazines of the day, Practical Wireless and Wireless World. Whether they worked as well or not they had to be "originals" otherwise, where was the satisfaction? I learned by my mistakes but grew to trust what I acquiered in this way: it was 100% mine, not a replication or mere validation of someone else's inventiveness."
Wow, that is certainly hardcore. I will note, however, that in getting back to the the question about whether I have "designed" the rig myself, I have NEVER had the questioner come back to say that HIS rig was homebrewed from HIS OWN original design. Never. Not once.
And I will note that building a rig from the schematic is an enormous challenge. It is not easy. It is not the mere replication of someone else's inventiveness. Anyone who thinks it is easy should try to homebrew a simple direct conversion receiver. They will discover that it is NOT easy.
I guess this comes down to what we mean by "homebrew." I prefer to stick to the old ham radio meaning of the term: It is homebrew if it was built at home, even if it is built from a schematic done by someone else. When Jean Shepherd built his Heising Modulator, was he working off a schematic from a ham radio magazine? He almost certainly was. But he gathered the parts, laid out the chassis, and put the circuit together. Most importantly, when trouble cropped up, he was able to step in and make the needed corrections. Was his modulator "homebrew?" Of course it was. Did he design it himself? No, his name was not Heising!
More than 100 people built our SolderSmoke Direct Conversion Receiver. We resisted pressure to turn this project into a kit. The folks who built it worked off schematics that we had prepared. They gathered the parts and built their own circuit boards, Manhattan style. They struggled to get the whole thing to work, to make sure the VFO was on the right frequency and at the right level, that the AF amplifier was not oscillating. Were these receivers "homebrew?" Of course they were.
Jim Williams warned that Analog Circuit Design was "A wierd book." He strongly discouraged collaboration between the authors, and noted that this would probably result in "a somewhat discordant book." We see that discord in the hardcore position taken by Barrie Gilbert. Many of the other designers seem to take a more flexible, less austere position. Some even seem to downplay the role of mathematics.
I think Barrie had a right to be proud of his fundamentalism. But not all of us are capable of that. Writing in Jim Williams' book, Samuel Wilensky sums it up nicely:
"I classify analog designers into one of two categories. There are those who do truly original work, and these I consider the artists of our profession. These individuals, as in most fields, are very rare. Then there are the rest of us, who are indeed creative, but do it by building on the present base of knowledge."
Here is a picture of Jim Williams taken through a Tektronix oscilloscope camera. I never used one of these things, but Dean KK4DAS did. Here are the details of the shot:
I took this great photo of Jim Williams with a Tek scope camera sometime around 1977 or so. There was no digital (or analog) manipulation. It was a simple double exposure. I first shot a scope waveform, then just to see what would happen, I pulled the camera off the scope, stuck it Jim’s face and snapped another shot before pulling the film. I never expected it to look this good….a view from inside the oscilloscope!
Here is the collection of pictures that this 'scope shot came from:
Thanks to Len Sherman for the pictures. On his site you will see, among other things, the upside down Christmas Tree of dead parts, and Bob Pease's Volkswagen Beetle.
Time for something completely different. As a kid, I lusted after the ROBOT SSTV systems that were advertised in QST. Yesterday, on a lark, I downloaded this program, tuned my Mythbuster transceiver to 14.230 MHz, and put the podcast microphone in front of the speaker. BOOM! SSTV signals started pouring in. The program automatically set the kind of SSTV format that was coming in, so there was no need for me to try to figure out if it was Scottie 1 or Martin 1 or whatever. I've done this before, but this program made it easier. The invention of SSTV by Copthorne MacDonald (another GREAT ham radio name!) is really interesting:
Sometimes the YouTube algorithm gets it right. This morning it sent me the above video from the Computer History Museum about Jim Williams. The video is 13 years-old, but that says something about the enduring impact that Jim Williams had. I especially liked the references to the need for understanding of analog circuits. As many have noted, Jim was very good at explaining this stuff.
As always with Dave's builds, " 'tis a thing of beauty." His photographs and documentation make it even better. Please go directly to Dave's site and enjoy his look at the SolderSmoke HOMEBREW Direct Conversion Receiver:
The Bob Pease book that KD4EBM gave me led me to the Jim Willams book entitled Analog Circuit Design -- Art, Science, and Personalities. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but I can already tell that it is great. Get this book. Make room on your shelf.
Jim was the editor, and it is a collection of contibutions made by a many different analog luminaries. Curiously, none of the bios show that there are any hams among them (but the articles of many of them seem to hint at ham radio backgrounds). MIT shows up a lot in the bios. Jim notes in the very first line of the preface that "This is a weird book." He talks about how it came together -- he met with the contributors and each of them pledged NOT to consult with the others about what they would write. Jim notes that the result is "a somewhat discordant book," that "Hopefully would lend courage to someone seeking to do analog work." " The single greatest asset a designer has is self knowledge." "Take what you like, cook it any way you want to, and leave the rest." Indeed.
I found that Jim's own contributions were among those that I liked the most. He writes about "analoggery" and "digital fakery" but then acknowledges that this is a "good natured" controversy. He notes that "no true home is complete without a lab" (a shack?) and that "no lab is complete without an HP series 200 oscillator." His bio reveals that he lived in California with his family and "14 Tektronix oscilloscopes." In a chapter entitled "Should Ohm's Law be Repealed?" Jim describes the very early influence of a neighbor, Dr. Stearn, who owned a Tek 535. It allowed them to see into circuits: "You knew the excitement Leeuwenhoek felt when he looked in his microscope." But that was not always enough: Jim tells how Stearn once successfully troubleshot one of Jim circuits simply by running moistened fingers over circuit while watching the scope.
Tom Hornak also really struck a chord with me. He writes of things that happened in the year "10 BT" (Before Transistors). He talks about how he and a childhood friend had trouble understanding the differences between voltage and current. "We found someone who knew the right answer, but he did not help us too much. Instead of using a simple analog such as a phasor diagram, he started to talk sine and cosine. We accused him of not knowing the answer either, and covering up his ignorance my muttering mumbo-jumbo." Tom explaines: "I know that trying to 'understand electricity' early in life had a lasting benefit to me. I got used to 'seeing electricity' in analogs and I am still seeing it that way. I believe every electronic circuit designer could benefit from thinking in analogs, and it is never too late to start. This belief made me write this chapter."
Barrie Gilbert -- the man credited with inventing the Gilbert Cell (the heart of the NE602) -- has a chapter in the book. He writes of circuits "laid out Manhattan-style" and "built on softwood bases." He hombrewed a very early TV receiver. He tested AF amplifiers "by placing a finger on the grid of the first tube." (We recommended something similar with the SolderSmoke Direct Conversion Receiver, but some builders seemed not to believe that this would work!)
It is undoubtedly a tragedy that we lost both Jim Willams and Bob Pease in June 2011. Jim died of a stroke at age 63; Bob died of a possible heart attack or stroke while driving home from Jim's memorial service. But here we are in 2025 still talking about their work and their books. In a certain sense they live on through their writing. This is a lesson and an inspiration for those of us who sometimes get a bit down by the vagaries of AI and the algorithms: We never know when -- perhaps long after we are gone -- someone might come across something we have written and find inspiration there.
First off, what a great name. It is a real ham radio name. Grote Reber. And he was indeed a ham: W9GFZ. We don't have names like that anymore. But we should.
Second, Grote Reber's mother was also the teacher of Edwin Hubble. Hubble was the guy who discovered that there were OTHER GALAXIES in the universe, and that they were all moving away from each other. That was a BIG discovery! Later, Grote's mom also had her son in her class. Both students were from Wheaton, Illinois.
Lest there be any doubt about Grote's dedication to radio, consider the following. (Much of the following comes from Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grote_Reber)
When he learned of Karl Jansky's work in 1933,[5][6][7] Grote Reber decided this was the field he wanted to work in, and applied to Bell Labs, where Jansky was working.
In the summer of 1937, Reber decided to build his own radio telescope in his back yard in Wheaton, Illinois. Reber's radio telescope was considerably more advanced than Jansky's, and consisted of a parabolic sheet metal dish 9 meters in diameter, focusing to a radio receiver 8 meters above the dish. The entire assembly was mounted on a tilting stand, allowing it to be pointed in various directions, though not turned. The telescope was completed in September 1937.[8][9]
Here is a really great article from Sky and Telescope magazine (July 1988) about Reber's homebrew radio telescope:
He was limited by the size of locally available 2X4 lumber. Neighbors thought he was trying to control the weather or to bring down enemy aircraft. Between Wheaton and the NRAO site in West Virginia, Reber's telescope spent some time at the National Bureau of Standards site in Sterling, Virginia. I was in Sterling just yesterday. I wonder if there is a plaque or something noting the telesccope's stay in that town. I note that at age 15, Reber had built a ham radio transceiver.
AND THEN HE MOVED TO TASMANIA
He did this because of propagation and low noise conditions. (This reminds me of how we sometimes said that very few people have actually said the words, "And then we moved to the Azores.")
Starting in 1951, he received generous support from the Research Corporation in New York, and moved to Hawaii.[12] In the 1950s, he wanted to return to active studies but much of the field was already filled with very large and expensive instruments. Instead he turned to a field that was being largely ignored, that of medium frequency (hectometre) radio signals in the 0.5–3 MHz range, around the AM broadcast bands. However, signals with frequencies below 30 MHz are reflected by an ionized layer in the Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere. In 1954, Reber moved to Tasmania,[12] the southernmost state of Australia, where he worked with Bill Ellis at the University of Tasmania.[13] There, on very cold, long, winter nights the ionosphere would, after many hours shielded from the Sun's radiation by the bulk of the Earth, 'quieten' and de-ionize, allowing the longer radio waves into his antenna array. Reber described this as being a "fortuitous situation". Tasmania also offered low levels of man-made radio noise, which permitted reception of the faint signals from outer space.
His Homebrew House in Tasmania
In the 1960s, he had an array of dipoles set up on the sheep grazing property of Dennistoun, about 7.5 km (5 miles) northeast of the town of Bothwell, Tasmania, where he lived in a house of his own design and construction he decided to build after he purchased a job lot of coach bolts at a local auction. He imported 4x8 douglas fir beams directly from a sawmill in Oregon, and then high technology double glazed window panes, also from the US. The bolts held the house together. The window panes formed a north facing passive solar wall, heating mat black painted, dimpled copper sheets, from which the warmed air rose by convection. The interior walls were lined with reflective rippled aluminium foil. The house was so well thermally insulated that the oven in the kitchen was nearly unusable because the heat from it, unable to escape, would raise the temperature of the room to over 50 °C (120 °F). His house was never completely finished. It was meant to have a passive heat storage device, in the form of a thermally insulated pit full of dolerite rocks, underneath, but although his mind was sharp, his body started to fail him in his later years, and he was never able to move the rocks. He was fascinated by mirrors and had at least one in every room.
To Canada -- And a Rejection of the Big Bang
The same July 1988 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine has a good historical vignette of Reber, with a focus on his actvities in Canada late in life (click on the image below). Reber had big doubts about the big bang. Unfortunately this seemed to spill over into scorn and ridicule for those who -- well -- believed in the big bang. We see this at the end of the article. Oh well, even great people sometimes get cranky.
Three cheers for Grote Reber.
I had trouble making the WayBack Machine links to work on my blog. But they seem to work on the Wiki page. So to see them, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grote_Reber Then go to the Reference section and take a look at the second and third items.
This book is kind of weird, but give it a chance. The author seems too prone to describe the physical attributes of his colleagues, especially female colleagues. But he was born in 1910 -- he was an old guy when he wrote this book, so perhaps we should cut him some slack. And there is one memorable episode where he defends a female applicant. In spite of the shortcomings, there are many real gems in there, often hidden among the descriptions of 1930's era Kleenex machines and refrigerators. I picked up the book a long time ago and only read it recently.
Some highlights:
-- Crystal Radios in the 1920s.
-- Working Australia from Michigan on 40 CW in 1927. And waking up his parents to tell them. (Decades later, I did the same thing after a ZL contact).
-- Doing a radio propagation survey using the 5 meter band (FMLA!)
-- Jansky's discovery of an extraterrestrial hiss in 1932. (It seems like that was the big discovery, So why did Penzias get the Nobel prize?)
-- A youthful trip to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
-- A regular ham band schedule from Ann Arbor to Berkeley that featured Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer.
-- Lots of mention of Fred Terman, Grote Reber, and Karl Jansky,
-- Some discussion of how Jansky was turned down for a job. And about how being a radio amateur actually hurt chances for employment; there are a few lines about anti-ham prejudice.
-- Lots of people known to us show up in the book: Joe Taylor, Shoemaker and Levy of Shoemaker-Levy 9 fame, Arthur C. Clarke, Maarten Schmidt of "First Light," and many others.
-- And of course, the WOW signal (that has recently been explained as probably having a natural origin).
-- Kraus tells of how the Latin words "Ad Astra per Aspera" (to the stars, with difficulty) were engraved above their radio telescope receiving room. He goes on to (correctly) criticize those who write about radio telescopes, without having ever built one. Remarkinig on one such critic, John Bolton, a revered Austialian radio astronomer and radio telescope builder, wrote, "If the writer had built a radio telescope his story of radio astronomy would be a different story."
Here is a good review of Kraus's "Big Ear Two" book:
Jay KI5VIR is a new ham, but you would never know this by looking at his build of the direct conversion receiver: It looks like something built by someone with a lot more time the amateur ranks. (See above.)
Jay writes:
I have completed the direct conversion reciever and I can't thank Bill, Dean and those that commented and asked questions on discord enough. This was my first build and I can't believe how much I learned. I have a long ways to go, but this was just what I needed to get started in homebrewing. 1- (BIGGEST CHALLENGE) was probably the diode ring mixer and learning to use my scope and setting it up to test the circuit. (this was also the most rewarding stage) 2-(WHAT DID YOU LEARN AND WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE?) I got a basic understanding of how to read a circuit and what different components do in the circuit.(I still want to revisit each stage and make sure I get a little more) 3-(WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOMEBREW NEXT?) I want to first dissasemble each board and rebuild while it is fresh in my mind and make sure I get a little better understanding. After that, I want to either build a transmitter to go with this reciever, or build a complete transciever. Not sure whether to build ssb or cw, but I definately want to build something I can make at least a few contacts with.
Congratulations Jay, and welcome to the Hall of Fame!
