Check out Pete's blog: https://n6qw.blogspot.com/2025/12/mostly-ai-generated.html
Homebrew vs Store Bought
There’s a moment every homebrewer knows: you shove aside the archaeological layers of past projects on the bench, uncover a few resistors stuck to a solder blob, and declare, “Yep, this is going to be a radio.” To the untrained eye, it looks like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. But to the enlightened? It’s the beginning of greatness — or at least something that won’t catch fire too quickly.
Buying a radio is easy. Too easy. You click a button, a box arrives, and suddenly you’re the proud owner of a rig that has more menus than a chain restaurant. You spend the first week scrolling through settings trying to figure out why the audio sounds like a kazoo trapped in a tin can. But building a radio? That’s where the real fun begins. It’s where you learn that “datasheet recommended values” are merely suggestions and that toroids exist solely to test your patience and your vocabulary.
Commercial radios are sleek, polished, and packed with features you’ll never use but will brag about anyway. They’re also sealed tighter than a politician’s tax returns. You can’t poke around inside without voiding the warranty, the warranty’s warranty, and possibly a few federal regulations. Meanwhile, a homebrew rig practically begs you to poke it with a screwdriver. It’s the difference between owning a sports car you’re not allowed to open the hood on and owning a jalopy you can rebuild with duct tape and optimism.
And let’s be honest: building a radio is an act of rebellion. In a world where everything is prepackaged, preprogrammed, and pre‑approved, choosing to melt solder and wind toroids is basically saying, “I reject your consumerist convenience and substitute my own chaos.” It’s a declaration that understanding matters. That learning matters. That the journey — the mis-wired stages, the smoke tests, and the moment you realize you soldered the IC in backwards — is part of the joy.
There’s also something deeply personal about a homebrew rig. When you build it, you know every quirk. You know why the VFO drifts when the cat walks across the table. You know why the audio chain hisses like an angry snake. You know the exact moment when the rig came alive for the first time, pulling a faint signal out of the ether and making you shout, “It works!” loud enough for the neighbors to wonder if you’ve finally snapped.
And that first QSO? Pure magic. When someone hundreds or thousands of miles away responds to your signal, you feel a surge of pride no store‑bought rig can match. You didn’t just operate a radio. You created one. You made electrons dance to your tune. You built a bridge across the airwaves using nothing but determination, caffeine, and parts that probably came from a cardboard box labeled “misc — maybe useful someday.”
Homebrewing also keeps the spirit of amateur radio alive. The hobby wasn’t built on buying the latest rig because the brochure said it had “enhanced DSP algorithms.” It was built on people who asked, “What if?” and then went to the bench to find out. When you build a radio, you’re participating in that legacy. You’re keeping the flame lit — even if the flame occasionally comes from a resistor, you accidentally overheated.
And let’s not forget the best part: when something breaks, you can actually fix it. No shipping it back to the manufacturer. No waiting six weeks for a repair estimate. No customer service rep telling you to “try turning it off and on again.” You grab a meter, poke around, and mutter, “Well, that shouldn’t be glowing,” and you fix it. That’s power.
Still, all of this chatter kind of disappears once you embrace analog LC VFOs. But here is a good article about all of this:
https://thenewstack.io/adafruit-arduinos-rules-are-incompatible-with-open-source/
Here is the ARRL announcement:
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.
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2017/03/channelized-bitx-60-with-five-channels.html
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2017/03/bitx-sixty-with-three-short-videos.html
https://bitxhacks.blogspot.com/2017/02/cap-stack-hack-putting-bitx40-on-60.html
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!
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:
https://lensprojects.com/analog-history/
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.
More info on MIT's Building 20:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20
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:
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2011/07/early-days-of-sstv-by-copthorne.html
I note that the first article in QST appeared in the month of my birth, and the FCC decided to allow SSTV in the phone bands when I was 10 years old.
Here are some signals received yesterday at N2CQR:
