I'm only guessing the date, but perhaps, sometime in the 1970s -- a portion of home brew and certainly the professional amateur radio industry pursued high dynamic range as the be-all, end-all for receivers.
Like most – I appreciate a sublimely quiet, high dynamic range receiver; especially on contest weekends. Imagine our “ideal receiver” -- one that that easily detects 2 or more desired signals with an amplitude difference of 90 or 100 dB with ultra low distortion. Then too, our perfect receiver provides ball-busting immunity to the spurious responses produced by the nonlinear interaction of multiple strong signals coming into our antenna with no sweat. Ooh la la .
We’re talking about amateur radio contest-grade receivers. You generally have to run lots more current, high amplitude local oscillators, spend more money on parts -- and perhaps apply more complex circuits to get towards our perfect, idealized receiver if you home brew this stuff. Will the pursuit of high dynamic range receivers help our analog-biased home brew hobby survive a little bit longer? Perhaps for some.
In Canada, from surveys and also from viewing the sea of grey-haired club Hams milling around at the Ham Fest / radio flea markets, the largest demographic are those Hams aged 60-80. Many of these folks still like CW, although the younger Hams don’t. It seems that the youngsters prefer voice modulation modes, plus they apparently favor battery powered, mobile rigs. All these points might prove good goals for home brew designers who hope to attract younger Hams into home brew.
A significant portion of the ‘old-timers’ are inactive – some haven’t fired up their rig(s) for decades. Not even on 2 meters.
I’ve chatted with a few of these ‘nearly, or totally silent folks’ (who still identify as Hams and come to larger amateur radio gatherings for social contact, community and to reminisce ), Why are they silent? The answer seems complex. Partly, it was the Internet which arrived here locally in 1995. Then perhaps -- smart phones, changing tastes, changing family-life priorities, home & yard downsizing, health concerns, the digital electronics age, plus ‘tens of billions or so’ competing leisure activities may have contributed to these folks giving up operating their radio sets. What about home brew? -- I’ve got no idea. All of this and more?
With emails and conversations, some entry-level analog-biased home brewers feel intimated by high performance, contest grade projects, or advanced test procedures. Not everyone wants to go in whole hog and learn stuff like small signal analysis, or C programming, how to solve complex equations in Python, or to measure noise figure
Newcomers face more practical tasks like finding truly knowledgeable, trustworthy Elmers & sourcing affordable parts in their country. Basic skills like soldering, how to make circuit boards and understanding how to wind transformers are all skills they need to learn. As with every other hobby, they must navigate through abundant online misinformation, big meanies, and hucksters.
At 1 time the Ham philosophy to just make do with surplus or cheap gear served us well. Like most hobbies, this morphed into consumerism -- better, faster, newer, more, more, more. Now, in the digital age – some potential builders feel even more like a fish out of water.
Further, the asynchronous nature or automation of Ham radio has put off a few people.... I recall 1 recent, very snarky email in particular; “While I slept for about 8 hours, 15 stations heard my beacon. Yippee! Boy howdy, has Ham radio ever gotten exciting!!!”
Maybe synchronous communication - actual rag chews on home brew gear will provide us something to talk about?!
For some older builders, having fun, re-purposing and being thrifty were key reasons they liked home brew and even Ham Radio in general. How do we reignite the home brew passion in those turned dispassionate, ‘silent’ 60-80 year olds? Perhaps it's a lost cause? Further, how do we recruit a few younger Hams into building some old-style analog-biased radio gear? What about the recruitment of bored baby boomers into amateur radio in general?
For ‘silent’ older Hams, I conjecture that complex rigs, or projects that require them to learn to compile code into a hex file and/or write some lines of code won’t likely help recruit them back into home brew radio.
Personally knowing about presbyopia first hand, should; or how will they learn how to build with SMD parts as certain leaded parts become expensive, hard to find, or bootleg?
These are topics perhaps the home brew community might think about.
On the other hand – cheap, powerful test equipment lies abundant. For example, low cost, hobby-grade vector network analyzers. Test equipment wise – it’s never been a better time to do home brew radio.
Perhaps simplicity,
fun and thrift for newcomers, or re-comers will once again serve
analog-biased home brew for a few more years?
With a simple, but good receivers, third order intercept point products normally lie below the receiver noise floor during casual listening. If the front end gets overloaded and pushes the receiver into non-linear operation, perhaps they might switch on an attenuator, or turn a potentiometer to hopefully re-establish linear function – or just have to cope. It’s not the end of the world. Having fun and receiver performance are not always related.
Am I active on the amateur bands??
Am I having fun ??
Might be the best 2 metrics to embrace. Who knows? Perhaps, I’ve got it wrong and demographics and technological advancements totally determines the fate of analog-biased home brew radio? Perhaps like the horse and buggy, amateur radio analog-biased home brew’s fate is sealed.
Simple, but good gear
Emphasize and teach quality basic measurement techniques
Thrift
Have fun
Learn at your own pace
Communicate
These 6 above bold themes will inform Popcorn Electronics video content going forward.
We’ve got a lot of newly or ‘newish’ retired boomers with time on their hands. Some of them might enjoy making some home brew analog radio gear. Kits are also an option.
Best!
here here
ReplyDeleteHello Todd! I have been thinking about the same things. As you know there is a lot of magic in using gear that you have built yourself. And it is still possible to do this. But I think the builder has to make some choices: Building it yourself might -- as you say -- require you to move away from the perfection, bells and whistles of the modern ICOM 7300 style rigs while embracing the simple functioning of analog rigs. Farhan was thinking of this three years ago:
Delete"So here we are, talking analog radios in 2022. Here is the memo : The analog never died. The world is analog all the way, until you descend into Quantum madness. The antennas are analog, Maxwell died a content, analog man. Our radios, ultimately, are analog machines and we are all analog beasts too. Amateur Radio technology has evolved into the digital domain. However, it has only made it easier for us to do analog with computers to simulate and print our circuits. So, it’s time to bid good bye to our Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and build an Analog Radio for ourselves. So let’s see what we can achieve in hindsight, a return to our native land and a rethink of our approaches. The radio is called Daylight Again, a nod to being back at the FDIM in 2022 after a gap of two years. It is named after the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s song that had been humming all the time while put this radio together, emerging after 2 years of lockdown. This radio that took two days to come together, no actually two years! That’s: parts of it got built and stowed away, thoughts were struck in the shower, questions popped up during early morning cycle rides and notes and circuits were scribbled in the notebook. I must take the first of many diversion here: I hope you all maintain a notebook. Write down the date and whatever you thought or did on the bench and the result. Nothing is trivial enough to leave out. Wisdom comes to those who write notes. I started to build this on Saturday the 14th May and I checked into the local SSB net on Monday morning, the 16th May 2022. Back to the radio. What can an analog radio do that will appeal to us homebrewers?"
More to follow. 73 Bill Hi7/N2CQR
Todd, there's a lot to agree with in your post. Although I want to provide some counter evidence regarding younger hams not getting into CW. Granted, this is at best anecdata, but in following SOTA/POTA ops (specifically the content of ops on YouTube) there are younger adults getting into CW, because it's the most efficient mode for portable HF ops. K6ARK, KM4CFT, SOTA+, N6ARA, KI7QCF (who is *addicted*), W4ARB, to name some that I'm familiar with. For the first time in a long time, I'm quite confident that this aspect of our hobby will carry on.
ReplyDeleteAs for the main thrust of your post, I completely agree about your sense of priorities in the home building community. There is a very satisfying sense of autistic pleasure in chasing the ultimate receiver figures of merit, but that's completely orthogonal to our sense of "fun", which also should be a very large factor in what we do. Otherwise, what's the point? If chasing the perfect receiver is your idea of fun, then excellent, have at it. For most people, it's not. Being able to make something work that you created with your own hand, tweaked with your own mind, is what's interesting and exciting to us homebuilders. Being able to build upon and extend previously hard-won skills in RF design is also very satisfying.
As they say on Ham Radio Workbench, ham radio is a hobby of 1000 hobbies, and there's enough room for everyone. However, those who turn their noses up at the less-than-ideal receivers do a disservice to our hobby. None of us are born knowing how to be a master at a certain skill, and there has to be a progression ladder that will keep us all engaged. Some of us will only get a little way up the ladder, and only a few will ascend to the top. That's ok!
Thanks again for the interesting blogging! 73 DE NT7S