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Foundations of Amateur Radio

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What if the Radio Spectrum was a data souce?

Posted: 27 May 2017 10:00 AM PDT


Foundations of Amateur Radio

The evolution of Amateur Radio is a constantly changing landscape. I've
previously described the transition from spark-gap to surface-mount and the
ongoing progression of inventiveness that brings this amazing hobby
together with the leading edge of science and technology.

If you think of software defined radio as a linear increment on the radio
scale you'll end up where we see some of the manufacturers today are
placing their bets. You'll find a radio that has knobs and buttons like a
traditional radio, but behind the scenes there is a computer and a new way
of accessing the radio spectrum.

A little further along the scale is the proverbial black-box, often with a
single button to power it on, a few connectors for antennas and a network
connection to get information to a computer. The software on the computer
often attempts to resemble a traditional radio with similar controls and
the combination of the box and the computer with the software running makes
for an Amateur station.

If you have no rules for how the user must interact with the radio, you
might come up with interactive waterfall charts that display the radio
spectrum as a graph, showing frequency along the horizontal axis, time
across the vertical axis and colour as a measure of signal strength.

Each of these experiences are attempting to achieve the same purpose,
making the radio spectrum available to the station operator.

If you completely decouple the concept of radio from this and look at the
spectrum as a source of data, then processing that data, often in
real-time, becomes less constrained by the limits of our current
perceptions of how a radio works and moves into the realm of data science.

To give you a concrete example, if you've scanned a photo on your computer
and are confronted by little dots of dust, there is software available to
remove that dust and re-create the image in much the same way as the
original might have been. The process is called noise reduction. That same
process could also be used to process radio spectrum, or audio.

There are many concepts that exist outside radio that can be used in this
new world. You could do live analysis of the bands, determine which signal
had the best chance of getting to the intended recipient, you could decode
information spread across multiple bands, with bandwidth use that could be
measured in gigahertz, rather than kilohertz.

With the limits of your mind as the only barrier, what other inventions
might be arriving at our doorsteps in the near future?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB
This posting includes a media file:
http://podcasts.itmaze.com.au/founda...teur-radio.mp3