Even if you are relatively young, you can probably think back on what TV was like when you were a kid and then realize that TV today is completely different. Most people watch on-demand. Saturday morning cartoons are gone, and high-definition digital signals are the norm. Many of those changes are a direct result of the Internet, which, of course, changed just about everything. Ham radio is no different. The ham radio of today has only a hazy resemblance to the ham radio of the past. I should know. I’ve been a ham for 47 years.

You know the meme about “what people think I do?” You could easily do that for ham radio operators. (Oh wait, of course, someone has done it.) The perception that hams are using antique equipment and talking about their health problems all day is a stereotype. There are many hams, and while some of them use old gear and some of them might be a little obsessed with their doctor visits, that’s true for any group. It turns out there is no “typical” ham, but modern tech, globalization, and the Internet have all changed the hobby no matter what part of it you enjoy.

Radios

One of the biggest changes in the hobby has been in the radio end. Hams tend to use two kinds of gear: HF and VHF/UHF (that’s high frequency, very high frequency, and ultra-high frequency). HF gear is made to talk over long distances, while VHF/UHF gear is for talking around town. It used to be that a new radio was a luxury that many hams couldn’t afford. You made do with surplus gear or used equipment.

Globalization has made radios much less expensive, while technological advances have made them vastly more capable. It wasn’t long ago that a handy-talkie (what normal folks would call a walkie-talkie) would be a large purchase and not have many features. Import radios are now sophisticated, often using SDR technology, and so cheap that they are practically disposable. They are so cheap now that many hams have multiples that they issue to other hams during public service events.

Because these cheap ($20-$40) radios often use SDR, they can even be hacked. These radios aren’t typically the highest quality if you are used to repurposed commercial gear, but when you can replace the radio for $20, it hardly matters.

HF radios are a different story. Thanks to software-defined radio, superpowerful computers, and FPGAs, even relatively inexpensive HF radios have features that would have seemed like magic when I first got my license.

While some hams like to build gear or use simple or older gear, modern transceivers, like the IC-7300 from Icom shown here, have incredible RF filtering done in software, spectrum analyzers, and scopes built in. The 7300, by the way, isn’t considered a “top of the line” radio by any means. But it has features that would have been a dream on a state of the art unit before the advent of DSP.

Having these kind of tools changes how you operate. In the old days, you’d tune around to see if you could hear anyone. Now, glancing at the screen will show you all the signals on a band and how strong they are. Touch one, and you tune it in immediately. Digital noise reduction is very helpful these days with so much interference, and, of course, you can control the whole thing from a PC if you want to.

The receivers are exceptional compared to what even a high-end radio would offer a few decades ago. Specialized filters used to be expensive and limited in options. Now, you can design any filter you want on the fly and it will be nearly perfect.

Granted, these radios aren’t in the impulse buy category like the handheld radios. Still, you can find them new for around $1,000 and used for less. There are also other similar radios for much less. Just as you can buy imported handheld VHF and UHF radios, there are imported HF radios that put out a lower wattage (20 watts vs 100 watts is typical). These still have plenty of features, and you can get them for about half the cost of the name-brand 100W rigs. [K4OGO] has a video (see below) about several popular radios in that price range and you’ll notice that many of them have similar displays.

Digital Modes

Paradoxically, you might not need as hot a receiver, or as big of an antenna, or as much power as you might think. Hams have long known that voice communication is inefficient. Morse code could be the earliest form of digital radio communication, allowing a proficient operator to copy signals that would never make a voice contact. However, hams have also long used other digital modes, including TeleType, which is more convenient but less reliable than a good Morse code operator.

That changed with computer soundcards. Your computer can pull signals out of a hash that you would swear was nothing but noise. Modern protocols incorporate error detection and correction, retries, and sophisticated digital signal processing techniques to pull information from what appears to be nowhere.

What kind of sound card do you need? Almost any modern card will do it, but if you have the Icom IC-7300 pictured above, you don’t need one. It turns out, it is a sound card itself. When you plug it into a PC, it offers audio in and out for ham radio programs. It can even send IQ signals directly to the PC for common SDR programs to work with.

Some digital modes are conversational. You can use them like you might a radio-based chat room to talk to people you know or people you’ve just met. However, some modes are more specialized and optimized to make and confirm contact.

Computer Logging

There was a time when every ham had a log book — a notebook to write down contacts — and a stack of QSL cards. Operators would exchange cards in the mail to confirm contact with each other. Many of the cards were interesting, and collecting enough cards could earn an award (for example, working all 50 US states or over 100 foreign countries).

Things are different now. Many people use a computer to track their contacts. While you could just use a spreadsheet, there are many ways to log and — more importantly — share logs online.

The advantage is that when you make a contact and enter into the system, it can match your entry up with your partner’s entry and immediately confirm the contact. This isn’t perfect, because there are several systems people use, but it is possible to interoperate between them. No more waiting for the mail.

DX and Propagation

I mentioned that having a display of the entire ham band changes how you operate. But there is even more help out there. Many people enjoy working rare foreign stations or special event stations held at parks or historical locations. These days, if you hear a station like that on the air, you can report it on the Internet so other people can find them. In some cases, the operator will report themselves, even.

Suppose you want to make contact with someone in Kenya because you haven’t done it, and you are working towards an award that counts how many countries you’ve contacted. Instead of searching endlessly, you can simply watch the Internet for when a station from that country appears. Then turn on your radio, use the digital tuning to go exactly to their frequency, and try your luck.

Of course, radio propagation isn’t foolproof. But you can use beacons to determine how propagation is near you. There are many tools to manipulate the beacon data to better understand radio conditions. In fact, if you use digital modes or Morse code, you can find out who’s hearing you on the Internet, which can be very useful.

Why Not You?

Some old hams say the Internet is ruining ham radio. I say it is changing ham radio just like it has changed virtually everything else. Some of those changes aren’t that drastic anyway. For years, people chasing awards, trying to work long distances, or participating in contests have very short contacts. You typically would exchange your name, location, and how strong your signal is and then make way for the next person to make contact. The digital mode FT8 automates all that. It is true that it isn’t very personal, but those kinds of contacts were never personal to start with.

What’s more is that you don’t have to use any of this if you don’t want to. I operate a lot of Morse code with no mechanical assistance. If I hear a big pileup, I might go look at the computer to see who has been spotted on that frequency. But I don’t have to. I could figure it out the old-fashioned way.

Hams work with advanced signal processing software, satellites, moon bounce, support communities, design antennas, foster school education, work during disasters, and push the envelope on microwave communication. No matter what your interests, there’s something you’ll enjoy doing. For many years now, you don’t even have to pass a test for Morse code, so if you didn’t want to learn the code, you don’t have to.

In many ways, hams were the original hackers, and you might be surprised by how many hackers you know who are hams already. I don’t know what ham radio will look like in the year 2100, but I know it will be pushing the limits of technology, somehow.

If you want to deliver the maximum power to a load — say from a transmitter to an antenna — then both the source and the load need to have the same impedance. In much of the radio communication world, that impedance happens to be 50Ω. But in the real world, your antenna may not give you quite the match you hoped for. For that reason, many hams use antenna tuners. This is especially important for modern radios that tend to fold their power output back if the mismatch is too great to protect their circuitry from high voltage spikes. But a tuner has to be adjusted, and often, you have to put a signal out over the air to make the adjustments to match your antenna to your transmitter.

There are several common designs of antenna tuners, but they all rely on some set of adjustable capacitors and inductors. The operator keys the transmitter and adjusts the knobs looking for a dip in the SWR reading. Once you know the settings for a particular frequency, you can probably just dial it back in later, but if you change frequency by too much or your antenna changes, you may have to retune.

It is polite to turn down the power as much as possible, but to make the measurements, you have to send some signal out the antenna. Or do you?

Several methods have been used in the past to adjust antennas, ranging from grid dip meters to antenna analyzers. Of course, these instruments also send a signal to the antenna, but usually, they are tiny signals, unlike the main transmitter, which may have trouble going below a watt or even five watts.

New Gear

However, a recent piece of gear can make this task almost trivial: the vector network analyzer (VNA). Ok, so the VNA isn’t really that new, but until recently, they were quite expensive and unusual. Now, you can pick one up for nearly nothing in the form of the NanoVNA.

The VNA is, of course, a little transmitter that typically has a wide range coupled with a power detector. The transmitter can sweep a band, and the device can determine how much power goes forward and backward into the device under test. That allows it to calculate the SWR easily, among other parameters.

In Practice

This sounds good, but how does it work? Well, to find out, I took a long wire connected to an MFJ Versa Tuner II and fed the NanoVNA’s TX port to the tuner. With the tuner in bypass, the screen looked like the first image. It actually had a pretty low SWR near 14 MHz, but everywhere else was not going to work very well at all.

The next step was to switch the tuner into the circuit. Ideally, you could infinitely vary the inductor and both capacitors, but making roller inductors is a cost, so many tuners — including this one — have switches that select taps on the inductor, meaning you can only change it in fixed steps. That isn’t usually a problem, though, because you can adjust the capacitors to make up for it.

Since you aren’t transmitting, there’s no rush, and you can easily switch things around and turn knobs until you can find a null. If you were using the actual transmitter, you’d want to avoid switching the inductor “hot” because the switch contacts won’t appreciate any high-power RF.

I centered the frequency range around 7 MHz and found the lowest setting I could on the tuner. Then, I zoomed back out to the entire HF band. Not bad.

I went through and found null spots for all the ham bands. It was also possible to measure the SWR for bands I can’t transmit on (for example, 15 MHz, to listen to WWV).

Once I had jotted down all the settings, it was time to reconnect the transmitter. Well, technically, a transceiver — in this case, an Icom IC-7300. Even without transmitting, having the knobs adjusted correctly definitely helped with receiving, often strikingly so.

But Did It Really Work?

My first attempt was to use the frequency exactly where I had tuned before switching in the transmitter. As you’d expect, the transmitter saw a low SWR and had no issues, but changing frequencies was a little different.

The knobs on the tuner are not especially precise. Some high-end devices have multi-turn knobs with counters to help you get exactly back to some setting, but this tuner has no such thing. So when the dot on the knob is on, say, “2,” it is hard to know for sure if it is exactly where you had it last time it was in the same position.

However, you can get close. Changing frequencies and tuner settings would sometimes give me a great SWR, but sometimes it was a little high (never any more than, maybe, 1.5:1). A minor tweak of the two capacitors on the tuner would resolve it quite easily.

A quick CQ on 15 meters resulted in the map you can see from the reverse beacon network. The furthest away I was heard was a bit more than 1,800 miles away. Not bad for a fairly short wire hung over a tree. Subsequent testing on several bands resulted in many contacts across four continents in a few hours.

Takeaway

Do you need to use a VNA to tune? No, but it sure is handy. Sure, it generates a tiny signal, but nothing like your transmitter. I like tuning very quietly and precisely without risking the expensive final amplifiers in my station. A good tuner can load up almost anything, and while you won’t get the performance you would get out of a proper antenna, you can still get on the air and have a lot of fun.

Of course, the VNA can do other things too. It can characterize components and modules like filters. You can even use them as time domain reflectometers to troubleshoot cables. It is worth noting that while I took pictures of the VNA so you could see what it would look like, it is actually better to use one of several programs on your PC that can create graphs and data that would be easy to work with. For example, I often use this one.

Want more things to do with your VNA? You can even map antenna patterns with one.

These days, not only are oscilloscopes very common, but even a cheap instrument today would have been the envy of the world’s greatest labs not that long ago. But back in the day, the home experimenter basically had two choices: buy a surplus scope that a big company was getting rid of or build a Heathkit. [Radiotvphononut] bought an old Heathkit OL-1 scope at an estate sale and set about putting it back in service.

If you are used to a modern scope, you’ll be amazed at how simple a scope like this can be. A handful of tubes and a CRT is the bulk of it. Of course, the OL-1 is an analog scope with a 400 kHz bandwidth. It did, however, have two channels, which was a rarity at the time.

The OL-1 was sold for a few years up to 1956 and cost about $30 as a kit. There was a version with a larger screen (five whole inches) that cost an extra $40, so you can bet there were more OL-1s sold since $40 was a big ask in 1956. While they don’t seem like much today, you were probably the envy of the ham club in 1956 when you lugged this in for show and tell.

This is a long video, but it pays off at the end. Overall, this was a more capable scope than the $66 scope from 10 years earlier we looked at. Did you ever wonder how people visualized signals before the CRT? Funny, we did too.

[DTSS_Smudge] correctly intuits that if you are interested in an old Heathkit signal generator, you probably already know how to solder. So, in a recent video, he focused on the components he decided to update for safety and other reasons. Meanwhile, we get treated to a nice teardown of this iconic piece of test gear.

If you didn’t grow up in the 1960s, it seems strange that the device has a polarized line cord with one end connected to the chassis. But that used to be quite common, just like kids didn’t wear helmets on bikes in those days.

A lot of TVs were “hot chassis” back then, too. We were always taught to touch the chassis with the back of your hand first. That way, if you get a shock, the associated muscle contraction will pull your hand away from the electricity. Touching it normally will make you grip the offending chassis hard, and you probably won’t be able to let go until someone kindly pulls the plug or a fuse blows.

These signal generators were very common back in the day. A lot of Heathkit gear was very serviceable and more affordable than the commercial alternatives. In 1970, these cost about $32 as a kit or $60 already built. While $32 doesn’t sound like much, it is equivalent to $260 today, so not an impulse buy.

Some of the parts are simply irreplaceable. The variable capacitor would be tough to source since it is a special type. The coils would also be tough to find replacements, although you might have luck rewinding them if it were necessary.

We are spoiled today with so many cheap quality instruments available. However, there was something satisfying about building your own gear and it certainly helped if you ever had to fix it.

There was so much Heathkit gear around that even though they’ve been gone for years, you still see quite a few units in use. Not all of their gear had tubes, but some of our favorite ones did.

When you are troubleshooting, it is sometimes useful to disconnect a part of your circuit to see what happens. If your new PCB isn’t perfect, you might also need to add some extra wires or components — not that any of us will ever admit to doing that, of course. When ICs were in sockets, it was easy to do that. [MrSolderFix] shows his technique for lifting pins on SMD devices in the video below.

He doesn’t use anything exotic beyond a microscope. Just flux, a simple iron, and a scalpel blade. Oh, and very steady hands. The idea is to heat the joint, gently lift the pin with the blade, and wick away excess solder. If you do it right, you’ll be able to put the pin back down where it belongs later. He makes the sensible suggestion of covering the pad with a bit of tape if you want to be sure not to accidentally short it during testing. Or, you can bend the pin all the way back if you know you won’t want to restore it to its original position.

He does several IC pins, but then shows that you need a little different method for pins that are near corners so you don’t break the package. In some cases for small devices, it may work out better to simply remove them entirely, bend the pins as you want, and then reinstall the device.

A simple technique, but invaluable. You probably don’t have to have a microscope if you have eagle eyes or sufficient magnification, but the older you get, the more you need the microscope.

Needless to say, you can’t do this with BGA packages. SMD tools used to be exotic, but cheap soldering stations and fine-tipped irons have become the norm in hacker’s workshops.

It’s easy to use electricity — solar-generated or otherwise — to desalinate water. However, traditional systems require a steady source of power. Since solar panels don’t always produce electricity, these methods require some way to store or acquire power when the solar cells are in the dark or shaded. But MIT engineers have a fresh idea for solar-powered desalination plants: modify the workload to account for the amount of solar energy available.

This isn’t just a theory. They’ve tested community-sized prototypes in New Mexico for six months. The systems are made especially for desalinating brackish groundwater, which is accessible to more people than seawater. The goal is to bring potable water to areas where water supplies are challenging without requiring external power or batteries.

The process used is known as “flexible batch electrodialysis” and differs from the more common reverse osmosis method. Reverse osmosis, however, requires a steady power source as it uses pressure to pump water through a membrane. Electrodialysis is amenable to power fluctuations, and a model-based controller determines the optimal settings for the amount of energy available.

There are other ways to use the sun to remove salt from water. MIT has dabbled in that process, too, at a variety of different scales.

It is hard to imagine that much we built today will be used ten years from now, much less in a hundred. It is hard to make things that last through the ages, which is why we are fascinated with things like ancient pyramids in Mexico, Egypt, and China. However, even the oldest Egyptian pyramid is only about 5,000 years old. [Mark Piesing] at the BBC visited a site that is supposed to lock up nuclear waste for 100,000 years.

This particular project is in France, but there are apparently dozens of similar projects around the world. Locating these nuclear tombs is tricky. They need to be in a geologically stable area that won’t contaminate water. They also prefer areas already depleted of resources to lessen the chance someone will be digging nearby in the far future. You also need people to agree to have these facilities in their communities, which is probably the most difficult thing to find.

Burying anything 500 meters underground is a challenge. But we were interested in how you’d plan to keep the material safely away from people for 20 times longer than the pyramids have stood next to the Nile.  Anything could happen over that timescale, and it seems unlikely that you’ll have an organization that can last that long and stand watch over these dangerous vaults. If they poke around in these holes, future archeologists could deal with a very real cursed tomb.

Of course, the whole idea is controversial. But putting that aside, how would you design something to last 100,000 years and stay secure? Let us know in the comments. It would be good practice for that generation ship to Bernard’s Star.

We’ve seen that it is hard to keep a clock running for even 100 years. Already, 50-year-old computers seem incredibly antique. What will tech be like in 100,000 years?