Foundations of Amateur Radio

The other day I was playing around with RDS, or Radio Data System, it's a digital signal that's often embedded in a commercial broadcast FM transmission. Among other things it contains information about the station, its content, frequencies and potentially other useful information, such as traffic alerts.

If you recall I've been working on 50 things to do with a Software Defined Radio and decoding RDS is one of those things. The decoding effort aside, I imagined a screen where you could see the RDS information, in real-time, as it was being transmitted by all the local FM broadcast stations. You'd see what music each station was playing, what their local clock thought the time was, how much they transmit other data and what they might do for emergencies, like say a Tropical Cyclone heading this way.

It occurred to me that this would be an example of a fundamental difference between a traditional radio and a Software Defined Radio or SDR. Specifically, we're taught that you tune a radio to a frequency, it demodulates or decodes what's there and plays the sound, or digital information, or whatever is being transmitted, on that frequency. If you want to hear something else, you need to change frequency and the radio decodes that new frequency.

If you have multiple channels to choose from, there are ways to automatically switch frequency, one after the other. One of my friends recently discovered an old scanner in a box and according to the specifications, it can scan 20 stations per second. If all 1,000 stations are programmed, it takes 50 seconds to scan them all. A lot can happen in that time.

The traditional solution is having more radios. Ideally you'd have one for every frequency you care about. Cost aside, logistically this is not fun. Imagine having to power a thousand radios, or find the one where the volume isn't right, or even find space for them, or antennas.

In the SDR world that's not quite how it works.

Instead of tuning to one frequency, you essentially tune to a range of frequencies and then, using software, decode one or more of those frequencies, at the same time.

Listening to multiple broadcast FM stations like that might not make a whole lot of sense, but what about decoding RDS, or listening to aviation frequencies, or local amateur radio repeaters, or multiple digital modes?

While that might sound far fetched, a $50 RTL-SDR dongle can manage 2.5 MHz of bandwidth over USB, by comparison, my $1,000 Yaesu FT-857d can receive all of 200 kHz in Wideband FM mode, and only whilst tuned to the broadcast band frequencies. In normal AM or FM mode it's 10 kHz, so you'd need 250 of them to listen to the same frequency range.

Again, just so we're clear, in analogue radio you need to change frequency to decode a different signal. In SDR you can simultaneously decode as many signals as resources permit.

For example, I can make a simple GNU Radio flowgraph, a little program, that accepts a command line setting, in GNU Radio it's called a parameter block, and run it with a frequency I'm interested in. Then I can run another copy of the same program with a different frequency. Rinse and repeat and I have as many receivers as I need.

While we're at it, you don't need to run the same program multiple times, you can run an FM decoder, a RTTY decoder, an AM decoder, all at the same time, as long as the frequencies you're looking at fit inside the bandwidth of the receiver you're playing with.

Just so we're clear, this is one receiver, one antenna, one power supply, with as many decoders as resources allow.

In other words, these two methods, analogue and SDR, are not the same.

Am I glossing over things? Sure. With such a wide bandwidth comes susceptibility to interference and signal overload, also the RTL-SDR dongle doesn't transmit, although, in 2014 Ismo OH2FTG managed to change the centre frequency of his dongle 300 times per second, causing the on board oscillator to leak in a controlled manner, making a Frequency Shift Keyed or FSK transmission. Yes, I know, that's not quite up to the standard of a transmission coming from an 857d.

You'll also need a computer, which you don't need to run an analogue radio, though truth be told, an analogue radio from the last couple of decades is pretty much a computer anyway. You can likely get away with a Raspberry Pi to process the data coming from an RTL-SDR dongle, so another $5, and yes, you'll need a monitor, keyboard, and a power supply.

The point I'm making is that these two methods are not the same and in the evolving world of amateur radio, there's space for both.

It also means that once you have this infrastructure, you can start experimenting with new radio technologies and approaches.

Will it make my 857d and its siblings obsolete? Perhaps, but I doubt it. There's still plenty of valve radios going around, not to mention the spark gap transmitter at Grimeton in Sweden. In other words, this is growing the hobby, which ultimately is why I'm here.

I will mention that it's not all hot cocoa and cookies. I've spent the past two days attempting to figure out why my very simple AM decoder isn't actually playing back the local ATIS or Automatic Terminal Information Service and why MacOS SDR applications don't include SoapySDR support, because of course they don't. Oh, yeah, I'm still trying to get my Proxmox server guest audio to work. I'm sharing this to make sure that you understand, that just like creating your own circuit board design and building it, there's plenty of experimentation to be done, problems to solve and challenges to meet, ultimately we're playing at the bleeding edge, at least it's not with sharp or hot implements.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB