By Rich Moseson, W2VU
Editor, CQ

Happy New Year! Now that it's 2003, we can safely say that we've managed to bring amateur radio into the 21st century, intact, healthy and moving forward. We can't necessarily say as much for each individual ham, of course -- particularly when it comes to moving forward. All too many of us are all too happy to stick with the familiar and the comfortable, using radios that are 20+ years old and modes that are 50+ years old without taking much individual interest in helping promote future technology.

Now before you start sending me nasty letters saying that I'm anti-CW (I'm not), you should know that the 50+ year old mode I'm thinking of is single sideband phone. That's right. According to the late Bill Orr, W6SAI, in his wonderful history of ham radio in the 50th Anniversary issue of CQ (January, 1995), SSB was actually developed in the early 1930s, and was introduced to the ham radio world at large in 1948, once suitable filters were developed and transmitters and receivers (no transceivers then!) were made stable enough to handle SSB.

Bill wrote that hams were slow to accept SSB. That’s an understatement. When I became a ham in 1970, there were still hundreds and hundreds of AM signals on the HF bands, and no shortage of people to contact if you came into the ham world with a CW/AM rig, like my original Hallicrafters HT-40 transmitter (bought from a fellow ham who'd just upgraded to his first SSB rig). There were also still plenty of people making fun of sideband’s “Donald Duck” sound on an AM receiver. It wasn't until the end of the 1970s that SSB truly became the dominant HF voice mode -- 30 years after it was introduced.

Frankly, in the intervening decades, there has been little to no additional development of amateur HF communications technology. Morse code still uses CW (remember, it started out as spark); voice still uses SSB, with dribs and drabs of AM and FM; even PSK-31 and its cousins are really just refinements of Baudot RTTY, another "revolutionary" mode when it was introduced to hams at about the same time as SSB, in 1947. Meanwhile, commercial radio technology has been advancing at a staggering pace over the past ten years.

Just as HF communication was revolutionized in the 1930s and 40s by the introduction of SSB and radioteletype, a new revolution is under way right now, a digital revolution. In the world of international shortwave broadcasting, engineers are hard at work on something called IBOC, an acronym for "In-Band, On-Channel" digital transmission. In plain English, it's a system for superimposing a digital audio signal – without interference – on top of an analog signal to permit listeners to hear their station regardless of whether they're using an analog or a digital receiver.

So far, though, amateur radio seems to be on the sidelines as we continue to hold fast to our analog technologies, particularly on HF. To be sure, computers have become an essential part of most HF ham shacks, whether used for logging, station and antenna control, internet callsign lookups (so a station on the other side of the world can contact me for the first time and say "Hi, Rich," before I've had a chance to tell him my name), or even for communication via the HF digital modes. But the digital "signals" coming out of our computers are translated into analog audio tones before entering our transmitters. The real digital revolution will come when the analog audio coming into our radios’ mic jacks gets turned into digital bitstreams riding waves of RF out to our antennas. 

This revolution is already here, of course, outside the world of amateur radio. In addition to IBOC mentioned above, as Contributing Editor Jeff Reinhardt, AA6JR, explains in his "Magic in the Sky" column this month, the VHF+ bands are quickly filling up with true digital signals, from digital cell-phones to spread-spectrum cordless phones and even digital garage-door openers. Jeff believes, as we do, that true digital communications on the amateur bands will not go far unless there is agreement -- soon -- among the manufacturers on technical standards that allow all digital radios to communicate with each other.

Right now, amateur manufacturers are taking baby steps into the digital arena. Alinco was first off the block with its DJ-596 digital handheld introduced in late 2001 (and reviewed in the June 2002 CQ). ICOM introduced its D-Star digital system and associated radios at Dayton last year, but the radios have yet to reach the US market. Big problem: As far as we can tell, the radios won't talk to each other. This is why, as Jeff explains in more detail, we need to agree on standards, and we need to do it before various manufacturers all go off in different directions, building mutually-incompatible radios.

But there's another issue: All the digital work so far has been on VHF and UHF. Ham radio's major attraction through the years has been, and still is, working DX on the HF bands. Unless and until the digital revolution makes its way to HF, it will remain on the periphery of amateur radio. For digital audio and spread-spectrum to really take hold in the ham world, we must find ways to make them work on HF.

This is a challenge on which digitally and technically-oriented hams can take a lead. In the eyes of most folks developing this technology, HF is "so yesterday." Well, we've been down this road before, nearly a century ago, tossed the "useless" HF bands while the important commercial stuff happened above 200 meters. We have another opportunity to re-invent HF radio. How does QSB affect digital communications? What will happen if we plug the output of an 802.11 wireless computer network into an HF transceiver and link to other hams' wireless networks on the other side of the ocean of your choice? Without the internet. Can we compress a wideband signal into HF-friendly bandwidths? The list of challenges is endless ... so is the list of opportunities.

There is a difference, though. The early 20th century was a time of innovations by individuals -- lone inventors turning ideas into reality, then finding a way to market them. Ham radio grew up in this tradition and continued it well into the latter half of the century, building satellites and computers in garages and basements. But the day of the individual innovator in technology is largely gone now. The technology is so complex that teams of people are needed to plan, design and build new products, especially products that represent a quantum leap forward. The basement tinkerer is not going to bring us the next chapter of the telecommunications revolution. But that doesn't mean we hams have to abandon development of new technology.

The internet (not to mention radio) gives us the means to conduct group research simultaneously in many different places, or to work in a coordinated manner on different aspects of a project. This is the concept behind the SETILeague's Project Argus, in which many listeners/radio-astronomers around the world – a large number of whom will likely be hams – will feed information and observations to a central point where it will be analyzed by trained scientists. The dispersed group theory was also used by AMSAT in building OSCAR-40. A small core group designed the satellite and its systems, then specific parts of the project are parceled out to groups of hams all over the world. The finished pieces came back to a central location, where they were integrated and assembled into the complete package.

There’s one essential ingredient missing in this picture, though, if you’re going to expand the concept beyond either single-goal projects (Project Argus) or one-of-a-kind product assemblies (AO-40). That missing ingredient is the amateur radio manufacturers. One example: the very creative folks at TAPR, Tucson Amateur Packet Radio, have already developed both spread-spectrum and software-defined ham rigs. But they have no tie-in with any of the major manufacturers, so their designs sit with a few prototypes built, but nothing even approaching wide acceptance and use.

Fact: As a group, we hams don’t build our own radios anymore.

Another fact: This is nothing new.

Hams have built gear only when it was the only option. Over the past 60-70 years, as soon as commercially-built gear has become available, patterns have switched from building to buying. If we want to continue to be involved in developing and refining technology that is going to be used, we must team up with the people who build our radios. This goes beyond telling the manufacturers what we want in their next generation of transceiver, to sharing knowledge and experimental results.

There has always been some level of suspicion by hams toward manufacturers (“They only want to make money!” This is America, folks, a capitalist society. Making money by making quality products is supposed to be good.). We need to build a new relationship between hams, ham organizations, and ham manufacturers, one of mutual trust instead of suspicion. It may take some work to build and maintain that relationship, but it is a necessary one – we all need each other equally in our little world (which, by the way, isn’t really so little – by one estimate, the amateur radio industry overall generates annual sales of well over $100 million. As I’ve said many times before, not bad for a “dying” hobby.).

Example: In Japan, ICOM is working with the JARL (Japan’s national ham organization) to develop its “D-Star” digital network. The company benefits by getting real-world field testing of its system before going into large-scale production. Japanese hams benefit by getting a state-of-the art digital repeater network in exchange for their help in creating the system, and JARL benefits by being perceived as a leader in amateur radio digital technology.

In the D-Star example, a manufacturer has approached hams through their national organization and the results have translated directly into new products for the amateur market. This manufacturer-driven approach is the opposite of the “techie-driven” approach generally taken in the US and exemplified by the TAPR and AMSAT models described above. It is an approach that should be given serious consideration here by the manufacturers, the ARRL, and technically-minded hams as a new model for bringing advanced technology into amateur radio. We will do whatever we can to help facilitate it, one bit at a time.