SDR is Leading Ham Radio Into a New Era

What comes into your mind when you hear the words Ham Radio? Morse code, antennas and old school communication? For sure its not old school communication, at least not anymore! Lately, a new technology called SDR, "Software Defined Radio" is the rising star and will change Ham Radio fundamentally during the upcoming years.

In principal, a big part of the radio (that's a box containing a lot if capacitors, coils, transistors..etc) is replaced partially by our computers which allow us to flexible change the functionality without touching the soldering iron.

Three basic components

When talking about radios (or any communication device) we can break it down into three major components:

1. The RF Component
2. The Signal Processing Component
3. User Interface

The RF component transforms the high frequency signals, the signals which are received through your antenna into a "processing ready" format (and vice versa). The Signal Processing component will shape the signal as you want to have it, for example the demodulation of a filtered Morse code signal which you will then hear on your headphones. The third component is the User Interface - these are the knobs, the displays and the touch screens where you control the radio from.

SDR vs. the classic radio

Understanding the three fundamental concepts we can start to discover now the huge advantages of a SDR, Software defined radio. While in classic radios, all three components where combined into one box, SDR allows us to use them independent and define them flexible. There is no requirement anymore that the RF component has to be in the same geographical location as the User.

Modern technologies allow us to operate a radio from anywhere in the world. Of course, the merit here goes also to the fast Internet who is one of the enablers of this technology.

Discover a new radio experience

A good example is the WebSDR receiver, located at the Dutch university of Twente. On their webpage, more than 100 users can listens simultaneously to a several hundred kHz broad spectrum of selected ham bands. This unique application is just an outlook to what kind of applications will be possible in the future with SDR.

While the RF components are already quite mature, the majority of new applications will be seen in the Signal Processing and the User Interface component areas. Its definitely an exciting future and you should make sure to be a part of it!