August 2010

A Ham’s Lament
By Barry Manz, Contributing Editor, MPD

When I was 13 (a long time ago), I was fascinated by the possibility of communicating without wires with a transmitter and receiver and a simple wire antenna. I listened to my little Toshiba “shortwave radio”, picking out amateur AM signals among the international broadcasts, radioteletype, and noise. I was hooked, and built my first couple of “rigs” and too many antennas to count, but ultimately graduated to an assortment of (mostly Japanese-made) transceivers, spending my time mostly on CW -- still fascinated by the ability to communicate with other people thousands of miles away with only a few watts or less.

Thanks to advances in analog, digital, RF and microwave hardware as well as software, communicating without wires today is something people just take for granted, which is awesome in every respect but one: a widespread lack of knowledge and interest about the incredible complexity required to make it happen, the core functionality of which is a radio. Convincing a 13-year-old today that communicating without wires is “really cool” is a lot more difficult today, when anyone can do it with the palm-sized miracle in his or her pocket, and having a conversation with nearly anyone is possible on the Web.

Proof of that fact lies in the numbers. In 1997, the number of radio amateurs in the US was 678,473 and was 692,360 as of August 1, according to the Web site dxzone.com -- an increase of 13,887 about 2% in 13 years. In addition, the average age of radio amateurs increases every year, which indicates that since hams rarely cancel their licenses fewer and fewer young people are joining the ranks. These figures are not unique to the US, and are comparable to those in other “rich” countries. It’s a safe assumption that the number of radio amateurs would actually have declined if the FCC had not made it substantially easier and appealing to obtain a license by eliminating the code test and expanding operating privileges to lower license classes.

It’s interesting to note that in some developing countries the number of hams is growing, no doubt owing to an increase in personal freedom and an interest in technology fostered by computers, mobile phones, and the Web. In China, where radio theory is a part of the school curriculum, the ranks of the amateur community are in rapid ascent. There are at least 90,000 hams in the country, according to the Chinese Radio Sports Association that oversees licensing for hobbyists there, and has been growing at a high rate. One 15-year-old member of the Sunny Radio Club was quoted in a Reuters article as saying that “I can get hold of people from far away with just a simple antenna. It’s different from using the Internet because you rely on other people.”

I have no doubt that having read this far most people would say that time and technology march on and ham radio is “just so yesterday,” and from a practical sense they’d be right. But in terms of national technological, educational, and economic competitiveness, they could not be more off the mark. The core technology driving every wireless device is RF and microwave technology and historically many or even most engineers first became interested in field and waves via amateur radio. As amateur ranks decline, it’s likely that so too will the number of microwave engineering graduates, shrinking the talent pool, with highly undesirable consequences.

Thoughts on “Antennagate”
It seems like the only time RF and microwave technology gets media coverage is when it’s being blamed for some malady, real, supposed, or imagined, of which Apple’s iPhone 4 debacle is the latest example. From a PR standpoint, The Fruit Company’s response to the almost immediate explosion of irate users was generally handled a lot like BP’s response to pouring millions of gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. That is, with lots of arrogance, telling owners not to “hold it like this” (the so-called death grip), blaming an irrelevant software-based overstatement of signal strength, offering a Band Aid fix, and ultimately pointing fingers at competitive products that “have the same problem.”

Of course, we all know that if you put an antenna inside a phone the signal will be attenuated when a hand covers it, and thus the problem affects every phone with an internal antenna to at least some degree. However, the problem is “The Hole” that allows hapless users to connect the phone’s two antennas with a finger, thus creating one big one that doesn’t work. It’s something that you wouldn’t expect from the company that reinvented the media player, created the first (and arguably still best) mobile phone user interface, has some of the world’s most talented engineers, and (like all phone manufacturers) spends huge amounts of time and money making sure a new phone works before it hits the streets.

Actually, maybe they could use some more RF and microwave engineers.
Barry Manz can be reached at manzcom@gmail.com.

Barry Manz
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