AmateurRadio.com

Interesting thread on the softrock40 email list about how easy it is these days to get a good sense of how well your station and the ionosphere are performing in an almost ‘hands-free’ way.

Increasingly modes like WSPR and tools like SDR have enabled us to let the radio do its thing and in a short amount of time access detailed logs of our successes – where we were heard. The softrock40ers were using this approach to compare their SDR rigs performance to other sets.

Rob KL7NA joined in the conversation. He pointed to his recent paper on what he calls ‘Robotic radio‘ that he presented to the DCC meeting in Vancouver WA recently.

Your radio is doing what the operator used to do automatically, and as you have been finding out, it is really fun to horse race different software demodulators, receivers and antennas, and radio locations this way.  I am trying to promote it as a way for our youth to get into amateur radio.  They seem to be very enamored by robotics.

Rob’s paper is full of interesting ideas and he lists the building blocks of Robotic radio… hardware, software and networks. He introduces his open source project CW Robot which is still in alpha and explains the thinking behind it.

This looks like a very rewarding place to play and discover – and there’s already a road map.