In this letter to the editor, the author comments on Ira Wilner’s reader letter, “For DX With SDRs, It’s Not the Same As It Was.” Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email [email protected].
There are many times when I, myself, can identify with the meme of “old man yells at cloud,” but Ira Wilner’s letter about software-defined radios takes the cake!
Here’s a guy lamenting at how people with SDRs have it easier than he did. And because of that, SDRs are — somehow — damaging the hobby of long-distance listening.
I think he misses the point that making the hobby a little easier invites more new blood. “Easier” doesn’t necessarily equate to “easy,” and yet he refers to SDR users as “lazy.”
The tools themselves may be different, but what Mr. Wilner might not realize is that the basic capabilities a general listener has in his or her toolbox is now a miniature equivalent to what professional signals intelligence listeners have had for decades: side-slope displays with waterfalls, wideband recording capabilities and 1.7 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth.
[Related: “SDRs Proved Naysayers Wrong”]
Mount a half decent low-noise/high-gain antenna — and maybe use some preselection filtering — as well as some isolation from computer noise and other challenging sources of QRM, and there you have what used to take up racks of equipment in an average field station.
Ok, so an RTL-SDR is nowhere near the specs of a Watkins-Johnson, I get that. The average RTL-SDR has a high enough noise floor that makes it questionable as a traditional high-quality DX machine. But you’re also paying around $50 USD for a device as opposed to $50k. I’m just throwing a number out there for a good, used, rack-mounted WJ and what signal processing might cost these days.
SDR technology itself isn’t even new. Software-defined and zero-IF radios in general have been in technological advancement since at least the 1970s. Today’s SDR just make these capabilities a lot more accessible and a whole lot more interesting to the entry-level novice — bringing in younger people to the magic of radio.
And isn’t that the whole point?
The radio listening hobby has been in a slow death march since just after the turn of the millennium. I even questioned at one point that with streaming so accessible and prevalent if those born today and onward might even know what a radio is. That is, until the recent influx of cheap Chinese portable receivers and SDRs. Couple this with young people seeing what can be done on social media and they are now becoming interested again — not just with AM broadcast-band DXing, but in all facets of the hobby.
As these devices become more capable and accessible, the chances drastically increase that radio, and by extension the radio hobby, will survive!
Denigrating those people by calling them “lazy” instead of encouraging them with new technology is what’s damaging the hobby.
— Mark J. Fine, Remington, Va.
[Related: “Meet the Hobbyists Behind Today’s Smartest Radios”]
