Going Digital, Part I

There was a time in the not too distant long-back when I actually looked forward to getting on the air & playing radio contests. I'd keep up with what contest was on its way my direction & I'd figure out what I needed to know or do to play the contest right.
     I always took on the challenge of what many folks – except for them what's deeply into contests as a way of life – would call "minor league" or "off brand" contests. Like the Dutch PACC contest, which shows up in the second weekend in February. Nice quiet little contest with a simple exchange for DX stations, meaning anybody outside of the EU & across an ocean or something.
     Then I'd go for the SAC (Scandinavian Activity Contest), which runs two weekends, one for CW and the other for phone. Another nominally uncluttered contest that works out good for folks wanting to get closer to a "Worked All Norway" award. Especially trippy if you think you speak Norwegian or Danish. These folks will come back to you like a lost family member. In the local dialect.
     Back when there was a Soviet Union & gringo hams could count on very simple, quick turn around QSOs with Russian hams there was the so-called "MIR Contest." The fact that the word Russian word мир means both "world" and "peace" made that contest interesting. Hundreds of Russian & Soviet hams on the air with their fast CW turning contacts almost as fast in the contest as they did in non-contest ops. And maybe a year or so later a pile of QSL cards showed up in my bureau envelope.
     Ah, thems was the days, thems.
     Even after the fall of the Soviet hegemony (or it's transubstantiation into something considered less threatening by the gringo governments) there was enough contest activity to make life interesting out of former Eastern bloc countries.
     Like the YO contest. A chance to get "worked all provinces" from the Federaţia Română de Radioamatorism (the Romanian amateur radio club). Another nice, quiet contest with the opportunity to shoot for the various "worked all counties in Romania" awards. Thirty different stations.
     Didn't know there were that many counties in Romania, didja?
     I found out by leafing through a now much abused copy of a book published by the SSA. I also found a bunch of other awards for ham radio activity that were just too goofy to pass up. I haven't added any of them to the wall in a long time, but that first fleeting encounter with the diplomboken back near the peak of the last sunspot cycle (around 1985) was part of the contest scene too.
     But like all good things tied to the baseband technology of amateur radioism, the contest scene was up for changes. Some occurred while I was playing in the surf, other changes came later and the most recent changes have pretty much taken the fun out of what was, once I got used to it, an interesting way to spend a huge chunk of weekend time away from all other concerns than those most basic to human survival.
     Like outhouse breaks.

And that's pretty much where I spend contest weekends any more: sitting apart from the hobby and invested in more mundane and more social pursuits. Truth up, amateur radio contest just ain't no fun no more, G.
     Yeah, the reasons, at least in my view, are probably pretty much the carping of an old guy trying to figure out which button to push. But a huge pile of the reasons for contesting falling out of favor with me involve the absolute mechanization of the contest process.
     Where once it was a hand on a knob and a hand on a key or microphone, nowadays it's software interfaces with the radio that put the operator in the position of a phone-answering Tamil in an overseas, out-sourced technical support & help desk department.
     That and CW just ain't fun when it's 100 wpm for the contact exchange and two billion words per minute for the sign-off & cheerio.
     And that's the fault of computers too.

See, many years ago – like around the time I got my first ham licence, which would have been thirty-nine years ago – there was an article in one of the ham radio magazines about two guys going looking for this one guy in their neighborhood who seemed to have such a powerful station that he won all the DX contests.
     All of 'em.
     So these two guys go lookin' and eventually come upon a radio shack hidden in the sierra madre with a bunch of towers, huge antenna systems and a small building obviously containing all the equipment.
     By some quirk of fate or fault of the property owner the two guys gain access to the innards of the radio shack only to find a huge pile of radios connected to a CRAY computer, which computer is spitting out QSOs and rotating beams and aiming antennas with a frightening complexity and speed.
     The original computerized station.
     The story ends with the two intrepid breakers-and-enterers shaking their heads in disbelief. They can't understand how a person – someone who obviously put the station together and set it up to run automatically – could get involved in a hobby so deeply that the human element completely disappeared in the process.
     A sort of wonderment at the deist mindset applied to ham radio much as Darwinism got subjugated to philosophical economic modeling in Marxism. You know: like a divine being gets so deep into making stuff that it creates the entire universe, only to get bored with it at the moment of completion, and which deity then spends eternity sitting back in some celestial throne watching the shit go down.
     But I digress.
     As usual.

My first radio was a kit radio. I built it. The most it got plugged up to was a set of headphones, a key, an antenna and a power source. Everything else was done by use of fingers. The only digital stuff going on with it and me was the connection between my nervous system, my fingers and the radio's knobs and control surfaces.
     That's the way radio worked in 1969, the way it worked in 1957 (when Dad got me the Hallicrafters S38E) and up until about 1989 when I bought and built an Elecraft K2. Knobs, switches, plugs and cables and a true physical contact between the operator and the equipment.
     All that started to change at least two decades ago when ham radio manufacturers began to use digital processes in their radios. First came the frequency counter that displayed the operating frequency to within a few hundred Hertz. The various electronic paddle keyers that appeared a few years before that were just the beginning. Before long all the serious switching and modification of signals and signal paths fell under the control of various digital circuits, all connected to a few push buttons on the front of the radios.
     And then somebody thought "You know, we could have all that switch setting info appear on the back of the radio so the user could build an interface to run the radio even better."
     Like the marvelously fancy (and egregiously expensive) ELINT intercept radios that the CIA used, some of which radios actually were offered to the public, although I couldn't then and bare can now understand why.
     From there it was the intersection of two technologies that led directly to today's fancy-pants radios. The beginnings of the "personal computer" revolution, by which computer technology became economically accessible and functionally useful to the common schmuck in the shack spelled the end of the old manual, manipulative approach to radio design.

I have spent probably nine thousand dollars on ham radio gear over the past 30-odd years of playing around. Much of that money was scrimped and saved. Some of it was obviously diverted from the family coffer to pay for my own self-indulgent puttering. I am not the least bit reluctant to admit that or to point the finger of silliness at my own fuzzy face.
     One of the radios that I've bought in the past four years or so was billed on a couple websites as an "entry grade radio." This means that the radio was considered basic and basically worthwhile to someone just getting into the hobby. It had features that a beginner would find useful. It was easy to operate and it had sufficient power to do a beginner's style job on the air. And there were a few add-ons that made sense.
     And it had a hole on the back where many of the radios controls could be tied to a computer with the appropriate and easily available software.
     It had two VFOs, passband tuning, RIT, keyboard frequency entry, built-in transmit audio processing and, with the appropriate add-ons, it could be set up with digital processing of the audio signal to remove noise & heterodynes on a received signal.
     That's what they call an "entry grade radio" today.
     Compared to my "entry grade radio," the modern one is a dream station radio. At least it would have been to me back 39 years ago. And the today one costs about the same as a middle-ground one from that time, dollar for dollar.

All this computerization of the innards of the radios has played right into the computerization of the social fabric. "They" say that almost every home in the USA today has at least one computer in it. One PC per family, with many more families having two or more computers. There are three in my house that get daily use and, if you want me to count the stuff that's sitting in my office, Cid's office & the kids catastrophe masquerading as a bedroom, there are a total of six computers that anyone could use. Altogether – as in: including the computers that are sitting in closets waiting for a nice day – there are eight.
     And the radios in my office/shack are all hooked up to my main box of geeks.
     Two radios, each of which individually is accessible to and from my computer, that I can sit down and play contest on, were I of the sort who enjoys spending radio time at a keyboard.
     That is, after all, the only connection between radio contesting today and the radio itself: the computer.
     The computer logs the exchanges.
     It logs the frequency, the time & the contacted station's callsign.
     It keeps a list of multipliers and new countries or whatever.
     It will calculate an approximate final score.
     It notes and announces duplicate contacts, deleting them automatically if necessary.
     And on CW the computer decodes and encodes the contest exchange message.
     The computer does it all.
     I just have to sit back and pick a band – to which the radio gets switched by the computer control software – and run off the keyboard and monitor. Frequencies, times, whatever and whoever: it's all done inside the computer.
     And when I'm done with the contest I can email my results to the appropriate official to see how well I did or didn't in having the largest score.
     All of it.
     On the computer.

From here on out, my main problem with contesting no longer concerns the amount of time and bandwidth spent by contesters chasing DX or gathering sufficient points. My main problem is that computerized radios have led to computerized contacts which has led to computerized contesting, which has taken the fun out of it all together.
     If you spend any time listening to a CW contest these days you'll hear something very evident: speed. The CW speed some contesters run is ridiculous. Hearing an exchange at 30 or 40 wpm is not unusual. Hearing the sign-off at 80 or 100 wpm is very usual.
     "Burp-burp" followed by "brat-brat" and then on to the next contact.
     I hear this stuff and think that I'm out of the game. I don't want to have to mouse or keyboard my way through a spectrum display to look for contacts. I want to tune the radio to a signal, catch the operator's attention, get the exchange right & move on to the next spot on the dial I can find someone running the contest on.
     Although this sounds old-fashioned, it's the way I like to play radio.
     Talking to people.
     I don't consider keyboard-driven CW as CW. I could just as easily work contacts on PSK or RTTY as I could with a microphone in my mitt. I would rather push a switch and twist a knob to rotate the antenna than have the computer hear a call-sign, figure the location & turn the antenna automatically to that point in space where a straight-line path exists in the ionosphere between the far station and mine.
     At the same time it's easy for me to see in the computerization of ham radio the continuing lurch in the direction of religion versus hobby.
     An overarching concern with the latest doodad & how it will supposedly give me more QSOs per minute in a contest and assure my acquiring the DXCC certificate in the long run smacks too much of a fundamentalism that has nothing to do with returning to old values or age-old precepts. Such meticulous attention to unnecessary details seems obsessional, and hobbies being hobbies they're already obsessional enough.
     Remember my nine thousand dollar estimate?
     Can you imagine what that sum would be if I were truly obsessed with this stuff?
     I can.
     It ain't a pretty thought.
     I'd have a room full of radios that stopped being "entry level" six model numbers ago. I'd have a couple towers in the middle of a moderate sized acreage. I'd have radios, plural, hosed up to computers, plural, to spend even more time inside, immobile before a couple screens than out in the yard enjoying the fact that the sun still shines, the grass still grows and the cats keep coming to my door.
     I'd be a obsessive moron with no physical presence of friends or family and, despite all the certificates such a station would gather for me, I'd still be alone in a room with a bunch of electronics equipment.
     And I still wouldn't be able to copy CW faster than about 20 wpm on a good day, no matter how fast my computer could copy it for me.
     I wouldn't be having fun. At least not like I used to.

So rather than not have fun by running my entire station via a couple interconnected, web-connected & whatever-else-connected computers there'd be, I'm not having fun 'cause the computers – and those who seem driven to use them in contests – have taken the fun out of contesting for me.
     My only recourse is simple: I turn off the radios, get up out of my chair, go downstairs, pet the cats inside and out and then sit in the sunshine reading a book. After all, a good day above ground is a good thing & sunshine, even if it falls from the sky in rain drops is better than a dark room full of glowing junk any day.

I just would rather have a couple simple-minded, old-fashioned, personal-touch contests now and then. More than once a year at SKN at least.