[AMRadio] "Have you ever tried SDR?"

[manualman at juno.com]

There are probably many more amateurs who enjoy the virtues of
plug-and-play and SDR-type radios because it gets them to do what they
want to do - play radio and make contacts. They have no interest in
constantly diddling with knobs, watching multiple meters, venting
periodic smoke, and screwing around at the workbench for endless hours
trying to make something work for more then an hour. Great AM listening
and great AM transmitted audio can be had with the majority of these
modern radios. If your hobby goal in life is to hold a soldering iron in
your hand for hours every day, more power to you, but I prefer the ease
of getting on the air quickly and making contacts when ever I want
without the constant diddling with knobs and meters and smoke.

Change is good and refreshing; wallowing in how it was back in the "good
old days" is never a healthy exercise - "you can never really go back and
repeat the past".

Pete, wa2cwa


On Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:39:23 -0700 (PDT) CL in NC <mjcal77 at yahoo.com>
writes:
> This question was asked in a comment.  I have, and found it to be 
> rather boring.  Sure, there is a lot of things you can do on RCV 
> with all the displays and bandscopes, I'm impressed that it can, 
> with the right software, decode every CW and data transmission from 
> 14.0 to 14.1 and display them all at once on  the screen.  But, as a 
> person who still likes to do 'radio', if I just discovered Amateur 
> Radio and this was my only option, I would not be interested.  I'm 
> thankful SDR's and computer based comm has not covered us like a 
> virus so far, even though the ARRL seems to hope it will.  Hopefully 
> when this new generation of hams gets bored with hamming as  just 
> another 'app' to load into their computer, they might rediscover the 
> history and pick up where the passing breed left off, keeping legacy 
> gear running, enjoying radio communications the way it was created.
> 
> Charlie, W4MEC in NC