Issue #44: Copycats Stomp on Ham Radio Innovation

Who, exactly, has got locked out? Sohelp. And let's get beyond D star....

 

Since I was not familiar with that book, I had to look it up a read a synopsis about it. The progression that it talks about with regards to small innovators eventually disrupting and overtaking the incumbents is precisely what I thought would happen with amateur radio SDR technology once it gained some steam in the early to mid 2000's. At that time I was picturing that the progression of that disruption to the 'incumbents' would play out over the course of 10 years or so. Sure there has been some pretty significant gains there by a few innovators, but nowhere near as much as I had expected.

So in retrospect, my estimation of that timeline in general was dead wrong, and by a lot. I had completely underestimated by a huge margin the degree of brand loyalty that exists within the amateur radio market space. Even now, I still see really rather limited erosion of that brand loyalty. And also the broad lack of interest in taking advantage of new technologies. A truly phenomenally sad thing to watch play out in what is supposed to be technology focused endeavor.

And yes, I've been ranting here on QRZ about the level of brand loyalty that there is, and how it is holding everyone back for many years now too.

 

Clay and I discussed disruption often. Frankly, the notion of disruption kept on changing definition, deviating far from the original paper by Clay and Joe Bauer. There, disruption was a progression of an innovation that actually started out not as good as extant options, but did enable new niches of use that were either overkill or too expensive when using use of the extant options. Then the disruption option got better, captured bigger niches, and eventually 'disrupted' the big extant ones.

Few new technologies are truly disruptive. Most hibernate and are picked up later. I coined a word for that;" hibervation". Hibernating innovation. Decades, often pass.There are many, many examples. I know: I've lived it. I am living it.

The bizarre thing is that the disruptive paradigm was married to the 'fail-fast' paradigm of venture capital. basically being used as a REASON why fail-fast is justified. IOW, throwing money at it was reasoned to take disruption and throw gas on the fire, speeding up time scales to a year or two rather than a decade or decades. Or failing. Next.....

Well, it seldom is successful.

In thirty years in business I have seen hundreds of start ups in the door. About 90 percent failed within 3 years. Undercapitalization was rarely the problem.

Flex is indeed 'flexible'. Ah yes; what's in a name?

73
Chip W1YW

 

Chip and Dave,

I believe that free/open source is a valid business model, but these folks chose the wrong path if they were looking to protect their IP, which doesn't happen in FOSS/Hardware. A much different licensing and ecosystem makes FOSS work.

And that someone "ripped them off" isn't correct. With FOSS, forks, copying, enhancing, and innovating atop the initial ideas are common and expected. If you don't want that to happen, you don't use FOSS as a business model because the entire strategy is different.

A decade ago, I believe it was M0NKA (maybe the wrong call) did an SDR, then was surprised that it was knocked off at an early stage. NOT choosing lawyers, NOT understanding how IP works, is a recipe for disaster.

It's not that I have no sympathy for these innovators, rather, it's one discipline, and business models are a different discipline which need to be understood if your goal is monetizing your work.

I spent years doing investor technical due diligence on high-tech products. A common theme with the successful product makers-- if their product could work-- was the strategy to monetize it over a term, with an exit strategy that was sane.

When sanity fails, many bad things happen. I saw the same failure rate that Chip did, and for the same reasons. I maintain, however, that open source projects can make money-- it's just done much differently and has a different exit strategy and monetizing scheme.

73 Tom W9YW

 

Hi Chip, we were referring to companies that come up with their OWN solution to a hook up or a new technology, when there is a defacto standard developing. Some radios force you to use their own tuner, for example, and they won't share what the connection is inside their cable for use with another brand. Now, one of the big boys is doing that with adaptive pre-distortion, despite the clean signal initiative mounted by a number of companies to have a standard. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Duane, I feel the pull as well. If something by "my brand" comes out, I'll jump on it. I'm not going to do that this time. They disappointed me too much. Too many small, incremental changes when a bunch of 20-and-30-somethings can come up with what are apparently very good designs far in advance of the big boys. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Thanks for jumping in Tom.

I used to work for a Japanese electronics company. They had serious R&D that was ahead of their competitors by at least a year or two. But the market didn't differentiate. Consumers who were prospects for this brand simply knew that it was a "good company," but that there were other "good companies" out there as well, and they'd always (or most always) choose a cheaper option. Hence, upstart companies who simply followed my employer and produced the cheap version would get the sale.

As someone said earlier in the thread, there are a lot of really cheap hams. Therefore, Chinese clones may never really go away. In Dmitry's case, I don't think anyone said that they were "ripped off." (Did I use that term in the article?). Dmitry even had a key contributor to the open source project (working on user interface) from China. What was surprising to Dmitry was the fact that these Chinese businessmen, instead of building it right and building it to work, simply put out the cheapest version of it that they could, utilizing even different final transistors. I mean, that's sad, to see something that has been "your baby" come into the real world as a crippled junky device because of changes made in the process! Dave, W7DGJ

 

Dave - I enjoy your articles but have never felt compelled to join the 'conversation'. I am not a developer but an end-user / consumer / ham radio operator. After reading your interview I clicked on your previous interview with Michelle Thompson and then on the article that she suggested (and you linked) on the xz hack. All in all very enlightening - and the xz hack was more than a little scary. Thank you for the continued education and supporting articles.

 

Well, there's the magic word: standard. Good luck with that.

The fact is the rank and file of US hams couldnt care less about 'clean signal initiative'. The only time it is applicable in 2024 is in a very few contests. The reality is the HF bands are becoming de-populated by the switch to FT8. The sensitivity of the bands is not being driven by SINR. Its being driven by SNR. The 'interference temperature' is DECREASING on the HF bands, not increasing.

Sorry, the notion that open source is driven by a cable standard is not a compelling example. The vast majority of US hams just won't care, ever. It's a niche issue driving a political agenda IMO.

WHat's the market for this mishigoss on cables and amps... 500 hams? 2000? VERY niche.

The future of ham radio is to stop looking at the 'radio' as a box and to look at what's on the table as a 'propagation machine'. That means optimising arbitrary signal links by AI in real time. That is a combination of SDR and internet driven generative AI.

Start there.

 

The issue is control. Ultimately the market makes those decisions. But we shlepp SO MUCH in between, with investors, stealers, regulations, political ideolgies, you name it, that we lose sight of what drives success, when ot happens.

The end user CONTROLS the ultimate use; the innovator CONTROLS--if he or she chooses-- the path.

 

Having foreign nationals collaborate on international projects is commonplace. The difference is the origin of the business model used. Whether from China, Texas, Canada, wherever, the open business model is brilliant and allows anyone to monetize, no matter the quality of their result-- quality is another vector.

Long ago I worked for Hitachi. My job was at first, QC for hundreds of consumer TVs, then manufacturing supervision for the same. It was an interesting experience of Canadian cabinets, picture tubes by the pallet from GE and RCA, main boards from a Hitachi subsidiary, etc.

Today, projects like JTDX, a branch of WSJT-X, is an international collaboration that's FOSS.

Chipmaking is now financed by governments-- but so also is much of agriculture. Where the line is drawn is political, in terms of who makes what moneys in various industries. Tech is not immune.

As Chip implies, the marketplace (end user opening a wallet, metaphorically) decides the relative success of innovation at the market price paid. Econ 101. Innovators need to think their models through. Brilliance is wonderful, but ideas are cheap currency. Cheap hams get what they paid for, baubles instead of rigs that stay above 50% of their selling price on QRZ's swapmeet twenty years+ later.

73 Tom W9YW

 

Thanks Tom, good insights. I wonder what an ic-7300 will be worth in 20 years. Or the new Yaesu with DVI-D output, already a thing of the past …. Built in obsolescence?

 

So it all comes down to us cheap hams ….

 

Well, not just hams...

Evryone is cheap.

;-)

 

You'd believe that SDRs would supplant every discrete-component & tube radio, but they don't. Knobs are a big factor, and many hams have not/will not convert to using a mouse. There are a new era of SDRs that are hybrid human/haptic interface, using computers but also retaining knobs.

The downside to the current era of machines is the inability to easily mod SDRs for some useful purpose. This was absolutely part of a prior era; look at how many mods exist for older ham gear. There are websites dedicated to transceiver and gear mods. Today, radios are far tougher to repair, let alone mod appropriately.

Few hams solder anymore, and SMT-mounted components are done by less than a percent of hams, I'm guessing. Same goes for highly-tuned gear like antennas. The skills to do this are tough, and yes, it involves math and ingenuity. Both are barriers. Nonetheless, some of us are more fearless than others, or want to invest in the equipment to do repair, mods, even compliance checks. My scope sits largely in its case, although my nanoVNA and TDR are sitting to my left for common access.

If you can subvert the skills by buying cheap goods-- and this suits your short term gains and enjoyment-- then more power to you. It just means we have an enormous problem with trash and recycling because the impetus to repair/mod has requisite costs in time/gear/materials/savvy.

The rhetorical value of a 7300 in twenty years.... tough to know. I don't own one because the ambient HF noise is randomly high in my suburban neighborhood, and the ambient intermod is a known problem for this specific model. I own a Yaesu 991a because of this, but this model has its own minor crazy. To some, however, the 7300 is great for their application, a known quantity, and like the venerable Volkswagen Beetle, will retain value for a long, long time. It's a commodity, otherwise well-designed rig. I am tempted by Xiegu and some other brands of radios, but I'm lucky to be able to afford something better for the context of my own needs.

In the marketplace, others have different values, and cheap knock-offs have their place. The problem with those knock-offs is product life, and ultimately, poor value and the damage of disposal.

73 Tom W9YW