Issue #44: Copycats Stomp on Ham Radio Innovation

I'm 100% on board with this notion, except the 'Internet Driven' piece of it. Leave the Internet out of the actual handing of the signals real-time. At no time should our radio's ability to hear and decipher signals be dependent on the internet.

Is there place for the Internet to support remote station operations or similar? Definitely, but in the 'remote' operations scenario that Internet connection is just a substitute for long analog cables from where the operator is sitting and where the RF I/O occurs. I am totally cool with that. However for me the key amateur radio 'purity' test is that the radio functions, including all of its real-time signal processing, without any dependency on other people's equipment, or parallel paths of non amateur radio communications. Your radio should function identically whether the Internet is there or not. As for the AI piece, sure I'm game if it comes without any real-time Internet connection dependencies. Bring it on.

The bolded above is a point I've tried to get across numerous times here on QRZ and elsewhere. Quit looking at the radio box as the being the radio, it is just a tool to access the RF spectrum, the less visible the physical radio box itself is, the better. When I'm deep into my style of operating, I barely perceive that there is even a radio box at play at all. I certainly don't get all gooey and gushy about how the radio box looks or feels.

 

Bit of clarification... what I meant is that the internet is used by AI to gather real time ionospheric data, wspr and RBN reports, and so on and predict optimum link, not a cognitive radio approach for example

 

And it is that bolded above that is holding so many ops back. There are so many things that you can do for controlling the radio hardware and surfing the radio spectrum that are massively easier to do once you can divorce yourself from the notion that you must use knobs to navigate the radio spectrum. The only reason knobs became the standard was that it was the only decently easy and economical way to do those things for many decades. But yes a mouse may itself not be the most optimal, but user interfaces optimally designed for them can be a much better way to drive things, especially so once you move beyond, one signal, one mode, one band at time operating. The key problem historically has been the tendency to keep bringing the box with knobs and buttons metaphor forward into software UI's. A big mistake.

I have occasionally pondered how or if the typical gaming controller could be brought into radio use. I think there are some good possibilities there. Ditto for some of the graphics handling typically found gaming. Not something 'virtual reality', but actual radio spectrum real-time reality presented on something other than a 2D screen.

As for the experimentation piece, consider that if the radio box is capturing a big chunk of the radio spectrum, and has it available for further processing in any way that you please, then you can create in software most anything that you want outside the hardware box, other than some level of tactile interface with the radio. With top performing bits of ADC and DAC hardware plus some front end filtering, it is actually pretty hard to imagine what additional hardware mods would be needed. Of course this is only true if the SDR hardware itself wasn't previously constrained by traditional radio design concepts. And yepp, you guessed it, the long established manufacturers have not done that yet. They have and continue to build radios with lots of rigid 1:1 relationships between the bits of hardware and its end use function. No amount of future software can overcome those early hardware design choices / limitations.

 

FWIW I tossed brand loyalty out the window almost from day one of my amateur career start some 44 ish years ago. I make my equipment choices based on the gear's actual technical capabilities and true innovation. And balanced across that, how viable it is terms of ongoing support and further development. You do need to see decent critical mass for those aspects of a company and it's gear.

 

This is turning into a great discussion.

Chip said:
“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. “

This is 100% correct to the original Clayton Christianson thesis. In ham radio, a good example would be the Baofeng HT’s. Not as good, not even ‘legal’ but ‘good enough’ to enable new users and create a new market.

The case also states that established manufacturers will never innovate because it will kill their existing products and profits. So someone else does it for them and they are put in a reactive position.

To Chip’s point that current big manufacturers are broadly based communications companies, that hasn’t changed. Historically all the ‘HAM’ manufacturers were in government markets. Collins, Drake, SignalOne, etc. They had to be to get reasonable scale.

I’m not sure the potential of SDR’s is well understood by the amateur community. I can now find and simultaneously decode multiple PSK-31 messages across multiple bands with open source hw and sw. That’s pretty neat. Yet my Yaesu transceiver struggles to copy W1AW RTTY bulletins on cold winter nights.


The next thread is like to pull on is copycats.
Copycats trade on the hard work and reputations of others. It’s not a valid business model. It’s like catching a falling knife. Somebody can always do it cheaper. The Chinese are finding this out as their labor costs increase as the supply of workers decreases.

China always comes to mind when this topic surfaces, but it’s alive and well everywhere. When I worked for a US based broadcast manufacturer my designs were copied by other US based broadcast manufacturers. Scaling the values of all resistors and capacitors does not make a new design. Copying the exact number of turns and diameter in what looked like an inductor but was really a coaxial capacitor that could take on any form factor is not a new design. At least they had to buy a product to reverse engineer it.

So my personal thing is to never buy from copycats. Where we spend our money makes a big difference.

 

One of the points of open source is to copy and improve. Don't choose it as a model if you don't want this to happen, or don't have the backing to drive your design, as opposed to those resources that the copycats own.

The TAPR work that made Hermes and other Hermes derivatives fueled a lot of development, with Apache Labs understanding how to compound the design into a viable string of successful products.

Flex uses similar software, but Flex adds strong sauces to its designs, too, and they retain value.

And you can buy a Hermes Lite or II and with a bit of tinkering use the same SDR software that they do. You can drive it with WSJT-X or one of its derivatives-- each having their own (not so secret) sauces.

Or, you can take the basic premise, as Yaesu has, and build successive radio builds that lead to the 991, the 991a, the FTdx-1200/etc, the FTdx-10 and 101, and now the FT-710/etc. Icom has taken a similar path. Kenwood, too-- just fewer models and developments in the market.

Much therefore, is the model and path you want to take, as to how you can derive revenue, productize ideas, protect them (or purposefully not) and monetize SDRs. The LoRaWAN developments are pretty amazing, and are a combination of differing models that have caught the world by storm both for hams but also other experimenters. There are no billionaires today in LoRa, but the fundamentals are there to do amazing models that are clearly visionary and diffuse.

I get that no one wants to get ripped off, and creators should be rewarded for their efforts. Thieves are rampant both in patent and copyright realms. Still, quality counts. Supply chain counts. Value counts. Fighting copycats when you open source your product, however, is folly-- it's not the same business model.

73 Tom W9YW

 

Often but not always the case.

Large companies tend to FUND the innovation internally, PATENT it, and then sit on it.

A KODAK moment....

KODAK is the most famous for this. They created digital photograhy and held the patents. As the patents expired they got destroyed by all the competitors who came in with digital photography. By that point, computers were 'personal', fast, and had plenty of memory and storage.

Hubris dictated that KODAK could control the change to digital photography on their time scale. Stooopid.

Now they are a, well, chemical company that went bankrupt and emerged as a shadow of themselves.

Meh....

 

I think Dmitry’s team designed some of these features … of course, they weren’t properly implemented in the clones. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Kudos Tom, great post.

 

Kodak was messing around in biotechnology when I started in that biz 40 yrs ago. They even had the first commercial industrial biotech product. It was called SnoMax, engineered microbes which allowed ski slopes to extend their seasons via artificial snow. It is frustrating to see how good R&D can go south based on bad management. Dave W7DGJ

 

Kodak also stepped on Polaroid's IP, costly litigation that cost Kodak a fortune. A relative who worked for Kodak in that era was caught up in that mess, endless testimony, subpoenas, and ultimately, a find for Polaroid. Intellectual property management is tough.

When I did research in the new computer printing industry, I found a long list of IP that was used by HP, Adobe, Apple, Xerox, Kodak, Canon, Lexmark, and others to protect their ideas. Cross-licensing deals then with Epson, Kyocera, Brother, Matsushita, and others made it all very complex during the early era.

Today, the wars are largely over in consumer/business-grade printing, each with their turfs.

73 Tom W9YW

 

Kodak and digital imaging are a great example of disruptive innovation. Initially digital imagers had poorer quality than film. But they rapidly improved in dynamic range, color fidelity, sensitivity and resolution. The race was on, and chemical photography became a niche market inside of 10 years.

User Interface and digital radio are another very interesting subject. I made a mid-career move to embrace industrial design and User Interface design as true competitive differentiators.
It’s amazing what happens when you make products intuitive and easy to use. You sell a lot of them!

The UI’s I see in ham radio are generally pretty abysmal and break a bunch of established best practices. Menus more than 2 levels deep, inconsistent control operation, inappropriate control response rate and span, modes not clearly annunciated, poor control placement allowing for unwanted actuation. And that is on just one radio, my FTdx-10! Did I mention the obsolete display interface?

 

Hey Tom . . . Industrial design is such a cool area, whether it is to design a kitchen appliance or cooking tool, or the Ham Radios we all love. I just wish that Apple was in the Amateur Radio business (of course, they never will be -- they are only in giant marketplaces). If they were, I know that the user interface issue you mention (present on so many radios) would go away. While it wasn't Apples originally, Steve Jobs saw the opportunity from Xerox and ran with it. If Apple made HT's, you'd buy one and turn it on, it would connect to a database somewhere and five minutes later your HT would be completely programmed with every repeater in your area. And if they made Ham Radios, you'd lose the deep menus of Yaesu and others for some kind of auto-whiz setup that asks you a few questions and configures your radio from there. There would be gripers who want more manual control options, but for 80% of the "audience" these radios would be immensely popular. I have a son who is interested in design (always was from a 10-yr old kid) and I was trying to talk him into electronics design and user interface, but he went to Hollywood and is a Production Designer for film and TV. There's a certain side of the brain which favors creativity and these designers, whether in film or in electronics, can envision how to leave users in the state-of-mind intended, or in the case of radio enhancing the experience of "plug and play" which at least a great number of hams would like when the radio comes out of the box. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Except in amateur radio from what I can tell. There's a perverse pride some people have with their shiny new radio having numerous multi-layer menus and many dozens of knobs and buttons, a majority of which are rarely used, and are all jammed tightly together.

But yet a knobs and buttons panel with just 5 concentric knob sets, plus two bigger single ones along with just 16 buttons with plenty of space between all of them is often considered uninteresting. Largely because it is the "wrong brand". Brand (and in many cases anti-brand) loyalty in amateur radio is an amazing thing to watch.

 

I agree Duane. Amateur radio brands have SUCH a loyal following. But it's funny . . . in the antenna department, I don't think they do. With antennas, as I mentioned in a previous column, there's a certain love for the TYPE of antenna we put in. (This stems from the fact that Hams can build any number of antenna designs themselves without needing a brand). But they are ALL, whether "store bought" or "home brew" tied directly to our radio ego and you can not get away with dissing someone's choice of an antenna. We get feisty when that happens. And, if you see a guy raving about his Chameleon, he's not going to just run out and buy another Chameleon when they announce something new. The brand loyalty on store bought antennas is one-tenth that of the radios we choose. Dave, W7DGJ