A Ham's Eye View

Doug Grant - June 1, 2012

Doug Grant received his first ham radio license from the FCC in 1967 and his BSEE in 1975. He has logged over 30 years in the semiconductor industry, mostly at Analog Devices, where he worked in engineering, marketing, and product line management for a wide range of analog, mixed-signal, RF and wireless products. He has also logged over 500,000 two-way contacts with other radio hams in every country in the world. Doug is currently an independent consultant specializing in semiconductor and wireless technologies.

Hams and flea markets

05.13.2013

One thing that hams all have in common is that they are cheap. Not frugal, not price-conscious. Cheap. Read More...

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Rig here is 16 bits at 250 MSPS

02.25.2013

One thing hams talk about is their equipment. Some like to brag that their rig is the latest, greatest, highest-performing radio. Read More...

Morse Code in orbit

10.11.2012

A launched CubeSAT includes an array of green LEDs, blinking the message “HELLO FROM NIWAKA JAPAN” in Morse Code. Read More...

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Morse code on Earth

09.26.2012

Many commercial and military services have abandoned Morse code, so why is it that on certain weekends of the year, the HF amateur bands are jam-packed with tens of thousands of hams blasting their CW signals around the world? Read More...

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Morse Code on Mars

08.10.2012

With everyone abuzz about the Curiosity Rover, I guess I need to write something about Mars--like the fact that there’s Morse code up there. Read More...

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Making sense (and a signal) out of noise, Part 2

07.17.2012

My last post dealt with direct-sequence spread spectrum, which uses something that looks like noise to conceal messages or share spectrum among multiple users. And now for something completely different… Read More...

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Making sense out of noise, part 1

06.21.2012

One of Mortimer Rogoff's projects ultimately led to a form of direct-sequence spread spectrum and the story is fascinating. Read More...

Introduction to A Ham's Eye View

06.01.2012

In the RF world, the antenna is the sensor. It is the ultimate sensor – any conductor is an antenna. It translates the ambient electric fields in its neighborhood into a voltage that we can process. Read More...

Receiver protection: a game-changer

04.24.2012

Receiver protection is a pretty important issue in radio transceivers of all kinds. Think about it…the receiver front-end is built to amplify very small signals – fractions of a microvolt – and needs to be protected from the output of the transmitter. Read More...

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Intel outside

03.24.2012

Why can’t the world’s biggest IC company get any market share in the cellular space? Read More...

The Battle of the Bands

02.27.2012

One thing the framers of regional frequency allocations did not anticipate was the evolution of global mobility. Read More...

RF, meet Analog; and his friend Digital

01.12.2012

Techniques like digital predistortion and envelope-tracking draw from all three domains…digital, analog and RF, and allow fundamentally non-linear (but power-efficient) amplifiers to behave like linear amplifiers. Read More...

ZAP (EMP)! (hissssssssss)

12.15.2011

I live in New Hampshire. There are several things that happen regularly here. Read More...

Interference-cost tradeoffs and cheating

11.13.2011

I’ve been following the excellent series on EMC by the gurus at Kimmel-Gerke Associates. Every engineer should have their materials close to hand when designing any kind of electronic equipment. Read More...