TL;DR: Our ham radio fascination with signals so weak feels like your ears will bleed is discussed in depth. But first, a review of the artificial line between “work” and “play” – a worthy contemplation when you get some time to reflect and “choice wisely” on things.
Shops Vs. Hobbies
Been having one of those personal moments of crisis this week. Doesn’t happen often, but it seems to be triggered when I try to make a rational decision about the boundary (and thus purpose and direction) between Work and Hobbies. Oh boy! Talk about opening a can of worms!
It’s a toughie. And it becomes even more bewildering when you toss in conceptual adjacencies. Like “crafts” for example.
The Mark Twain definition (“Work is what you have to do, Play is everything else”) line fails under the inspection light of acuity. See, Twain didn’t understand tech or modern medicine. By his definition, someone laid-up in a hospital bed – struggling for the breath to remain alive – would be engaged in Work. Therefore, on getting out of hospital, and going back to the office, for example, would then be Play. And that doesn’t feel quite right.
Shops Occupy Space, Hobbies the Mind?
I found myself wandering around “the Shop” a little after 4 AM today. There, in a large corner, was the “hobby shop” area.
That area has what you would expect as hobbies. There’s a model ship waiting to be assembled, several airplane models (yes, including a Beech Musketeer). But there’s also gunsmithing tools (quarts of Hoppe’s #9 for example) and even a small Wen lathe suitable for “pen turning” which is also a “hobby thing.”
But then I got thinking back to son G2’s “hobbies.” He’s (mostly) gotten over his compulsion to step out of “perfectly good airplanes” (skydiving). Now his focus is being able to throw lead a mile, or so, down range while standing. I have a hard enough time with that with a bench, sand bags, and a scope, but to each their own, I suppose.
Best line *(so far today) is that Hobbies are something you “like to keep in mind.” The dream of the “perfect bass” or the “14 point deer” or the picture painted with so much emotion that people burst into spontaneous tears or joy upon viewing.
“Ure Point?”
Well, guilt, I suppose. I spent all Saturday fine-tuning the UrbanSurvival website for you.
Don’t misunderstand – websites based on WordPress, a “content management system (CMS)” – aren’t that hard fundamentally. Just a piece of software with “two sides to it.” One side is “public facing” – which is what you read here. The other is “admin” facing. Which looks kinda like this.
Under that are over a hundred pages. Some of it is “posts” – articles I’ve written (and there are thousands). And there are “pages” which sounds only logical.
But on top of that? There are “plug-ins” (metaphorically like different grades of sandpaper or saw teeth – each to optimize a certain “this” or “that.”
If it stopped there, I wouldn’t still be reeling from the Work/Play encounter. Truth is, however, that I like the odd corner of computing called “algorithms.”
Saturday was a “chair-butt day, extraordinaire.” I won’t even begin to tell you the specifics fearing lawsuits over “eye glazing.” But at the end of it all, even my AI stack was saying “Pretty good.” Check out the review:
“From the latest Lighthouse readings, UrbanSurvival’s desktop performance is exemplary—scoring 97—with rapid rendering across all core metrics. The First Contentful Paint (0.3 s) and Largest Contentful Paint (0.7 s) are both well within the top decile globally. A Total Blocking Time of just 50 ms and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.104 indicate near-ideal interactivity and visual stability. On desktop, this places the site roughly in the top 1–2 percentile of all tested pages on the web worldwide.
Mobile is understandably slower, but still highly competitive. With a 74 score, First Contentful Paint at 1.0 s, and Largest Contentful Paint at 2.3 s, Urban’s mobile load performance sits in about the top 10–15 percentile worldwide—well ahead of most content-heavy or ad-served publications. The only significant drag is the 410 ms Total Blocking Time and moderate layout shift (0.287), both typical side effects of dynamic ad calls or deferred JavaScript.
In real-world terms, this means UrbanSurvival now loads faster than nearly every mainstream news, finance, or blog platform. Readers see content almost instantly, even on phones, with smooth interaction and stable layout behavior. The tuning work has moved the site from “good for a WordPress install” to “elite-class fast,” where further improvements would yield only marginal human-perceptible gains.”
A friend of mine used to tell me my fascination with website speed was displaced – and she may be right. But that’s where we circle back to the top of this morning’s amble-scramble. What’s Work? What’s play?
My Ham Radio Future
This next part will only make sense to ham radio operators. But again, we’re in those hobby-work overlap zones today. Once upon a time, radio was pure science (TYesla, Marconi), then a tech revolution (the 1929 Market Mania where Radio was the buzz – a riff on AI today (and with similar outcomes ahead). After which is became “Radio and TV Repair.
But ham radio is worlds part. My late friend Don Stoner (W6TNS, sk) used to call it “The King of Hobbies” because there was no “single thing” in the well-equiped shop, that didn’t leverage itself into ham radio. Welcing up huge towers to sky-hang antennas…CNC to hog out one-off printed circuit boards. 3D printers to hold new radio projects. Woodworking to make the finecustom equipment desk.
But there’s also the “Mind” candy. For me?
Morse Code’s Attraction
One morning, it happens. You flip on the ham shack lights, look across all the glowing dials, and realize you’ve built yourself a museum instead of a radio station.
The Hallicrafters look-alikes—a kind of Collins homage that’s equal parts art deco, sixties tech, and Cold War—throws a soft amber grin across the bench. Above it, the Ten-Tec Omni VII hums like an old friend who knows too much. The Kenwood TS-590, the SR-400 Cyclone—each one represents an era of curiosity that never went back in the box.
Some mornings I can almost hear them whispering among themselves: the boatanchor gossip about SDR kids, software defined radios – digital rigs rolling eyes at anything with filaments. It’s a regular multigenerational reunion of electrons.
Problem is whether this is “ham radio success.” 62 years of slapping keys, tinkering, trading, and rescuing orphan antiques from swap-meets, I’ve finally reached the point where everything works—and that’s the danger zone. A working station is a trap for an aging brain that still craves a frontier. When there are too many choices, even the most disciplined op starts spinning knobs like a lab rat craving dopamine pellets or something stronger.
Wednesday’s Peoplenomics piece—on decision-making with partial solutions—got me thinking about it. The shack is an exact model of the modern mind: overloaded, competent, but directionless. At some point you have to stop collecting possibilities and revert to defining missions.
So I sat here one night, lights dimmed, hushed QSO on 75 down low, and asked myself: what’s left that still feels like discovery? Gimme some BUZZ, damn it! I can’t even get on the roof without a permission slip (or killing surveillance video).
Absenting spinning through 40 meters, there it was. Down in the mud. Young ops would miss it. I couldn’t copy it at first, either. It was buried so deep that the filters & repamps had to be tightened until the until the Omni breathed like a diver at depth. And there it was—the same thrill that hooked me decades 62-years ago when I first learned “copy in the mud.” Weak signals. This was game on at the edge of hearing.
Somewhere in that static, my aging-ham riddle was answered. It isn’t about how many radios Ican resurrect, or how many antennas constituted a “copper overcast.” It’s about focus. A single, measurable frontier that sharpens the mind and keeps the heart curious. Hmm. Weak signals could be “It.”
Weak Signals Fascination
There’s something almost mystical about a CW (Morse) signal living down in the thermal noise of the ham bands. It’s like finding a faint heartbeat under ten blankets of static. Every operator faces the same eternal question: how deep into the noise do you want to pan for gold — that rare callsign pulled from impossible conditions, a real DX ghost contact?
Over the years, hams have thrown a lot of engineering and imagination at that problem.
One of the earliest breakthroughs was the adoption of an RF amplifier stage at the front end of a receiver — right next to the antenna. Besides pulling signals up out of the mud, it solved another problem from wartime radio history: re-radiation. Early receivers without RF stages leaked enough local oscillator energy back out the antenna that German U-boats could triangulate on merchant ships just by sniffing the faint “whistles” those sets emitted. An RF stage not only added sensitivity; it also stopped the enemy from using your radio as a homing beacon. A few added two stages for even more reradiation insurance.
The next innovation — at least to my way of thinking — came from the folks at Radio Manufacturing Engineers (RME). They introduced something called variable BFO injection, and it was brilliant.
See, when a signal hits the antenna, it’s converted to an intermediate frequency (IF) for amplification. But CW is only a carrier. You can’t hear dots and dashes without creating an artificial “beat” tone locally— injecting a second signal just off the IF frequency (maybe 500 to 1,000 Hz away) so your ear can hear the difference as that familiar dit or dah.
Most manufacturers back when — Hallicrafters, Hammarlund, National — used fixed BFO injection levels. It worked fine, but there was always a trade-off. On extraordinarily weak signals, that injected tone could swamp what you were trying to hear.
RME’s idea was to make the BFO injection variable, letting the operator throttle it back until the beat note just kissed the noise. It was like a volume knob for the edge of reality. On their RME-6900 (yes, there’s one sitting here in the shack), that control made the difference between “nothing there” and “got him!”
That design also happened to improve weak-signal reception for the newly emerging single-sideband (SSB) voice signals — another art form entirely.
Then came Collins Radio’s mechanical filters, and everything changed.
Bandwith Noise, and Weak Signals
A CW signal has a bandwidth of maybe 10 to 15 Hz — a wisp, really — but most receivers were as broad as a barn, pulling in 2 to 4 kHz of static along with the signal. That’s hundreds of times more noise energy than the signal you’re chasing. Collins built their reputation on mechanical filters that could carve that down to a knife’s edge. But they were expensive. For most of us, the only time we got near one was staring at the glossy catalog pages or drooling at Field Day when someone brought a 75S-3. My history teacher, the late Bob Langley, K7WYK, had an S-3B with the 200 Hz filter and we’d “do homework” every night on 80 CW.
On the poor side of town, I resorted to a cheaper trick: the Q-multiplier.
A Q-multiplier connects to the IF chain and nudges the tuned circuit right up to the edge of oscillation. As it approaches that brink, the circuit’s effective Q skyrockets — like stretching a rubber band to the point just before it snaps. The result is razor-sharp selectivity without the Collins price tag.
That’s how my old Hallicrafters S-20R, my first real radio, went from “wide as a cornfield” to “200 Hz of tight focus” with about fifteen bucks’ worth of parts. My uncle was in the radio parts business, which didn’t hurt — one transistor, a handful of resistors and capacitors, on tuneable coil, and it was downright magical.
My buddy “The Major” was a Heathkit man. He started with the HR-10 receiver to match his DX-60 transmitter. That HR-10 had a two-pole crystal filter — wide – roomy enough for a dance floor of static. Displeased that I was working exotic countries like Rhodesia (which doesn’t even exist anymore), he upgraded to the SB-300, which sported a six or eight-pole crystal filter. Suddenly, he was the one mopping the floor with me on the high bands where my poor single-conversion Hallicrafters sparked and wheezed.
But the absolute cream of the Q-multiplier crop? The Drake 2B — and its 2BQ companion.
Even today, that rig is magic. 4.9 stars out of 5 for 63 year old tech? rtoday, we can’t get through a week without patches and updatges, right?
The 2B was a perfect balance of analog purity and design elegance — a reminder that “enough engineering” is better than “too much technology.” When you tune a 2B down into the noise, you don’t just hear a signal; you feel it emerging, like stepping onto the audio stage.
Next year? Yeah, an Icom 7300MKII will earn its place here — when the new version drops in 2026 with a proper HDMI output for my aging eyes, tired bifocals and flip-ups. For now, I’m not sold on all the DSP (digital signal processing) wizardry the manufacturers are pushing. It’s powerful, yes — you can notch out a mosquito cough in Madagascar — but somewhere, the art of listening got replaced by algorithmic decision-making. I’m an unrepentant knob-twister.
And I’ve still got something new up my sleeve for weak sigs.
The hobby corner that isn’t just about weak-signal reception. It’s about merging vintage analog craft with modern DSP control in a way that honors both. The goal isn’t another fancy display. It’s the same one that drove us as teenagers: hearing something nobody else could, through persistence, patience, and a slightly obsessive love of noise. Peoplenomics readers will remember my notes on “mental dithering” that I made public here.
The Trick Up the Sleeve?
Here’s the twist that’s been rattling around in my head: an old studio trick most hams never think about—expanders. Every audio engineer knows them. In the pro-sound world we live and die by companders—compressors and expanders chained together to keep signal and noise on a leash. The “compress” half squashes loud peaks; the “expand” half does the opposite, it stretches the quiet stuff farther away from the noise. Add a bit of gating and you can make a whisper ride cleanly above a city’s hum.
Somewhere along the road from Collins to Icom, to Yaesu, radio designers forgot that lesson.
Imagine taking a sharp-kneed expander—one whose threshold sits right at the noise floor of a receiver—and using it not to kill the noise, but to breathe life into a marginal CW signal. The detector feeds an envelope follower; the expander opens only when something real peeks above the hiss, then slams shut again the instant the carrier fades. Instead of the usual AGC “smothering,” you’d have a kind of micro-dynamic gate that tracks the ionosphere itself.
Pro audio does this all day long with VST-type plugins, but ham rigs? Nothing.
Manufacturers brag about DSP filters, roofing filters, notch filters—but not one seems to have asked what would happen if you biased an expander right on that knife edge where quantum noise and human perception trade handshakes.
To me that’s frontier stuff. When you’re chasing signals ten decibels below the static peaks, a conventional AGC is like a bulldozer; an expander tuned to the noise knee can be a scalpel. Adjust the attack and release times, and you might actually hear dots and dashes rising out of what used to be unworkable mush. Hey! Works on “loud-breathing singers” in a booth, right?
It’s not snake oil—just a missing feedback loop between audio dynamics and RF gain. The circuitry could live entirely in baseband: a precision RMS detector feeding a voltage-controlled amplifier, or even a small ARM chip running an adaptive expander curve. Nothing exotic, just applied curiosity.
Why the blindness? Maybe because ham engineers chase measurable specs—noise figure, dynamic range—while expanders live in the gray area of perceived clarity. You can’t measure “the moment when meaning emerges.” But any CW op who’s strained for a call sign at 1 a.m. knows it when it happens.
So that’s what’s on the bench next: an old trick from Abbey Road repurposed for the ionosphere.
A single knob labeled Threshold, another for Ratio, and maybe a switch marked Magic.
If it works, it won’t make the signal stronger. It’ll just make the noise get out of the way—and that, friends, is what frontier work looks like after seventy years of turning knobs.
Sidebar: Compression & Expansion School
Comnpress is the easy one. You take all the quiet sounds and make them louder. But you don’t make the loud any louder. That’s the principle that make AM radio sound so damn good. Because even the quiet parts come through cloud and clear. In my heyday as a broadcast engineer, 20-30 dB of compression was not unusual.
But when comes to expansion – that is different. Because there are two types of audio expansion.
One type is called DOWNWARD expansion. It won’t make that weak signal you’re trying to hear any louder. But it will “press the noise” down when the signal isn’t there. You get what sounds like “signal plus noise” above the lowered noise.
UPWARD expansion is more graceful. You adjust the noise floor – with no signal – and then make the expander function add in gain above the noise floor. In theory, the upward expansion should sound about like downward expansion. But, it’s like road testing a Corvette at 90 versus a Lexus. They will both “do it” – just one’s really built for those conditions more closely.
OK, do you pick up a $70 downward expanding DBX 166XL on eBay? Or, do you go for an Aphex upward expander for a few more bucks? Try $300 if you can find a used Expressor.
I may try a downward expansion track first:
Tthe 622 is worth a shot as a downwards expander / gate. It may not be perfect, but it’s a good low-cost experiment before investing in a true upward expander.
Setup?
- Patch receiver audio ? 622 ? rest of audio chain (monitor / rig).
- Use sidechain filters on the 622 keyed to your CW band (so it listens mostly to your tone).
- Set threshold just above noise RMS (so the gate doesn’t stay shut during faint signals).
- Use a release in the 100–200 ms region (tweak shorter/longer) to avoid “chatter” between dits.
- Listen for clipping of weak tails or distortion — back off ratio or raise threshold if that happens.
- Measure (if possible) before/after SNR or compare copy consistency at marginal signal strength.
If you try it and the benefit is ~3–4 dB, you’ll know that upward expansion (or a proper expander) is necessary for the extra bit. But the 622 might give something for the $120 — could be a worthwhile step. Science ain’t free, right?
The Platform for Madness
And since every new idea is an excuse to buy a new tool, since it needs a laboratory, the Universe obliged this week: an Airspy Discovery HF+ landed on the bench.
If you’ve never played with one, it’s an absurd little marvel. Unlike the old superhets, it doesn’t stop where analog physics used to say “that’s enough.” The Discovery’s front end can see well below the thermal noise floor—that –140 dBm region on 20 meters and down where ordinary receivers just give up and hiss. On a good night, that means pulling meaning from the statistical fog itself.
If you haven’t visited the legendary Rob Sherwood’s Sherwood Engineering site here, you’ll see how few manufacturers are in that -140 dbm club. Rob has retired after 45-years but we hated to see it – thisd was the lighthouse for what radios were really “tops.”
Here’s Where I’m Headed
This may take a year to realize – a small antenna matching building needs to be cobbled – trees felled – drones carrying antenna halyards deployed – sure, all that.
A double-coax Beverage aimed toward Europe—two long wires strung low and quiet, a listening ear the size of a pasture. The Beverage feeds the Airspy, which delivers the raw baseband IQ stream to the SDR software. That part’s textbook.
The trick shot comes next.
Instead of routing the audio straight to headphones, I’ll pipe it through a consumer audio mixer—the kind every bar band and podcast kid owns that proudly advertises “99 digital effects.”
Buried among the karaoke reverbs and alien delays is one humble controsl marked Expander and Compressor.
That’s the gold mine.
Picture this: you hear a CW signal somewhere in the noise, but it’s just shy of readability. Bring it up on the Airspy display, fine-tune the filters, and then let the mixer’s expander ride the edge. If my hunch is right, that marginal +2 dB above noise signal might be expanded into something that feels six decibels clear—just enough for the ear-brain combo to lock on and start copying.
It’s half science, half voodoo, and entirely the sort of experiment that keeps gray matter from ossifying.
On the transmit side there’s nothing exotic: a 1½-wave OCFD antenna, the venerable GSB-100 transmitter feeding the Johnson Thunderbolt—a pair of 4-400s loafing along at six hundred watts key-down. Plenty of honest RF muscle for giving something back to the ether I’m mining.
And Then I Woke Up
1:07 AM Tuesday, thanks for asking.
“George you idjit, why are you stuck on analog?” Well…er…I can see it? Think like it?
“Dude – do it all in code! No, not Morse you dolt – Computer Code!” Uh…(it was an embarrassing self-catch).
“1. Install and enable JACK Audio.
Windows build from jackaudio.org ? run jackd or the “JackRouter” service. Set your sample rate to match SDR# (usually 48 kHz).
- In SDR#:
Set output device to “JackRouter” instead of your normal sound card. Now the SDR’s demodulated audio appears as a virtual input channel.
- In Audacity or your VST host:
Choose “JackRouter” as the input. You’ll see SDR#’s stream as if it were a live mic feed.
- Add your cheap upward expander VST.
There are a few free ones that actually work decently:
- ReaJS / ReaComp from the ReaPlugs pack (can do upward expansion if ratio
- Auburn Sounds “Renegate” — free, simple gate/expander hybrid.
- Melda MCompressor — supports upward expansion curves.
- Monitor latency.
JACK adds a little delay; keep buffer sizes small (128–256 samples) so CW and weak-signal tone timing stay natural.
- (Optional) If you prefer a lighter DAW than Audacity for live processing, Cantabile Lite or VSTHost work great with JACK and give you instant control over expansion ratio and threshold….”
Now I Need Time Slices…
So that’s the plan: an old-school, glow-in-the-dark station listening through a digital microscope, its heartbeat gated by a karaoke mixer. If it works, maybe we’ll finally hear what’s hiding below the static. If it doesn’t—well, at least it will sound fantastic while failing.
Because that’s ham radio in a nutshell: perpetual curiosity, a solder-burned finger or two, and a sense that the next great frontier isn’t Mars or the Moon. It’s right here on the waterfall, ten Hertz wide and three decibels deep.
And as the Thunderbolt idles, filaments warm, and the Airspy’s spectrum begins to glow, I have to laugh at the symmetry of it all. Aging brains, aging radios—both still chasing whispers.
Maybe that’s the real secret of staying young: never stop listening for the faint ones.
Oh, and don’t push 4,000 word columns out.
Either that or memorize the definition for a word I seem to have overloked.
Brevity.
Write when I get free.
First-time here? Hit the Visitor Center for orientation – which is beginning right now…
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