These are Contributions to a Discussion on Low Level EME from the Moon-Net.

From: Michael, NV3Z/VK2BEA

Subject: Fwd: Best DFT Paramaters for weak signal

I am playing around with a 56002 DSP and would like to use it to detect EME signals in real time.

These are the questions that come up...

Am I likely to be able to better than my ear with DSP?

What are the best strategies to use? Do I do a long FFT to determine where the signal is in the audio band then use that information to tune a filter (and use my ear) or do I try and detect the signal with the DSP directly?

Is windowing the input samples a good idea (and which one is best)?

What sample time do I use. (The 56K can do a 1024 point FFT in about a millisecond)

How much pre-filtering is a good idea?

(and yes I've seen AF9Y's web page!)

   |\      _,,,---,,_          Michael Katzmann  ( NV3Z / VK2BEA /
G4NYV )
   /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_              -  Broadcast Sports Technology
Inc.
  |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'             -  Odenton, Maryland. U.S.A.
 '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)          michael%vk2bea@secondsource.COM

==============================================================

			   B*T = 1

	1 Hz bin seize,  sample time for the data points 1   sec
       10 Hz                                            100 msec
      100 Hz                                            10  mesc

73 from Ian G3SEK          Editor, 'The VHF/UHF DX Book'
			  'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
Professionally:
IFW Technical Services     Clear technical English - anywhere.

6. Processing: The software for processing these signals might provide some kind of analog display (such as a spectral display) as well as digital decoding of the message. The analog display could use a long integration time to indicate the presence of a signal (as a tuning aid), although shorter integration times must be used in the portion of the software that recovers the message content. Some form of tuning-aid display would likely be necessary because the signals might be too weak to detect by ear, although the narrower-bandwidth signal processing algorithms could still decode them.

Most digital communication systems are designed to operate at a relatively high SNR. Some weak signal work has been done by NASA/JPL, however, in connection with their deep space probes. Some of their techniques (developed 30 years ago) might be applied to EME.

Some of the requirements described above might already be met by an existing protocol (such as PACTOR II, etc.) if the data rate were reduced by a factor of ten or more. I'm not an expert in this area so perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I can help. It might be really beneficial to start a dialog between the EME and amateur digital communication communities.

Regards,

Lee Blanton, WA8YBT/6 Temecula, CA

e-mail: blanton@ni.net

From: Rein Smit, W6/PA0ZN

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

Hi Lee,

Tom Clark's paper was about digital signal processing and about doing FFT's in particular. This would cope with your statement about the loss in S/N due to the wider bandwidth of FSK. One would just look to 5 or 6 sets of bins for a signal to be present or not. The bin width in freq would depend on Doppler and other factors inherent in signals that are reflected from the moon surface.

Although I did not go to that particular CSVHF meeting, I remember stories about Tom Clark doing experiments in Alaska with this technique. Tom did these experiments around 1975 - 1980

The reason that very liitle is being done in this area is, I believe, that historicly we, in particular the older ones among us like large finals and enjoy to copy cw by ear and not by a machine.

I am very much interested in starting up a group of people with interests in low power EME.

73

Rein W6/PA0ZN

http://www.nitehawk.com/rasmit/dsp50.html

From: Brian Beezley, K6STI

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

To: "J. Lee Blanton"

Lee, the signal-processing methods you discuss for low-power EME are well understood and have been applied successfully to many different power-limited communication channels. They certainly can be used to recover EME signals from well below the noise. In fact, you can recover an arbitrarily weak signal if you're willing to wait long enough.

However, I wonder how many EMEers would be satisfied with a QSO that goes something like this: Your computer displays a message that callsigns are now being sent and received, reports are being exchanged, rogers have been acknowledged, and the contact is terminated--all without you, the "operator," ever hearing anything but noise. In fact, the whole process, including scheduling, receiver tuning, antenna pointing, and the contact itself could be completely automated.

I'm not an EME operator. Perhaps the thrill of communicating via the moon doesn't require direct personal involvement--maybe it's satisfying enough simply to design and build a system that can do it by itself. But I suspect otherwise. For my one EME QSO (on six meters at K6QXY), the fun was successfully digging an extremely weak signal out of the noise. I thought I had good ears from years of HF weak-signal DXing but the concentration and intense listening required for a single contact amazed me. When I finally completed the QSO after 30 minutes, I knew I had really accomplished something--it was a satisfying personal experience. If I had simply been informed by a computer that the contact had been made, I know I would not have felt the same.

The issue of automated EME contacts is just like that regarding automatic CW decoding on HF. With today's technology, it's quite possible to pull callsigns an operator can't hear out of a pileup and display them on a computer screen. In fact, last summer I developed software to do just that. I was going to market it for use with contest-logging programs--a little window would pop up listing the callsigns, some of which might be needed multipliers. I decided not to market the software when I realized that I would not want to use it myself. I love digging callsigns out of pileups--it's fun! I don't want a machine to do that for me and take the fun away.

So the question is: Do you want to give up the fun of being personally involved in making EME QSOs? Would it be as enjoyable if an automatic system did it all for you? What do you get out of EME anyway? Isn't it the satisfaction of overcoming a tremendous personal challenge? Or have I got it all wrong?

		      73--Brian, K6STI
			  k6sti@n2.net

From: Bob Bruninga

To: "Rein A. Smit", rein0zn@ix.netcom.com

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

DOnt forget about the advantage of $165 GPS cards to provide worldwide 1 microsecond time sync to all ground stations. Wouldnt precise time sync have a significant dB advantage in the DSP?

From: Rein Smit, W6/PA0ZN

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

Greetings,

I believe one could introduce DSP as a supporting tool without totally going to an automated blackbox system. Using a waterfall display in combination with filters should be helpful provided that one would accept a low code speed. This would still keep the operator close to the noise so to say.

The bottom line is though, I agree, there does not exist much demand for low power EME in wide circles of the weaksignal community. And the technique will most likely die out because of limitations in zoning, antennas, money, etc. We see this also in the avarage age of the participants in these techniques. Lets face it it is not an hobby for your avarage person with a family and a job living in an area where he or she can find work!

73's

Rein Smit

W6/PA0ZN

http://www.nitehawk.com/nekiosk.html

From: Rein Smit, W6/PA0ZN

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

Greetings,

There is no doubt about the fact, that GPS will play a roll in communications as well as other applications in society.

Here again, I think Tom Clark did a paper last year at one of the meetings about GPS in an amateur radio setting

By using GPS one could easily do forms of interferometry for example. What about a project to link 3 or 4 EME stations into a interferometer. Here is also a place where people with EME capabilities could get active in area's such as radio astronomy and SETI.

73's

Rein Smit

W6/PA0ZN

http://www.nitehawk.com/rasmit/

To: rein0zn@ix.netcom.com (Rein A. Smit )

From: Brian Beezley, K6STI

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

I believe one could introduce DSP as a supporting tool without totally going to an automated blackbox system. Using a waterfall display in combination with filters should be helpful provided that one would accept a low code speed. This would still keep the operator close to the noise so to say.

Yes, I think you're right about this. As long as I can still hear something of a signal and maybe try to tune it in better or make some adjustment, then I can remain interested. If not, well, there are other things I think I'd rather spend my time doing!

		      73--Brian, K6STI
			  k6sti@n2.net

From: Tom Clark, W3IMI

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

cc: blanton@NI.NET, ka9q@amsat.org

In a posting over the weekend, Lee Blanton (WA8YBT/6) wrote some words related to some ideas I have been espousing. I thought I should reply to portions of his message:

Rein Smit W6/PA0ZN recently wrote an interesting message touching on the subject of low-power EME. Part of what he wrote was:

Tom Clark presented a paper at CSVHF a number of years ago in which he proposed to do a sort of FSK using 6 freq's I believe and leave any combination of this set on for either 100 msec or even 1 sec. ...

I also believe that many people in the future will be forced for many reasons such as antennas but in particular power restrictions, into this direction of doing low power EME.

I've been thinking about this too, due to my limited space for antennas, budgetary constraints, close proximity to neighbors, etc. To achieve a significant reduction in EME power requirements, detecting Morse code by ear will clearly no longer suffice. I don't think that multitone FSK is the answer either because spreading the power among several tones will degrade the SNR (since multiple tones require more bandwidth than a single tone and the tones are detected separately against noise.

Actually, the multi-tone spreading will NOT cause a reduction in detectability. First, the use of FSK increases the average power -- with Morse we have only a ~50% duty cycle, whereas the FSK tones would be on 100% of the time, so we start with a ~3 dB enhancement.

Second, the tones would allow for coding to enhance error correction. Losing one (or more) of the tones does not cause the loss of information. This is a form of Spread Spectrum communications (although the spreading bandwidth is narrow -- like ~2 kHz). As an aside, the ability to do this kind of signal enhancement is precisely why some of us strongly feel that the weak signal community should not rise up in arms about the new proposed Spread Spectrum rules!

Third, the particular form of the spreading would be chosen so that the spectral broadening in the reflection process (due to multiple reflecting regions on the moon's surface) would be (at least partially) de-correlated between the tones. When one of them fades, the adjacent tones may well be peaking.

Phil Karn (KA9Q) and I are trying to get together a paper for this year's CSVHFS meeting where we discuss the coding and spreading gain, hopefully with some good computer simulation examples.

I believe that by using modern digital communication techniques the effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) requirement for reliable EME communication could be reduced by perhaps 10 dB or more. This would allow many more stations to work EME. Accomplishing this will take some careful planning and serious technical work. At this point it might be worthwhile to establish some top-level requirements:

1. Bandwidth: What is needed is a new, very low data rate transmission mode. We should probably aim for signal bandwidths of the order of 1 to 10 Hertz. Digital signal processing techniques employing FFTs and perhaps carrier tracking algorithms could permit the use of such narrow bandwidth waveforms without requiring super-accurate tuning in the receiver.

Actually the 1-10 Hz channel bandwidths won't work. The received signal is spread out in frequency to ~100 Hz at 432 MHz (even more at higher frequencies) so a proper matched frequency-domain filter cannot coherently integrate down these bandwidths. However a proper FFT-based detection scheme which integrates INCOHERENTLY in the frequency domain (i.e. summing the POWER in adjacent FFT-derived bins) does work. Back in the bygone days of yore (like 1988), N4HY, I2KBD and I showed that we got EME echoes on 70 cm with OSCAR-class stations using FFT processing with an early TI TMS320-10 DSP board. All we did were carriers, and we never got around to trying any coding of the signals since we got diverted to build hardware/software for the AMSAT Microsat satellites.

2. Data Rate: The new mode would necessarily be a digital mode, perhaps something like very slow RTTY at about one character per second or less. I know that sounds pretty slow, but who's in a hurry? (The Navy uses similar low data rate communication methods to communicate with submerged submarines on ELF.)

Here I agree wholeheartedly. My thoughts have been along the lines of using a data rate of 1 Baud (or 2,4,8 if the signals are really strong) with the signalling elements precisely timed. This time-synchronous operation would be achieved by having each station use GPS-based timing receivers. This would mean that the digital signal extraction process would NOT need to extract the timing clock clock from the data -- the receiving station would know precisely when each new data element was arriving. This alone can buy 10-20 dB in recovered SNR!

Much of my efforts of late have been devoted to getting an affordable clock into the hands of the amateurs. Anyone who is interested can take a peek at the on-line documentation for my "Totally Accurate Clock" ("TAC") on my anonymous ftp file server at the URL

W3IMI

Most of the early TAC developments centered around a ~$400 GPS receiver (the Motorola ONCORE) with which we have shown ~30-50 nsec timing accuracy and precision. Recently I have been trying a new "TAC Lite" using a ~$160 Garmin GPS20 receiver which seems to be a fairly good clock at the usec level. TAPR has recently announced a group purchase of GPS20's and I am working with TAPR to have the rest of the TAC boards be made widely available.

The next step in the TAC project is to augment the design with circuitry to use GPS to "discipline" a Crystal (or low-cost Rubidium) oscillator to give you a "nearly Cesium" frequency standard (in addition to the TAC's clock timing functions) for a low price (tbd, but probably < $500).

On the timing front -- it goes without saying that the round-trip travel time to/from the moon is 2.2 seconds. But you know where you are, where the moon is and where the station on the other end is located to a total accuracy of a few msec or better -- much less than the one second timing period I suggest.

3. Modulation: Modern modulation methods that permit phase locking and carrier tracking should be used to achieve the best SNR. Coherent phase shift keying (PSK) would be a better choice than FSK in this respect. BPSK or QPSK modulations might be good candidates. BPSK and QPSK modulation have the same performance for the same BIT rate (but not baud rate). More efficient modulations are available (in terms of information rate per unit bandwidth, or 'bits per Hertz') but they also require higher SNR. Methods using on-off keying should be avoided. Keeping the carrier on continuously during a transmission will utilize all of the RF energy (power x time) available from the transmitter, which will help to maximize the SNR at the point of detection.

Again, I point out that the signal returning from the moon has a coherence bandwidth of at least 100 Hz for all bands 70 cm and above. Therefore any PLL, and any coherent modulation scheme (like BPSK) simply will not work. This is precisely why we came to a multi-tone FSK scheme as the most optimum.

snip snip

Most digital communication systems are designed to operate at a relatively high SNR. Some weak signal work has been done by NASA/JPL, however, in connection with their deep space probes. Some of their techniques (developed 30 years ago) might be applied to EME.

Not sure that I agree with your use of the word "most"!. In today's crowded spectrum environement, there is a real penalty to operating at high SNR. For example, in the case of the new CDMA digital cellular telephones, it the phones are too QRO, they block other channel users, decreasing the number of users and significantly hurting revenues!

Some of the requirements described above might already be met by an existing protocol (such as PACTOR II, etc.) if the data rate were reduced by a factor of ten or more. I'm not an expert in this area so perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I can help. It might be really beneficial to start a dialog between the EME and amateur digital communication communities.

Any of the techniques developed for sub-optimum HF communications (PACTOR, CLOVER, etc.) probably have limited applicability in weak signal work. My desire is to "invent" a more optimum scheme tailored to weak signal work. Some simple calculations show there is ~20 dB (or perhaps more) of "gain" to be achieved when the system is optimized.

Don't fear that this will be too expensive. What Phil and I have been talking about would require a good (486 or Pentium) PC equipped with a SoundBlaster board plus a GPS receiver for timing coupled into your existing radios which would operate in "SSB" mode with a ~2 kHz bandwidth. It would be desirable to have the radio's frequency controlled by the PC, and it is desirable to use a disciplined oscillator as a frequency reference since you will need to have knowledge of your TX/RX frequencies at the ~100-200 Hz accuracy (i.e. synchronized between you and the fellow on the other end) level.

Hope this stimulates further discussions -- 73 de Tom, W3IWI

From: Laura Halliday, VE&LDH

Subject: Re[2]: Low-Power EME

There have certainly been some interesting comments on this topic!

I'm one of those who finds the concept of EME interesting, but who is constrained by living in an apartment in an urban area. Thus, my primary interest is in microwave EME, where the antennas and transmit power are a bit more reasonable. My X band operations, so far, are wideband, Gunn-based, and involve a few tens of milliwatts output. This will change. I promise.

EME operation started as a technological stunt (let's not kid ourselves here...), and if that's all people want it to be, it will remain sterile and die out. If it's to amount to anything, it needs to be much more, and sophisticated modern technology is the key. Just think of what commercial interests are doing with meteor scatter packet!

One approach that comes to mind immediately - while plucking an arbitrary signal out of noise is a hard problem, if you know something about the signal you're looking for (you do, generally), and know something of what's happened to it (again, you do), it may be a lot easier to recover it. This sounds a bit like CCW, but there are other approaches, which people have already discussed. Hmmm...

Laura Halliday VE7LDH         "C'est une femme mutine, assez
lhalliday@creo.bc.ca           elegante, grave et legere, ayant le
ve7ldh@amsat.org               sens du confort et du plaisir
Locator: CN89mg                en tout." - C. Deneuve

From: Ray Soifer, W2RS

Subject: More on QRP EME

Hi all,

A few additional thoughts stimulated by Tom Clark's latest note:

1. Tom's comment about synchronizing the time element so that the receiving station would know when the data bits are supposed to start and stop, without trying to extract that from the received signal itself, sounds very promising. I'll take his expert opinion about the 10-20 dB, though, because I don't have enough information here to try to derive that conclusion myself. If there really is that much advantage, let's all try to go for it! One question: would GPS be the most cost-effective way of doing this, or would a VLF time standard be easier to use?

2. On the other hand, claiming approx. 3 dB gain because the multiple tones would be transmitted at a 100% duty cycle instead of Morse with its approx. 50% duty cycle strikes me as double-counting. Assuming that we're all running our transmitters at full power, we'd have to de-rate them by the same 50% duty-cycle factor. A transmitter capable of 100 W on Morse would only be capable of 50 W with continuous tones. Of course, those people using the full legal limit (1.5 kW in the USA) would benefit from the full 3 dB to the extent that their transmitters are capable of it, but is that really QRP?

3. Most of the discussion I have seen on Moon-Net concerns 432 MHz and above. I've had lots of experience with QRP EME at 144 MHz, where libration peaks frequently last as long as 3 to 5 sec each, long enough to get quite a lot of information through on Morse at speeds of 15-20 WPM (12-16 baud). Going to data rates as low as 1 baud would give up most of the value of these signal-strength enhancements, which are typically as strong as 4-7 dB and sometimes as much as 10 dB. In addition, as Tom has mentioned to me in private correspondence, received signals during libration peaks are often far more coherent than at other times, permitting narrower bandwith windows to be used at such times. Since the duration of libration fading is inversely proportional to frequency, the use of similar techniques at 432 MHz would presumably require data rates three times as fast as at 144 MHz.

4. At both frequencies, but especially at 144 MHz, the use of ground-reflection gain is so valuable for QRP EME as to be virtually mandatory, at least with conventional (i.e., Morse) transmissions. Digital signal processing would seem to offer the possibility of filtering techniques to reduce the noise picked up by horizon-pointing antennas, thus enabling ground-reflection gain to be used more effectively. I'm not aware that anyone has yet developed such techniques, but I'd be interested in any thoughts along these lines.

5. Brian, K6STI, makes some excellent points. I, too, love to dig weak signals out of the noise (as well as to provide weak signals for others to dig out, hi). But EME'ers as a group have always been eager to embrace any technology that will help us make QSOs, so I suspect that both approaches (assisted and unassisted) will always be used. Where I, personally, draw the line between "real" and "unreal" QSOs is exactly where Ed Tilton did so many years ago: if it's in real time, it's a real QSO -- if you have to play back the tape later to see if you have a complete QSO, you don't have one. So, if the computer decodes the transmission while you're sitting there and the QSO is still in progress, it's a good one.

73, Ray,. W2RS

From: Ian White, G3SEK

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

Brian Beezley wrote:

Perhaps the thrill of communicating via the moon doesn't require direct personal involvement--maybe it's satisfying enough simply to design and build a system that can do it by itself. But I suspect otherwise. For my one EME QSO (on six meters at K6QXY), the fun was successfully digging an extremely weak signal out of the noise. I thought I had good ears from years of HF weak-signal DXing but the concentration and intense listening required for a single contact amazed me. When I finally completed the QSO after 30 minutes, I knew I had really accomplished something--it was a satisfying personal experience. If I had simply been informed by a computer that the contact had been made, I know I would not have felt the same.

Exactly. One of the greatest satisfactions of EME (and meteor-scatter) is that even though you may not be able to copy the other guy all the time, you *know* that the two of you are working together to make a QSO.

That's why the vast majority of EME enthusiasts will only contemplate live, real-time QSOs. European MS QSOs involving speed-shifting of received bursts are not quite real-time, but they are still very much "live" in the sense I've just described.

Sure, we now have the technology to do it all by machine. But we also have the freedom to keep the fun parts for our own enjoyment.

		      73--Brian, K6STI
			  k6sti@n2.net

From: J. Lee Blanton, WA8YBT/6

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

Greetings all:

Apparently there are sentiments both for and against low-power EME. That surprised me a little but that's OK. There is room enough for all of us in amateur radio.

Regarding the purported 'automated' nature of low-power EME techniques: It was not my intention that low-power EME would be any more automated than RTTY, just slower. The use of advanced modulation techniques and error-correction coding does not necessarily make a QSO any more 'automated' than a voice conversation via digital cellular telephone.

Tom Clark (W3IWI) brought up a good point -- that the doppler spreading on lunar returns won't permit the use of ultra-narrowband phase-coded waveforms. If that is the case, a combination of coherent (FFT) and non-coherent integration would be more effective, as he suggests. (Sorry about the slip -- I'm used to more coherent targets.)

Regarding EME traditions: There will probably always be some EMEers preferring the brute-force approach. (Ah yes...the crackle of high voltage...the smell of the ozone.) But after all this is 1996 and there may be other ways to go.

73,

Lee, WA8YBT/6
blanton@ni.net

From: James R. Miller, G3RUH

Organization: None whatsoever!

Subject: Re: More on QRP EME

On Mon, 8 Apr 1996 18:32:17 EDT Ray Soifer wrote:

Where I, personally, draw the line between "real" and "unreal" QSOs is exactly where Ed Tilton did so many years ago: if it's in real time, it's a real QSO -- if you have to play back the tape later to see if you have a complete QSO, you don't have one. So, if the computer decodes the transmission while you're sitting there and the QSO is still in progress, it's a good one.

There's a contradiction here. Signal processing doesn't operate in real time. It post-processes data. Sure the delay might be only a few milli- seconds, but it's a delay nonetheless.

Now, more hairy processing takes longer; could be a second or two. How long are you prepared to wait before you declare it "non-real time". One second? One minute? A week-end's hacking?

============================================================================
   James R Miller                    E-mail:    g3ruh@amsat.org
  Cambridge England                  Stardate:  1996 Apr 09 [Tue] 0728 utc
============================================================================

From: Ray Soifer, W2RS

Subject: Still More on QRP EME

James,

True enough, all signal processing IS post-processing and thus not in real time. As you go on to speculate, that still leaves the issue open as to what should be, and should not be, accepted as being a "real" QSO.

As Brian and Ian have noted, there will always be some who refuse to accept ANY mechanical or electronic assistance. That is one reason why the European system of MS has never been adopted in the US, as it depends upon "playing back the tape" or its modern, computerized equivalent. We are all in amateur radio for fun (at least I hope so) and if anyone doesn't want to use a computer, that's his Hiram Percy Maxim-given right. As for myself, I don't see why electronic assistance should be automatically barred. RTTY QSOs are accepted for DXCC credit, and how many of us can copy Baudot, ASCII or Pactor by ear?

That being the case, we need a functional definition of "quasi-real-time" that will still satisfy the relative purists, such as myself, who believe that a QSO is not a QSO unless it is completed during one "sitting." One solution, I believe, is suggested by the EME QSO protocol itself, under which you do not send a signal report until you have copied both call signs, you do not send "roger" until you have both calls and the signal report, and the QSO is not complete until each station has copied "roger" from the other. I would suggest that for a QSO to be complete, this protocol must be completed within the time allotted for the schedule. Most EME schedules last half an hour and those of more than an hour are quite rare. While there is no absolute time limit on the duration of a schedule, perhaps the definition of a "sitting" might be the period during which both stations have mutual lunar visibility. If you lose the moon before completing the QSO, you've got to start over next time. In practice, most QSO attempts will be for far shorter periods of time, if only because few operators are that patient. Still, I would argue that if it takes a weekend's hacking to copy a signal, it shouldn't be considered a valid QSO.

73, Ray

From: Ian White, G3SEK

Subject: Re: Low-Power EME

Laura Halliday wrote:

EME operation started as a technological stunt (let's not kid ourselves here...),

That is true, but it's only of historical interest. The relevant question is why people are choosing to come into EME *today*. In most cases I think it's a natural extension of an existing interest in weak- signal VHF/UHF DXing. EME is simply the next step, and the technology and the DX operating interest go hand in hand.

and if that's all people want it to be, it will >remain sterile and die out.

That would be true, but only if the premise about EME being only a "technological stunt" were true - which it ain't.

For a lot of people, it's the balance between technology and personal operating skill that makes EME - and VHF/UHF DX in general - so challenging and satisfying.

If it's to amount to anything, it needs to be much more, and sophisticated modern technology is the key. Just think of what commercial interests are doing with meteor scatter packet!

Sure, but the commercial objective is a box on the wall, which the end user can install and forget. All the fun is in the development process. In use, commercial comms equipment is not meant to be interesting or fun; it's only meant to work and be reliable, and in that sense be as boring as possible. Those are good and valid objectives for commercial comms... but they don't automatically apply to amateur radio.

One of the best things about amateur radio is that each of us can follow our own personal path. We have many choices. If you personally enjoy developing technology that does all the operating for you, you can go right ahead and do that. But please don't assume that is the only worthwhile or "right" objective in amateur radio.

73 from Ian G3SEK          Editor, 'The VHF/UHF DX Book'
			  'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
Professionally:
IFW Technical Services     Clear technical English - anywhere.