My Virtual Workbench

Foundations of Amateur Radio

With the ever increasing pace of innovation, well, change, I'll leave alone if it's actual innovation instead of marketing, we see new software released at an almost alarming rate.

There is an urge to stay abreast of this process, to update, upgrade and try new solutions as soon as they are presented to you by well meaning friends and colleagues, not to mention online marketing, uh, reviews and other enticements that make you click the button to install something to avert the fear of missing out.

If you've done this for a number of years, actually, who am I kidding, a number of weeks, you'll discover that this comes at a cost. One that the corporate world has attempted to address by using terms like Standard Operating Environment, backups, administrator privileges and other such annoying things that prevent users from trying something new and breaking things.

At home and in the shack most of that is not a problem. No corporate IT division around to stop you, but soon you'll discover that something you installed caused you grief, encouraged your logging software to stop talking to your radio, prevented you radio from changing frequency, or blocked the latest digital mode from working as intended.

I live in that world too, but with the benefit of an IT background I decided nearly a decade and a half ago that enough was enough. I bit the bullet and bought myself a new computer. I vowed to install only one tool on that laptop, a virtualisation environment, also known as a hypervisor. It allows you to run a virtual computer inside a window. Given enough CPU power you can run multiple virtual computers in multiple windows inside your actual physical hardware.

This gives you flexibility. You can run a copy of your favourite operating system in a virtual environment, install the latest and greatest software on it and if it breaks, you delete it and start again. In my case I'm running my daily desktop environment where I'm currently writing this as a virtual Linux machine inside my physical computer which is also running several other virtual machines, including some network monitoring tools, a software defined radio development environment, my accounting software and plenty of other things.

Each virtual machine is nothing more than a folder on my physical computer and making a full backup is as simple as making a copy of that folder. Better still, if I want to try a new version of something on a machine that I'm already using, I can duplicate the folder, fire up the copy of the virtual machine, install the new software and test it. If it works, great, if not, throw it away and start again.

Changing physical computers is also simple. Buy a new computer. Install the hypervisor, copy the machine folders across and start working.

From a security perspective, it also means that I can install a random bit of software recommended by a friend without getting worried about it stealing any of my information, given that my private information isn't on the virtual machine on which I'm installing this unknown piece of software.

I also use this to compile new bits of code. If I come across a project on GitHub that I'd like to try, I can fire up a brand new machine and install all the prerequisites without running the risk of breaking something that I rely on. It also means that I can test with different operating systems, from macOS, any flavour of Linux, copies of Windows and play with virtual copies of Android or if I'm feeling frisky, BeOS.

There are other ways to achieve some of this. For example, you could get yourself a Raspberry Pi and half a dozen MicroSD cards. Install an operating system onto a card, boot the Pi, install your new application and if you like it, use it. If not, wipe the card, start again. You can have a dedicated WSPR beacon card, a contest logging card, whatever you need, all separate, all easy to backup and change as needed.

If that's not enough, some virtualisation environments allow you to emulate different microprocessors, so you could run ARM code on an x86 processor, or vice-versa.

If you want more, you can investigate containerisation. A tool that allows you to essentially create a mini virtual machine and run a new environment using a single command, so fast that you essentially don't need to wait for it to start-up, allowing you to mix and match environments as needed.

At this point you might ask why I'm even talking about this. What does this have to do with amateur radio?

Well, it's how I have my test bench set-up. Sure I have a soldering station, multimeters, a NanoVNA, an antenna analyser and all that kind of great stuff, but my radio world is mostly software and in that space all my tooling is pretty much virtual, put together in such a way that I can pick and choose precisely how I want to test something without killing something I rely on.

I'm telling you about it because in my experience much of the amateur community still relies on a desktop computer running Windows and I have to tell you, there is so much more out there for you to explore.

What does your virtual workbench look like?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB