Do we really understand our hobby?

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Today I was going to talk to you about Grid Dip Oscillators. Some research later I realised that I don't yet understand the topic enough to explain it to myself, let alone explain it to you. I then set my sights on a simpler thing, an SWR Meter.

Pretty standard fare in a radio shack. You plug it in and off you go, nothing to it.

So I then set about learning how this actually works. As you know, if it's written on the Internet, it must be true, and in this case, there must be a thousand different explanations and ways that this common black box works in your shack. Since I found so many different explanations that made me recall a quote:

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

So, at this point I should sit down and explain it to you as if you're my grandmother, right?

Unfortunately I'm not yet at that level of understanding, so I'll not add to the noise of explanation until such time as I do understand it. Instead I'm going to take a left turn and observe that Amateur Radio is full of explanations. Some of them great, many of them horrendous.

I see Amateurs on-line arguing about how something works and then I hear them on-air doing more of the same.

It occurs to me that where ever there is argument about how something works there is one of two things going on, lack of knowledge or lack of understanding.

I'm not saying that every Amateur doesn't understand, I'm wondering if it's possible that our collective understanding of how our hobby works appears to be lacking in scientific rigour and that it's incomplete. I'm wondering how much of our hobby is actually understood and documented.

While I'm here, I should point out that taking observations of a phenomenon isn't an explanation of how it works. The observations will get you places, but the unexpected or unobserved might get you killed along the way.

I've said in the past that this hobby is like Magic and I still think that. The more I learn and understand about it, the more Magic comes in to play. This is what keeps drawing me back to this wonderful world of Amateur Radio.

While I was searching for my SWR explanation I came across this little gem which speaks to me greatly and goes a long way to explaining why some of our hobby is so misunderstood:

"the reason that your friends and ours cannot understand mathematics is not because they have no head for figures, but because they are unable to achieve the degree of concentration required to follow a moderately involved sequence of inferences"

So, next time you sit down to explain how something works, bear that in mind, since following along a string of things that lead to an explanation might not be something your, or my, friends are willing to put up with.

I wish I'd seen that quote before I attempted to explain why I had several antennas on the roof and couldn't just have one.

Still learning...

I'm Onno VK6FLAB