Ham radio is well worth getting into if you come from a software background but want to get more hands-on with embedded electronics. Radios are ubiquitous in modern technology, and getting a deeper understanding of how they work can have surprising career benefits too!
ACCount37•1h ago
The RF fundamentals stay the same, but the gulf between ham radio and modern RF comms is truly vast.
Those TDM'd bands 40MHz wide, with digital data and modulation past the limits of sanity, and the entire RF system being integrated into one die somehow? Oh boy.
jacquesm•56m ago
What really blows me away is the range that you can achieve with almost no power on tiny little antennas. For instance, ELRS uses a transmitter/receiver that is less than a gram, that can keep a link with a drone alive across 30 km or even more. And the antenna is so small you might toss it away with the packaging if you're not paying attention.
Oh, and it also speaks WiFi, just in case and it has its own little onboard computer and a web server.
jacquesm•1h ago
Job well done! I tried reverse engineering the encryption on Yamaha's midi files. I thought it would be super complex but it turned out to be ridiculously easy. It's funny when you're preparing mentally for some long slog and turns out to be an hour at best. In case you're interested: they used a fixed block of 256 bytes that they xor'd the data with in a cyclic fashion.
tiniuclx•1h ago
ACCount37•1h ago
Those TDM'd bands 40MHz wide, with digital data and modulation past the limits of sanity, and the entire RF system being integrated into one die somehow? Oh boy.
jacquesm•56m ago
One example:
https://rcmaniak.pl/userdata/public/assets/images/SpeedyBee/...
Oh, and it also speaks WiFi, just in case and it has its own little onboard computer and a web server.