Support What You Want to See in the World

A plea to rethink the way we do business

A few weeks ago, I ran across a guest essay from Wojciech Kaczmarski, SP5WWP on the Zero Retries Substack entitled What Stalls Amateur Radio Development? I don’t necessarily agree with everything written in this editorial, but I do believe in the general message that we need new ways of funding our FOSS amateur radio/hobby electronics endeavors, if we all want to continue to enjoy the fruits of many valuable hours of development from talented people in this hobby.

I’d like to note that this is not some kind of passive-aggressive way to nudge you to support me financially on this Substack. If anything, this is a way for me to attempt to hold myself publicly accountable so that I more fully live up to the ideals that I’m espousing here, as well as to try to put these ideas in front of more peoples’ eyeballs. I would encourage you to support projects and creators that inspire you the most. With that in mind, I’m going to pull some quotes out of the linked article so I can riff off them to add some of my own ideas. I encourage you to follow the link above to read the article in its entirety.

Photo by Jannik Selz on Unsplash

It’s not a secret that most of the amateur radio community depends on large companies (Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood) and solutions they provide. The status quo is all about keeping hardware and software proprietary, minimizing users’ chances to modify it. While there are new models of radios being advertised all the time, they do not offer anything new. This keeps the amateur radio world in a state of artificially sustained technological stagnation, short-sightedly throttling down the progress in order to maximize someone’s profit. It’s been already shown that community-driven projects can lead to technological advancements - the advent of MMDVM (4), M17, OpenRTX (5), WPSD (6), OpenWebRX (7), and many others. The purpose of this open letter is to show that cutting-edge, open-source solutions can only be successfully proliferated by a group of skilled amateur radio developers.

It’s undoubtedly true that most hams are reliant on the equipment provided the big-name amateur radio manufacturers. I personally don’t believe in any kind of conspiracy of “throttling down the progress in order to maximize someone’s profit”. Frankly, considering how relatively small a market that we radio amateurs are, it is actually shocking to me that there are multiple large corporations who still actively manufacture radios made just for us. Progress does happen (and I think it has picked up over the last 20 years), but there’s no doubt that there’s not a huge motivation to push the envelope because we are small market. A lot of the progress we’ve had in our radios have probably come because these advancements are applicable to radios across the manufacturer’s portfolio.

It is no secret that I am a huge proponent of the marriage of open source software, firmware, and hardware with amateur radio, for multiple reasons. I do strongly agree with SP5WWP’s assertion that open source community-driven projects are behind quite a bit of the current innovation going on in our space. I also believe that the FOSS philosophy is a natural fit for the ethos of amateur radio; where we push to drive technical innovation, train and hone a group of skilled engineers, and freely share what we know. The last few decades has demonstrated that a lot of very valuable work can come out of these kinds of efforts.

Volunteering is a wonderful work model - you get excellent, qualified workforce for free. It allowed many amazing projects to appear - MMDVM, OpenRTX, WPSD, M17, to name a few in the amateur radio community. There is a big problem behind it though - volunteers can rarely be bound with any obligations or time constraints. This also means no one can have any expectations against volunteers. They can be distracted, their reliability and commitment can span from anything between extremely enthusiastic to hardly interested. It is understandable that people prioritize tasks in their lives - family and daily job is by far more important for most of us than hobby-related projects.

The usual open source development model is to rely upon an army of unpaid volunteers. Only the largest projects have any significant kind of funding (the kind that can pay the salaries of multiple engineers), and that money is typically provided by large corporate sponsors, who get a bit of a quid pro quo. Most folks doing the FOSS grunt work aren’t getting rich off of it, by any means. They do it because its a labor of love, typically.

We hams also tend to do a lot of volunteer work related to our hobby, so this kind of effort is a natural fit for us. And honestly, it’s fine for a lot of things, but there are problems with this approach, as SP5WWP mentions. If it’s a labor of love, you’re only going to do it as long as you at least somewhat like it. Life also gets in the way (as I know all too well), and if this stuff isn’t paying the bills, it will go on the back burner. And because of our relatively small niche, a FOSS project contributor who gives up is going to have a big impact on his project and the projects downstream from it.

Second issue relates to long term commitment required for sophisticated projects. Many complex functions require more than one person to be involved (12). This implies project management, reporting, planning and documentation, tasks seldom attractive for volunteers. People come and go, leaving unfinished tasks behind. The turnover rate varies mostly between days and, more rarely, months.

This speaks to an under-appreciated aspect of FOSS projects: that it’s pretty damned difficult to run a project that depends upon more than one person to function. It’s akin to the proverbial herding of cats. In a situation like the traditional project, where no one is getting paid for their work, then there is nothing binding the team together other than their desire to see things through and the honor of having made something. The project manager or lead can’t force anyone to do anything. The fact that significant things still get done in this manner is somewhat astonishing.

“They all want, but do not commit”

Project’s followers usually have brilliant ideas and provide valuable feedback, but when it gets to implementation, suddenly everyone turns impotent.

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For this exact reason, most subprojects are run by a single person, or mostly by a single person [vide: M17 specification document, WPSD, the Remote Radio Unit, OpenRTX]. This burden causes significant emotional stress, easily deteriorating the lone developer's psyche. The effect is further amplified by the pressure coming from the user base, with its never-ending requests and expectations.

Here is one of the biggest problems that I’ve personally encountered in this model. It’s nearly cost-free to critique and offer suggestions on how to change or improve the project, but very few people are going to help to contribute actual work (or funding) to the project. In fairness, most users probably don’t have the ability to really help on the technical side, but that doesn’t stop some of the most entitled and strident ones from making demands on others’ free labor.

My most-starred GitHub repo is a decently popular Arduino library. Between the massive impact of the pandemic shutdowns and then the 18 month process to move our family from the city out to a rural property, I was unable to do any work on any of my radio and electronics projects for a couple of years. As it stands now, I have a huge backlog of issues to try to tackle. First I have to triage them and then hopefully put some effort into the fixing the highest-impact problems. Quite a few people rely on this library for their projects, so whatever code I change, I have to ensure that I don’t break theirs. I’ve actually had a few pull requests from thoughtful people, but those that aren’t trivial changes need to be carefully scrutinized and tested before release. It’s pretty overwhelming for one person to deal with. Fortunately, I haven’t had many of the entitled people popping up, but the ones that do act up certainly do sap your will to do work for others.

Another example is the shortage of educational and explanatory materials created by the community, despite the fact that the community has enough knowledge to create it.

This specifically is the reason why I’m working on Project Yamhill. I never expect to make any significant amount of money off of it. I hope to leave a legacy for future generations of radio amateurs so that they can learn RF electronics without the need for an expensive course or degree. As amazing as software defined radio is, the science of RF design is never going to go away.

To be a real threat to the aforementioned status quo and bring amateur radio back to its open-source tinkering roots, it is not enough to rely on volunteers, as this model is too inefficient for large, high-impact projects. There is a significant, consistent effort required to provide the critical mass needed to bring products to market.

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Monetary profit is a human motivator that can be used to push the state-of-art forward faster than it would otherwise move. There seems to be a wide assumption that technology will continue to improve, however, that is not a certainty. Hiring an engineer who believes in the goals and vision of the organization relieves the pressure for the individual to have to work elsewhere to earn a living. The engineer’s priorities will naturally align with the priorities of the organization. This will help the organization to consistently drive to keep striving.

I completely agree that being able to make money off of these types of endeavors is the best way to move them forward, provide motivation, and make them self-sustaining. Where I diverge with SP5WWP is in the specific methods. Although this essay doesn’t come right out and state it, it seems to me that what SP5WWP is calling for is more akin to the funding model seen in larger open source software projects, where a corporate patron (or perhaps a charitable organization in this particular case) provides the money to the project. I am personally not a fan of this approach, as it makes the funded project beholden to the desires of the organization providing the funding. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and all that.

I’m a big believer in the neo-patronage model, where those who use and enjoy your work are the ones who fund it. This is the model that Substack is built on (and earlier websites such as Patreon and such), and I think it has the best chance of providing a positive impact for the “little fish”. The problem is that not enough of us at this time will fund things this way, probably for a variety of reasons. Yes, we hams are notoriously…frugal…and that’s certainly a factor. But I also think a lot of the problem is that this is all a relatively new model, and we’re not really used to thinking in neo-patronage terms. Younger folks are much more accustomed to this way of doing business, with the proliferation of content creators who provide paid memberships, superchats, merch, etc.

The entire point of this essay is not to throw a pity party for those who put out open source projects. Rather, I hope to encourage you to think about the potential benefits we would all receive from a cultural shift where we consciously allocate some monthly funds to directly support those who bring us the things that we enjoy and rely upon in our wonderful hobby. I certainly don’t have all of the answers here, but I believe that talking about these issues is the first step in changing the culture for the better.

With that said, let me make some suggestions for concrete actions that you can take to help move things in a better direction:

• The biggest thing you can do is provide that financial contribution to projects that you use regularly or simply want to see succeed. I’m working on changing my habits so that I can budget a bit more every month to contribute to creators and projects on a continuing basis.

• If you find a problem with a project, be quick to offer positive feedback and help, and slow to offer criticism. Pointing out issues is necessary, but let’s not do it in a needlessly critical way, nor use them as a cudgel against the people working on the project.

• In a similar vein, if you really feel strongly about something with one of these projects, put some skin in the game. Whether it is via your time or financially, your opinion means a lot more if you actually have something riding on it.

• In general, try to patronize small creators and businesses more often. Please don’t buy clones off of Aliexpress and the like. None of us are getting rich off of this, and when some random overseas company free-rides on a small creator’s designs, it just hurts the prospects of future work being done.

• One area where I know we need a lot more work is in social networking. YouTubers are already pretty good at this, but I think it would be beneficial if we all started supporting and cross-promoting each other more. I don’t know exactly how this should work in practice, so any suggestions would be most helpful.

It’s a huge cliché, but we’re going to have to be the kind of change that we want in this world. By learning some new habits, we can create a more self-sustaining ecology that will benefit all of us in the long run.

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What’s Next

Unfortunately, not much has happened on the Project Yamhill front over the last few weeks, as I had to focus on my paying job and then we had family visiting with us over this past week. I did do some more testing with the MAX2681 as a product detector to make sure it would be usable in this configuration. I’m fairly convinced that it will work at least as well as a SA612, so I’m going to create that Project Yamhill mixer module based on it.