The vast majority of the world's electronics run on 1960s and 70s technology, it's not just ham radio.
Bloody nobody cares about bleeding silicon from Intel (or TSMC for that matter), everyone cares whether Analog Devices is still making that one chip they released to market 50 years ago (or if they have a drop-in replacement if not).
And just so people don't get the wrong idea: It's not that improvements are shunned. It's that recertifying with new and improved advancements costs time and money that nobody wants to justify.
The new shiny hasn't be properly battle tested. When latest silicon from Intel/TSMC has been around for 50-60 years, we can talk. It's also much easier to repair analog equipment in the field with whatever you've got laying around than digital equipment. That's part of the charm/allure of steam punk
It's also much easier to repair analog equipment in the field with whatever you've got laying around than digital equipment.
That... depends. Analog equipment tends to have much, much higher component counts than digital equipment, making it much more difficult to troubleshoot defective components (try measuring a capacitor with a resistor in parallel), and the skillset needed to troubleshoot analog vs digital is also massively different.
On the other hand obtaining spare parts for analog circuits is going to be easier in a few decades than it will be for FPGAs and other semiconductors, and completely forget about ASICs.
I'm a one-dude-in-the-basement freelancer and about 5 years ago I was asked to build a device that would measure a slowly changing signal and use it to modulate a 5kHz input, and generate a differential, bipolar output. Basically, read the position feedback on a machine tool and generate output that looked like a resolver.
I did it half in code, half in hardware. The hardware was pricy, but it was the easiest way to get it done in low quantity.
Fast forward a couple years and it's now cheap enough to do 90% of all of that in code. I could probably cut my BOM by 60%, but at low production volumes there's no compelling reason to redesign the system. So, for as long as my customer wants these, I'll build them exactly the same way.
The one that annoys me is handsets using proprietary batteries and charging. I want them to have USB-C port for charging. This came up for me with disasters where it would be easier to use USB power banks than AC chargers or converting 12V.
Some of the Chinese radios are starting to include USB-C port but all the mainstream manufacturers haven't changed. They should could out with new handsets, redesign old ones, or come out with batteries with USB-C ports.
The one that annoys me is handsets using proprietary batteries and charging.
You can squarely blame Japan for that hellscape of a mess.
Nowadays we like egging Apple for their proprietary shenanigans, but they are actually nothing compared to how much hate Japanese companies have for universal, intercompatible standards and how much that mindset has affected electronics at-large to this day from Japan's outsized influence in electronics during the 70s through 90s.
For example, if you have a ham radio transceiver from ICOM you absolutely require ICOM handsets, microphones, speakers, and other accessories for it. Equivalents from another brand like Yaesu or Kenwood will not work, even if the physical connectors are the same because the individual wiring is proprietary.
Some people here might recall Sony only supporting MemoryStick and telling SD cards and CompactFlash to fuck off, ham radio is that but exponentially worse.
The vast majority of the world's electronics run on 1960s and 70s technology, it's not just ham radio.
Yeah it's crazy how little modern tech has made it to different niches. I was looking into metal detecting a few years ago, and there is basically no technology to any of them, even the expensive ones. You'd assume they'd have fancy android powered devices with gps and stuff, but no it's the same basic circuitry they've had for decades.
The base circuitry for detecting metal probably hasn't changed much (at least not for amateur prices), but there are apparently modern metal detectors with app integration and gps and the like: https://apps.apple.com/be/app/go-terrain/id1419674707
Huh. Now you are making me picture a metal detector design with an array of overlapping current loops and a fancy deconvolution software on top that gives you an image (probably very fuzzy but still an image) of what magnetic source its detecting. Could be pretty cool!
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The vast majority of the world's electronics run on 1960s and 70s technology, it's not just ham radio.
Bloody nobody cares about bleeding silicon from Intel (or TSMC for that matter), everyone cares whether Analog Devices is still making that one chip they released to market 50 years ago (or if they have a drop-in replacement if not).
And just so people don't get the wrong idea: It's not that improvements are shunned. It's that recertifying with new and improved advancements costs time and money that nobody wants to justify.
The new shiny hasn't be properly battle tested. When latest silicon from Intel/TSMC has been around for 50-60 years, we can talk. It's also much easier to repair analog equipment in the field with whatever you've got laying around than digital equipment. That's part of the charm/allure of steam punk
That... depends. Analog equipment tends to have much, much higher component counts than digital equipment, making it much more difficult to troubleshoot defective components (try measuring a capacitor with a resistor in parallel), and the skillset needed to troubleshoot analog vs digital is also massively different.
On the other hand obtaining spare parts for analog circuits is going to be easier in a few decades than it will be for FPGAs and other semiconductors, and completely forget about ASICs.
It's not even the big guys.
I'm a one-dude-in-the-basement freelancer and about 5 years ago I was asked to build a device that would measure a slowly changing signal and use it to modulate a 5kHz input, and generate a differential, bipolar output. Basically, read the position feedback on a machine tool and generate output that looked like a resolver.
I did it half in code, half in hardware. The hardware was pricy, but it was the easiest way to get it done in low quantity.
Fast forward a couple years and it's now cheap enough to do 90% of all of that in code. I could probably cut my BOM by 60%, but at low production volumes there's no compelling reason to redesign the system. So, for as long as my customer wants these, I'll build them exactly the same way.
The one that annoys me is handsets using proprietary batteries and charging. I want them to have USB-C port for charging. This came up for me with disasters where it would be easier to use USB power banks than AC chargers or converting 12V.
Some of the Chinese radios are starting to include USB-C port but all the mainstream manufacturers haven't changed. They should could out with new handsets, redesign old ones, or come out with batteries with USB-C ports.
You can squarely blame Japan for that hellscape of a mess.
Nowadays we like egging Apple for their proprietary shenanigans, but they are actually nothing compared to how much hate Japanese companies have for universal, intercompatible standards and how much that mindset has affected electronics at-large to this day from Japan's outsized influence in electronics during the 70s through 90s.
For example, if you have a ham radio transceiver from ICOM you absolutely require ICOM handsets, microphones, speakers, and other accessories for it. Equivalents from another brand like Yaesu or Kenwood will not work, even if the physical connectors are the same because the individual wiring is proprietary.
Some people here might recall Sony only supporting MemoryStick and telling SD cards and CompactFlash to fuck off, ham radio is that but exponentially worse.
Yeah it's crazy how little modern tech has made it to different niches. I was looking into metal detecting a few years ago, and there is basically no technology to any of them, even the expensive ones. You'd assume they'd have fancy android powered devices with gps and stuff, but no it's the same basic circuitry they've had for decades.
The base circuitry for detecting metal probably hasn't changed much (at least not for amateur prices), but there are apparently modern metal detectors with app integration and gps and the like: https://apps.apple.com/be/app/go-terrain/id1419674707
Huh. Now you are making me picture a metal detector design with an array of overlapping current loops and a fancy deconvolution software on top that gives you an image (probably very fuzzy but still an image) of what magnetic source its detecting. Could be pretty cool!