Over 400 Ham radio operators take part in annual convention

Event displays sBITX that requires lesser complex circuits and runs on a low-cost computer board

It was a day of circuitous wizardry with around 400 Ham operators from across the country converging at the Lamakaan Annual Radio Convention (LARC 4) on Saturday, and sharing information about frequencies, antennae, and wireless technologies. It also witnessed the sBITX, a software-defined indigenously designed radio.

Explaining what this means, Ashhar Farhan, who developed the sBITX transceiver, and wrote the code, says, “Software defined radios are more compact. Hardware defined radios are much larger. Otherwise this radio would have been the size of a trunk. Software defined radios allow for correction of data, and storage of data. They also amplify weak signals.”

The sBITX transceiver, Mr. Farhan said, was developed on LINUX. The idea was to add more features, and this was possible on open source platforms. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” Mr. Farhan quotes Eric Raymond, a famous open-source software advocate. This implies that the more access to the code a larger number of people have, the easier it is to identify bugs, fix them, and the better the radio can be.