It all started in 2017 during the coding craze…
My radio journey began in a curious way, that is, not with radio at all. In 2017 I was caught up in the coding craze and was learning how to code. I kept getting frustrated with the process because I couldn’t understand how it all truly worked. Where was all the code going? How was it making things work?
That led me to studying computer architecture. I went deeper and deeper until I understood that computers worked at the transistor level, and that all those ones and zeros were electrical signals.
I looked through dozens of archived computer hobbyists magazines in my explorations, which is where things began to take a turn. I read old computer magazines like BYTE issues from the 1970s and was amazed that the schematics and concepts were written in a way that demonstrated there was already a common knowledge shared among them. So I thought OK, how does everyone reading seem to already know what all this is??
I went further back in the archives to radio hobbyist magazines and realized that many of the computer hobbyists sprung up from being radio hobbyists! They were familiar with the computer circuit schematics because they understood radio schematics.
I began learning radio as a way to easier understand analog and digital integrated circuits, as they are based on the same principles of electromagnetism.
I am so happy to be on this journey. Understanding radio more is helping me to understand computer architecture and engineering, and in the future I want to experiment with IC design, especially with analog circuits.
Analog circuits are becoming more relevant again because digital computing is hitting energy limits, and analog can perform certain operations with far less power. Radio teaches you how to work with analog circuits in a very practical hands-on way, which is how I learn best.
