Interview with Ward Silver: Nuts & Volts Columnist, Engineer, Ham Radio Enthusiast

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Audio Transcription

Note: I did not transcribe this myself. Please excuse any spelling, grammar, punctuation errors or omissions.

Ward: Hello!

Me: Hey Ward, it’s Brian.

Ward: Sitting here looking at your list of stuff to talk about, how’s that sound, ok?

Me: Sounds great, sometimes the old fashion stuff works better than the new technology

Ward: I got an old AT&T phone hanging around here someplace, just for when everything goes down, you never know, you know.

Me: yeah I have a regular corded phone too in case the power goes but I’m actually fighting some virus or sinus thing so, if I happened to sneeze or sound a little nasally that’s why.

Ward: Oh, well I can forgive you.

Me: Ok Thanks, so let’s go ahead and have you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do and all that stuff.

Ward: Well ok, I am an engineer by training and I guess some people will tell you by nature and I got interested in science about the time I opened my peepers and I’ve always been a STEM kind of tech guy

Got interested in electrical engineering when I was about 10 or 11 and stumbled on an amateur radio magazine QST, in the library when I was 11 and that pretty much sealed the deal. Looked like it was a lot of fun, and people doing things that looked interesting.

It took a few years to get a license and stuff but then once I got involved with the guys in high school club, it was pretty easy to learn and that was basically a huge doorway to electronics back in the day.

A lot of people went through that; didn’t have internet, didn’t have computers although we had sort of time share terminal in the high school and that’s where I started computer programming. Then I went to engineering school at the University of Missouri, Rolla and spent 20 years in product development and individual self-proprietorship type consulting and things like that, I did industrial instrumentation, medical devices and various types of software and wound up sort of retiring from that in the early 2000’s.

I took up teaching for a while and that morphed into technical writing and editing as an independent thing and I’m sure that would amaze my high school English teachers but here we are, and I’ve written several books now and edit some of the major hand books and license manuals for the American Radio Relay League, and radio stuff and that kind of ties it up from the technical stand point.

Other than that I like camping, canoeing, playing the violin, tossing Frisbees around, and playing ultimate when I’m not spraining my ankle and getting outside; that sort of stuff. So now you know everything.

Me: Ok great, so tell us a little bit about your column in Nuts & Volts, because I’ve been a reader of that magazine for a while and I know your column is relatively newish, but I enjoy reading it so can you tell us more about that?

Ward: Ok, so I’ve been a Nuts & Volts reader “On and Off” since back in the day when they were a full size news print, sort of a combination of eBay of the day and some technical stuff, and I’ve written a few articles for them over the years and at some point it occured to me that it might be a great idea to take the column that I write for QST, which is called “Hands on radio.”

It’s about experiment and technical topics to take to the broader audience that might be interested in some of the same electronics stuff, so Nuts & Volts were enthusiastic about that, so each time I write a column which comes out bi-monthly, I try to take something in the ham domain.

The column is called “The Hams Wireless Work Bench”, that would be an interest to general electronics, robotics, makers, drone flyers, whatever you got to explain like what we’ve done to things like transmission lines and ferrites and propagation, and oscillators all these kind of stuff. Things that you find all across the industry and the hobby along with just Ham radio.

Me: Ok Great, interesting, I do love the column like I said. You kind of already answered the first question about your involvement, you said you were an engineer. Do you still purse it has a hobby?

Ward: Yes! I’m really into Ham radio in a lot of different ways, I have a fairly different large station in Missouri and a portable thing that is mobile in the car, I’m interested in all sorts of new things, like digital modes, and I want to do earth moon, earth communications and some of these really special and interesting new types of protocols and super low powered stuff.

So the big time hobby aspect, plus there are all kinds of electronics around the house just associated products or projects I should say, so the engineering department here at home is pretty stacked up from floor to ceiling with electronic stuff.

Me: Ok, and are you still employed or did you retire?

Ward: I’m self-employed, I do the technical writing and editing thing, I’m going to be retiring over the next few years but sometimes retirement just means you work even harder, you sometimes wonder how you ever had time to work, right now I’ve got a list of projects that’s just amazing, so we’ll see.

Me: I know you said you’re into Ham radio, would that be your specific niche or specialization or do you have others too?

Ward: that’s primary, although that covers a huge range of things. Everything from DC power to GO physics, so it sounds specific but it’s quite broad.

Me: ok, I know you said you were an engineer so I assumed you had some sort of formal education or degree

Ward: Yea I got a bachelors in engineering from the University of Missouri and am a member of the IEEE, that sort of thing.

Me: ok, I also have an electrical engineering background myself and I am an IEEE member also so that’s good

Ward: Good stuff, you know when you’re just getting started, joining a professional society seems like a bit of a luxury and you’re not really sure if it’s going to pay benefits one way or the other, but over the years I’ve found that joining my professional society has turned out to be a good thing for training and literature and it’s a great way to keep on whatever aspect of your profession you’re interested in in terms of developing technology if you’re going to stay current in engineering for a long time with the way automation is going, you need to keep yourself the forefront of technology and that’s a good way to do it.

Me: That is absolutely true, do you work with any microcontrollers?

Ward: Oh yes, it’s funny because when I started out in electrical engineering I thought I was going to be an analog circuits guy, op amps, mixers, and RF isolators and amplifiers, and I’ve certainly done a bunch of that, but what I’ve done more of is microcontroller development when I was really active in industrial microelectronics.

My favorite was the Motorola 68HD11, I guess they are now Free Scale, and knew it inside and out to see and assembly language writing for it, but I really had a great time I really enjoyed it, I kind of miss it, and the closest I get to it nowadays is writing some short visual basic stuff and developing add-ons inside spreadsheets and stuff. It’s the same kind of thing – but I really miss wrestling with software puzzles for days and days and I really liked microcontrollers.

Me: Ok, I noticed myself during the past 7/8 years that trainers like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi have kind of taken the place of the PICs and AVR’s, especially in the hands of hobbyists. Do you prefer to work with the naked micros like the PIC, AVR or are you more like a trainer guy like an Arduino or Rpi etc.

Ward: well I’m an agnostic, I don’t fall real strongly in one way or the other. If I just want to do a little App or something, pretty much I can buy it off the shelves as an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi based solution. I really don’t even have to do the programing, I just go to the internet and pretty much what I want is always available.

If I was going to design something from scratch like a kit or something I’d probably go with the naked microcontroller because it’s a lot less expensive and I just like building little gadgets. When I was an engineer, my specialty was to build these little very tightly coupled microprocessor analog things that would do ultrasonics, or ranging or something like that.

Me: ok, so here’s an interesting question that wasn’t on the list. Do you consider working exclusively with Arduinos and other trainers as cheating, what are your thoughts on that?

Ward: there’s no such thing as cheating. If you get the job done and you meet the requirements within the resources that you got its ok. But you do get points for elegance sometimes but unless you’re building a million of something, then what’s really more important is to get it to the customer as quickly as possible.

You need to have a tool box full of tools and that can be everything from an 8 pin, absolutely minimal little microcontroller to full size single board computers, and whatever the need, don’t worry about if it’s cheating just do it.

Me: Interesting, so tell us a little about your first project, what went well what went wrong?

Ward: Well the first project that I really built was a HW16 Ham radio transceiver and I was very careful about building it, these things cost about a hundred and fifteen bucks back in the day which was really stiff but not ridiculous, and so I carefully soldered everything and Heath Kit fans will remember the old instructions to put a wire in a terminal strip and they say don’t solder it yet and then you put in 4/5 more than solder the whole thing.

Well I left one of the wires flopping around and I didn’t notice it didn’t get soldered on. It was a high voltage lead from the transformer so when I turned it on nothing worked. So that was it, and I triumphantly found that problem, soldered it back to the terminal strip and neglected to notice that I had bent a bleeder resistor lead to the point where the high voltage went through this bleeder resistor directly to ground.

when I turned it back on the second time I learned about letting the smoke out of a large wire wound power resister about 6 inches in from my noise and so I guess that would be a lifelong trauma and I’ve never been able to turn on a new project after that without an involuntary glance. So we got it working right away but it was an interesting way to start your building career.

Me: So what was your most difficult project, would you say?

Ward: when you asked me that in an email, I said some real interesting troubleshooting experiences that was my challenge for about 20 years of being self-employed, you do a lot of trouble shooting but I think the most difficult project I had was helping a medical company take a heart monitor that had been developed under one set of FDA rules and bring it to market under a brand new and far more stringent set of rules. Including a lot of documentation of failure mode analysis and hazard analysis and verifying functionality and qualifying it. You just cannot believe how much supporting engineering there is in medical devices and this was a life critical heart device, and so the documentation is really on steroids.

As you know trying to bring a product under one set of rules is hard enough but when it’s been developed under a more relaxed regime and you have to document it to a more difficult regime it just takes a lot of thinking and figuring and revising and documentation and it just went on and on for a couple of years really.

We got it done and it worked and it was a successful product and it probably saved a lot of lives so I feel like I did a good job but it was really difficult, and it required a lot of politics and just working things out, new processes, verification, validation and all this stuff they never tell you in school, but once you get out there the system engineering can really dominate far more than just electronics, that was the my most difficult one.

Me: Ok, and what are you currently working on now?

Ward: Well the current project is to take the big station that I have, it’s not here at the house – the big ham radio station, three towers and a couple of radios, lots of antenna switching, amplifiers, rotators, the whole thing and make it operate by remote control.

So that involves everything from worrying about how to turn power on and off through the telephone system, and then you got to worry about DSL bandwidth, control programs, and integrating all this stuff in Latin C of audio and it’s a challenging thing to say the least. It requires everything from worrying about crimps on wires all the way to abstract telephone stuff.

Me: Good, what do you think is the most challenging thing about electronics?

Ward: Well, to a guy my age — I’m 60 — I started programing on a teletype back in the day where analog was king and then things just shifted over the years. The most significantly challenging thing about electronics these days is that so much of electronics – especially commercial is disappearing into these big black things with lots of legs that get soldered on a circuit board, and you can’t go into these things and probe around with a volt meter and stuff, you have to do it through either virtual hardware, design language or FPTA compilers.

This is all very abstract now, you can’t go in and put your finger on the resister and see which one is hot, it’s a whole different ball game and we do not as yet have a good set of visualisation tool like you do for electronics schematics and so this all has to exist in your head.

This makes it very difficult to exchange ideas with other people if you can’t see them, if you don’t have a common visual language to describe what’s going on in there, so with everything being hybertive software and hardware now, we really need that common […] that you get from unrolling a D size schematic on a work bench and sitting down with couple other people and trying to figure something out.

We have a hard time doing that, that’s the new environment, that’s where it’s going, we’re going to have to figure it out but right now it’s kind of hard

Me: ok interesting, so you’re referring to integrated circuits and that’s making it more complexed.

Ward: Yea the complexity is an order of magnitude more than what you used to do when, you know you use discrete packages to wire everything up. You can routinely now work on a 10,000 gate FPGA or ASIC that would have taken racks of equipment back in the day and a huge amount of wiring and now, it’s basically just plug in a USB cabled to the development system and you download the programming thing, and go get a cup of coffee and by the time you’re back it’s done.

But on the other hand all that complexity has to be managed and if you’re doing anything complicated, the verification and validation that it is actually working the way you want and its doing the right thing are very difficult.

A good example is the Samsung Note 7. It’s an incredible complicated system, and in the commercial market place they failed to demonstrate that the whole system was functioning properly, particular in regards to battery maintenance, and so they’ve had a huge disaster and this is just kind of an indication to where the problem is, you got all this complexity and it doesn’t just go away just because it’s in an IC.

So if you’re going to make very complicated things then you’re going to have to have very sophisticated engineering processes to go with it and those aren’t cheap.

Me: Right, I actually have a Galaxy Note 5 I got earlier this year which works fine, I had issues with the S6 that’s why I got the Note 5. I wonder why they skipped the Note 6 and went to 7, that’s kind of interesting.

Ward: Well you know sometimes products, you put them on the drawing board and you get them out there and by the time you get them into development, you realize the ground is changed underneath you and it’s time to go to that next level whatever that is and so that’s common in a lot of industries is by the time we got this out it was obsolete. It happens a lot especially in software.

Me: That is true, so finally here what your thoughts are on the future of electronics and more specifically Ham Radio?

Ward: Well, In general I think we’re going to see more integrated stuff, more capability and controls, the Arduino will follow the IC, until some point we get an IC that does all this and it will be subsumed into a new, more complicated package that does more of what the Arduino did or the Rpi or whatever.

I just feel continual evolution of complexity all wrapped up and put into a component, and today’s component a system that used to have lots of individual components. We used to start with the resistor and now we start with and entire computing package, so that trend is going to only accelerate. So, I see that’s where that future is going, but the future is still going to have to grapple with the notion that you got an analog world to deal with.

So at some point the digital world have to interact with the analog world. Whether that’s DC power or RF, so you’re still going to have this boundary, and that’s really the Rubicon that Ham radio is grappling with right now. I don’t know if your familiar with software defined radio, but basically the new radios that are coming out, the first thing they do is digitize the signal coming in from the antenna, and it is all digital until it pops back up as audio for you to listen to.

So if you’re using digital mode it doesn’t need to pop back up as audio, but you still need to deal with the fact that signals are going to go in and out of an antenna and they’re going to bounce around out there, either off the ionosphere or off the ground or whatever.

There you have propagation issues and that’s a big, big challenge for Ham radio because it’s always been a very hands-on hobby, but a lot of that hands on stuff is disappearing inside the IC to where the soldering iron now becomes a compiler.

Me: Right, and that’s not the first time I heard that.

Ward: and that’s our challenge

Me: Anything else you want to add or say?

Ward: You know there is no substitute for just doing stuff and I challenge people out there that are listening and saying – “it all sounds so complicated” and “I don’t know if I can deal with it”; don’t worry about it, just go and have fun.

If something is interesting to you explore it you don’t have to become that expert at it, just try it. Find some other people that are doing the same thing and go out, join in with them or work with them, ask a lot of questions, always ask a lot of questions, and just continue to follow your interest. You can do simple things, you can do complicated things and don’t be afraid to share what you learn with others it will come back to you 10 folds over.

Me: Great, interesting, I really appreciate your time, and again, everybody this is Ward Silver and if you’re a Nuts & Volts reader check out his column “Hams Wireless Workbench”, great column and like I said I really appreciate you taking the time to do an interview with me.

Ward: No problem and if your listeners are interested in Ham Radio, they can find Ham Radio for Dummies, it’s a real Dummies book. I wrote it awhile back, it’s in it’s 2^nd edition and maybe that will answer some questions for them.

Me: Ok great, well I appreciate it and you have a good day.

Ward: Ok and as we say in Ham radio “73” short for best regards.

Me: ok thank you.

Ward: Bye Brian.

Me: Bye.

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