These days you cannot be a good radio hobbyist without some form of computer. These days they are as common as navel lint and can be a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop or even a smart TV. If you are reading this then you have, at the very least, some form of computing device available to you. Your iPhone or Android? It is a powerful computer, as is your Smart TV. Hell, even my refrigerator has more computing power than the roomful of computers that I connected to in high school computer classes.
Radio guys use computers for a wide variety of purposes, from programming our radios to finding the frequencies to listen on to controlling them locally or even remotely. Even in our non-radio lives we use some form of computer for almost everything it seems. It wasn’t always that way. We used to live very well without all the information in the world at our fingertips, and it wasn’t all that long ago.
As a kid in the 1960s we had no Internet, computers, smartphones nor anything resembling connectivity outside a standard analog wired-in telephone. Most people had a single phone, or if your home had 2 floors you might have an extension. The phones were owned by the phone company, and they issued a single phone and, if you asked nicely, they might rent you a second one. Since my dad was an executive for the phone company, we had 4(!) phones in our house: living room, master bedroom, kitchen and basement. Even Dad had to pull in some favors for that! That was our connectivity to the outside world. Beyond that we had to actually go outside.
The only exposure I had to computers those days was either what I saw on TV or at my dad’s office. When we would ride the Northwestern train downtown to the Loop to visit his office, we would ride the elevator (manned by the same attendant for years) up to his office. They had a pneumatic tube system that sent punch cards around that I though was cool as I could hear the airflow. His secretary had a tube port near her desk, but I never saw her actually use it. They did have a computer system in the building, the basement had these big racks that the 8-year-old me had no clue about, but Dad said that it was a computer. I do remember seeing stacks of those punch cards neatly piled up everywhere.
It was in high school in the 70s that I first started to work with computers, I took a computer elective as I had already completed all the math courses (algebra, calculus and applied mathematics) by the middle of my Junior year. We had a classroom set up as the computer lab with a few Teletype terminals as well as a terminal with a CRT. CRTs were the same technology as TVs back then, basically a huge vacuum tube that shot electrons onto a glass screen. The few computers that had them weren’t really computers then. They were more accurately called “Terminals” as they were basically a remote access device that connected to a computer someplace else. At our school the actual computer was at the school district headquarters in a nearby town. We wrote computer programs onto either punch cards or yellow tape with punched holes, dialed up the computer with a phone and placed the handset into an acoustic coupler. We would run the tape or cards thru a reader on the terminal, and the results would display on the CRT or printer, depending on which terminal you were at.
At the time it was fascinating but compared to today it felt kind of useless. You can only play the cards you were dealt unless you were smart enough to make a new deck. I never followed up with the computer science courses I was offered back then, I was too busy with the fire department, baseball, girls and scanners, not always in that order. There was no interconnect then between any of these activities and computers, so computers lost out.
The next interaction with computers was the week after I graduated from high school. I was hired as a dispatcher for a town I had never been to before some 10 or 15 miles from home. I had applied for it as a summer job thru the Careers office at my school and was hired conditionally; I had to actually graduate before I started working. Here I was, barely 18 and hired onto a police department full-time and being exposed to a whole new world of technology. The dispatch center had a Teletype machine, just like the one I used in school. There was no display, just a printer with rolls of yellowish paper, a punch-tape reader on the edge of the terminal and a weird box under the table they called a “Mux” with all kinds of connectors, wires and flashing lights.
After a few months that old Teletype would be replaced with a CRT terminal we called “Big Orange”. The monitor unit was in a huge orange box, the display was a monochrome green, and the printer was a separate unit at the back of the room. Since we had 2 positions in the dispatch center the display and keyboard were on a rotating pedestal that could be turned to either side. That lasted a couple years and was replaced with a new terminal, the DataSpeed 40.
Still, however we have had no connection to the radio hobby and computers, other than we used a terminal at work for running plates and sending messages to the State Police. At home I didn’t have a computer until years later, by this time I was a police officer in a different town. A friend sold me his TRS-80, with a cassette drive and a small color TV used as a monitor. I tried several times to make it work for something useful and never really succeeded. I had no printer so I couldn’t even print up a list of my scanner crystals. I did keep them in a text document and then use the computer to sort them; I could then write them down in order. In the time I wrote the program, entered the data and displayed them I could have much easier sorted them on paper, but I had to use this darn thing for something.
I had a similar experience a few years later with a Commodore 128, I even had a floppy drive for it. I did get a database program, but it got unbearable to enter data into it. I had it for a year and it started to collect dust, so I ended up giving it to a friend who helped me move to a new apartment.
A couple years later I met a friend who had a Mac Plus, he let me use it to start entering frequencies from a printed list in a program called FileMaker. It was easy and quick and I was hooked. Soon thereafter I bought my own Mac Plus and I never looked back. I still had no direct connection to the radios; however, it was basically used to consolidate and process data. It wasn’t for a couple years that I bought a modem and started using the Internet. I had Delphi and later CompuServe but usually used local BBSs more. We had a couple BBSs in our area that were dedicated to scanner stuff. The SCUG (Suburban Commodore User’s Group) BBS was rebranded to the CARMA BBS and was used by club members. It was owned by a friend that I still talk to daily now, 40 years later. Another friend ran a BBS called The Monitor Post and we had access to a couple Wisconsin BBSs run by our friends north of the Cheddar Curtain.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Dial-Up Internet access was becoming more mainstream, AOL and CompuServe started to give way to local Internet Service Providers. I had one called “The InfoRamp” that served me faithfully for years. I had 3 phone lines in my house back then, one for me for voice, one as a fax line and a separate line for my wife’s TTY. We had a set up with phone line switches so we could switch the modem on her computer to one line or the other and a similar setup on my computer. We had these little flashing light boxes that reminded us that a line was occupied so we would not try to use it and disconnect a computer in the middle of a long download. At the time I had had a wide variety of Mac’s and when I got a new one my wife inherited my older one.
Eventually I got one of those new-fangled cable modems with their always-on connection. It was wickedly fast and I no longer had to worry about phone lines. I had cable modems for the next 25 years until a few years back when we got fiber direct to the house. This made connectivity to things like RadioReference and other radio-centric sites a breeze. I was still using FileMaker to organize my frequency lists, MS Word to write my articles, newsletters and books and later LogMeIn or a VPN to connect to my work computers to troubleshoot issues without having to drive 40 minutes to the office.
OK, here we are, more than 1700 words in and I haven’t connected a computer to a radio yet. Well, that changes now. As a Mac guy, connecting my computer to a radio was not really practical. That kind of stuff was mostly restricted to those “PC” guys with DOS and later, Windows. While we had these computers at work I avoided them at home. It was considered a mortal sin by Mac users to use Windows at the time. Eventually however I caved and bought an old DOS laptop from my friend Scooter so I could program my own Motorola radios that I started to get. My HT600, MT1000’s and MaxTracs needed DOS and this old RadioShack laptop fit the bill.
Then I discovered trunking and everything changed overnight. Using programs like Trunker and Trunktrac turned my life around. I was fascinated by this stuff and spent much of my free time chasing down all those new trunking systems all over the Chicago area. Once I finished that I went on a trip thru the rest of Illinois and documented all the systems I could find there. I sent all that data into this new website I found called Trunkedradio.net and soon Illinois was possibly the best represented state outside their main focus area of the Southeastern US.
These DOS programs all used serial ports to connect to radios, and only certain radios had serial port access. Sometimes one could add such a connection to a radio without it but that was not for the faint of heart. USB was yet to make an appearance on consumer gear, and even when it did it was on Mac’s, not Windows. It would be a couple years later that PCs started to embrace USB. Eventually it became ubiquitous and radios started appearing with USB ports. Serial ports on computers disappeared and now in order to connect to radios with serial ports you need some sort of USB converter.
Further blurring the line between computers and scanners are SDR’s. Software Defined Radios are devices connected to a computer that uses the computer to tune the radio and process the audio or even data signals. SDR’s can range from $20 to thousands. Some radios are basically SDR’s with a user interface built in. The Uniden SDS100, SDS200 and upcoming SDS150 are the most well-known but these days several ham radios (IS-705, IC-7300 etc.) and wideband receivers (Icom R8600 and a bunch of radios from the Far East like Xiegu, Malachite and others do the same.
These days computers are as much a part of the radio hobby as the radios are. You don’t even need a radio to enjoy scanning, just pop over to Broadcastify or one of the other online scanner sites. In my office today I use a Mac Studio for most of my day-to-day stuff. I could (and have) used it to run my radio programs like Sentinel, ProScan, Butel, RT Systems and others on my Macs by using Parallels to run Windows but it is more convenient for me to run a separate PC instead.
I had been using Intel NUCs for years (and still do for some things) but a couple years ago I built a gaming PC that I don’t game with. It turns out that the gamers drive the PC market and by building a machine capable for gaming makes foe a great computer for radios. It has 64GB of RAM, a pair of high-capacity SSDs set up in a RAID configuration (which saved my bacon last year!) as well as great graphics capability. It handles control of a dozen of more scanners as well as an AirNav RadarBox and a couple SDRs without breaking a sweat.
These days building a computer is much different than it was back in the day. I never did so then myself but had friends who did build their own computers from scratch or from kits. Lots of soldering and obtaining dozens of memory and processing chips was the norm. There was no Amazon back then, sourcing parts was half of the battle.
Fast forward to late 2023 when I built my current PC. I went to the Internet and picked the parts I wanted. I could have ordered them and have them delivered but the wife and I wanted to get away for a weekend, so I printed the parts list and headed off to Los Angeles, where at the time the nearest MicroCenter was. We thought of going to the Denver store, it was not that much further but there was a railway museum I wanted to see near LA, so we headed west instead of north.
We arrived in heaven, disguised as MicroCenter in suburban Tustin, CA and I handed my parts list to the guy at the Build Desk. He told me to come back in half an hour and so the wife and I browsed around the toy store and found a few things I could not live without. When we came back to the Build Desk there was a shopping cart with my name on it. The guy said they had everything in stock (I knew that already as I checked online the night before) but the prices were a little different. The CPU price had gone up $20 that morning but the mother board and GPU prices went down by almost $100 between them so I was still $80 ahead.
After melting my credit card a little more, I loaded everything up in my car and we headed home. The next night the kid and I built (well, assembled) the computer, installed Windows and the next day I started to install 20 instances of ProScan, then a couple different Butel, RT Systems, Icom and Kenwood programs as well as the SDR and AirNav stuff. It was up and operating that evening and has run fine since. I did have one of the SSDs fail a year later but Samsung replaced it and it restored easily.
Last week the new MicroCenter finally opened in Phoenix. It is a 90-minute drive for me, which I suppose is a good thing. If it were on my side of the Valley, I would probably spend so much time there that they would recruit me to work there. I am happily retired and don’t need the money. I would probably spend more on gas than I would make there anyway. We went for the VIP Opening the day before the main Grand Opening and it was very nice, but a bit smaller than I had imagined it would be. They did have some FRS and MURS radios for sale there. I had a BCD325P2 with me set on CloseCall but heard no radio traffic nor did I see any of the employees’ carrying radios.
So, in conclusion, if you don’t have some sort of computing device you aren’t reading this. If you are reading this then you have at least a cellphone, smart TV or something. You can’t really escape computers these days, they are an important part of life. These days the Internet is a utility much like running water or electricity. I can live without running water for at least 2 flushes but take away my Internet for a day and I wouldn’t know how to make it thru without going even crazier than I already am.
Radio guys use computers for a wide variety of purposes, from programming our radios to finding the frequencies to listen on to controlling them locally or even remotely. Even in our non-radio lives we use some form of computer for almost everything it seems. It wasn’t always that way. We used to live very well without all the information in the world at our fingertips, and it wasn’t all that long ago.
As a kid in the 1960s we had no Internet, computers, smartphones nor anything resembling connectivity outside a standard analog wired-in telephone. Most people had a single phone, or if your home had 2 floors you might have an extension. The phones were owned by the phone company, and they issued a single phone and, if you asked nicely, they might rent you a second one. Since my dad was an executive for the phone company, we had 4(!) phones in our house: living room, master bedroom, kitchen and basement. Even Dad had to pull in some favors for that! That was our connectivity to the outside world. Beyond that we had to actually go outside.
The only exposure I had to computers those days was either what I saw on TV or at my dad’s office. When we would ride the Northwestern train downtown to the Loop to visit his office, we would ride the elevator (manned by the same attendant for years) up to his office. They had a pneumatic tube system that sent punch cards around that I though was cool as I could hear the airflow. His secretary had a tube port near her desk, but I never saw her actually use it. They did have a computer system in the building, the basement had these big racks that the 8-year-old me had no clue about, but Dad said that it was a computer. I do remember seeing stacks of those punch cards neatly piled up everywhere.
It was in high school in the 70s that I first started to work with computers, I took a computer elective as I had already completed all the math courses (algebra, calculus and applied mathematics) by the middle of my Junior year. We had a classroom set up as the computer lab with a few Teletype terminals as well as a terminal with a CRT. CRTs were the same technology as TVs back then, basically a huge vacuum tube that shot electrons onto a glass screen. The few computers that had them weren’t really computers then. They were more accurately called “Terminals” as they were basically a remote access device that connected to a computer someplace else. At our school the actual computer was at the school district headquarters in a nearby town. We wrote computer programs onto either punch cards or yellow tape with punched holes, dialed up the computer with a phone and placed the handset into an acoustic coupler. We would run the tape or cards thru a reader on the terminal, and the results would display on the CRT or printer, depending on which terminal you were at.
At the time it was fascinating but compared to today it felt kind of useless. You can only play the cards you were dealt unless you were smart enough to make a new deck. I never followed up with the computer science courses I was offered back then, I was too busy with the fire department, baseball, girls and scanners, not always in that order. There was no interconnect then between any of these activities and computers, so computers lost out.
The next interaction with computers was the week after I graduated from high school. I was hired as a dispatcher for a town I had never been to before some 10 or 15 miles from home. I had applied for it as a summer job thru the Careers office at my school and was hired conditionally; I had to actually graduate before I started working. Here I was, barely 18 and hired onto a police department full-time and being exposed to a whole new world of technology. The dispatch center had a Teletype machine, just like the one I used in school. There was no display, just a printer with rolls of yellowish paper, a punch-tape reader on the edge of the terminal and a weird box under the table they called a “Mux” with all kinds of connectors, wires and flashing lights.
After a few months that old Teletype would be replaced with a CRT terminal we called “Big Orange”. The monitor unit was in a huge orange box, the display was a monochrome green, and the printer was a separate unit at the back of the room. Since we had 2 positions in the dispatch center the display and keyboard were on a rotating pedestal that could be turned to either side. That lasted a couple years and was replaced with a new terminal, the DataSpeed 40.
Still, however we have had no connection to the radio hobby and computers, other than we used a terminal at work for running plates and sending messages to the State Police. At home I didn’t have a computer until years later, by this time I was a police officer in a different town. A friend sold me his TRS-80, with a cassette drive and a small color TV used as a monitor. I tried several times to make it work for something useful and never really succeeded. I had no printer so I couldn’t even print up a list of my scanner crystals. I did keep them in a text document and then use the computer to sort them; I could then write them down in order. In the time I wrote the program, entered the data and displayed them I could have much easier sorted them on paper, but I had to use this darn thing for something.
I had a similar experience a few years later with a Commodore 128, I even had a floppy drive for it. I did get a database program, but it got unbearable to enter data into it. I had it for a year and it started to collect dust, so I ended up giving it to a friend who helped me move to a new apartment.
A couple years later I met a friend who had a Mac Plus, he let me use it to start entering frequencies from a printed list in a program called FileMaker. It was easy and quick and I was hooked. Soon thereafter I bought my own Mac Plus and I never looked back. I still had no direct connection to the radios; however, it was basically used to consolidate and process data. It wasn’t for a couple years that I bought a modem and started using the Internet. I had Delphi and later CompuServe but usually used local BBSs more. We had a couple BBSs in our area that were dedicated to scanner stuff. The SCUG (Suburban Commodore User’s Group) BBS was rebranded to the CARMA BBS and was used by club members. It was owned by a friend that I still talk to daily now, 40 years later. Another friend ran a BBS called The Monitor Post and we had access to a couple Wisconsin BBSs run by our friends north of the Cheddar Curtain.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Dial-Up Internet access was becoming more mainstream, AOL and CompuServe started to give way to local Internet Service Providers. I had one called “The InfoRamp” that served me faithfully for years. I had 3 phone lines in my house back then, one for me for voice, one as a fax line and a separate line for my wife’s TTY. We had a set up with phone line switches so we could switch the modem on her computer to one line or the other and a similar setup on my computer. We had these little flashing light boxes that reminded us that a line was occupied so we would not try to use it and disconnect a computer in the middle of a long download. At the time I had had a wide variety of Mac’s and when I got a new one my wife inherited my older one.
Eventually I got one of those new-fangled cable modems with their always-on connection. It was wickedly fast and I no longer had to worry about phone lines. I had cable modems for the next 25 years until a few years back when we got fiber direct to the house. This made connectivity to things like RadioReference and other radio-centric sites a breeze. I was still using FileMaker to organize my frequency lists, MS Word to write my articles, newsletters and books and later LogMeIn or a VPN to connect to my work computers to troubleshoot issues without having to drive 40 minutes to the office.
OK, here we are, more than 1700 words in and I haven’t connected a computer to a radio yet. Well, that changes now. As a Mac guy, connecting my computer to a radio was not really practical. That kind of stuff was mostly restricted to those “PC” guys with DOS and later, Windows. While we had these computers at work I avoided them at home. It was considered a mortal sin by Mac users to use Windows at the time. Eventually however I caved and bought an old DOS laptop from my friend Scooter so I could program my own Motorola radios that I started to get. My HT600, MT1000’s and MaxTracs needed DOS and this old RadioShack laptop fit the bill.
Then I discovered trunking and everything changed overnight. Using programs like Trunker and Trunktrac turned my life around. I was fascinated by this stuff and spent much of my free time chasing down all those new trunking systems all over the Chicago area. Once I finished that I went on a trip thru the rest of Illinois and documented all the systems I could find there. I sent all that data into this new website I found called Trunkedradio.net and soon Illinois was possibly the best represented state outside their main focus area of the Southeastern US.
These DOS programs all used serial ports to connect to radios, and only certain radios had serial port access. Sometimes one could add such a connection to a radio without it but that was not for the faint of heart. USB was yet to make an appearance on consumer gear, and even when it did it was on Mac’s, not Windows. It would be a couple years later that PCs started to embrace USB. Eventually it became ubiquitous and radios started appearing with USB ports. Serial ports on computers disappeared and now in order to connect to radios with serial ports you need some sort of USB converter.
Further blurring the line between computers and scanners are SDR’s. Software Defined Radios are devices connected to a computer that uses the computer to tune the radio and process the audio or even data signals. SDR’s can range from $20 to thousands. Some radios are basically SDR’s with a user interface built in. The Uniden SDS100, SDS200 and upcoming SDS150 are the most well-known but these days several ham radios (IS-705, IC-7300 etc.) and wideband receivers (Icom R8600 and a bunch of radios from the Far East like Xiegu, Malachite and others do the same.
These days computers are as much a part of the radio hobby as the radios are. You don’t even need a radio to enjoy scanning, just pop over to Broadcastify or one of the other online scanner sites. In my office today I use a Mac Studio for most of my day-to-day stuff. I could (and have) used it to run my radio programs like Sentinel, ProScan, Butel, RT Systems and others on my Macs by using Parallels to run Windows but it is more convenient for me to run a separate PC instead.
I had been using Intel NUCs for years (and still do for some things) but a couple years ago I built a gaming PC that I don’t game with. It turns out that the gamers drive the PC market and by building a machine capable for gaming makes foe a great computer for radios. It has 64GB of RAM, a pair of high-capacity SSDs set up in a RAID configuration (which saved my bacon last year!) as well as great graphics capability. It handles control of a dozen of more scanners as well as an AirNav RadarBox and a couple SDRs without breaking a sweat.
These days building a computer is much different than it was back in the day. I never did so then myself but had friends who did build their own computers from scratch or from kits. Lots of soldering and obtaining dozens of memory and processing chips was the norm. There was no Amazon back then, sourcing parts was half of the battle.
Fast forward to late 2023 when I built my current PC. I went to the Internet and picked the parts I wanted. I could have ordered them and have them delivered but the wife and I wanted to get away for a weekend, so I printed the parts list and headed off to Los Angeles, where at the time the nearest MicroCenter was. We thought of going to the Denver store, it was not that much further but there was a railway museum I wanted to see near LA, so we headed west instead of north.
We arrived in heaven, disguised as MicroCenter in suburban Tustin, CA and I handed my parts list to the guy at the Build Desk. He told me to come back in half an hour and so the wife and I browsed around the toy store and found a few things I could not live without. When we came back to the Build Desk there was a shopping cart with my name on it. The guy said they had everything in stock (I knew that already as I checked online the night before) but the prices were a little different. The CPU price had gone up $20 that morning but the mother board and GPU prices went down by almost $100 between them so I was still $80 ahead.
After melting my credit card a little more, I loaded everything up in my car and we headed home. The next night the kid and I built (well, assembled) the computer, installed Windows and the next day I started to install 20 instances of ProScan, then a couple different Butel, RT Systems, Icom and Kenwood programs as well as the SDR and AirNav stuff. It was up and operating that evening and has run fine since. I did have one of the SSDs fail a year later but Samsung replaced it and it restored easily.
Last week the new MicroCenter finally opened in Phoenix. It is a 90-minute drive for me, which I suppose is a good thing. If it were on my side of the Valley, I would probably spend so much time there that they would recruit me to work there. I am happily retired and don’t need the money. I would probably spend more on gas than I would make there anyway. We went for the VIP Opening the day before the main Grand Opening and it was very nice, but a bit smaller than I had imagined it would be. They did have some FRS and MURS radios for sale there. I had a BCD325P2 with me set on CloseCall but heard no radio traffic nor did I see any of the employees’ carrying radios.
So, in conclusion, if you don’t have some sort of computing device you aren’t reading this. If you are reading this then you have at least a cellphone, smart TV or something. You can’t really escape computers these days, they are an important part of life. These days the Internet is a utility much like running water or electricity. I can live without running water for at least 2 flushes but take away my Internet for a day and I wouldn’t know how to make it thru without going even crazier than I already am.
