Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today's Amateur Radio is less like the valve or transistor based radio and more like a computer. So much so that most radios today have a mechanism to connect the radio to a computer. This mechanism is called a Computer Aided Tuning interface, or CAT interface. It's a mechanism that's used to allow two way control information to be shared between the radio and a computer. This interaction is a serial connection, generally something called RS232. This is a standard that was developed in 1962 and it specifies things like timing, voltages and other attributes. The electronics from that era don't look much like the ones of today and most of the challenges with getting this stuff to work is related directly to these differences. It should come as no surprise that each manufacturer has their own take on what this whole contraption looks like and most of this technology is not directly compatible across radios. So, let's imagine that you've got a radio and a computer and they're phy