Talks & Publications

Writing and speaking on amateur radio, digital modes, and the theory behind them. I’m particularly interested in explaining why things work rather than only how — and in finding the parallels between radio and other technical fields.

If you’d like me to speak to your club or group, contact details are in the footer.

Publications

Understanding FT8 through DNA-sequencing parallels

RadCom, Radio Society of Great Britain — May 2026

FT8 routinely decodes stations at signal-to-noise ratios as low as −24 dB, on bands that sound completely dead. My day job is with DNA sequencing systems, which face a strikingly similar problem: reading billions of individually minute, noise-swamped molecular signals at better than 99.9% accuracy. The two fields arrived independently at the same engineering answers — structured message formats, precise timing synchronisation, strong error correction, and quality metrics.

The article uses those parallels to explain how FT8 achieves such extraordinary weak-signal performance. No molecular biology or advanced mathematics required — just the engineering trade-offs that make information transfer possible in high-noise environments.

Seeing signals: I and Q from first principles

RadCom, Radio Society of Great Britain — September 2026 (scheduled)

IQ data sits at the heart of every modern software-defined radio, yet it’s usually presented as an equation rather than something you can picture. This article builds I and Q up from first principles and with minimal mathematics: why a single measurement of a wave is ambiguous, how a pair of quadrature measurements resolves that ambiguity completely, and what the resulting IQ plot actually shows you for real signals — from a bare carrier and CW, through AM, FM and SSB, to the digital modes.

Resources referenced in the article:

Setup for IQ visualisation and digital signal processing
sdrconnect-iq-visualiser — my SDRconnect IQ visualisation plugin
sdrplay-gnuradio-examples — my GNU Radio flow graphs for SDRplay devices
SDRplay · GNU Radio · Radioconda

Invited talks

Understanding FT8 through DNA-sequencing parallels

RSGB Convention 2026 — Saturday 10 October 2026

An invited convention session developing the themes of the May 2026 RadCom article: why FT8 and modern DNA sequencing solve the same weak-signal problem in the same ways, and what that tells us about digital mode design.

RSGB Convention speakers

Making the invisible visible: understanding your SDR through IQ visualisation

RSGB Convention 2026 — Saturday 10 October 2026

An invited convention session introducing IQ visually and with minimal mathematics. It covers why IQ matters for modern radios, how to read an IQ plot, and what analogue voice (AM, FM, SSB) and the digital data modes (CW, RTTY, FT8, PSK, QAM) each look like in the IQ plane — finishing with a live demonstration using a purpose-built Raspberry Pi IQ visualiser.

RSGB Convention speakers
Raspberry Pi SDR — the demonstration device

Making the invisible visible: understanding SDR through IQ visualisation

Cambridge and District Amateur Radio Club (CDARC) — 8 May 2026

The first outing of the IQ talk, given to my home club. Starting from the idea that a wave is the shadow of something rotating, it builds up to I and Q, then works through what noise, carriers, CW, AM, FM, SSB and the digital modes each look like on an IQ plot — with a live Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR showing real signals off air.

Raspberry Pi SDR — the demonstration device