Arduino for Ham Radio – Review

As promised in my earlier post about the Arduino for Ham Radio book I’m back with a review. Overall I am very pleased with the book. It is well written and contains many projects that aren’t easily found on the internet. While you could find information on some of the projects featured in the book most of the information is incomplete whereas the book’s projects are complete and known working. This book is for the radio operator that knows nothing about Arduino but wants to learn while building useful Ham radio projects. The introduction chapters are very well written and should help even a novice in the world of electronics and microcontrollers learn how to build projects and write code using the Arduino platform. While the introductory chapters weren’t useful for myself the projects however are and I’ll be featuring several here in the coming months. Below is a listing of the projects offered in the book:

• Random Code Practice Generator
• CW Beacon and Foxhunt Keyer ***
• Fan Speed Controller
• Digital Compass
• Weather Station ***
• RF Probe with LED Bar Graph
• Solar Battery Charge Monitor ***
• On-Air Indicator
• Talking SWR Meter
• Talking GPS/UTC Time/Grid Square Indicator
• Iambic Keyer
• Waveform Generator
• PS/2 CW Keyboard
• Field Day Satellite Tracker ***
• Azimuth/Elevation Rotator Controller ***
• CW Decoder ***
• Lightning Detector ***
• CDE/Hy-Gain Rotator Controller
• Modified CDE/Hy-Gain Rotator Controller

(*** designates projects I may be building soon)

As you can see there are many projects designed for every level of Ham operator. I have already been planning an Arduino weather station that will tie back in to the APRS network so the information on that project within the book will be tremendous help. The CW Beacon project will be another one I’m going to be building soon to use with other projects. If you are interested in learning the Arduino platform while building Ham radio projects this book is for you, I highly recommend it! If you are interested here’s the link to the book on Amazon.