Column: Embedded design


Pulling up the ladder By Myk Dormer, RF Engineer and Director, Smallwireless Limited T


he loss of analogue TV broadcasting in the UK is now ancient history. It is an established fact and, with the availability of low-cost receiving equipment for


the digital terrestrial and subscription-free satellite services and the rise of on-line streaming, this loss is little mourned. T e future of analogue radio broadcasting


in the UK is uncertain, with current government policy only “guaranteeing these services until the early 2030s”. T e concern I wish to highlight here


relates to the analogous switch-off of the analogue radio broadcasting services, as digital audio broadcasting (DAB) and Internet radio services become more widely adopted. T is cut-off has previously ranged from “aſt er 2019” to “in the 2030s”, depending on the particular political mouthpiece or industry pundit speaking. In my opinion, the current DAB service


is a valuable addition to the existing spectrum of radio services we currently enjoy in the UK, but the idea that it could replace analogue broadcasting fi lls me with horror. My reason for this is not related to the already widely discussed issues of coverage, cost of receiving equipment or the fundamental quality of the received audio signal; my concerns are related to education. To explain: I am an electronics engineer,


specialising in RF circuitry. I design radios and have done so for a very long time. T e skills necessary to follow my career can’t be learned purely from the theory, in a classroom. T ere is a huge amount of practical, on the bench tinkering, which can only be learned by years of


10 April 2026 www.electronicsworld.co.uk Without analogue broadcasting (medium


It is as if we were to prohibit children


from riding bicycles, while still expecting those same children to grow up into professional motorcycle racers


experimentation. To follow this path, it is not enough to make a decision in the fi nal year of a (usually mostly-theoretical) electronics degree “to be an RF engineer”. You already must be an enthusiast, an amateur, an experimenter – and that is something that starts in childhood. Like most engineers of my type, I started


early with “crystal sets” and simple discrete transistor circuits, slowly increasing the sophistication of my receivers until – long before the GCSE examinations loomed – I had a good grounding in the practicalities of radio circuits. My childhood knowledge was by no means cutting edge, and much of the time I had spent was applied to re-inventing things that would have looked old-fashioned in the 1940s, but it was fascinating and it gave me a fundamental interest in – and grasp of – the subject. T ere is a unique satisfaction to be enjoyed when listening to a radio station on a receiver that you have constructed yourself, from the basic components.


wave and band II FM) such simple juvenile experimentation is quite simply impossible. An AM crystal set can be built with less than ten parts – oſt en home-made or improvised – while a simple FM receiver kit might include less than thirty parts. However, the complex digital coded


OFDM transmissions of the DAB system can’t be received by such elementary – even “primitive” – circuitry at all. T ere is no entry level to this sort of receiver design: even the simplest digital receivers are built around highly complex, custom-made ICs, not available to the general public. Even with the knowledge of a complete, fully-trained engineer, the task of putting together a bench prototype of a DAB radio is daunting: Without access to very specialised parts, they would need at least the processing power of a desktop PC to even decode the signal into audio. Even then, the specifi c codec algorithms used in the decoders are not public domain, but are instead “owned” by specifi c corporations. By taking away analogue broadcasting,


you take away the mechanism by which future radio engineers (and military signallers, and amateur radio operators) fi rst encounter the technologies we need them to master, if the future generations of engineers our society needs are to thrive. As an analogy: It is as if we were to


prohibit children from riding bicycles, while still expecting those same children to grow up into professional motorcycle racers.


T is column on embedded design prepared by Myk Dormer continues in the next month’s edition of Electronics World.


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