Price, Performance and Satisfaction with HF Rigs: Articles and Talks

I’ve created a unique database of the Rob Sherwood NC0B bench tests table from Sherwood Engineering (and working directly with Rob) with the market price at introduction in recent US Dollars and the current average satisfaction rating on eHam.net. This research was first published in the ARRL National Contesting Journal (see below). I’ve also given several remote talks to clubs as listed below. One of the key features of that work was to link data attributes to the rig-level (transceivers and receivers-only summarized simply as “rigs”). A second was the create a single composite index of all nine (9) of Rob’s tests. As readers may be aware, Rob sorts his table by the single measurement that he prefers as a CW contest operator, the narrow dynamic range. This composite, the Sherwood Performance Index (SPI), takes a more complete measurement of receive performance into account. However, no transmit bench measurements are available at this time.


The two-part article in the NCJ and some talks I’ve given to clubs are listed below.

Frank M. Howell. Price Versus Performance and Satisfaction in an HF Transceiver, Parts 1 and 2. See cover page of NCJ below.

This paper was published as a two-part article in the ARRL National Contesting Journal (Vols 49, 1-2, 3-4, 2021). The original manuscript was edited quite a bit by the NCJ Editor so I’ve posted a PDF of that full manuscript here. Slides from the various talks I’ve given are available here. A recent video to the Bury ARS in England is below as well as ones given to the Sutton & Cheam Radio Society, the Cycle 25 virtual hub, the Denby Dale Amateur Radio Society.