The ARS Lab Introduces the Crud Table

Since the introduction of the ARS Lab in July 1999, the Adventure Radio Society has built a substantial fund of practical experience in our effort to methodically, accurately and objectively review the performance of amateur radio gear.

With that background as our teacher, we now recognize the need to introduce changes in the content and format of our reviews.

Simply put, we are concerned that most technical reviews published in amateur radio publications today are over the heads of most rank-and-file operators and—in all candor — pretty useless.

While we take pride in the time and effort ARS has invested in equipment reviews to date, we're at the same time afraid our published reports have fallen into the same category as too many other publications: Yawn.

So, we are taking a deep breath and trying something new.

We are not sacrificing the technical depth of our work, but we want to make it more focused, interesting, understandable and useful.

Here's the premise: When you boil it down, most amateur radio transmitters do what they are supposed to. The problems lie with receivers.

To be concrete, many receivers—ranging from appliances to kits—suffer from a severe case of crud.

They are ruined by insipid filters, phase noise, DDS spurs, distortion from close-in strong signals (third order), distortion from widely spaced strong signals (2nd order), birdies, leakage on the image and IF frequencies, and nasty pops and thumps from AGC.

Even among store-bought appliances, the state of the art is so lacking that many radio amateurs have never heard a clean receiver. They think that crud comes from "band conditions"—not the receiver itself. For a long time now, gimmicks and "gee whiz" bells and whistles have been replacing design competence and solid fundamental technical principles.

With this issue of The ARS Sojourner, our reviews will start out with an Executive Summary and a Crud Table. At a glance, you will see how we think the receiver under review stacks up.

Mind you, we understand that performance compromises are always necessary, because of the need to save money or to minimize current, or something else. But 90 percent of the time, we believe, the box could have been much better with just a few more parts or better design, without sacrificing the box's mission.

And sometimes the "mission" itself is a delusion. For example, how many radio amateurs need the low current consumption of a Gilbert Cell mixer? Not a lot. Most of them would be better off with more current flow and much better performance.

See what we mean?

Please read this month's review of the Elecraft K-1 to get a look at our new approach in action.