Dick Benson

Most legends in this series earned their place by keeping the old iron alive — restoring it, documenting it, defending it against the passage of time. Dick Benson, W1QG, earned his a different way. He took the design philosophy embodied in the finest boatanchors ever built — the Collins S-Line — and carried it forward into the FPGA era, proving that the values that made those radios great were never about the tubes at all. They were about architecture, serviceability, measurement discipline, and the stubborn conviction that a radio you build and understand yourself is worth ten you bought in a box.

Benson spent his career as a hardware development engineer and later as an Applications Engineer at The MathWorks, the company behind MATLAB and Simulink. Licensed for more than half a century, he assumed — as many of us do — that his radio-building days were largely behind him. Then he retired, on 23 July 2015, and the affliction returned almost immediately. The trigger was absurdly modest: a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA evaluation board found on eBay for thirty-four dollars, delivered to his door. That board, and the one commodity his working life had never allowed him — time — set off one of the most remarkable second acts in modern homebrewing.

The YAFR — Yet Another Fine Radio

Benson paired that $34 Spartan-3E with a Linear Technology LTC2206 analogue-to-digital converter sampling at 80 MSPS — a combination he described as “a marriage made in heaven” — and built the radio he christened the YAFR: Yet Another Fine Radio. An Analog Devices AD9744 DAC handles RF output at the same 80 MSPS rate, a TI PCM3008 16-bit codec covers the audio, and a humble Microchip PIC 18F4520 runs the entire user interface over a simple serial link. The signal processing itself — the actual radio — lives in the FPGA, and Benson designed all of it graphically in Simulink with the Xilinx System Generator blockset, simulating every stage before a single bit was committed to hardware.

The result is a full-coverage 2–30 MHz CW/SSB transceiver so configurable that Benson had to add a state save-and-recall system holding 255 complete radio personalities. It remains his main CW and SSB radio, packaged — like most of his rigs — in a salvaged HP instrument case, because in his estimation no off-the-shelf enclosure comes close to the elegance of vintage Hewlett-Packard sheet metal. A dearly departed friend of his used to remind him that they were not building spaceflight hardware, and Benson took the lesson to heart: life is too short to sweat cosmetics when the engineering underneath is sound.

The YAFR might have remained one man’s masterpiece, except that Benson’s friend Jeff Anderson, K6JCA, built his own version of the rig and documented it across one of the most exhaustively detailed build blogs in amateur radio. Anderson is unambiguous about provenance: he calls Benson the father of the FPGA SDR design, with the underlying architecture and the vast majority of the Simulink implementation being Dick’s work. Through that collaboration, Benson’s architecture became one of the most thoroughly documented open homebrew SDR designs in existence — a gift to every builder who follows.

The Measurement Bench

Behind the radios stands the other half of the Benson legend: the bench. His shack houses a substantial collection of vintage test equipment, anchored by a cesium-beam frequency standard — an instrument that originally sold for roughly $32,000, enough to buy a house in its day — which he acquired non-working for $300 and returned to service after tracing the fault to, of all things, a loose screw. It is the boatanchor rescue story in miniature: patience, diagnosis, and the refusal to believe that good engineering is ever truly dead.

That measurement discipline flows outward to the whole community through his MATLAB Central contributions, several of which are directly useful to anyone maintaining vintage receivers. His high-Q resonator measurement tool drives the HP 3577A and HP 8753 vector network analyzers over HPIB, implementing Professor Kajfez’s Q-measurement method — precisely the technique needed to characterise the crystal and mechanical filters at the heart of every serious boatanchor IF strip. Alongside it sit a Datum GPSDO logging application, a PI-network impedance matching design tool, S-parameter utilities complementing the RF Toolbox, and a MATLAB GPS receiver interface.

He is also the community’s kind of skeptic. When a batch of suspiciously cheap eBay LM2596 regulator boards crossed his bench, Benson measured rather than assumed — discovering they switched at 50 kHz instead of the specified 150 kHz, exposing them as likely relabelled or counterfeit parts, and documenting the poor output-capacitor ESR that made their ripple performance so dismal. And his advice to builders of HF directional couplers, relayed through the K6JCA blog, compresses decades of RF wisdom into three words: “Strays are everything.”