Design Is How It Works — Applied to Ham Radio

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs, New York Times, 2003

Jobs was pushing back against a shallow idea of design — the notion that a designer’s job is to hand someone a finished product and say make it pretty. True design, in his view, is not decoration applied on top of a thing. It is baked into how the thing behaves, how a person interacts with it, whether it gets out of your way or fights you every step.

The RST System: How Ham Radio Operators Report Signal Quality

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0300

When two amateur radio stations make contact, one of the first things they exchange is a signal report. Rather than trying to describe signal quality in free-form words across potentially noisy, weak, or multilingual paths, the hobby settled long ago on a compact three-digit code: RST. It stands for Readability, Strength, and Tone, and it works the same way everywhere on the planet.

R — Readability (1–5)

Readability describes how well you can actually understand the content of the received signal — not how loud it is, but how intelligible it is.

Field-Notes on OH2DQH

Design Is How It Works — Applied to Ham Radio

The RST System: How Ham Radio Operators Report Signal Quality

R — Readability (1–5)