Book Review: "Ham Radio for Arduino and PICAXE"

My summer reading list included "Ham Radio for Arduino and PICAXE" edited by Leigh Klotz and published by the American Radio Relay League (http://www.arrl.org/ham-radio-for-arduino-and-picaxe)

The book opens with a message from Dale Dougherty, founder of Make Magazine, and I hoped this would be a book that shared one of the disastercommohio missions: getting Makers and Hams working together. The book is more of a microcontroller-book-for-hams, than a ham-book-for-microcontroller-experimenters.

I own a few ARRL-published books and many feel like the editor pulled a few articles out of QST that addressed a theme, wrote a simple introduction, and called it a book. QST article quality is pretty decent, but they often feel like a cut and paste job. This book was different. It's clear that while each of the project chapters can stand alone, they have been edited as a whole and make intelligent references to one another where it makes sense.

The projects are also more advanced than simply dropping an arduino into a communications problem. I learned a few microcontroller tricks from the book that I hadn't picked up from reading other DYI/Maker microcontroller project descriptions online.

It is definitely worth the money if you're planning a project similar to the one featured in the book. The projects are very heavy on pre-existing solutions, they'll recommend an existing data-radio shield versus a more home-brew solution, so part costs can quickly add up, when a clever circuit or coding might be less expensive.