When I returned to the shortwave hobby in the 1990’s, the AOR AR7030 was my first, new professional receiver.

Back then, we read magazines, like Monitoring Times and Britain’s Shortwave Magazine. I started reading about John Thorpe’s new receiver design in collaboration with Japan’s AOR. I still have my May 1996 copy of Ham Radio Today with its full technical review of the AOR AR7030.

To find out more, I turned to a relatively new resource: the Internet. In the mid-1990’s, rudimentary search engines were just starting up. Hobbyists turned to bulletin boards and Usenet (newsgroups). These information sources provided two clear messages. First, great receiver. Second, highly polarized views about the AOR AR7030 front panel design. Love and hate for the menu-type interface.

Since my other main hobby at the time was writing software, it struck me that I could write some software to connect to the receiver and develop an improved user interface. One with better ergonomics. That was the first seed of an idea for ERGO radio software.

I still remember driving to Calgary airport to pick up my new radio at customs, which I had purchased from Javiation in the UK. After unpacking and setting it up, I felt this was the best sounding shortwave receiver I had ever listened to, especially for SWBC. Still do. Here is a video for the AR7030 in action.

Controlling the AOR AR7030

However, I probably could not have picked a more difficult RS232 control protocol to write software. Most radios use either plain ASCII text or binary packets (like the ICOM radios) for serial communications. The AR7030 used neither. It has a 1200 baud serial interface. You are expected to program the receiver like a computer. This means poking values into memory locations in the receiver CPU and then executing commands on the CPU – directly.

For example, to change frequency, you need to:

• lock the receiver firmware
• select a page of working memory
• address the frequency registers
• calculate the frequency code in hexadecimal and poke six bytes into memory locations
• execute the tune receiver command
• unlock the receiver firmware

Whew! And that was just to change frequency. But it works. Anyone who managed to write software to control this rig deserves a pat on the back.