Paul Clark

Paul Clark grew up watching Star Trek reruns, and like many of his math-enabled contemporaries, knew exactly who was the most important person on the Enterprise. Without Scotty, the ship doesn’t go. Especially after Kirk and company have wrecked it for the 500th time. With that critical understanding, Paul proceeded to earn a few engineering degrees and started designing stuff. At first it was stuff made of silicon. He spent over a decade designing chips, from ASICs to mixed-signal microcontrollers. He then moved to the software world as a product manager, where he defined development tools for a variety of programmable products. Finally, he struck out on his own as a consultant, working on a number of different hardware and software projects, many of them radio-related. All of these roles honed Paul’s skills at communicating technical concepts, both in written and verbal form. Combined with his insatiable curiosity for all things technological (remember Scotty?), the next step was clear: explore an exciting new tech and teach others about it! As such, Paul is in the middle of writing a series of four books on Software Defined Radio (SDR). This exciting field is all about democratizing radio design, essentially moving the work of designing radios from the world of hardware to the world of software. This transition makes it easier to prototype new radios as well as share radio designs online. Even more importantly, SDRs make it vastly easier to reverse engineer RF signals - a huge win for security researchers. It’s very inexpensive to get started with SDR - you only need a PC, a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and some open source software. There is a bit of a learning curve, however. Fortunately, the Field Expedient SDR series of books walks you through the essentials of using gnuradio (the open source software) and the HackRF One SDR. You definitely don’t need an engineering degree to work through the books. In fact the key radio concepts you’ll need to know are demonstrated with a series of hands-on projects. Those projects explain how radios work while simultaneously teaching you to use the software. Getting started in SDR is easy if you have the right guide. Let Paul be that guide.