About Me

Hello, and welcome!

My name is Rafael (PY1OWL, formerly PU1OWL), and I have never been very good at staying within the boundaries of a single field. Electronics led me to computers, computers led me to signal processing, signal processing brought me to digital communications, and digital communications eventually brought me back to amateur radio. Somewhere along the way I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, a Master’s degree, and later a Doctor of Science in Electronic Engineering—but, more importantly, I never stopped taking things apart to understand how they worked.

My fascination with electronics began in 1983 after stumbling across a beginner’s electronics magazine at a local newsstand. Building simple amplifiers and tiny FM transmitters soon became programming computers, designing digital circuits, studying adaptive filters and machine learning, experimenting with RF systems, and, years later, finally becoming a licensed amateur radio operator. Looking back, it all feels like the same hobby that simply kept changing shape over the years.

Today my interests span a rather eclectic mix of subjects: amateur radio, digital signal processing, FPGA design, embedded systems, microcontrollers, computer architecture, photography, and the history of technology. I enjoy moving between theory and practice, whether that means designing an RF amplifier, implementing a RISC-V computer on an FPGA, experimenting with digital communication systems, or simply trying to understand why an old piece of technology was engineered the way it was. I find that the most interesting ideas usually appear where different disciplines overlap.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I don’t really have many hobbies. I have one lifelong curiosity that simply happens to manifest itself in many different forms.

This website is my engineering notebook. It is where I collect projects, experiments, travel notes, ideas, successes, failures, and the occasional rabbit hole. Some articles are polished tutorials, others are simply records of things I learned while trying to build something. If the topics seem unrelated at first glance, they probably aren’t—at least not in my head. My hope is that by sharing this journey, someone else might find an idea, a solution, or perhaps just an excuse to start exploring a little deeper.