For Jonathan Dorminy of McDonough, the seeds for his amateur-radio passion were planted several years ago.
The catalyst for that passion, he said, came when he received a book on the subject as a Christmas gift.

“Amateur radio allows you to talk to people all over the world, and it’s a very technical hobby,” said Dorminy. “You can build your own transmitters and receivers, and through this, you learn about the actual circuits and electronics that are used in commercial communication devices.”

Dorminy, 14, was recently named to the Top 300 Broadcom MASTERS for the third straight year. Broadcom is the National Middle School Science Research Fair. Dorminy is one of 1,800 applicants to make the 2021 Broadcom MASTERS list.

For this year’s project, Dorminy built on previous amateur-radio endeavors, which also resulted in Broadcom accolades in 2019 and 2020.

“I wanted to replace the receivers in my project with lock-in amplifiers,” said the homeschooled freshman. “I wanted to do this because lock-in amplifiers are the most sensitive receivers at this time, which allows better weak-signal communication.”

Dorminy learned in early September that he had made the MASTERS list for the third consecutive year.
“I was incredibly happy and proud of myself,” he said.

MASTERS is an acronym for “Math, Applied Science, Technology, and Engineering for Rising Stars.” The annual list, compiled by Broadcom Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public, honors the country’s outstanding middle-school students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) competition.

In 2020, Dorminy’s project featured a basic continuous-wave transmitter. He also used lock-in amplifier receivers connected to a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which is approximately the size of a credit card.

“I wrote a program that would allow a person to send and receive texts with this system,” he said.

Dorminy said that while watching the news during hurricane season a few years ago, a hurricane hit the Bahamas Islands. Dorminy then began pondering the effect of adverse weather on roads, bridges and other forms of infrastructure.

“The most important piece of infrastructure for emergency response is the communications infrastructure,” he said. “If first responders don’t have communication, they can’t respond as effectively. My project was, I wanted to create a device that would assist with this problem.”

Dorminy said voice communication is made more difficult during a hurricane — an issue he was determined to improve in some way.

“If you’re talking into a phone, your voice could be muffled,” he said.

“If you’re outside in the wind and rain in a hurricane, you can see how difficult it would be to communicate with voice. I wanted to create a method of texting that would be completely independent of the cell network, to eliminate the interference that is inherent with voice communication.”

Dorminy is set to take part in 4-H Project Achievement this year, using his ham radio work, said his mother, Ann. She said Jonathan also holds an amateur-radio Extra Class license, which allows him to do all that is allowed by the Federal Communications Commission.

“It’s a tremendous amount of physics study — more than an AP course,” said Ann Dorminy. The mother congratulated her son on his accomplishments in the field of amateur radio. Still, she said his motivation is not driven by the recognition he receives.

“I was very proud of him because he spent a lot of time investigating ideas from physics, astronomy and other sciences to find ideas for his next innovation,” said Ann Dorminy. “Awards are secondary. He really enjoys sharing what he’s learned and what he’s doing.”

Jonathan Dorminy said he has a passion “beyond awards” for amateur-radio communication. Rather than putting an end to his research, he hopes to bolster his knowledge on the subject in years to come.

“I think I want to become an electrical engineer,” he said. “I’m looking forward to continuing the project. Working on this project, I’ve learned a lot about circuits and electrical engineering in general, so I’m getting an early start on it in a fun way.”