Lowering the Noise Floor: Mindful Listening Through an RF Lens
If you’ve ever worked with frequency-division duplex (FDD) systems, you already know the headache: transmit and receive at the same time, on separate bands, without stepping on your own feet. In theory, it’s simple. In practice, it’s a minefield of self-interference and signal contamination unless the design is deliberate and disciplined.
I started noticing the same problem outside the lab—specifically, in conversations. The metaphor was compelling. When someone else is talking and I’m busy planning my reply, it’s just like transmitting while I’m supposed to be receiving. My mental noise floor rises. The signal-to-noise ratio drops. Their words are still landing, but my internal transmitter is drowning them out.
This has haunted me more than I’d like to admit. All manner of group interactions, even simple one-on-one conversations with friends—I’d catch myself drafting rebuttals while they were still mid-sentence. Sometimes I wouldn’t catch it at all. I’d walk away realizing I missed the tone, the subtext, the thing they actually needed me to hear. Not because I didn’t care, but because I wasn’t listening. I was busy transmitting.
Engineers deal with this problem in hardware. Too much transmit leakage into the receive path? You lower the TX power. Add filtering. Change the schedule. Protect the receiver so the real signal isn’t lost. All of it is just an attempt to recover the cleanest possible input.
Listening works the same way.
If I’m mentally drafting arguments, trying to be clever, or waiting to jump in, I’m not really receiving anything. I’m pretending to listen. Eventually, yeah, I can reconstruct the missing pieces with some sloppy human forward-error correction—“I think they meant…”—but the nuance is gone. The emotional data is gone. The meaning leaks out of the signal.
Lately, I’ve been trying to lower my internal transmit power. Catch the moment my brain starts broadcasting. Dial it down. Reopen the receiver path. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than it used to be. And when I get it right, something changes. I not only hear the words, I hear what’s underneath them: the pauses, the tone, the intention. The person.
When it is my turn to speak? The response is better—cleaner, more grounded, and less noisy. It actually belongs to the conversation instead of fighting against it.
So next time you’re in a meaningful conversation, try the engineer’s approach: quiet the transmitter, protect the receiver, and let the real signal come through. In RF and in life, communication quality starts with listening. And honestly, that kind of tuning goes a long way toward making us better engineers—and better humans.
Author: Nathan B.
