Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio For much of the past month I've been attempting to articulate what Open Source Software is, why it's important, how it's relevant to our hobby, how it works, how software is different from hardware and why you should consider if the equipment you buy comes with source code or not. I'm finding it difficult to separate out the issues since they all hang together in a cohesive clump of ideas and concepts. So, let me go sideways to set the scene. There is a movement that asserts the right to repair our own things and to ensure that manuals and diagnostic tools used by manufacturers are made available to the public. For many radio amateurs that might sound quaint and obvious, since for much of the hobby that kind of information was not only available, it was expected and assumed to be available. You can get the circuit diagram and testing procedures, the alignment process and the list of required test equipment for most if not all amateur transceivers today and truth be told, if th

Foundations of Amateur Radio The hobby of amateur radio is about communication. When you go on-air and make noise, you initiate a communications channel, sending information out into the world and hoping for another station to receive and decode what you sent. The channel itself can be used in an infinite number of ways and each one is called a modulation mode, or mode for short. The popular ones come with most radios, CW, AM, SSB and FM. Those few are not the only ones available. In fact as computers are being integrated into the radio at an increasing pace, signal processing is becoming part and parcel of the definition of a mode and new modes are being introduced at break neck speed. I've talked about WSPR as an example of one such mode, but there are many, each with their own particular take on how to get information between two stations. As you listen on the bands you'll increasingly find yourself hearing a bewildering litany of beeps, pops and clicks. Some of those are due to ionospheric conditions,

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I received a lovely email from Simon G0EIY, who reminded me that there is a voice-keyer that fits into a microphone. It was designed by Olli DH8BQA as a replacement for a standard Yaesu MH-31 microphone. I'd come across this a while ago and for several reasons put off actually ordering one, but Simon's encouragement tipped me over the fence and I've placed my order. What I'm expecting to arrive at some point is a kit that has the minuscule surface mount components already soldered to a circuit board, leaving a couple of individual components ready for my soldering iron abuse. I'll let you know how it goes. This little experience reminded me that I've been stumbling across solutions like this for years, an amateur with an itch to scratch and the drive to do something about it. For example, Paul KE0PBR likes to operate satellites and in doing so amassed a collection of frequencies. Since the Doppler effect alters the actual frequency depending on the satellite coming to

Foundations of Amateur Radio Sometimes when you head into uncharted territory, you gotta laugh at yourself from time to time. Last weekend I participated in a contest, something I enjoy doing as you might recall. To simplify the process of setting up in a vehicle I'd proposed a bold plan to save space and reduce complexity. I was anxious about reducing the amount of technology because I'd come up with a plan to use a paper log to track my contest contacts. I had visions of operating for the best part of 24 hours and making hundreds of contacts. This was based on the fact that in 2016 I'd done this same contest on my own and made a 138 contacts and scored 18221 points, having moved 17 times. I'd also done the contest in 2018 and for reasons I don't recall, I made one contact over 8 hours. That right there should have been a warning sign that I might not quite get the result I'd been fearful of. Blissfully unaware of the adventure that was unfolding, after driving to the first location, I called CQ for the

Foundations of Amateur Radio My first ever interaction with amateur radio was a field day on Boterhuiseiland near Leiden in the Netherlands when I was about twelve. The station was set-up in an army tent and the setting was Jamboree On The Air, or JOTA. My second field-day, a decade ago, was a visit to a local club set-up in the bush. At that point I already had my licence and I'd just started taking the first baby steps in what so-far has been a decade long journey of discovery into this amazing hobby. A field day is really an excuse to build a portable station away from the shack and call CQ. A decade on, I vividly remember one member, Marty, now VK6RC, calling CQ DX and getting responses back from all over the world. From that day on I looked for any opportunity to get on air and make noise. Often that's something I do in the form of a contest. I love this as a way of making contacts because each interaction is short and sweet, there's lots of stations playing from all over the planet and each contest h

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently a budding new amateur asked the question: "What radio should I buy?" It's a common question, one I asked a decade ago. Over the years I've made several attempts at answering this innocent introduction into our community and as I've said before, the answer is simple but unhelpful. "It depends." Rather than explaining the various things it depends on, I'm going to attempt a different approach and in no particular order ask you some things to consider and answer for yourself in your journey towards an answer that is tailored specifically to your situation. "What's your budget?" How much money you have set aside for this experiment is a great start. In addition to training and license costs, you'll need to consider things like shipping, import duties and insurance, power leads and a power supply, coax leads and connectors and last but not least, adaptors, antennas and accessories. "Should you buy second hand or pre-loved?" If you have electronics experience that you

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the questions you're faced with when you start your amateur journey is around connectors. You quickly discover that every piece of equipment with an RF socket has a different one fit for purpose for that particular device. That purpose includes the frequency range of the device, but also things like water ingress, number of mating cycles, power levels, size, cost and more. As an aside, the number of mating cycles, how often you connect and disconnect something is determined by several factors, including the type of connection, manufacturing precision and the thickness of the plating. That said, even a so-called low cycle count connector, like say an SMA connector lasting 500 cycles will work just fine for the next 40 years if you only connect it once a month. Back to variety. My PlutoSDR has SMA connectors on it as do my band pass filters, my handheld and one RTL-SDR dongle. The other dongle uses MCX. Both my antenna analyser and UHF antenna have an N-type connector whi

Foundations of Amateur Radio A while ago as part of my ongoing exploration into all things radio I came across a utility called rtlsdr-airband. It's a tool that uses a cheap software defined radio dongle to listen to a station frequency or channel and send it to a variety of different outputs. Originally written by Tony Wong in 2014, it's since been updated and is now maintained by Tomasz Lemiech. There are contributions by a dozen other developers. The original examples are based around listening to Air Traffic Control channels. I know of a local amateur who uses it to listen to and share the local emergency services communication channels, especially important during local bush fires. While sophisticated, it's a pretty simple tool to use, runs on a Raspberry Pi, or in my case, inside a Docker container. It's well documented, has instructions on how to compile it and how to configure it. Before I get into what I've done, as a test, let's have a look at the kinds of things that rtlsdr-airband can do. Fir

Foundations of Amateur Radio The activity of amateur radio revolves around experimentation. For over a century the amateur community has designed, sourced, scrounged and built experiments. Big or small, working or not, each of these is an expression of creativity, problem solving and experimentation. For most of the century that activity was accompanied by the heady smell of solder smoke. It still makes an appearance in many shacks and field stations today, even my own, coaxed by an unsteady hand, more and more light and bigger and bigger magnification, I manage to join bits of wire, attach components and attempt to keep my fingers from getting burnt and solder from landing on the floor. I've been soldering since I was nine or so. I think it started with a Morse key, a battery and a bicycle light with a wire running between my bedroom and the bedroom of my next door neighbour. In the decades since I've slightly improved my skill, but I have to confess, soldering isn't really my thing. My thing is computer

Foundations of Amateur Radio As you might recall, I took delivery of a device called a PlutoSDR some time ago. If you're not familiar, it's a single-board computer that has the ability to transmit and receive between 70 MHz and 6 GHz. The system is intended as a learning platform, it's open source, you get access to the firmware, compilers and a whole load of other interesting tools. I used it to play with aviation receive using a tool called dump1090 which I updated to use Open Street Map. If you're interested, it's on my VK6FLAB github page. Over the past few months I've been steadily acquiring little bits and pieces which today added up to a new project. Can I use my PlutoSDR to transmit WSPR? This all started because of an experiment and a conversation. The experiment was: "Using my FT-857d on 70cm can I transmit a weak signal mode like WSPR and have my friend on the other side of the city decode the transmission?" The answer to that was a qualified "Yes". I say qualified, since we weren't able to tr

Foundations of Amateur Radio In my day job I work in computing. For many years that consisted of going on-site and fixing stuff. Invariably this involved me fixing servers that were installed into a room the size of a broom closet with an optional air conditioner screaming in my ear. The experience often included sitting on a crate, or the floor, holding a keyboard and if it was a Windows Server, rolling a mouse on my knee in order to click on stuff barely discernible on a tiny screen that likely sat a meter too high above my eye line with Ethernet wires going diagonally from one end of the room to the other. These days with ubiquitous internet connectivity that kind of experience is mostly a thing of the past. That said, operating a radio during a contest in many stations I've used over the years is not far from that kind of layout. Often a traditional shack starts off with a radio on a table with a notepad to record contacts. Over time that gets expanded with technology like a computer. It's common to h

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever taken a moment to consider the available bandwidth on the various amateur bands? As an entrant into amateur radio in Australia as a Foundation licence holder you have access to six different amateur bands, the 80m band, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm. If you add the bandwidth from each of those bands together, you end up with 26.65 MHz worth of bandwidth to play with in Australia. I can tell you that's a big chunk of bandwidth, but until I give you some context, 26.65 MHz isn't likely something that you can picture. You might think of things as being pretty crowded. For example, on the 40m band during a contest it's common to hear wall to wall signals. There's barely enough room to call CQ and not interfere with anyone else. But how crowded is it really? Let's start with an SSB signal, typically it's 2.4 kHz wide. On the 40m band, with 300 kHz of bandwidth, there's room for about 125 SSB signals side-by-side. On the 10m band, there's space for over 700 SSB signals s

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've been around radio amateurs for a little while you're likely to have heard about the Solar Cycle and that it affects radio propagation for HF or High Frequency, also known as shortwave communications. The frequencies in the range of around 3 to 30 MHz, or 100m to 10m wavelength. One of the main ways it's used is for is for long distance or global communication and one of the most common ways that's done is using the ionosphere around the globe to refract a radio signal. In September 2020, the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel, announced that Solar Cycle 25 had commenced in December 2019 and radio amateurs around the globe rejoiced. The first question for me was, why Solar Cycle 25? You might think of the Sun as a stable light in the sky. As it happens, the bright light hides all manner of ferocious activity. One of the measures of this activity is the number of dots observed on the surface of our Star. These dots are called sunspots. As Solar activity increases, the num

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you have the opportunity to build your shack, it might start off as a table in the corner where you plonk down a radio, plug into nearby power and run coax to. That's pretty much how most shacks start, mine included. For me the step of running coax was an activity that took weeks of planning and procrastination and days of climbing on the roof. After actually completing that and getting two runs of coax to my planned shack, one for HF and one for UHF and VHF, the shack building itself was pretty simple. I had to get power to the location, but an extension lead took care of that. In the interest of space I put the power supply on the floor, a wooden floor that ensured good circulation, unlike carpet, perhaps a topic for another day, I plugged my coax into the radio, plugged in the 12 Volt power and was up and running. Over time that space continued to grow. Looking at it right now, it has two computer monitors, a laptop, three radios, two coax switches, a keyboard, mouse, di

Foundations of Amateur Radio A little while ago I was gifted a new radio, well, new to me. A Kenwood TS-480HX. It's an all mode HF transceiver with 6m. Does 200 Watts, but you know me, I'm into QRP, low power, so I first had to figure out how to dial the transmitter down to 5 Watts and that was after figuring out how to feed the dual power supplies from one source and have the fuses work as expected. When I received the radio, I took stock of all the bits that it was packed with, all complete, all the accessories, even the user manual was laminated. The previous owner, Walter VK6BCP (SK) whom I never met was an amateur after my own heart. I've talked about how he meticulously documented his alterations to a power supply for example. Previously I've taken this radio on holidays to operate portable in a field day. The experience was underwhelming, in that I didn't hear anyone and nobody responded to my CQ calls. At the time I put it down to a poor antenna and unfamiliarity with the radio, despite reading the

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last weekend was memorable for all the right reasons. Filled with 24 hours of amateur radio, spent with friends, in a park, making noise and having fun, marking the first time I recall setting up in a park for that length of time with so few extra resources. Normally we'd be decked out with tents, or in my case a swag, we'd have camping stoves, perhaps even a caravan or two, tables, cutlery, the whole shebang. This time we brought none of that. Just radios, antennas, batteries, water with a few snacks and folding chairs. This was like nothing I've experienced before and it has me asking myself: Why did I wait so long to operate like this? It was wonderful. We spent it being on-air and making noise during a 24 hour contest which is specifically intended to celebrate and reward portable operation. In case you're wondering, the John Moyle Memorial Field Day is to encourage portable field day operation and provide training for emergency situations. It was created in memory of Joh

Foundations of Amateur Radio The landscape of remotely operated amateur radio is changing by the day. Once the territory of home brew DTMF decoders and remote controlled radio links, now more often than not it's a Raspberry Pi with an internet connection, or some variation on that. Before I continue, I must point out that amateur regulations vary widely around the globe, especially in this area. It appears mostly due to the rapidly changing nature of remotely operated radios. For example, most, if not all software defined radios are technically remotely operated. You run software on your computer, the radio is connected to a network, you twiddle a setting on your computer and the radio responds. The computer is not part of the radio, but without it there's not much radio to be had. There's no need for both to be in the same room, let alone the same building. Similarly, a Kenwood TS-480 and a Yaesu FT-857d are both radios that have a removable face with knobs and a display. The main body of the radio is a

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur radio is an environment for infinite possibilities. I've spoken about the way that contacts can happen, seemingly out of the blue, how propagation has so many variables it's hard to predict what will happen at any given moment. During a contest you might scan up and down the bands looking for an elusive multiplier, a contact that's worth extra points, or a missing DXCC country, in your quest to contact a hundred or more. It's easy to get swept away in the excitement and disappointment that comes with success and failure. I'm mentioning this because it's pretty much how many people in our community go about their hobby, me included. I've likened making a contact to fishing, taking your time to get the rhythm of the other station, understanding that there's a human at the other end. Taking stock of what they're hearing, which stations they're responding to, how they respond and if they give out hints about making a successful contact with them. The other day I came acros

Foundations of Amateur Radio Every community has its own language. As a member of that community you learn the words, their meaning and their appropriate use. For example, the combination of words "Single Side Band" have a specific meaning inside amateur radio. Outside of radio, those same words are random words with no relationship. Sometimes a term like "FM" can be heard across many communities with similar understanding, though not identical. It gets tricky when a word is used widely but doesn't have a common understanding at all. A word like "software" for example. A question you might hear in amateur radio is: "Can I buy a software defined radio or SDR that has digital modes built-in?" It's a perfectly reasonable question, the radio runs software, the digital modes are software, so the answer is obvious, right? What about: "Can the hundred or more computers in my car play Solitaire?" Aside from the perhaps unexpected fact that your car has computers on board, you most likely know the answer to tha

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur radio lives and dies with the ionosphere. It's drilled into you when you get your license, it's talked about endlessly, the sun impacts on it, life is bad when the solar cycle is low and great when it's not. There's sun spots, solar K and A indices, flux, different ionosperic bands and tools online that help you predict what's possible and how likely it is depending on the time of day, the frequency, your location and the curent state of the sun. If that's not enough, the geomagnetic field splits a radio wave in the ionosphere into two separate components, ordinary and extraordinary waves. All that complexity aside, there's at least one thing we can all agree on. A radio wave can travel from your station, bounce off the ionosphere, come back to earth and do it again. This is known as a hop or a skip. If conditions are right, you can hop all the way around the globe. I wanted to know how big a hop might be. If you know that it's a certain distance, then you can figure ou