Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio A topic that rarely if ever gets any serious air-time is the humble station log. It's a process where you track what contacts you've made with whom, when and what conditions prevailed at the time. Notice first of all that I mention that it's a process. A station log is made up of several different moving parts and if you're new to this you might think of your station log as a physical thing. You can actually buy things called Station Logs, looks like a book, it has pages, lines, columns, sometimes pre-populated with headings and as you operate, you write stuff into this book. Let's start with the stuff. What stuff? How much stuff? Have you ever heard another station on-air say something along the lines: Hey Wally, it's been a long time, we last spoke in 1984, how are you and how are the kids? If you thought for a moment that the station had all that information stored away in the back of their mind, that's not to say, some do, but most of the time it's thanks to their station

Foundations of Amateur Radio On Thursday the 3rd of July 2008 at 6 minutes to 7 at night a developer called Dan KK7DS started to scratch an itch and published the results. The next morning before breakfast Dan added more. Since then about a hundred people from around the globe have contributed to that project. Some people made little changes, others made large contributions over many years. In all, on average, the project saw a change every 29 hours over more than a decade of contributions. On the 16th of July, less than two weeks into the project, it got a name, CHIRP. It's been translated from US English to Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and the Queens English. From the beginning of talking to a single Icom IC-92 radio, CHIRP today supports 27 different Icom radios, 36 different brands of radio, hundreds of different radios in all, with new ones being added every couple of months or so. The software runs on anything that will run Python, that includes

Foundations of Amateur Radio I grew up with Lego, plastic blocks that you can put together in infinite variety. My oldest Lego kit hails from 1964, kit 324: House with Garage and it's still in pretty good nick today. It's missing the tree and the car and the garage door is broken and a few blocks have vanished, but putting it together the other day reminded me of the art of building. Today I still play with Lego. In fact after a hiatus of several decades I pulled out my old boxes and started sorting my blocks. That lead to building the House and while I was at it, I managed to reconstruct my first Lego Technic kit, 850: Forklift, bringing with it a flood of memories. Why the Lego? It's been my source of inspiration for many decades. It has allowed me to imagine something and then go on to build it. Over the years I've learned that this is not a universal experience. I recall one friend who was gifted a huge Lego car, but had no idea that you were allowed to modify it and I blew his mind converting his fou

Foundations of Amateur Radio The transceiver you use to get on air and make noise needs power to operate. The traditional voltage for our amateur equipment is 13.8 Volts. Why not 12 Volts you ask. The short answer is chemistry, but let's move on, there is lots to cover. Generally that 13.8 Volt is specified with a +/- symbol and some percentage. For my radio it's 15%, which means that if I plug it into power that's somewhere between 11.7 Volt and 15.9 Volt, I'm good to go. Then when you look a little closer at the specification you'll see that my radio draws 22 Amp. That's a whole chunk of juice that needs to come from a power supply. Of course that means that you'll also need to deal with 22 Amp fuses, wire capable of dealing with 13.8 Volt at 22 Amp, and connectors that won't melt when you do that. If you look closer again, you might notice that 22 Amp is when you're using the radio at maximum power, that is, 100% duty cycle and 100% power, and only during transmit, in the case of my radio, 100 Watts fo

Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've spoken about the joy of making something out of not much. On that theme I've covered WSPR, the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, a mechanism to use a modest station to report signals received, which is something any suitably interested person can participate in, no license required. For a time I had my radio, a Yaesu FT-857D connected to a Windows XP notebook running WSJT-X, a piece of software that has the ability to set the frequency of your radio and then listen to what the radio is hearing, attempt to decode it and then report on what was heard. The beauty of this system is that you're using your own station to report signals heard, that is, your own antenna, your own coax, your own radio. Essentially you can use it to see what can be heard from around the world at your station. I had this running for a while, but the set-up was less than satisfactory, because I use the same radio and antenna to run weekly nets, the computer was running Windows XP and runni

Foundations of Amateur Radio The hobby we call amateur radio is enormous. One amateur called it a thousand hobbies in one and that just about sums it up for me. Being bored inside this hobby is not an option, because there is just so much to do and see. Yesterday I found a completely unrelated aspect to our hobby, call it the one thousand and first hobby associated with amateur radio. A friend came over and handed me the separation kit mount for my Yaesu FT-857D, it's the bit of plastic that you clip to the back of the head of the radio, so you can mount it somewhere separate from the main body of the radio. I have one of those already, purchased from a local supplier, at the time, 8 years ago, it cost me $80, these days it's included with the radio. For my station I needed a second mount and I really didn't want to spend that much money on three cables and some plastic, so I went hunting for alternatives. One of my friends is doing some 3D printing R&D for his job and has access to a printer to do som

Foundations of Amateur Radio We tend to spend most of our energy looking at antennas and power to evaluate how well our station works. Based on a better antenna or more power, you're likely to make more contacts is the general gist of the process. Being a QRP operator, power rarely comes into the conversation, 5 Watts is what you get, leaving antennas as the prime method of discovering how effective we can be. Recently I received an email from Layne AE1N, pointing me at an article he wrote on the Nashua Area Radio Society website titled: It's all about the decibels - factors in enhancing station effectiveness. The article, goes into great detail in looking at an alternative way of measuring how well you're doing and builds on the December 2013 QST article - How Much Punch Can You Get from Different Modes? In our hobby we measure using a thing called the decibel. I've spoken about it at great length previously. The way to use it is to compare something against something else. Using the metric used in the

Foundations of Amateur Radio Operating your amateur radio station at home, in your shack, is one of the often discussed aspects of our hobby. Much has been said about installation, antennas, grounding and the like, but what if you want to operate mobile? Picking a location, of all the locations available to you, can be quite the task. For some it's daunting, others find it challenging, others take to it with ease and often you find yourself overwhelmed by choice. What makes a good operating location, what should you look for and how do you do this better? First thing to consider is that options give you choice, choice gives you uncertainty, which can lead to stress and other unpleasantness. If you're completely flummoxed as to how to select a location, visit the Summits On The Air website, or the World Wide Flora and Fauna site and see which of the qualifying locations is reachable for you. The choice becomes much easier if you don't have a choice. Picking from a proscribed list makes it easier to start a

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I have a new callsign, it's exciting, special, kind of strange, to be known as something other than VK6FLAB. It's hard to overstate how much of your identity as a radio amateur is linked to your callsign. It's a strange phenomenon to those who are not amateurs, or who have only just joined the community and are still learning to remember what callsign they have. We think of callsigns as semi-permanent fixtures, but realistically they're far from that. In your life as an amateur you'll operate many callsigns, even if you never change your own. When you're operating the local club-station, you'll use that callsign, or when you're participating in a special event, say an activation of an island, or some remote DX station, or when you get on air to make noise in another country. Some stations use special contesting callsigns, either for speed, or to commemorate another amateur. There are those who collect callsigns like badges, others only ever register one and keep it for t

Foundations of Amateur Radio In 2017 a new digital amateur mode called FT8 joined the ranks of inventions related to our hobby. Since then it's taken the amateur world by storm, filled the bands with contacts and attracted a strong following among radio amateurs across the planet. Making contacts with low solar cycle numbers has never been so easy. Together with that following comes a growing chorus of those who decry this addition, the filling of our air with useless noise and it's too easy, not real radio, there's no conversation, who cares about contacts, I want to rag-chew, anyone can do this and it's not right. Clearly some think of FT8 as the end of amateur radio as we know it. Recently I came across a list of other technologies that made amateur radio too easy and would cause the end of our hobby. Amplitude Modulation or AM, Semi-automatic CW Keys or Bugs, Vacuum Tubes, Single Sideband or SSB, Radio Teletype or RTTY, Repeaters, Electronic CW Keyers, Transistors, Electronic digital programmable comp

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the single most recurring topics within our community is that of antennas. Everywhere you look is a story or a photo or a website or a contact about an antenna that came into being because somebody had an idea. Now if you've been in the ideas field for a while you'll have learnt that having the idea is often just the start of the process. After that there's planning, sourcing, building and testing. If you're lucky you'll end up with something and a story to tell. If you manage to persist you might even end up with a working antenna. The other day I managed to have an idea that I'd not seen anywhere else. As it turns out and perhaps not unsurprisingly, I'm not the first to have this idea. Despite that, what struck me is that I'd not seen or heard of this combination of antennas before. As you might recall, one of my earlier forays into antennas consisted of purchasing a set of mono-band antennas. I intended to use these on my car while operating mobile, but despite count

Foundations of Amateur Radio The hobby of amateur radio is a curious animal. It sits at the junction between empirical evidence and the scientific method. On the one hand it's all about physics, electricity, magnetism and the science behind those. On the other hand it's about trying something out and seeing what happens. When I started in this hobby, I was all about the science. I wanted to know "Why is it so?" "What evidence is there to support that?", all the typical questions you might ask if you're coming at this from that direction. As is often the case, the more you know, the less you know. That is, the more you understand a topic, the more you understand that you know nothing. The deeper you dig, the more variables become apparent, the deeper the hole goes, the further away from absolute you travel. That's not to say that our hobby is unknowable or non-deterministic, far from it. It's often so complex as to defy immediate explanation using high-school physics. You'll get to a certain point with tha

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past year and a half I've been working on a secret project. Today I'd like to share what I've been up to. To set the scene, I'm not doing this on my own, a fellow co-conspirator is Randall VK6WR who became an amateur about 20 months ago. Randall has a long association with the Engineering Development Array and the Murchison Wide Field Array, two of several radio telescopes that are built on one of the few radio quiet areas in the world and located near the future home of the Square Kilometre Array, the SKA. One day Randall and I started talking, as you do, new amateur, new topics, interesting new fields and ideas. We hit on the idea that radio astronomy telescopes are able to receive 2m signals. This started a discussion about using a radio telescope to receive a moon-bounce signal. So, the idea was born. Can we create a 5 Watt signal, bounce it off the moon and have it be heard by a radio telescope? Randall and I have been working on that on and off since our first d

Foundations of Amateur Radio Often we forget the things we've done or achieved and every now and then it seems like a solid use of time to reflect a little on what went before and what that did. Recently I asked various amateurs what they were proud of having done or achieved in the past year, their little personal victory, their thrill to keep coming back to the hobby. For me it was the research and production behind "Is man-made noise really vertical?". It took several weeks to research and produce and received only a handful of responses on social media or via email, even though it was downloaded and read about 10,000 times or so. For me it gives me a thrill to have spent time digging into the Who, What, Why, When, Where and How of a topic that seems steeped in myth and often remains unexplained or unexplored. One amateur shared that they'd made their first HF contact from Perth to Romania, one had gotten their license this year after procrastinating for 30 years, another came back to the hobby after b

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I managed to get some quality on-air time when I participated in a contest. This isn't about contesting. Although I suppose tangentially it is. It was a most enjoyable experience shared with some friends and because we did it at a local radio club, Sunday morning had all manner of visitors joining us for a little social chat, just the ticket for breaking the monotony of calling CQ. Normally when I do a contest I wear headphones, actually it's a headset, that is something over my ears with an attached microphone to capture my contacts without me having to use my hands or move my head towards a fixed location while I'm making the contact. One hour in my trusty headset broke clean in half. They've been with me since 2012 so I was a little disappointed. They weren't cheap. I'm not going to tell you what brand it is, but they're very popular in the contesting community and I bought them based on those recommendations. Given that I now had no headset I immediately went to t

Foundations of Amateur Radio The question that new amateurs most often ask after "What radio should I buy?" is "How do I get the best antenna?". In a household where you're the only antenna affected aficionado the question is likely more along the lines of: "Why do you need another antenna?". The answer is pretty much the same, an antenna is fit for purpose, generally only one purpose. Going from A to B without walking might involve a car. If it's just you, one seat is enough, if your local cricket team is coming too, you might need more seats. If the road is rough, you might need a good suspension and if it's the middle of summer in Australia, air-conditioning isn't a luxury but a necessity. Each of those different requirements varies depending on circumstance and need. There are plenty more variables, fuel, distance, cost, and the deeper you dig, the more choices. Antennas are no different. While cars have an element of fashion, colour, styling etc. antennas are more utilitarian, radio amateurs rarel

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day one of my non amateur friends asked for some help. He wants to set up a receiver for his bush fire brigade that's available via the internet so his community can listen to the communication channels when there are fires around, or when a volunteer is out of radio range but still wants to hear what's going on. His question was about hooking up an antenna. We started to discuss what he already had and it turns out that he has enough coaxial cable in either 50 Ohm RG58 or alternatively 75 Ohm low loss quad shielded satellite TV coax. He's not an amateur, won't be broadcasting and just needs it to work without spending too much money. We then started talking about antennas and he had a tuned whip and a generic scanner antenna. Turns out that the tuned whip was for 78 MHz and he needs to listen to 164 MHz, so I suggested the scanner antenna, so called broadband, but no actual specifications. Then we talked about how it was going to be mounted to his metal roof. Tek

Foundations of Amateur Radio In our hobby there is a term "Elmer", referring to someone who helps new amateurs find their way inside the community, locate resources, understand techniques, etc. It's part of what we might consider the folklore of amateur radio. I started this with the intent to quickly introduce the concept of an Elmer and then spend some time talking about our own role in this adventure, but as is often the case, I was side-tracked by my own investigation. There is a push within the community to abandon the concept of an Elmer, that it's not real that it serves no purpose and that it's a recent invention and irrelevant to our community. Finding an Elmer today appears to be hard work, seeing the wood for the trees, finding a unicorn in this social media connected world. But as it turns out, Elmers are closer than you think. With a little searching, the person who is credited with introducing the word Elmer into the amateur radio vocabulary was Rod W9BRD. He was the author of a column "How'

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I read a message from Theodore KS5I who has been around the block a couple of times. He recalls the excitement he experienced when he was first licensed in 1967, the year I was born. He described that at the time transistors were just coming into their own and it was so wonderful to be learning about them. The closing sentence sealed it for me: Theodore wrote: Perhaps, its time for some of us more mature operators to release the past so our hands are free to grab hold of the future and share the enthusiasm of those who look ahead with the same hope and excitement that we had so many years ago.. It's that level of enthusiasm that our hobby needs to foster and develop. The landscape we live in is changing all the time, but new adventures are always just around the corner. They might not look like what was available 50 years ago, or last year, or even yesterday, but they too have their place in the pursuit of amateur radio. Learning is a lifelong activity. If you

Foundations of Amateur Radio Imagine a world where electronics are pervasive, a transceiver can be purchased for the price of two Big Macs, kits are designed and built using simple tools at home, software makes it possible to invent new methods of communication on an almost daily basis, where long distance contacts are made throughout the day using milliwatts while ionospheric propagation is at an all-time low, where national parks and peaks are being activated at an increasing rate, where new people join in every day, where it's easier and easier to obtain a license and where the word geek is held as a badge of honour. That world is here, it's now and when Rex, KE6MT writes that we're in the midst of a golden age of amateur radio, he hits the nail on the head, or should that be fist on the key? It's easy to notice that amateur radio is difficult, that it's big, that it's messy, that it's full of know-it-alls, but it's hard to remember that it's fun, that it's rewarding and that every day more and more peo