Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are people who ask questions and there are people who answer them. Sometimes the people who answer even know what they're talking about, but sometimes they just repeat what they've been told without any form of critical thought. The reason I raise this is because when you're a new amateur with a shiny new license, you're like a little puppydog, going from tree to tree to have a sniff. Does this smell good, what about this, ooh, that's a nice smell, I wonder what it tastes like. Puppydog analogies aside, as a new amateur you're filled with questions and uncertainty. You don't know what you don't know, you don't know how much you don't know, your license is still wet, so even if you know something, it might not be true. Interestingly the more I look at this, the more I find that new amateurs, filled with questions are more likely to dig around in the fundamental understanding of things and learn something along the way. I've been around this community for a little while

Foundations of Amateur Radio Get on air and make some noise is a phrase I use often to encourage amateurs to be active on-air and use the bands that are available to us. One thing that's often glossed over is how to actually make that noise. It can be scary to make that first contact. If you've got your radio installed, your antenna erected, your operating position set-up just right and you're ready to actually key your microphone, how do you do that and how do you get the attention of those around you? First things first. You need to establish if your radio is actually working as expected. If you're using a UHF or VHF radio, often the simplest way is to find a local repeater, key-up your radio and give your callsign. The result should be at least a carrier, a beep or a callsign in Morse-code. Some repeaters even have a voice ident, so you can hear that your action of keying the push-to-talk had an effect. If that isn't working, then there are lots of things you can troubleshoot, but that's for another d

Foundations of Amateur Radio Mistakes are common in all aspects of life. Sometimes they are only known to you, other times they are public knowledge and open to ridicule and lambasting. Getting on air for the first time is an accomplishment and often the initial source of mistakes, mishaps and great frustration. Once you've made it on air, the reception to this feat is often underwhelming, people around you don't appear to appreciate the amount of effort you went to in order to key your microphone and for others to be able to hear that. If you've been in this community for a while it's easy to forget what is involved to make that first contact and to dismiss those around you who've managed to obtain their license, acquire their equipment, install and configure it just so and to actually achieve the first visible milestone in their amateur radio journey, though technically it's audible. If you've never done this, or if you have but have delegated it to the historical backwaters of your mind, here's an outli

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I did an experiment. I searched for "dipole calculator" and using the first 20 results I calculated the length of a dipole suitable for 7.130 MHz. I chose the frequency for no other reason that there is a 7130 DX net every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and for the longest time I've been unable to participate due to the lack of a HF antenna in my new shack. So here's some things I learnt from doing this experiment. Depending on which calculator I use, the length of my dipole can vary by over a meter from longest to shortest result. Depending on my desire to use metric or imperial measurements, my dipole will be a different length, because of course electrons move at a different speed if you're not using the metric system. In case you're wondering, 1 inch is defined as being exactly 2.54 cm, so there's plenty of opportunity to vary that. Speaking of standards, we all agree that the speed of light is a constant, right? Turns out that for some calculators, you can c

Foundations of Amateur Radio One topic that is longer than all other topics combined is that of antennas. Designing, planning, sourcing, building, tuning, using, you name it, all of this is regular fare in the day of a radio amateur. I've discussed the topic here regularly and no doubt I'll revisit that when the mood or necessity takes me. One topic that is rarely discussed is that of failure. About six months ago I moved house. I've been rebuilding my shack, doing all manner of fancy shuffling of gear and yesterday I finally got to the point of getting some HF activity happening. During that process I went through boxes and boxes of stuff, with coax, connectors, wire, nuts, bolts, heat shrink and all the other necessities of being a member of an experimental hobby like ours. One box contained wire. You know the adage, only two types of wire required in our hobby, cheap wire or free wire with a preference for free. This box was stuffed with wire. Bits with connectors, bits wound around spools, bits in zip

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the often repeated attributes of noise and antennas is that man-made noise is vertically polarised and that is why a vertical antenna sounds noisier than a horizontal dipole. It's an interesting thing to say, but it it true? Let's start with what constitutes man-made noise. Cars driving past, solar panel inverters, pool pumps, high-tension power lines, garage door openers, broadband internet modems, LED lights, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, plasma televisions and so on. The more you think about this, the more noise makers you discover. So, are these noise sources all aligned in the same way, making the same noise? Clearly not. There is no alignment standard for installing a lamp, how to align your lawn mower, which direction to drive, what angle to point your garage door opener, so the statement that man-made noise is vertical is clearly bogus. That doesn't mean that the rest of the statement is also wrong. A vertical antenna in an urban environment often sounds much nois

Foundations of Amateur Radio The first time I came across the concept of antenna polarisation was a decade before I became a radio amateur. To connect to the internet while driving around Australia I became the proud owner of a portable satellite dish. Portable in the broadest sense of the word, 150 kilos with a dish that's 2.4m high, 1.8m wide, steel base, electronics, power and patience to erect and point. The dish has a receiver and transmitter component that needs to be aligned, just so, in order to be able to have two-way communications using 5 Watts into geosynchronous orbit. The transmit and the receive are exactly 90 degrees offset from each other. One is called horizontal polarisation, the other vertical. The first thing to observe is that if you're using the wrong polarisation, it doesn't really work well. We'll get into what is right in a moment. Depending on where you you ask, the definition of not working well can be as bad as 40 dB loss. Just let that sink in for a moment. If you want to pu

Foundations of Amateur Radio The term NVIS, or Near Vertical Incidence Skywave is in my short experience as an amateur heaped with scorn and ridicule. Terms like cloud-warmer come to mind when people discuss the principles associated with NVIS, but that does happen in the context of where I live, that is, one of the most isolated cities on the planet, Perth in Western Australia. NVIS has several advantages over other forms of HF communication, it can be done with low power, there is little or no signal fading, simple antennas work well, it has low path loss, better signal to noise ratios and if you're in a valley, you can still use it. So what exactly is NVIS? In the past I've talked about long distance HF communication. Your radio signal bounces off the ionosphere, bounces back to earth and so-on. Like skipping a stone on a pond, the angle at which your signal hits the ionosphere determines what happens next. In general, shallow is good, steep is bad, much like the plop you hear when you don't hit the po

Foundations of Amateur Radio A recurring question for people who are not yet, or newly licensed is something along the lines of: I have a friend who is 400 kilometres away, can I talk to them on my hand-held 2m radio? This particular question arrives in different forms, but generally along the lines of attempting to communicate between point A and point B at some or other distance. The responses, on social media at least, less so on-air, are often very technical, or offer the advice to get a license, or to get a clue, or the question is ignored or dismissed. That's not helpful, or fair. The person asking the question has expressed an interest in our hobby and is looking for help. As a basic set of answers, if you're both standing on the ground, you'll generally be able to talk about 5km using your hand-held. Stuff between you like buildings and hills will lower that distance. If you both stand on a hill, you can talk further away. As an aside, you can talk to the International Space Station with a 2m, 144

Foundations of Amateur Radio Morse Code is a way of communicating with people across the globe using dits and dahs and the spaces between them to convey a message. It's no longer required to get an Amateur License, but that doesn't mean that it's not useful, in fact, far from it, Morse is still heavily used in this hobby. I've been attempting to learn Morse code for quite some time. To do this I was told, time and time again, over and over, ad nauseam, that Morse is an Auditory Language. I was told that the way to success was to listen before sending, to be able to decode before ever touching a key and to learn with tapes. I also was told that if I learned it slowly, I'd run into trouble later on when I wanted to hear a beacon, which identifies itself with much faster Morse Code. Morse is an interesting phenomenon. We describe it in words in day-to-day terminology as having dots and dashes, which is how the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU defines it, but I have been assured that I should

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the past I've talked about a weekly net I run, called F-troop. It's intended to be a place where new and returning amateurs find their feet, have a chat, test their gear, meet new friends, ask questions and sometimes get answers. If you want to come and join in, you're welcome to and I'd love to meet you. This net came about because I was new to the hobby and didn't find anyone running any on-air activity for people like me. I asked around and with some encouragement I decided to start an activity. Just like that. My point is that you can do the same. You can keep looking for that elusive group of people who share your interest, or you can get on-air and start a conversation. There's no forms to complete, there's no rules about how it has to happen, no expectations about how you run your net, just have at it. F-troop today looks nothing like it did on day one. On the first day I was on a simplex frequency and nobody could hear me. The next week I moved to a different day an

Foundations of Amateur Radio Don't get me started, Let's start this thing, Where do I start, Start me up, I could go on, but I have better things to do today, like starting a podcast. Amateur Radio is a hobby with an enourmous range of activities, interests, skills and experiences. If you're new to this hobby, you might find yourself standing at the edge of a precipous wondering what to do next. Where do I start, who do I ask, what's the first step, what if I fail and a myriad of other doubts and concerns. Would you be surprised to learn that this same dialog happens to every Amateur, all the time? Let's say that I'm an experienced member of the community and there is this new mode called FT8 that keeps polluting my PSK31 transmissions. I decide that it's time to see what it's all about. Or, imagine that you've been invited to come on a hiking trek for the first time with some fellow amateurs to activate a summit. Or, you hear about a new entity that has just been announced. Or, you decide that you nee

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are times when you realise that you've always nodded your head when a particular topic came up and after doing that for long enough, you think you know what's going on. Turns out that, no, you didn't, but that the topic itself was interesting enough to learn from. In my case, Three Phase Power. I came upon this topic over the past month while I struggled with power interruptions, blinking lights, weirdness throughout my house. Turns out that it's been happening for a lot longer than I've lived here. After spending some time with the local power company, which I was told was filled with people who didn't care, turns out that they do, but they're busy people. After some back and forth, some logging, some finger pointing and head-scratching, the solution to my woes was to move me from the White Phase to the Blue Phase. I nodded and smiled and everything was well with the world. I know that there are three phases, Red, White and Blue. If you have overhead power in your stre

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's been raining around here for a while now. Not in the order of 40 days and 40 nights, but significant. Mind you, I have lived in a place where it rained every day for 57 days, but I digress. Water, plenty of it and often in all the wrong places. Being a radio amateur you come across water in many aspects of the hobby, sometimes it comes in handy, like lubricating your throat while you're calling CQ, or as a ground plane for an antenna, other times, not so much, like when it enters the shack and causes the black smoke to escape from your pride and joy. As I said, I'm no stranger to rain and in my travels I've encountered plenty of it. I managed to travel around Australia for a couple of years and I took with me a two-way satellite dish with sensitive electronics attached. Living in Australia I planned for dry. This place is dry. Often very much so, but as it turns out, dry doesn't mean without humidity, storms, rain or in one case hail. These experiences told me a little a

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I had a conversation with a group of amateurs, ranging in experience from newbie to salty, from purchase to build, from buy to scrounge, in other words, the whole range. One person in the group asked about how to get started with soldering. Their first harmonic had just been granted a license and they wanted to encourage the new amateur to build something, anything. That in turn started a whole conversation about the how, where, why and what of the way of the heated element and its application to a circuit board. In 2012, almost exactly two years after obtaining my amateur license I purchased an electronics kit. The kit was sold by my local electronics store and was intended to become a High Precision LC Meter. The electronics store packages together many of the schematics that are published in Australia's Silicon Chip Magazine and in this instance, it also came with a lovely case, build instructions and a review from someone who had built the kit, John, VK3FJBX. The

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've been part of the amateur community for a while and have heard me talk on matters of contesting, you'll know that I'm an avid contester and that for me it's better than sliced bread. Of course, I'm me and you're not. If contesting isn't of any particular interest to you, the hobby of amateur radio is big enough for at least 999 other attractions. I talk about them regularly. If you're on the fence, or if you're unsure, or if you are not enamoured with this whole contesting thing, then today I'd like to ask you to consider another aspect of this activity. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you to participate in a contest. As I said, there are many other activities within the hobby. For example, testing propagation is a recurring theme, as is testing your gear, your radio, your skill and doing all manner of other amateur things. For many of those activities having another person to test with is often a way to get a result and if you find yourself on a lonely Saturday lo

Foundations of Amateur Radio It seems that when you categorically state something, like I did recently, you get emails and feedback, almost immediately, pointing out the folly of your assertion. Within the context of setting up your radio, an hour before you go away, I intended to convey: "One thing I can categorically state is that programming your radio manually just before your holiday is really something that you should try and avoid." That's not what I actually said. I missed out on the "just before your holiday" in that sentence. The upshot was that I received lots of feedback, some tips and different suggestions on how to do this and do it well. As I hinted at, you should know how to program your hand held. It's almost an essential life-skill. I generally take a copy of my manual with me, either on actual paper, you know, dead-tree variety, or as electrons as a PDF on my phone or other screen-based gadget. That doesn't mean I like programming my radio. In fact I will be so bold as to assert that I

Foundations of Amateur Radio A regular question from people who go on holiday is: "Which repeaters should I put into my hand held radio?" If there was infinite amount of memory and time, the answer would be simple - All of them. If it were that simple, I wouldn't be talking about it and you wouldn't be asking the question, so given that it's not that simple, what options do you have for dealing with this question, generally an hour before you pack up your suitcase to leave on that trip to another location. For me, my first effort was to try to find a list of repeaters for the new location. Failing that, I ventured onto the national association and downloaded their list, which I might add, was woefully out of date, but I wasn't to know that when I found it. I then fired up a copy of the cross-platform CHIRP programming software, pushed all the repeater frequencies into my radio and called it a day. I did have the benefit of a radio that was able to group memories into separate so-called banks, which allowe

Foundations of Amateur Radio How to get the best Amateur Radio gear? A recurring question for new entrants to our hobby, and truth be told, some experienced ones as well, is: "What's the best hand held to buy?", or the best antenna, or the best base station, the best coax, the best mount, the best software, the best something. There's a principle in Engineering, Good, Fast and Cheap, pick any two. You can have Good and Fast, but it won't be Cheap. You can have Fast and Cheap, but it won't be Good. You can have Good and Cheap, but it won't be Fast. The concept of Quality is balanced between these limits. With that in mind, answering the question in search of the best is already a trade-off. To muddy the waters further, there is an economic principle related to pricing. It goes a little like this. If you sell an amateur radio gadget for $50, there's a group of people who will buy it. There's a group of people who would have paid more for the same thing and a group of people who can't justify $50. If you m

Foundations of Amateur Radio A question that occurs more often than you might think is one related to powering your radio. It comes in a few different flavours, like: "I want to install a radio in my car, how do I power it?", or "I want to operate portable, what's the best way to power my radio?" or "What power-supply should I buy?" There are many more versions of this, but they all come down to the same underlying challenge. I spoke about sizing a battery a couple of years ago, but that's not the only consideration. If you look at the power specifications of my Yaesu FT-857d, you'll see 13.8V DC +/- 15%, Negative ground, 1 Amp on Receive and 22 Amp on Transmit. Based on this I purchased two 26 Amp Hour batteries and a 45 Amp variable power supply. My amateur license restricts me to 10 Watt and I tend to operate using 5 Watt. On receive the actual draw, specified in the documentation at 1 Amp doesn't go above 0.5 Amp in typical use. Transmit, specified at 22 Amp doesn't go above 3.6 Amp at 5 Watts and at