Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a solitude about amateur radio. Sitting in your shack, listening to the bands, trying to locate an elusive station and if you're doing a contest then even that can be something that you do alone. Don't get me wrong, I like my own company as much as the next introvert, but there is much joy to be found in finding a companion. Over the years I've participated in group activities, camping, field-days, contests, activations, antenna building, ham-fests and the like. These activities have been excellent and I highly recommend that you attempt to find a local community where you can connect with other amateurs to find common ground and explore this hobby together. Last week I did a contest with a friend. Each on our own, but doing the same contest at the same time. The contest itself was what can only be described as a fizzer. For my 8 hours or so of operating I managed a grand total of one contact and that wasn't even with my friend. What made the experience one to remembe

Foundations of Amateur Radio We as radio amateurs log things. We log our contacts, we log our progress towards an award, we log how many different countries we've contacted, which stations we heard with WSPR, how many kilometres we managed per watt, which stations were in a net, what callsigns received a QSL card, what location we're in when we made a contact. You get the point, we log things, many things and for many different reasons. Here's a log that I started last week. An asset log. You heard me, an asset log, a thing that logs what amateur radio stuff I have, when it came into my life, where it came from, what brand it is, what model, what the serial number is and if I spent money on it, how much money I spent. It shows things that I've loaned to other amateurs and it shows things that are on loan to me. It started with a conversation about a silent key. That's what we call radio amateurs who have died. The idea of a silent key is one that reminds us that everyone is unique, that every manual Mors

Foundations of Amateur Radio The topic of how radio evolves and embraces available technology is one that describes the hobby itself. From spark-gap through AM, SSB and FM our community picked up or invented solutions to make communication possible. When the internet came along it too became a tool ripe for picking and in 1997 a connection between a radio and the internet was made with the Internet Radio Linking Project or IRLP when Dave VE7LTD, a student at the University of British Columbia, joined the UBC Amateur Radio Society. Using a radio, some hardware and a computer, you could send audio between radios across the internet. Since then this field has exploded with D-STAR, Echolink, DMR, AllStar, Wires, CODEC2, System Fusion and Brandmeister. At a glance they're all the same thing, radio + internet = joy. Looking closer there are two distinct kinds of internet radio contraptions, those where the radio is digital and those where it's not. IRLP is an example of an analogue radio connecting to hardware

Foundations of Amateur Radio Where are all the Amateurs is a question that I am asked regularly by new entrants into our community. The journey most new amateurs go through and the one I followed starts with becoming interested, getting a license, buying a radio, setting it up and then turning on your radio. If you're lucky you are at this point surrounded by other amateurs, hopefully in a club setting, or you have a friend nearby and you're off and running. The reality is likely that even after a successful first on-air adventure, you'll be on your own in your shack asking yourself where everyone went. I've talked in the past about picking the right day, for example, a Wednesday is likely to have less people on air than a Saturday, but that's only part of the story. One of the things that had never occurred to me until a while after I became an amateur is that listening is a really important way to find other amateurs. Let's start with some things that might not have occurred to you. Most amateurs are

Foundations of Amateur Radio With computers becoming more and more ensconced within the confines of our radio shack the variety of information available is increasing regularly. The introduction of a waterfall display has dramatically simplified the process of detecting what the activity level is on a particular band. If you've never seen a waterfall display, it's often a real-time, or nearly real-time display of radio activity. Leaving aside the mechanics of how this comes about, or how much you see, generally it's presented as a picture that changes over time. In reality it's a very compact way of showing a lot of information. You can think of it as a chart, showing the horizontal axis as frequency, the vertical axis as time and the colour as signal strength. So as you look from left to right you'll look at higher and higher frequencies. For example, the left side might be 7 MHz and the right side might be 7.3 MHz. Halfway along is 7.150 MHz. Similarly, now, as in zero seconds ago is at the top of the

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other week I participated in a contest. This particular contest was on the 80m band, around 3.5 MHz. The contest itself, while worthy of a mention, the Harry Angel Memorial Sprint, runs for 106 minutes and commemorates every year of Harry's life, at the time, the oldest radio amateur in Australia. I made two contacts. Count 'm and weep. Two. So, you could do the thing that I might have done in a previous contest, smiled, thought, "Wow, that's not very many contacts." and got on with life. You're free to do that, but I wouldn't be talking about this today if I shared your view. In fact I'm sure that in my activities as a radio amateur I've managed to learn, and in some ways unlearn some things along the way. In a previous contest I might have operated a club station, made contacts a plenty, added to the overall club score, added new countries and multipliers, had some good natured ribbing to go along with it and walked away with nothing to show for it on my own log. The tr

Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've talked about leaving your shack and setting up your station in a different location. I have my car configured as a mobile shack of sorts, that is, it's got a radio, an antenna mount and wiring to manage the location of the speaker, the head-unit and the microphone. This weekend I'm planning to do a contest and it's been a while since I operated my radio from my car. I've been advocating that you should do some preparation before actually going and doing your thing, so during the week at lunch time I had a look around on the map and picked a spot that I'd like to operate the contest from this weekend. I drove to the location and pretended to set-up my station, actually, I did set it up. Tuned to the actual frequency, configured my tuner, found out that the tuning range for my antenna isn't ideal for 80m, not that this was a surprise. I'm using a so-called multi-tap antenna and the tuning range is somewhat dependent on factors such as the little metal spike that

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the past I've talked about the Standing Wave Ratio, the SWR, and how it describes some of the characteristics of your antenna system. I say system because it's not just the antenna, it's the connection between your radio and the antenna as well. The coax or feed line, their length and how you've connected your antenna, all feature in the performance of the entire kit and caboodle. As an aside, that's why measuring an antenna with an SWR meter at the bottom of the antenna, while you're bolting it to the top of your mast is likely to give you a different result when compared with the measurement performed at the radio. During the week I was asked about how cutting an antenna changes the SWR. The question included a quote from the ARRL Single-Band Dipoles page which states: "If you see that the SWR is getting lower as you move lower in frequency, your antenna is too long. Trim a couple of inches from each end and try again." The person asking the question, Phil, wanted to kno

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week during F-troop something very interesting happened. If you're not familiar with F-troop, it's a weekly net for new and returning amateurs and every Saturday we welcome callers to the one hour net to discuss anything and everything amateur radio. It's been going for about seven or so years, about as long as I have been making this weekly contribution to the hobby. Normally there's a host, often it's me, but not always, handing the microphone to the next person who then in turn hands the microphone back and the host passes it on to the next caller. This is helpful for new amateurs who then only need to remember two callsigns, their own and that of the host. It's a safe place where people can ask questions and hopefully find an answer, make a mistake, say the wrong callsign, have their roger-beep turned on, be off frequency, all the typical things you do when you're learning or when you've dusted off an old radio after having been away from the hobby for a while. Last w

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you read it on the Internet, it must be true, but what happens if you read it and there are 700 different answers? In my day job I search countless times a day for answers to problems. Based on my experience I can look at a list of responses to a question and tell myself what the skill-set is of the poster, "they don't know what they're talking about", "they're guessing", "they've got no clue", "they tried it", "ah, this one knows what they're talking about". As an aside, a company once advocated that we should use social media as a way to provide support to customers, but based on my experience, seeing the correct answer in a series of posts being voted down into oblivion and seeing the wrong answer being promoted is a fantastic example of why that won't work, ever. Infinite monkeys with typewriters might eventually write Shakespeare, but it will take an infinite amount of time and before they succeed there will be a whole lot of rubbish. When I started researching magneti

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week a friend reminded me that the process of determining what's happening within a shack comes with experience. In my day job my whole skill-set can be summed up with one word: "debugging", in all its many and varied guises, fixing code, hardware, business processes, skill-sets, what ever it may be. The process is pretty much, figure out what's going wrong, find out what shouldn't be happening and attempt to join the mismatch together with anything from gaffer-tape to good old fashioned hard yakka. Back on topic, the question my friend asked was about their WSPR receiver which had stopped making spots. If you're not familiar, WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter is a way of listening at specific times on specific frequencies for a signal and when received and decoded, publishing the spotted signal on a website. Their first thought was the antenna, that's where the signal comes from, so if that's not working, the rest fails. Pretty good first guess at figuring out

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 6 - Joy of discovery - read about microphone technique, the dead band, propagation maps, melting coax, amateur radio satellites, strange antennas, self-training, SOTA adventures and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever considered the infrastructure that exists to make it possible to tune to 7.090 MHz, call CQ and make contact with anyone on the planet? In a world where we as radio amateurs share spectrum with radio and television broadcasters, mobile phones, wireless networks, satellites, GPS, drones, wireless headphones, radar, boating, aviation, citizen band, garage door openers, fitness trackers and any other wireless gadget imaginable, not to mention radio astronomy, microwave ovens, meteorological aids, inter and intra car communication, autonomous cars, trains and more. The world clamours for spectrum and in among those allocations we find the amateur bands. There are 24 million odd people in Australia, a few normal people, but mostly odd and about 14000 radio amateur license holders, that's about 0.06% of the population. It's extraordinary that in the last 100 years of radio spectrum allocation we have access to the bands we have. It's easy to forget that in the rarefie

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I spent some time discussing the losses associated with connectors between your radio and your antenna. The traditional wisdom, and I use the word "wisdom" ironically, says that each connector introduces loss into the feed line. There is an understanding that the more connectors you have the worse it is and the more loss you have. Jim W6LG did the test, connected up 30 odd connectors and measured. His measurements were done on 14 MHz and on 50 MHz, using 50 microvolts and 1 kilowatt. No discernible difference. Of course after I mentioned this out loud the questions started. Why didn't he test this at a usable frequency, something like 145 MHz, or in the GHz band? Then there were those who said that this wasn't a real test and that it should be tested with coax in between the connectors. I discussed this all at some length and one idea we had was that perhaps the intersection between the coax and the connector was the problem, that each transition between coax and conn

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 5 - Getting on air - read about the perfect SWR, how to become a better operator, what batteries to use, the difference between a propagation forecast and reality, the phonetic alphabet, antenna compromises, Q-codes and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A question that comes up regularly is one about loss, specifically loss in the coax and connectors between your radio and your antenna. The general wisdom is that better coax gives you better results and more connectors is bad. Anything with double joiners, or such like is really bad. So, essentially we've been taught that we should have the shortest coax possible with as few connectors as possible. Pretty fair and reasonable, right? During the week I was introduced to a video made by Jim W6LG. Jim has a YouTube channel going back a couple of years with about a 100 videos. One video is loosely called Jim measures the loss in coax connectors and 100 foot of RG8X. In case you're wondering, 100 foot is 30m and 48cm of coax. I know this because the United States of America despite appearances to the contrary is actually metric, they defined the inch as being 2.54cm back in February of 1964. Other than driving on the wrong side of the road, they're not too strange and they talk o

Foundations of Amateur Radio The ultimate radio shack is a nirvana that most amateurs I've met strive for all their life. One of the many views I've heard on the topic keeps speaking to me, one of minimalism, less is more, what is the absolute minimum that you can use and still call yourself an amateur? As you know, I've recently moved and my shack was packed up into some boxes and is now slowly being unearthed. At the moment there are two antennas, a radio and a power supply. Keen observers will note that this is the same as it was last week. I've left well enough alone because of two reasons, one being that I'm trying to catch up on lost work during the move and the time where my internet connection was less than optimal, the other reason being that I've been attempting to work out what I actually want from my shack. Unlike my previous QTH, my current location affords me more flexibility, much more, as in four to six times more space to call my own. That's not to say that I was previously living in a sh

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 4 - Just get started - follow my journey through the amateur radio community, how to use QSL cards, mobile antennas on HF, licensing requirements, policing the airwaves, the super check partial list, packing up coax, lightning protection and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is some truth in simplicity. I've mentioned in the past that "suck it and see" is a perfectly valid solution to figuring out if something is going to work or not. I've moved into my new home, my new QTH. The roof is colour bond, that's basically a corrugated iron roof, painted in some random colour. I think it's grey, but don't quote me on that, could be green. Inside is a mezzanine floor, essentially carving out a space within the roof area. It's going to be my office and radio shack, so after setting up technology, I had a spare 15 minutes and came across a box that had my radio bits inside it. After setting up power I went and combed through some more crates to locate a magnetic mount and the vertical I use on 2m and 70cm in my car. The roof beam is held up by a steel post which forms part of the railing that surrounds the mezzanine floor. All conventional wisdom tells me that this is a poor place for an antenna. So, undeterred with little else in the way of simple

Foundations of Amateur Radio From time-to-time people move and their shack tends to move with them. For me that move is happening right now, I'm moving all of 900m up the road, a long story in itself, but perhaps best told over a camp fire far from civilisation. As I started the process of working out what needed to be done I realised that I made a few rookie errors. The first one, one that I've made before, but at the time my excuse was that I knew nothing about amateur radio - some say I still don't - this time I was busy focussing on above ground power, pole-top transformers and high-speed internet. I forgot to check mobile phone coverage, forgot to bring a radio and forgot to listen on HF. I will no doubt find out what the state of these things is when I actually move, in a few days from now, but my rationalisation was essentially, "I'm not able to operate from home as it is, so it won't get any worse and if I'm lucky, it might get better." Frankly I didn't have the heart to tell my long-suffering par