Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've discussed different aspects of contesting in relation to Amateur Radio. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, contesting is an activity where you test your station and skill against other amateurs. Unlike other contests where you're all in the same physical location, say a stadium, or an online playing field, amateur radio contesting is most commonly done from the comfort of your own shack. Of course, as is true for everything in life, there are exceptions to this. There are contests where you're not in your own environment, say on a field day, at a contest station, or some other place, but I'll ignore these for the moment. In most organised sports, and amateur radio is no exception, there are rules for participating. It should go without saying that you're expected to abide by the rules. Disqualification, bans, even life-time exclusions and revision of results can and have happened. Contests are planned by different people and groups and vary greatly across t

Foundations of Amateur Radio In every new technology there is an ah-ha moment, the single one insight that defines for you personally what this technology is all about. No doubt this happened when Amateurs first used valves, when they started using transistors and so on. For me that moment happened during the week. You've heard me talk about the absurd noise floor, that is, the incredible amount of local radio noise that I experience at my shack. I've been working my station portable to get away from the racket. During the week I came across something that is likely to change that. You've no doubt heard about diversity reception. You can use two different antennas, do some fancy phase switching and make the noise go away. Now I should clarify, at least briefly what that looks like. Imagine throwing a stone into a lake, it makes waves. If you throw two stones into the lake at the same time, the waves get bigger, but if you were to time it just right, you could throw in one stone, then the next. If you time

Foundations of Amateur Radio On a regular basis I receive emails from fellow amateurs and shortwave listeners who provide feedback and ideas about this weekly segment of Amateur Radio. It's a joy to read how they feel that my little contribution encourages them to continue in the hobby, or come back to the hobby, or to build something, or to do something, to participate, to experiment. Yesterday I received an email from an amateur who came up with an idea that's worth sharing. The idea was pretty simple. Encourage every new entrant into our hobby to build a crystal radio. I know that this might sound like a trivial thing, even silly, but for me it makes complete sense. Imagine that, building a receiver and understanding how it actually works. I know I've never actually done that and I suspect I'm not alone. So, here's a thing. Next time you're looking for a project to do, for a thing to make, for some soldering practice, try making a crystal radio. There's opportunity to make it work for CW and SSB - thin

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I started doing some research on Baluns. It was prompted by a message from a fellow amateur who asked about how they work and what they do and what the difference was between a 1:1, a 1:4 and a 1:9 balun. While doing that, I thought I'd look up what the definition was of a balun. It says right here on Google - so it must be true - that it's a type of electrical transformer used to connect an unbalanced circuit to a balanced one. I clicked on the link that said "Translations, word origin and more definitions", which showed me a history of the use of the word balun and I was hooked. The explanation of a balun will have to wait for another day. I started looking at the use of the word going back to the 1800's, based on Google's Ngram Viewer. Looks like it was used a bit between 1800 and 1910, but steadily declining in use, until it started picking up in popularity around 1930. Today the word balun is more popular than the phrase "radio amateur", but less popular than either

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today we have a world where radios are more and more like appliances. We can buy them at a store, ship them to our location, open the box, plug in the radio to an antenna and start operating. I said, "like" an appliance, because a transceiver is not like a toaster in all aspects and it's those little gaps between the toaster as an appliance and a transceiver as an appliance that I want to highlight. I was with a farmer recently who had a CB radio in his troopie, or if you're not familiar with that, a Toyota Land Cruiser, this one had 400.000km on the clock and was just getting run in. According to the farmer, the CB had never worked right. He joked that it was often easier to yell across the paddock than to use the radio. On a farm there are lots of things happening, during harvesting, heavy equipment is moving everywhere and communications are vital. I was with a friend and the first thing that we noticed about this CB is that it was a UHF CB, that is, it was using 70cm, or 4

Foundations of Amateur Radio Yesterday during dinner I heard an interesting story. Apparently there was a farmer who had a chicken coop that he kept warm at night by using a 240 Volt light bulb hooked up to the chicken wire surrounding his chickens. The farmer's property was in the vicinity of a local AM broadcast transmitter. They only found him because the people in the shadow of the chicken coop had bad reception. I'm sitting at the dining table, listening to this tale and wondering, could it be true? My gut feeling was no, but surrounded by food and friends it was hard to put my finger on precisely where this doesn't add up. A little digging revealed that the transmitter in question was the local ABC 6WF transmitter at Hamersley. So, what do we know about this transmitter? First of all, it's a 50 kW AM transmitter. I must confess, I have operated this station. Imagine that, 50 kW AM, with an introductory Foundation License. Anyway, back to the 6WF transmitter. It's located on a block of land, roughl

Foundations of Amateur Radio Whenever I go out to play radio, which is whenever I actually want to operate, I try new things. For example I've experimented with different clocks, to keep track of what time I made a contact, I've experimented with different ways of logging, with different locations, different antennas, with different bands, times of day, methods of calling CQ, methods of making a contact with a DX station, different methods of looking at propagation, different distances from interference. As I said, every time I try something else different. One thing I do, that might not seem obvious. I try to only change one thing. The reason I do that, is so I have a better understanding on what the change actually did. Of course this isn't entirely possible, you often cannot park in exactly the same spot, at the same time with the same propagation, but if you go out often enough, things start coming together. So, for a clock, I use a $20 digital watch that has two time-zones. I set it to show local and

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are times when you'll find yourself being encouraged to participate in a contest. You might receive an email, a Facebook encouragement, or even hear an item on the local news about a contest. Where do you start if that's what you're interested in? Well, first things first. You need to find out when this contest is exactly. The reason this is important is because you might go though all the preparation, only to find yourself sitting at a family BBQ listening to your favourite family member sharing the story about the dog and the lake, rather than being in the contest. Once you've determined that you are in fact able to participate in the contest, put it in your diary. This seems obvious, but I can guarantee you that there will come a day when you're happily sitting in the sun having lunch when that sinking feeling appears and you realise that the contest you were going to play in started 8 hours ago. Now that you've got the basics out of the way, what's next? Find the c

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I was looking around my shack and noticed that I have lots of different amateur radio tools that go beyond the simple bits and pieces that I started with, namely a radio, battery, power supply, coax and antenna. While I have no illusion that my gear is complete, or even representative of all of the stuff that you might need or come across, I think that it's worth while to mention a few bits and pieces that you may not have considered. I think the first thing I got that wasn't part of the basic kit, was a dummy load. It's only a little one, rated at 50 Watts or so, but seeing that I'm only using 5, that's more than enough. I use it to check things like VOX sensitivity, that is, I want to set-up a way to talk into my radio without having to push a button - for when I'm doing a contest, and I don't actually want to transmit any signal while testing, so I plug in the dummy load and test with that. I also use it to plug into the end of a piece of coax that I'm testing. I can t

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I had the pleasure of talking to a group of freshly minted Amateurs. It's a semi-regular occurrence where I visit a local club that offers training to obtain an Amateur License. I should mention that you'll find clubs like this all over the place and there are often opportunities to do remote examinations if you're too far from an assessor. This however isn't about becoming an Amateur, that's something that I'll leave entirely up to you, even if I think that being an Amateur is a wonderful thing. One of the things I like about this hobby is that it's different things to different people. There is a huge variety of aspects to this pursuit of Amateur Radio and as I've said in the past, it's really a thousand hobbies rolled into one. In Australia there are three so-called classes of license, think of it as a moped licence, a car license and a truck license. If you want to drive a truck you need that one, but if you're on a moped, there's no need to spend your efforts on lear

Foundations of Amateur Radio A recurring topic of conversation is propagation. There is learned discussion about sun-spots, A and K indices, forecasts, ionospheric probing, not to mention half-baked guess work from less scientific perspectives. It's been my experience that all these tools are wonderful, but none of them beat turning on your radio and having a listen, or better still putting out a call. So when do you listen and where do you listen? The trivial response would be everywhere, all the time, but none of us has enough time for that. In general, 20m, 14 MHz works most of the time. At night, frequencies lower than 20m, that is 40m, 7 MHz and 80m 3.5 MHz work better. During the day, higher frequencies, 15m, 21 MHz and 10m, 28 MHz work better. Of course this is not a hard and fast rule. As I said previously, there is no such thing as a perfect antenna, in fact we can prove that it cannot actually exist. Similarly, there is no such thing as perfect propagation. We tend to think of propagation in

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm operating portable, in fact I'm operating portable every day. Though I'd have to confess, some days more than others. I have to do this by necessity. There is lots of RF noise at home, so I'm forced to physically move away from the interference and set up elsewhere. You can do this as simply or as complex as you like. I've done it with a bag that contained my radio, a battery and a wire antenna that I strung between two trees. I've also gone portable with my car, camping gear, a trailer full of radio gear, a wind up mast and a rotatable dipole with a generator to provide power. And everything in between. My point is that for every circumstance there is a different set of tools that will solve your problem. Several amateurs I've spoken to are quite unsure about this portable adventure and are not really geared up for such shenanigans even if they're interested to get out and about. So what is involved with going portable? The essence of any station is the antenna

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I was asked about finding the best antenna calculator. It's a tool that helps you determine what the length of an antenna should be for a particular frequency. Picture a dipole antenna, two wires, end to end, strung out horizontally, joined in the middle by a feed point. A dipole is most effective if its total length is half of the wavelength of the frequency it's intended for. To calculate what that is, you divide the speed of light by the frequency. So, for argument sake, the wavelength for 28.5 MHz is roughly 10 m, which makes sense, since 28.5 MHz is in the 10 m band. If you use your favourite search engine to find a dipole calculator, you'll find many different ones. If you try a few, you'll find that the answers that each calculator gives is slightly different. For a half-wave dipole on 28.5 MHz, you'll find that there is a half meter variation among the calculated answers. If you do this for a dipole for 3.5 MHz, you'll find the variation is just over 4 m betw

Foundations of Amateur Radio In your travels around the sun it's likely you've heard the phrase: "Use it or lose it." Within the ranks of our hobby, that refers to making noise on air and using the bands we've been allocated. It's easy to sit in your shack - in what ever form that might take - turn on your radio and scan up and down the bands to see what's going on. If something interesting catches your fancy, you might even plug your microphone or key in, and actually call the other station. Unfortunately, that's not using the bands, that's sitting on the side and listening. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it's no way to ensure that the bands and privileges we enjoy today are going to be here tomorrow. Over the past few years I've come across several ideas to change that. I've seen blogs and posts from individuals who attempt to make a contact every day, in what ever form they prefer. Some don't distinguish between local or DX contacts, portable or QRP, whatever takes their fancy. In Ne

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today propagation is what it is, yesterday it was different and tomorrow it will be different again. It's one of the fundamental aspects of amateur radio. We talk about propagation on air, like we do the weather. Rain, sun, snow or storm, there's always something. Of course most of those weather events have no impact on radio. A rain drop isn't going to make a great deal of difference to a HF signal, other than potentially making the operator wet, or creating a short-circuit in an unexpected way. Propagation on the other hand has little or no effect in day-to-day life, other than your GPS, mobile phone or other electronic device. In radio however, propagation makes the difference between only hearing your neighbours and speaking to another station on the other side of the globe. In the past I've mentioned that if you skip a stone across a lake, you get a good idea about how radio waves bounce off the ionosphere and in doing so, make it possible to hear and be heard beyond the

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I read a comment a fellow amateur made about an antenna. He said: "Of course, that antenna is a compromise..." Let me say that again: "That antenna is a compromise ..." It was the funniest thing I'd seen all week and the person making the statement wasn't even trying to be funny. Unless you're looking at the Sun from a distance, or checking out the propagation associated with the Big Bang, All Antennas are a compromise. We can prove that an isotropic antenna, one that is a theoretical point source of radio waves, cannot actually exist, so that basically means that you cannot have it all, ever. Once you've got your head around the notion that no such thing as a perfect antenna actually exists, or can exist, it makes sense that amateurs around the world spend so much time discussing and trialling antennas. As you get involved in Amateur Radio, you'll soon realise that the number of variables to construct an antenna is large. The more you learn, the more variables you

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today we have a standard for our on-air phonetic alphabet - technically it's called a spelling alphabet, but I digress. As you should be aware if you're a licensed Amateur, we use the so-called standard phonetic alphabet. It's used and defined by several organisations, including the International Telecommunications Union, the International Civil Aviation Organisation and NATO. It should come as no surprise that each of those organisations defines their own alphabet. It just so happens that today each of these definitions is the same, but that hasn't always been the case. In the United Kingdom, Alpha went through Apples, Ack, Ace, Able an Affirm. In the United States, Alpha has been Able, Affirmative, Afirm, Able, Alfa. In Amateur Radio we've heard America, Amsterdam and even Australia. All that for just the letter that we spell as Alpha. If that's not enough, try on Adams, Adam, Anatole, Anton, Ancona, Antonio, Anna, Aarne, Adana, Aveiro, Amor, Ana and Avala. No wonder we

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I want to talk about things to say and do in a contest. Before I begin, I must point out that there are many views on this and depending on your aim for the contest, what I'm going to talk about will be different. First of all, a contest is an Amateur Radio activity that starts and stops at a particular time. Often this time is expressed as UTC, or Universal Time. Since there are several official time-zones and more unofficial time-zones here in VK alone, you'll need to check your own location to determine what the actual local time is, but for my money, I have a watch that is set to UTC and during a contest I put it on my wrist. Apart from the rules for each contest, often described in mind-numbing detail with particular exceptions for different issues, often grown over time, there is a basic aim to get on air, make contact with other stations and exchange a salient piece of information. This information of course varies with the contest, but the most common exchange is

Foundations of Amateur Radio The hobby we call Amateur Radio is hard to explain to anyone outside. I was recently asked about what it was about the experience that had me hooked. I talked about Summits on the Air, SOTA, Islands on the Air, IOTA, World Wide Flora and Fauna, WWFF and satellite communications. DX hunting and competitions, but I never quite managed to capture what it all really means. Since then I came across a really wonderful explanation about what it is that we have here. Said simply, Amateur Radio is a thousand hobbies in one place, each with their own community, their own skills, their own gear, pursuits and club-songs. For some it's the pursuit of making a contact using low power and Morse-code, for the next it's building the key to make that happen, the next person wants to build the radio, the amplifier, the twin-feed, the mast, go camping, etc. etc. The characterisation of 1000 hobbies in one place under the umbrella also helps in other ways. It highlights that we're all different,

Foundations of Amateur Radio The origins of names of things in Amateur Radio has a long and internet riddled history, with hear-say and false memories added. The humble BNC connector was patented in 1951. BNC doesn't stand for Baby N-Connector, Bayonet N-connector, British Naval Connector, Berry Nice Connector, Berkeley Neucleonics Corporation or any such name. Apparently, it's named after it's inventors Paul Neill and Carl Concelman, the Bayonet Neill-Concelman connector. They went on to invent the Threaded Neill-Concelman connector, the TNC. A sub-miniature version of these connectors came in three types, A, B and C, called SMA, SMB and SMC. Also, the N-type connector was invented by the very same Paul Neill at Bell Labs, and the C connector came from Carl. The Yagi antenna, was invented in 1926 by Shintaro Uda in collaboration with Hidetsugu Yagi, both of Tohoku Imperial University in Japan. It's actually called an Yagi-Uda antenna. Yagi described the antenna in English in 1928 and his name became asso