Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Whenever I'm out in the bush in the process of erecting some or other wire contraption, uh, antenna, I cannot help but think of the iconic Australian rock band, Skyhooks, not for their glam rock inspired music, nor for their pure mathematics and computer science degree holding guitarist, but for their name. In antenna erection, a skyhook is called for when you point at a spot in the sky and will into being an attachment point for the wire antenna in your hand. It's always in the perfect spot, holds any weight and of course it's made from unobtainium. Absent a skyhook, there are other ways of hoisting an antenna into the air. A recent discussion revealed that in some places catapults and trebuchets are frowned upon, if not outright illegal. Can't imagine why. Depending on their size, they may be difficult to transport. In the same vein, antenna launchers, lightly camouflaged spud guns, are essentially a gas pressurised tube, causing a projectile to be launched by releasing a va

Foundations of Amateur Radio So, the 19th of February 2024 came and went. As it was, my day started with the highest minimum that month, 27.5 degrees Celsius, that's the minimum overnight temperature. The maximum that day here in Perth, Western Australia was 42.3 degrees. The day before was the highest maximum for the month, 42.9. If you're not sure, that's over 109 in Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's scale. That same day the Australian regulator, the ACMA, launched a new era in Amateur Radio. Moving from personal amateur licenses we legally became part of a class license regime. We have the option to hand our license back and get a refund, but the cautious side of me prevailed and I've not yet handed back my license, since it's currently the only proof that my callsign is valid, the one issued to me in December 2010. I contacted the ACMA to ask about this and was told that they were having display issues with their system and was sent an image showing both my callsigns and email address. I'm not saying that I

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you operate your station portable, either for fun, or for points, you might be surprised to learn that getting on air and making noise isn't quite as simple as bringing a radio and turning it on. Aside from the need for a reliable power supply, batteries, generator, solar panels, or a magic mains socket, there is the requirement for bringing enough gear to get on air, but not so much that setting up takes days, or even hours. The decisions you make are influenced by where you decide to operate from. If you want to stay in your car, the location is not nearly as influential as when you decide to find a park where you want to have some fun. Finding a location is not a trivial process. If you only plan to get on air for an hour to activate a park, you pretty much get what you find, but if you plan to be on air during a contest for the day, other things start to come into focus. For example, what are the toilet facilities like, are we digging a hole, or is there a public faci

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever had a day when nothing you started actually got anywhere? I've had a fortnight like that. Several weeks ago I wrote a couple of articles about emergency communications and its tenuous relationship with our hobby. As a result I managed to get a week ahead of myself and started using that week to do some long overdue analysis of the WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter data set. I've started this process several times and I finally had a whole fortnight to come to grips with 6.7 billion rows of data. Spoiler alert, it hasn't happened yet. The data contains a record of every reception report uploaded to WSPRnet.org since Tuesday 11 March 2008 at 22:02 UTC. It's published in compressed comma separated value text files and after previously spending weeks of wrangling I managed to convert each one into an sqlite3 database. This wrangling was required because some amateurs used commas in their callsigns or grid squares, or backslashes, or both, and SQLite import isn't

Foundations of Amateur Radio A few weeks ago I discovered that the regulations for amateur radio in Australia had some definitions that caused me to wonder if 2,312 amateurs in VK, me among them, had been operating illegally? Specifically it appeared that using a WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter transmitter of any kind, both computer controlled and stand-alone beacons, was contrary to what was permitted in the rules, since in Australia an "amateur beacon station" means a station in the amateur service that is used principally for the purpose of identifying propagation conditions. The rules go on to say that you must have a specific beacon license and not having one is not permitted. I suggested that it was time to send a letter to the regulator, seeking clarification. Well, let me tell you, that set a cat among the pigeons, not at the regulator, but within the amateur community. Between posting a draft of my proposed email to a local mailing list before sending it to the regulator, and publishing

Foundations of Amateur Radio I recently discussed some of the notions of amateur radio as emergency response. The idea that you might jump into the breach and be a hero is appealing and often celebrated. The American Radio Relay League, or ARRL, proudly tells the story of two amateur radio emergency communication events. One, of a person who fell in their bathroom and happened to have a handheld radio that they used to contact another amateur who contacted emergency services. The story goes on to say that being part of the Amateur Radio Emergency Services or ARES had taught the amateurs the ITU phonetic alphabet, as-if that's not a requirement for getting your amateur license. Then there's the story of two teenagers who were critically injured in a remote area and amateur radio rescued them due to a contact with a random local amateur. Never mind that there was a local off-duty EMT who actually stabilised the patients. While you might point at this as "amateur radio to the rescue", to me this is a case of

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur radio is an activity that falls between two camps, those who think of it as a service and those who approach it as a hobby. I think that the notion of amateur radio as a service is often repeated, but in my time as part of this community, I've seen little evidence of actual service. That said, the idea of amateur radio as a service is often linked to emergency communications, for example, a phrase used by the Wireless Institute of Australia is "Amateur Radio - A Trusted Partner in Emergency Response" on a page outlining the long and fabled history of our hobby in service to the community in times of emergency, mind you, none of them in the past decade. If we look at the idea of amateur radio as an emergency response, what does that look like today and how might we best be of service? The question that prompted this discussion centred around the best mode to use for emergency communications and was presented in the context of a tool that links HF radio with email, but i

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I came across an amateur who expressed concern that someone was using a frequency set aside for repeater use with their hotspot. Band plan issues aside, and you are encouraged to send an email to cq@vk6flab.com with the link to the official band plan that applies to your DX entity, in my experience it's not unusual for an amateur who is configuring their so-called hotspot to use such a frequency. While you might be familiar with the concept of a mobile phone hotspot that allows you to connect a computer through your phone to the Internet, in this case we're talking about an amateur radio hotspot. Similar in that it allows you to connect through the device to the Internet, but different in that this is essentially a device that connects radios to the Internet, and yes, if we're being pedantic then computers and mobile phones also have radio, well spotted. Anyway, an amateur radio hotspot is a radio with an Internet connection and in that it's much like a modern rep

Foundations of Amateur Radio From the 19th of February 2024, the ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the regulator, is modifying the rules for amateur radio in Australia by moving to an amateur class license where all amateurs will operate under the same license instead of under an individual one. You must be qualified to operate under the new class license and all currently licensed radio amateurs should now have been issued with a recognition certificate for their current qualification level. Keep this certificate safe, it authorises you to operate as an amateur and shows which callsigns you currently hold. I've just received a revision that now correctly identifies my callsign VK6FLAB as a four-letter callsign, rather than three-letters which caused concern over the longevity of my call. There's no annual charge to operate as an amateur, no charge to keep a callsign, and no charge to do an exam, however, if you operate a repeater or beacon, you'll continue to require a transmitter

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I stumbled on a project called Maia SDR by Daniel EA4GPZ. Maia, spelled Mike Alpha India Alpha, is a star in the Pleiades cluster. The Maia SDR project homepage proclaims that it is "An open-source FPGA-based SDR project focusing on the ADALM Pluto". Now, I can completely understand if that collection of words is gibberish to you, but take it from me, it's not, let me explain. PlutoSDR or Pluto is the common name of a piece of hardware which is officially called the ADALM-PLUTO Evaluation Board. It's a sophisticated device made by Analog Devices that provides a radio platform with some very interesting properties. Specifically it's both a radio transmitter and receiver with the ability to use frequencies between 70 MHz and 6 GHz. It runs embedded software you can tinker with because it's all Open Source and it's all very well documented. Many people have used the Pluto as a remote transceiver by controlling the on-board radio with a USB cable. While that's neat,

Foundations of Amateur Radio The attraction to amateur radio for me lies in the idea that it provides a framework for experimentation and learning. There's never an end to either. Each time you go on-air is an opportunity to do both and every chance I get, I cannot help being sucked into another adventure. My weekly scribbles are an attempt to both document what I've been up to and to encourage others to take a step on the path that I'm discovering, moment by moment, week by week. One of the more, lets call it, comment inducing, activities I like to explore is low power operation. This is not to the liking of many operators who are happy to run their shack at full legal power. For me, full legal power is 40 dBm, or 10 Watts. That's not to say that I've never experienced the thrill of running a pile-up on a contest station, I have. What's not to like? You speak with people from communities far-and-wide, they're clamouring to talk to you and making contact is pretty easy, almost effortless. The lure towards m

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to spend a little longer with you than usual, but then, I think this is important and it's good to end the year on a bang. Have you ever attempted to make contact with a specific DXCC entity and spent some time exploring the band plan to discover what the best frequency might be to achieve that? If you got right into it, you might have gone so far as to attempt to locate the band plan that applies to your particular target. If you have, what I'm about to discuss will not come as a surprise. If not, strap yourself in. When you get your license you're hopefully presented with a current band plan that is relevant to your license conditions. It shows what frequencies are available to you, which modes you can use where, and what power levels and bandwidth are permitted. It should also show you if you're the primary user or not on a particular band. If you're not sure what that means, some frequency ranges are allocated to multiple users and amateur radio as one such

Foundations of Amateur Radio Walking into your shack is often a joyous experience. You take a moment to smile at your setup and, at least mentally, rub your hands in glee anticipating some fun. Well, that is how it is for me, but recently it's been less of that and more of an audible groan at the accumulated cruft that makes it nigh on impossible to sit down, let alone achieve anything fun. It's not as bad as it could be. I'm forced to keep my station at least operational to host my weekly net, but if that wasn't there, it would have been overtaken by anything and everything finding a flat surface to put stuff on. It got to the point where I had to move some radio equipment off my desk, just so I could pile more stuff onto it. So, on Tuesday I finally had enough. It was a pretty normal day, waiting for others to get stuff done, deadlines be damned, but I took one look at the shack and snapped. This has happened before and I suspect that it will continue to happen throughout my life, but that day I'd crosse

Foundations of Amateur Radio Cars have been here for well over a century and so has radio. Cars pretty much start when Carl Benz first applied for a patent for his "vehicle powered by a gas engine" on the 29th of January 1886 which is regarded as the birth certificate for automobiles. Radio starts as a thing when Heinrich Hertz proves that radio waves exist in 1888. Since then things have changed, a lot. Today, both these technologies, cars and radio, are everywhere. It's estimated that there are 1.47 billion vehicles on the planet today, in contrast, there are only 44 thousand broadcasters across the globe, serving about 4 billion people, or half the population. So, cars win, right? Not so fast. The Wi-Fi Alliance estimates that there's 3.8 billion Wi-Fi devices being shipped this year alone and there's about 19.5 billion in use. Many of those are mobile phones, so they're not only using Wi-Fi, but GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G or 5G radios. In many cases they'll have Bluetooth on board and will be receiving GPS in

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a perception in the community that the hobby of amateur radio is an expensive way to have fun. While it's entirely possible to spend thousands of dollars on equipment, in much the same way that it's possible if your preferred hobby is golf, getting started does not have to require that you start planting money trees. Lots of fun can be had using cheap amateur radio transceivers that are used all around the world. If you do start with such a radio, the chances are good that you'll come across amateurs who make disparaging remarks about the lack of compliance of such radios. When I say compliance, I'm talking about specific measurements specified by the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU. When you transmit on a specific frequency, there are rules about how much that signal is allowed to be unintended, or to use the official term, spurious emissions. Specifically, the signal you transmit has to meet the requirements for the mode you're using and it must also

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur radio is an activity enjoyed by many people around the world. How many exactly is cause for debate. The most recent official figure we have is from the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union. In 2020 it counted over 3 million people, but an article written a year later puts that figure at 1.75 million. In Australia there's a common narrative that the total amateur population is in undeniable decline, some think that it's on a stark decline. Interested in hard data, for years I've been collecting information around the amateur population in Australia and I can report that across the nine years that I have data for the total variation is within two percent and it's not a straight line down either. There was a dip in 2020, potentially associated with training and callsign allocation being moved from the Wireless Institute of Australia to the Australian Maritime College, something which is going to change again shortly when amateur licensing in Australia will revert to

Foundations of Amateur Radio For years I've been hosting a weekly net called F-troop. It's a one hour opportunity for new and returning amateurs to get together and share their questions, and sometimes answers, about anything and everything amateur radio, with side trips into astronomy, electronics, circuit boards, testing gear and whatever else takes our fancy on the day. The net runs for an hour every Saturday morning starting at midnight UTC, which for some is a time when they're fast asleep, though truth be told, several of our regulars are night owls. In VK6 where I am, midnight UTC is a more reasonable 8am, unless we have another referendum when we can decide if we want daylight saving, or not. So far we've had four of those, yes, really, in 1975, 1984, 1992, and 2009, and each time daylight saving or summer time was rejected. All I'm saying is that the chances are good that midnight UTC is going to be 8am in VK6 for a while yet. Anyway, that time of the morning affords me the luxury of getting out o

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I started a new project. If you know me at all, this is not unusual. Having worked in the IT industry for nearly 40 years it's also not unusual that projects have a way of surprising you and this project was no different. Recently I've been talking about antennas, a topic close to the heart of many amateurs and one that garners a lot of opinion and in my experience, much less in the way of facts, so being a firm believer of facts, I set out to add some of those to the discussion. After having described that the environment is not often discussed in the context of antenna behaviour, coupled with the personal experience that it has by far the biggest influence, I set out to discover if I could use my computing skills to simulate this problem to build a picture that would speak a thousand words. Prompted by a friend who shared with me a link to an opinion that stated that dipole antennas didn't have 2.15 dBi gain, but in fact, apparently, had 8.5 dBi gain, I was en

Foundations of Amateur Radio Let's compare the same antenna in different locations... Over the years I've spent many hours building and testing antennas. I've talked about this and discussed how there is essentially an infinite variety of antennas that can exist. To give you a sense of this, picture a basic dipole antenna, two bits of wire, same length, connected to a feed-point. We're doing this experiment in space, so we're not concerned with trees or rope, or the ground for that matter, more on those shortly. We can make this dipole straight, or we can make it into a V-shape, or bend over the edges, or make each side into a half-circle and join them, or make them into a spiral, or kink the wires, or bend them over, or any number of variations. Every time you change something, the antenna radiation pattern changes and the antenna behaves differently. While at its heart the antenna might still be considered a dipole, essentially a change in radiation pattern effectively means a different antenna. In thos

Foundations of Amateur Radio All antennas have a radiation pattern that charts on a sphere where it radiates more and where it radiates less than the theoretical isotropic radiator. This comparison is expressed as dBi antenna gain. There is a fundamental concept in antenna design called "reciprocity". Essentially it means that transmit and receive behaviour of an antenna is identical. In other words, the radiation pattern of an antenna applies for both transmitting and receiving of signals. Unfortunately, this does not mean that if two stations are communicating and one can hear the other, the reverse is also true. Let me explain why. Let's set the scene. Imagine two stations, me, VK6FLAB at Lake Monger, in Perth, Western Australia and Charles NK8O in the Lake of the Ozarks state park within the Ozark Mountains in central Missouri. We're both on the 10m HF band and in this story I've finally managed to learn Morse code and I'm "talking" to Charles, mind you, Charles apparently does have a microphone, so p