Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The third clause of the original Amateur's Code reads: The Amateur is Progressive. He keeps his station abreast of science. It is built well and efficiently. His operating practice is clean and regular. The 2022 ARRL handbook is similar: The Radio Amateur is PROGRESSIVE...with knowledge abreast of science, a well-built and efficient station and operation above reproach. The ARRL website adds in some pronouns and removes the science from the clause: The Radio Amateur is PROGRESSIVE...He/[She] keeps his/[her] station up to date. It is well-built and efficient. His/[Her] operating practice is above reproach. I'm not sure what prompted this alteration and frankly, I'm not a fan. Pronouns aside, science is at the heart of what it is that we do and that has been the case since the very first amateur went on air. It's also bewildering to me that knowledge and science has been transformed into keeping your station up to date, which means something else entirely. The original is ab

Foundations of Amateur Radio The second clause of the original Amateur's Code reads: The Amateur is Loyal. He owes his amateur radio to the American Radio Relay League, and he offers it his unswerving loyalty. The 2022 ARRL handbook presents it with the following words: The Radio Amateur is LOYAL...offers loyalty, encouragement and support to other amateurs, local clubs and the American Radio Relay League, through which Amateur Radio in the United States is represented nationally and internationally. The ARRL website goes the extra mile to make this hard work and states that: The Radio Amateur is LOYAL...He/[She] offers loyalty, encouragement and support to other amateurs, local clubs, the IARU Radio Society in his/[her] country, through which Amateur Radio in his/[her] country is represented nationally and internationally. Pronouns aside, this has got to be one of the more tortured efforts you might subject an entire group of humans to. Written in an attempt to enumerate each and every specific versio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The first clause of the original Amateur's Code reads: The Amateur is Gentlemanly. He never knowingly uses the air for his own amusement in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. He abides by the pledges given by the A.R.R.L. in his behalf to the public and the Government. The 2022 ARRL handbook version states it like this: The Radio Amateur is CONSIDERATE...never knowingly operates in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. Today the ARRL website presents it as: The Radio Amateur is CONSIDERATE...He/[She] never knowingly operates in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. It's surprising to see the addition of the He/[She] pronoun when nothing is added by doing so, in fact for some amateurs this actually reduces its relevance, something which I've spoken about before. We could just simply change the words to remove the pronoun entirely, but does that actually cover all of what we want it to mean? Should this consideration be limited to operating,

Foundations of Amateur Radio The American Radio Relay League or ARRL is one of the oldest amateur associations on Earth. 1926 saw the birth of "the Radio Amateur's Handbook", the first edition of what we now know as "The ARRL Handbook For Radio Communications" featured chapters on what it means to be an amateur, how to build and operate a station, how propagation works and how to experiment. The very first handbook had 5000 copies printed and thanks to the website WorldRadioHistory.com we have access to a signed copy by the author himself, the Communications Manager of the ARRL, Francis Edward Handy (W1BDI). He starts the 228 page book with the following words: This Handbook is written as a guide for member-operators of the League. It is also useful as a source of information to the man who wants to take part in amateur radio activity but who has no idea of how to get started. Written first of all for the beginner, such an amount of useful and up-to-date information has been added that the Handbook in its p

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the most misunderstood settings on your radio is the microphone gain. You'll often hear people talking about adjusting it up or down depending on what they hear and the results are often displeasing to the ear. The very first thing to know is that the microphone gain is likely the single most audible setting on your radio, right after the tuning frequency. It's pretty much the first variable between your voice and your transmitter. Set it too low and you'll hear nothing, set it too high and you'll hear gibberish. I said it's pretty much the first thing, but it's not the very first. That's your voice, unique in all its glory, loud, soft, happy, sad, funny or not, it's the thing that your microphone captures to transmit. Closely coupled to your voice is the distance between your mouth and your mike. The closer you are, the louder, the further, the softer and the more background noise creeps in. As an aside, speaking of noise, there's background noise at play, but there's

Foundations of Amateur Radio As a new amateur one of the initial perplexing issues you're confronted with is setting up your first radio to talk to the local repeater. The question is so common that it's almost an invisible rite of passage to a new licensee. While I'm a fan of learning, there is plenty of that to go round and setting up your radio to talk to a repeater shouldn't be a hurdle to getting on air and making noise. Ignoring the whole repeater thing for a moment, let's consider your radio. It doesn't matter if it's a handheld, a base station, a boat anchor or something else. To participate in the whole repeater experience, you need to tune your radio to hear it. Technically, if I told you that you could tune to a local repeater on 146.750 MHz, that would be enough information to get you going, but this depends entirely on a set of standard assumptions that are likely not obvious to you. Let's explore what's going on. Given that frequency, you can set your radio to 146.750 MHz and in most cases,

Foundations of Amateur Radio The art of amateur radio is a globe spanning activity, held together by radio waves and the promise of a community with a shared uncommon interest. The strength of a community depends entirely on the members of that community. Without the efforts of each individual amateur, our worldwide license to experiment is doomed. You might ask yourself what part you have to play in this? Consider what would happen if a group of amateurs decided to transmit on an unlicensed frequency, or purposefully interfered with other legal users. It's obvious that the regulatory response to such illegal activities would be swift and left unchecked, it would spark the end of our hobby. What prevents that from happening is our common purpose, our common interests, our willingness to address such behaviour, or said in another way, our community standards. It's the thing that keeps us talking, sharing, learning, experimenting and having fun along the way. I've been told many times that I shouldn't expe

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are days that my brain just cannot keep up with all the ideas that I have spinning around and today is one such experience. Before I take you on this wild ride I will mention that I'm only going to focus on the amateur radio specific things going on, but I tend to have a couple of projects on the go at any one time, much like a messy desk piled high with paper, books, gadgets, parts and coffee cups, my mind has this sometimes exhausting tendency to see connections between various projects and often this results in deeper rabbit holes, so with that in mind, I'd like to make an attempt at describing all the amateur things that are going on at this very moment. So, here goes, hang on! It all started with two friends, independently and until now, unbeknownst to each other, playing with a mode called Digital Radio Mondiale, or DRM. It's something I've talked about before. One friend is trying to decode it, the other is trying to generate it. I'm sitting on the side cheering on

Foundations of Amateur Radio In over a decade of writing a weekly article about all manner of different aspects of our hobby and community, I've never once talked about power connectors for your radio. It's so universal as to be invisible and rarely discussed. So much so, that something you do out of habit, makes another stop dead in their tracks and ask themselves why they never thought of it. Despite how you might feel at the time, there's no such thing as a stupid question. The other day a fellow amateur Dave VK6KV asked about a power connector he'd seen at the local electronics store. That question started a group discussion about powering radios and how best to achieve that. The very first thing to discuss is that the vast majority of amateur radio transceivers expect a nominal voltage of 13.8 Volt DC. That might sound like a strange requirement, but it's the voltage that comes from a fully charged 12 Volt lead acid battery, which is what many radios use as a power reference. The next thing to consid

Foundations of Amateur Radio Not a weekend goes by without an amateur radio contest or six, each with its own objectives, audience, times, rules, exchanges and scores. When you get bitten by the contesting bug, you'll quickly graduate from using pen and paper to keyboard and screen. That process comes with the inevitable selection of software suitable to both run on your shack computer and log your particular contest since as you'll discover, not all software knows about all contests or runs on every computer. When you eventually do arrive at a working solution, you'll reap the rewards of using technology. Contesting software can help in many different ways. From logging your operating frequency and mode to tracking where other stations are active and it doesn't stop there. Type in a partial callsign and your software can suggest which ones it might be. Log a contact and you'll see if your contact is valid within the rules or not. Software can track your activity level and warn if you're exceeding any conte

Foundations of Amateur Radio A couple of weeks ago a friend, Ben VK6NCB asked an interesting question in our weekly net. He wanted to know, if money wasn't a concern, what would your ideal shack look like? The answers varied widely from leaving everything as is and using the money to retire, through to purpose built fixed or mobile shacks, with world wide DXCC activation travel and everything in between. My own answer was a little different. I envisaged establishing an RF research laboratory and spending my life exploring and investigating the ins and outs of the fundamentals of our hobby. Building software defined radios and building tools to leverage their capabilities. As far-fetched as money not being a concern might sound, it's something that a group of radio amateurs had to grapple with in 2019 when their group came into some money. The result is a private foundation with the aim to support, promote, and enhance amateur radio digital communications and broader communication. The foundation, Amateur

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you connect the antenna ports of two radios together and transmit from one into the other, that would be bad, right? Just how bad would it be and what could you do differently? Before I dig in, you might ask yourself why on Earth this question even arises. Consider having two radios and one antenna. You couldn't use a T-piece to connect two radios to the antenna unless both were receivers. So, after connecting and disconnecting coax for a decade, you might decide to use a two position coaxial switch instead. Set the switch to one port and the first radio is connected to the antenna, flick it to the other port and you've just avoided swapping coax between radios. I'll point out that in most cases a coaxial switch can be used to connect multiple antennas to one radio, or in reverse, connect multiple radios to one antenna. When you do start looking for a switch it would be good to test that at no point it connected any two switching ports together, potentially causing the mag

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the time that I've been a radio amateur not a day has gone by without learning something new. Today was no different and this time learning took me both by surprise and delight. I realise that being delighted by charts, since that's what we're talking about, might not be something that comes naturally, but I can highly recommend that you use this as an opportunity to explore. So, which specific chart am I referring to? The venerable Smith Chart, something which I've seen from a distance many times in the past decade, but never actually understood, or to be honest, even looked at with anything more than a glance and a shudder. My first exploration started with a book published in 1969 by the person who developed the chart, Phillip Hagar Smith, an electronics engineer. The book, over 250 pages, is dense and frankly my reading of the first part of the book did not fill me with delight, but based on what I discovered afterwards, I might revisit it. The purpose of the Smith cha

Foundations of Amateur Radio It is in my nature to ask questions. It's been hammered into me from an early age and it often brings me new friends, new ideas and new projects. After spending quite some time mulling over my understanding of radio, I came up with this question: "Is it possible to build a single radio transmitter that is capable of emitting a WSPR signal at the same time on all the HF bands?" Before we look at the hardware, let's contemplate for a moment what this transmission might look like. Imagine a WSPR transmission as a normal audio signal. It sounds like a couple of warbling tones for two minutes. Unpacking it, the audio signal is about 6 Hz wide and sits somewhere between 1400 and 1600 Hz. If you were to draw a power chart of this, displaying the frequencies horizontally and power vertically, you'd see a completely flat chart with a little spike, 6 Hz wide, somewhere between 1400 and 1600 Hz. Using an analogue radio, you can play this sound into the microphone or audio port and the ra

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you finally get to the point of pushing the talk button on your microphone, after passing the test, receiving your license, getting your radio, building an antenna, digesting the manual, identifying a repeater, untangling its offset, programming those frequencies and keying up, you might be surprised to realise that you're lost for words. Something which I've talked about before. Even if you do have something to say, finding a person to say it to will be the next big challenge. Truth be told, the more frequencies you have to choose from, the harder it seems to discover a fellow amateur and with Internet connected repeater networks, your choice appears infinite. So, how do you initiate communication on a repeater? Do you call CQ, ask for a signal check, or just kerplunk the repeater to prove that your signal is getting in? The very first thing to remember is that you have the exact same rights as every other amateur. No amateur is above any other, though hearing some conve

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was woken by the sound of a thunderclap. It was shockingly loud and came out of the blue. A few moments later, it happened again. I exploded out of bed, rushed to the shack, disconnected the beacon power and switched the antenna coax to "safe". After breathing a sigh of relief, everything went dark and with it came the distinctive sound of the sudden death of the uninterrupted power supply taking with it my workstation. With nothing else left to do, I reported the outage to the power company, went back to bed, pulled the covers over my head, snuggled in and surprisingly, slept pretty well despite the barrage of water hitting my QTH. The next morning the power was back on and I discovered that one of the residual current devices, the one that powered most, if not all, the wall sockets had tripped. I reset it and much to my surprise, most of my QTH came back to life. I say most, because after breakfast I had a moment to switch on my radios and see what, if any, d

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you obtain your license there's a whole lot of learning to be had before you even get started with your first transmission, but when you get there you'll discover that learning has just begun and the rest of your life will be beset with challenges, quests, discovery and dawning understanding. One of the early and recurring questions is around the best time to be on air. Before I get into the why, the answer is, right now. This interminable question will continue to haunt you throughout your life, and the most pressing answer will be shaped around the missed opportunity. You'll discover tools that assist with predicting propagation, web-sites that explain what the various layers of the ionosphere do and how they affect your ability to use radio to make contact with other amateurs. There's learned discussion around testing and tracking propagation, special modes that help create your own maps for your own station and you'll discover an endless supply of experts who will adv

Foundations of Amateur Radio In our hobby we regularly invoke line of sight when we discuss the VHF and higher bands. It's a simple concept to help describe when two transceivers can hear each other. The process evokes an image of a beam of light travelling unobstructed between the antennas at either end. Some might picture a laser, others a flashlight, both are useful to become familiar with some of the concepts. If there's a pole between the two, a laser beam, unless it's particularly powerful, won't go through to the other side. A flashlight beam on the other hand might fit around the pole and still be visible at the destination. That illustrates that objects can get in the way of a signal, reducing strength and sometimes blocking it entirely, but it's not the only effect at play. Imagine a building with a mirror glued to its side. If you shine a laser at an angle at the mirror, you can reflect the light off the mirror and essentially still land on target. This is useful if you want to avoid an obstacle

Foundations of Amateur Radio The amateur radio community is as varied as humanity across the globe. It represents an endless supply of ideas and experiments that continue to attract people looking for something new and exiting. On the face of it, our hobby is about radio and electronics, about propagation and antennas, about modes and contacts, but if you limit your outlook to those topics you'll miss out on a vast expanse of opportunity that is only just beginning to emerge. Until quite recently, computing in amateur radio was essentially limited to logging and contest scoring. It has evolved to include digital modes like PSK31 and the advent of smaller, faster and cheaper computers in the home has brought the possibility of processing unimaginable amounts of data leading to modes like WSPR and FT8. In the past I've spoken about how amateur radio means different things to different people. Making contact using a digital internet enabled repeater is sacrileges to one and manna from heaven to another. Betw

Foundations of Amateur Radio The lure of digital modes and the opportunities they bring are enough to tempt some amateurs to begin a journey into integrating their radio and computer to make a new world come to life. This isn't without pain or challenge, but the outcomes are so enticing that many embark on this adventure every day. As a person who has made this trip it's heart warming to see the joy writ large on the face of an amateur who makes their first FT8 contact on a home brew wire dipole rigged together on a Sunday afternoon to take advantage of the latest opening on the 10m band. On the flip side, it's heart breaking to see an amateur falter at the first hurdle, attempting to make their computer talk to their radio and giving up because it just won't work. At first this attitude bewildered me in a community of experimenters, but over time I've come to understand that sometimes an analogue approach isn't suited to the digital world. There isn't really a place where you can attach your multimeter an