Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever taken a moment to consider the available bandwidth on the various amateur bands? As an entrant into amateur radio in Australia as a Foundation licence holder you have access to six different amateur bands, the 80m band, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm. If you add the bandwidth from each of those bands together, you end up with 26.65 MHz worth of bandwidth to play with in Australia. I can tell you that's a big chunk of bandwidth, but until I give you some context, 26.65 MHz isn't likely something that you can picture. You might think of things as being pretty crowded. For example, on the 40m band during a contest it's common to hear wall to wall signals. There's barely enough room to call CQ and not interfere with anyone else. But how crowded is it really? Let's start with an SSB signal, typically it's 2.4 kHz wide. On the 40m band, with 300 kHz of bandwidth, there's room for about 125 SSB signals side-by-side. On the 10m band, there's space for over 700 SSB signals s