Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The frequency you listen and transmit on in a modern radio is derived from a crystal master oscillator, in my case 22.625 MHz. That master frequency is multiplied and divided to determine the final frequency. To get to 2m you need to multiply by 6. To get to 70cm, multiply by 20. Similarly, to get to 40m, divide by 3. Any slight variation of crystal frequency has an impact. 100 Hz variation in the master oscillator causes the radio to be off by 600 Hz in 2m, or 2000 Hz in 70cm. The higher you go the bigger the error. This leaves us with two problems. If the crystal changes frequency over time, your radio wanders with that change which is especially noticeable on the higher frequencies. I've previously discussed how you can deal with the variation by correcting for temperature. The other problem is the actual absolute frequency. If the radio is set-up for a crystal with one frequency and you replace the crystal with a different one, how do you know what frequency you're actually on? Your dial says one thing, but is that the actual frequency? How do you measure any difference? Is a new radio the same as an old radio, does the frequency change over time? Measurement is the act of comparing two things. Think of a ruler, wooden stick with markings on it. If the lines on the stick are not drawn in the right place, anything you measure with that stick will not match other sticks. That won't matter if you only ever use your stick to build everything, but typically you use parts supplied by someone else with their own measuring stick. In your radio the same is true. What the actual frequency is doesn't matter until you need to compare it to the frequency of someone else. Like say, another radio station. The first thing we need is something to compare with, a reference frequency. As it happens there are several of those around. As an example, you'll find reference broadcasts on 5 MHz, on 10 MHz, 15 MHz and 20 MHz. There are countless other frequencies where you'll find radio time signal stations. These stations broadcast on a steady frequency with a defined signal that you can use to do measurements against, even your local broadcast stations have a carrier that you can get started with. A typical radio time signal will be an AM station with all manner of information encoded on the transmission. You can tune your radio to the station and hear a talking clock, second marks etc. Unless your radio is seriously out of whack you're unlikely to be able to notice any frequency errors. If you tune to the same station with side-band you'll hear some artefacts, but essentially you'll hear nothing. However, if you tune slightly off frequency, you'll hear a tone. This tone is the central carrier frequency and it's very accurate. At this point you can do many things. I'll cover one of them. I'll explain this with 10 MHz. If you set your radio to Upper Side Band and tune to 9.999 MHz on your radio, you should hear a 1 kHz tone. Similarly if you set your radio to Lower Side Band and tune to 10.001 MHz you'll also hear a 1 kHz tone. In essence you're listening to the carrier as a 1 kHz audio tone. You can swap between the two frequencies, by setting one on VFO-A and the other on VFO-B and switching between them with the A/B switch on your radio. If the tone changes, your radio is off frequency. How much off frequency is determined by the difference between the two tones. By lowering both frequencies by the same amount, or raising both by the same amount, one of the tones will go up while the other one goes down and vice versa. Once you've got both the tones the same, write down both frequencies. Split the difference and you'll know what frequency your radio thinks 10 MHz is on. You'll need a radio with both Upper and Lower Side-Band and the ability to switch between two frequencies and before you get started, you need to make sure that your radio doesn't have any frequency changing stuff turned on, RIT, Clarifier, Offset, whatever it's called on your radio. All of them need to be off. There are countless other ways of doing this, a procedure called zero-beating with a signal strength meter, using a tone and listening for a wobble in the sound, using an external second receiver and zero beating against that, using a computer to generate tones, using the FMT software included with the WSPR software and likely many more. The point of all of these processes is to detect a difference where there shouldn't be one. One final comment. The most accurate process at this time without specialist measuring equipment is by using your WSPR enabled computer and the FMT software that's included. I'll look at that next time if I can understand what Joe K1JT wrote on the subject. Happy measuring! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio You know when you walk down the street and you lift your foot and all of a sudden you realise that you stepped in something and now it's stuck to your shoe? I had that feeling during the week. Last week I mentioned that I had purchased a TCXO, a Temperature Controlled External Oscillator. Lowell NE4EB set me straight by pointing out that XO stood for crystal and that TCXO stood for Temperature Compensated Crystal Oscillator, which then lead me on a merry goose-chase trying to learn about all that. I mention this because while the stickiness on my shoe kept me busy, it also highlighted that I'm still a babe in the woods on a steep learning curve to knowledge with some roadblocks, diversions and potholes along the way. That reminds me, if you ever feel the urge to pull me up on something I've said, you can email me via my callsign at gmail.com. So, how does this Temperature Compensated Crystal Oscillator actually work? Without getting into the circuitry behind the scenes, as I mentioned previously, a crystal oscillates and the frequency is dependent on temperature. Turns out this is a predictable curve, which makes it possible to account for changes in temperature. In addition to keeping the temperature stable, another way to keep the frequency of a crystal stable is to have an electrical circuit that changes depending on temperature and have that create something like an opposing curve, so you can add the two together and end up with a pretty stable frequency. Before you start asking how exactly, let me just remind you of the shoe with the stickiness on it. In essence you have something like a resistor that changes resistance depending on temperature, it's a component called a thermistor, and that in turn affects a resonant circuit, also known as an Electronic Oscillator, or LC circuit, which in turn affects the circuit that is driving the crystal. These days most if not all of that is on a chip and you get a neat little package that you can plug into your radio to give it frequency stability and hopefully accuracy. I did say I was going to talk about accuracy this week, but the doo-doo I stepped in put a swift halt to that. Besides, now I know that there is a thing called a thermistor, the second portmanteau I ever learned, together with Gerrymander, so there's that - oh, also, Tanzania, Eurasia and Oxbridge. Back to Amateur Radio. The oven controlled crystal I mentioned last week, they exist in high-end measuring gear, not in the $26 TCXO I have installed in my radio. While I'm on the subject, you can also compensate for temperature with software, using either a purpose built micro-processor, or even the host processor that is using the crystal, but that gets into magic self-referencing voodoo pretty quickly. And while I've been playing, Japan is finally being received here and I heard a station 18656km away during the week. Mind you, AA3GZ in Doylestown, Pensylvania, on the Atlantic Ocean side of the United States was putting out 100 Watts, so there's that. I'll leave you with a thought that I hope to be able to answer next week. If your radio has a crystal that determines what frequency it's tuned to, how do you use that to determine the accuracy of the frequency, more self-references, just because I can and besides, I'm a software developer and recursion is part of my make-up. I'll give you a hint, it's not all to do with MHz. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week I spent a little time talking about the Weak Signal Propagation Reporters network, or WSPR, pronounced Whisper. You might remember that I set up my radio to receive these signals to see what I could learn. Turns out, I learnt quite a bit. I left the software running for a week. During that time my station reported 456 signals received with a total of 54 stations in 27 call areas. The longest distance 14,000 km, PC1JB in Veenendaal in the Netherlands who was using 1 watt. The best performance based on km per watt is R0AGL in Siberia, 10,000 km, with 2 milliwatt. Highest power heard, one station with 100 watts, but from a performance perspective, only just squeaks into the top 10 contacts. Typically stations used 5 watt or less. My 10m quarter-wave vertical antenna was pretty good in hearing things across all bands. I heard stations across the frequency range, from 160m through to 10m. It heard 1 station on 160m, VK7MF, using 5 watts, 3,000km away. The most prolific band was 40m, accounting for 41% of the signals, 30m was pretty close at 35% and even 10m was respectable with 5% of signals heard on that band. Which brings me to a comment about propagation. The Solar Flux Index this week was pretty abysmal. It's been the lowest it's ever been, 66 and still I was able to hear signals across all HF bands. Just think about that for a moment. All the solar numbers say the bands are dead, all the listening in the world says the bands are dead, but using WSPR reveals that this isn't true, it's not even close to being true. My station in a very high noise environment still heard signals across all bands. Based on a visual comparison with other stations, signals were generated in all directions, but for my station, I didn't hear anything coming from the North East Quadrant, that's between North and East. It could be that the signals are being suppressed by the distortion in my antenna pattern, which might be caused by a metal gutter in that direction, or it might be that signals coming from that direction, mainly Japan and the United States, are too weak to be heard above the noise level at my station. I'm investigating that further, but that's for another day. Speaking of other stations, in total during the same period as my station listening, there was a total of 6.9 million reports, representing 2490 listeners and 4463 transmitters. That means that I heard just over 1% of stations on my radio. Not bad given my meagre set-up and minimal configuration and installation. On to things that I was attempting to learn about the performance of my radio. Every WSPR transmission includes the frequency and location information, which allows you to determine what the difference is between what frequency the other station reports and what frequency your radio sees. Of course, there can be variation across both radios and to make things more interesting, this changes over time. This drift is likely to be distributed pretty evenly across all stations, but then I didn't hear all of them, so my results are not completely definitive, but overall the drift reports show a frequency drift of minus 3 to plus 2 Hertz. Slightly skewed down. That's not yet conclusive proof that my station is slightly off frequency, but it seems to indicate that my new crystal is slightly low. I'll be investigating that further. And that neatly brings me to why I have been doing this. You might not be surprised to learn that many things inside your radio are frequency controlled. Those frequencies come from a single central location, a master oscillator that in my radio vibrates at 22.625000 MHz. The crystal that does this is affected by temperature. When you transmit, the radio heats up and the frequency of the crystal changes slightly. Normally this isn't an issue, but if you're working on being on a particular frequency, especially on the 2m or 70cm band, then this starts to matter. If you leave your radio running for a few hours, things are likely to be more stable, since the temperature in your radio becomes more stable. Another way to do this is to control the crystal temperature directly. You can insulate it, or heat it in a little oven, or a combination of both. This is a so-called Temperature Controlled External Oscillator, a TCXO. It's more stable and thus over time the frequency shouldn't change much. In my case, the range is 5 Hertz and as I said, it's slightly skewed down. The next step is to measure the actual frequency that my radio is tuned to. This will require a little more effort. I'll talk about that next week. In the mean time, I'm doing some more analytics to compare how my noise-floor affects my station, how it compares to other stations across the same time-range and how little changes in volume, antenna and the like affect what results I get. There is lots of data to digest, lots of knowledge buried among the stats and I'll be spending the coming weeks seeing if there are things here of a wider i

Foundations of Amateur Radio This week I'm going to talk about a Digital Mode you can use with any Amateur License, or even without an Amateur License. You can set-up your radio, hook it to a computer and the Internet and after installing some software, you can join the Weak Signal Propagation Reporters. So how do you start, what does it do and how can it help you? First of all, WSPR, pronounced Whisper, is a way of encoding information and transmitting it across the spectrum. At the other end a radio receives that signal, sends it to a computer where a piece of software attempts to decode and then log it. This Digital Mode, invented by Joe K1JT, is one of several modes that are gaining popularity across the Amateur Radio community because the beauty of this mode is that it's so unobtrusive that you're unlikely to actually hear it if you were to tune to a dedicated WSPR frequency. If you want to find out what your station can hear, you can set yourself up as a dedicated receive-only station and report your findings to a central database where others can share your information and learn what propagation is like at that particular point in time. Of course, it also means that you can use the same information to learn what propagation looks like in your neck of the woods with your radio and your antenna set-up. There's even an option that allows you to have your radio automatically change frequency - known as band hopping - and listen for WSPR signals across the bands that you allocate. If you like, you can go to the wsprnet.org website right now and do a search for my callsign, VK6FLAB and see what stations I've heard since I turned it on. Go on, have a look, I won't mind. My station is set-up to do band hopping across all HF frequencies all day and night and during the grey-line it only listens to 80m, 40m, 15m and 10m, since those are the frequencies my license allows me to transmit on and I'm particularly interested how they work at sun-rise and sun-set. You might have heard me before talking about how the noise at my home is atrocious. Nothing has changed, it's still abysmal, but WSPR signals are coming in and being decoded. If you want to do this, you'll need a radio - any radio will work, a computer with a microphone socket and a way to pipe the audio from the radio into the computer, I'm using a 3.5mm male plug to 3.5mm male plug - you don't need a fancy audio interface, you're only listening. If you can connect an interface cable, your computer can also change frequency for you, but that's not needed to get started. Make sure that you turn the volume right down before you plug anything in. Connecting a headphone output directly into a microphone input can blow up the port if you're not careful and WSPR doesn't need much in the way of volume. The software helps you get it set right, so read the manual before you start. Once you've set-up your radio and your computer, you can watch the signals coming in on a waterfall display, a graphical representation of the audio and frequency that shows strong signals in red and no signal as blue. You'll find that turning up the volume too high will actually reduce the ability to hear signals. I'm keen to learn what I can hear and how many stations my simple 10m vertical antenna can hear across the Amateur Radio spectrum. I'd love to hear your weak signal stories and see what you can hear. As I said, it seems I'm becoming a short-wave listener after-all. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a friend of mine asked a really silly question. How come when I point my YAGI at a direction for a station using the great circle, the signal is there but weak, but when I point it in a different direction, say 20 degrees away from the great circle, the signal improves? Being a good little Amateur, I responded with the logical explanation. Well, two things come to mind, one being that you're not pointing where you think you're pointing, that is, North on your antenna isn't North in reality, so when you point at the other station, it's not actually where you're pointing, and when you adjust, the antenna ends up in the correct direction. Another explanation I came up with is that the pattern of their YAGI isn't what they expect. There might be local factors that influence the pattern, putting weird distortions into their foot-print and making for "interesting" nulls where there should be signal, and vice-versa. That in turn started a whole conversation about directions and where stations are. Leaving aside the difference between long-path and short-path, which I should probably talk about at some point, an antenna should get signal from the direction in which you point it, right? So, what if I told you that the antenna was in fact pointing correctly and there were no distortions in the antenna pattern, what then? Turns out that the Ionosphere isn't uniform - who'd have predicted that - in case you're wondering, that's a joke - the Ionosphere isn't uniform, it takes in many and varied influences, from the earth's magnetic field, to heating by the sun, to solar storms, coronal mass ejections, and any number of factors that we as a species are only just beginning to discover. If you imagine for a moment a radio-wave coming up from your antenna, bouncing against the Ionosphere, back to earth, then bouncing back up, then doing the same thing again, you'll quickly understand that because the Ionosphere is variable, the height and angles at which this bouncing is occurring varies along the path. But here's a shocker, who said that the signal had to bounce up and down vertically, what if the same variability of the Ionosphe height caused a signal to bounce in some other weird direction, like at an angle, or side-ways. Would the path of the signal from your station to the other end follow a great circle line? Turns out that this silly question wasn't silly at all and I learned something unexpected, my radio signal isn't a straight line, something which I confess, did come as a surprise, but now, looking back, seems pretty obvious. I love silly questions, they often turn into an opportunity to learn. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the past I've talked about what kind of station I have, how I tend to operate and what kind of tools I use in my day-to-day running of an Amateur Radio station. This week I want to take a closer look at what I do when I participate in a contest. I remember fondly the first contest I ever set-up for, fondly as-in, "What was I thinking?" Let me set the scene. I'd previously been to a few stations that were participating in a contest. Some of those were in a club-shack, others were set-up portable in the field. For my first contest I was going to set-up my station in the field, so I needed to bring everything myself. Fortunately I was with friends, one with a camper-trailer, so I didn't need to bring a roof, or the kitchen sink, but I did bring pretty much everything else. My list included tables, chairs, antennas, radios, headphones, connectors, soldering iron, power-boards, extension cables, logbooks for paper logging, pens, clipboards, two computers, four spare batteries, power supplies. It took hours of preparation, packing and not to forget, lugging, and when the contest was all done and dusted I noticed that while I brought everything, I didn't bring the right things and some things were missing. For example, the little connector cable between the front face of my radio and the back of my radio was not packed, so I could only work with a long cable, which was subject to interference which I couldn't fix because I didn't have any ferrites. Other missing tools were a multi-meter, an antenna analyser and a dummy load, to name just the ones that come to mind today. A wise man once told me that the more you camp, the less you bring. Combined with my first contesting experience, that's become my motto. Bring Less. So last week, I packed much less and much more precise. My total packing list was: A radio and a tuner, wire for wire antennas, crimp connectors and a crimper, a multi-meter and antenna analyser, a dummy load, barrel connectors and adapters from N to PL259, BNC and the like. A computer for logging and a CAT cable, a headset, a foot pedal, a notebook and pen. That's it - other than a toothbrush and a sleeping bag and warm clothes. As it was, my foot pedal didn't work, because there was a fault in the adapter cable and I've added fixing that to my list of to-do items. Which brings me to the next thing I learned. It doesn't matter what you start with on your first contest. What matters is that you track it and then after the contest try to spend some time figuring out what worked and what didn't. If you update your list then over time it will become better and targeted to your specific circumstances. When I do a contest mobile from my car, my packing list is similar, but not the same. I've not yet got it down to a fine art, but I'm getting better. One day I'll have the perfect kit, but then something unexpected is likely to happen and the perfect kit will change, again. What is currently in your contesting list, what do you bring and what do you leave at home? What adventures did you have with your latest contest and what lessons could you share with others? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The way we connect our antenna to our radio depends on a number of different factors. If you've come through the ranks recently, like I have, it's probable that you've only ever considered using COAXIAL cable. It's a single conductor, surrounded by some type of insulator, which in turn is surrounded by a conductive shield, which is protected by another layer. There are variations where the shield has multiple layers, including layers of foil and braid, so-called quad-shield COAX, and there are variants that have several cores, sometimes two sets of COAX connected side-by-side and so on. In many ways, COAX is an invention of convenience, which has several compromises as a result, loss over distance, termination issues, twisting and deformation and others. It's compact, less susceptible to external interference, it's relatively easy to route to its destination and if you treat it well, it's easy to carry around, but it's not the only way you can feed an antenna. You may have come across the term Ladder Line or Twin-lead, or Twin-feed line. You may also have heard horror stories associated with this "ancient" - well at least in Amateur Radio Terms - technology. Essentially, Ladder Line is two conductors, side-by-side, evenly separated by spacers. It's in use all over the place. If you look up at your power-lines in the street, or the high-voltage lines on top of towers, you'll notice that those are essentially Ladder Line. You've no doubt been told that you need to keep Ladder Line away from everything, in order for it to work, but that's not actually what's needed. What's required is that both conductors are exposed to the same fields. This means that if you're running the Ladder Line through a metal window, you need to ensure that both lines get the same amount of exposure to any nearby metal, you might put a slight twist in the Ladder Line, or you might put it in the middle between two bits of conductor, like a metal window frame. You might also have been told that Ladder Line radiates. It does, but only if the antenna you're feeding isn't balanced, because what actually happens is that the two sides of the antenna don't cancel each other out and the difference is radiated by the Ladder Line. It's worse if the Ladder Line is some resonant length on the frequencies on which you're using the antenna, because it will receive the signal from your antenna and re-radiate that too. It really means that you need to pay attention, but the cost of that attention pales into insignificance, if you think of the benefits. You might recall that your radio is most happy when it's transmitting into a 50 Ohm load. One of the measurements associated with that is an SWR reading of 1:1. This has come to be interpreted as: "You need a 50 Ohm antenna in order for it to radiate." and that's not actually true. All antennas will radiate, and as long as they are at least half a wave length long, their efficiency will be about 90%. The problem isn't the antenna, it's how you feed the antenna. As I said earlier, if you're a relatively new amateur like me, you might have put one and one together and decided that you need to feed it with 50 Ohm COAX and that your antenna needs to be 50 Ohm. If you do that, it will work, but it's not the only way. The reason you need to have a 50 Ohm feed-point to plug your COAX into, is because the COAX has a lot of loss if there is a feed-point mis-match. The higher the mis-match, the higher the loss. For example, using an 80m Dipole on 40m might mean an SWR of 65:1. This has about 80% loss on 100 feet of RG-8 COAX at 7 MHz. All you're doing is heating up COAX. However, if you were to feed it with 600 Ohm Ladder Line, the loss might only be around 3%. Before you start getting out the calculator to prove my maths wrong, this isn't about maths, it's about the difference between Ladder Line and COAX. COAX is wonderful as a tool, but Ladder Line should not be consigned to the annals of history, because in many, many situations it out-shines COAX. The combination of the thickness of the conductor and the separation width, determines its native impedance. There is lots of documentation online, including calculators on spacing and thickness, so you can build your own. I've seen lots of different types of spacers, from watering tubes cut to length holding the wire with cable-ties, to bits of Perspex, to cutting board plastic and others. The simplest and cheapest one I've seen to date was last weekend, made from two earth wires separated by strips of garden edging that comes in rolls. You cut off little strips, drill two holes, feed the wire through and if you're feeling that it needs permanency, glue them in place. Of course you can buy the stuff, but it's getting harder and harder to find at reasonable cost, so experiment a little. Ladder Line, it's not evil, it might surprise you and you will have another feather in your cap when you go out portable to set-up a field station. I'm

Foundations of Amateur Radio The art of keeping your station organised and accessible has much to do with choosing wisely which bits to keep and which bits to throw. That's part of the story, but there are other aspects of organisation that will assist you. Rolling up coax is a skill that you need to learn. The over and under method of coiling cable is by far the easiest way to ensure that your coax stays healthy and happy without kinks and other distortions. Once you've coiled your coax, many amateurs use electrical tape to hold the coil in place for storage. This can be helpful, since it means that you'll always have a handy supply of electrical tape on hand for when the need arises, but an alternative is to use Velcro cable wraps which attach semi-permanently to one end of the coax and can be wrapped onto itself to make a loop around the coiled coax. Making a water-proof connection, for temporary use can be as simple as covering it in electrical tape. This isn't ideal and not permanent and water inside coax is a guaranteed way to create problems that go well beyond the one time that it got wet, with rust and rot destroying the connector, then the conductors and then ultimately your radio. A better solution is to use either self-amalgamating tape, or plumbing tape to cover the join, followed by electrical tape and even cable ties to ensure that the tape stays in place. There are self-amalgamating dispensers that allow you to coat a connector in a sticky goo that also keeps water out, but getting it off at a later stage is guaranteed to make your hands black and sticky. If you're operating portable, then getting your wire into the air might be associated with throwing something into a tree to pull your antenna up. A fishing rod is a very helpful tool, complete with some fishing weights, to get the wire into a tree. Bring spare sinkers because you're going to lose some along the way. Storing a cable or stay kit is often a laborious affair with the rope getting tied up in knots throughout your kit with the next 30 minutes spent untangling the almighty spider-web that magically appeared inside your go-kit. A great way to prevent such an adventure is to invest in different size zip-lock bags. You can label the bag appropriately and see inside what's there, so if you have a few of them, you only need to grab the one you need and use different sizes for different purposes. Too small means they pop open and too large means you can't find what you need. Bring along some ratchet straps. They don't need to be 20m monsters, 2m is just fine, but bring a few. You'll be surprised how often they come in handy to tie down a radio, or a squid-pole, or strap a clipboard to something. A clipboard is a useful surface to write on, to keep your logs and if you get a clipboard box, you can store your electronic log keeping device and some pens in the same place. At one point I actually attached the head of my radio to my clipboard with some screws which made operating and logging even easier. No doubt you've got some tips of your own, so feel free to drop me a line and share. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I have a confession to make. Looking back it's clear that once your brain goes down a certain path, it's easier to follow the path than to find an alternative one. When I was growing up, above my bed, bolted to the wall were two brackets. On top of those brackets, secured with double-sided tape was a radio-cassette player. If you're unfamiliar with what an audio cassette is, don't worry, this is about the radio side of things and is from the days when Digital Music was not in wide use like it is today. I used this radio to listen to local stations, both on the AM and FM broadcast band, and I managed to even get to the beginning of the FM broadcast band where the police radio happened to be at the time in the country I was living. As years went by, that radio-cassette player was replaced with a radio tuner, then a combined amplifier tuner and I re-programmed it as I moved around the globe with new local stations filling up the quick select button memories. Over the last year or so it occurred to me that my latest device had been sitting inside a box in the garage for the better part of a decade and that the gap was filled by the radio in my car. I would drive somewhere and turn on the radio and listen to something interesting, or something boring, depending on what the airwaves brought to my antenna at the time. I started wanting to listen to the end of interviews, or rock along to some other happy tune when I got home, but I found the transition to be painful. I experimented with streaming radio, spent hours looking for software and currently the best I can do on that front is to have an App on my phone that streams a local radio station. You're likely by now doing one of two things. We'll get to the second one in a moment. The first one is probably going to be along the lines of "Yeah, so, what exactly has this got to do with Amateur Radio again?" If you're not thinking that, you might be thinking something that only occurred to me last week. "Why don't you use your Amateur Radio and tune that to a local broadcast station?" Indeed, why not? I'd never considered that even though my Yaesu FT-857d can tune from 100 KHz through to 470 MHz, covering most of the Amateur Bands, I'd never considered that it would also allow me to listen to a local broadcast station. It's not that I haven't actually tuned to those stations, or listened to the local Air Traffic Control frequencies, or the local Non Directional Beacons when they still existed, it's that those activities were in the context of Amateur Radio, along the lines of propagation, or interesting signals, not background music, or listening to an interview or a talk-back station. I've not yet gone to the trouble of pre-programming those stations, since my Amateur Radio is sensitive enough to pick up stations that my car cannot hear, but the list of frequencies that I'm tuning to during the day, using AM and FM is growing. Shame I can't get FM stereo from my Yaesu radio, perhaps that's something I should play with at some point. So, my second point is, "Duh, my Amateur Radio is also a radio, that you can listen to other broadcast stations with." Of course, it's a pretty pricey transistor radio, or short-wave radio, if you think of it like that, but if you've got it sitting next to you right now, it's simpler than making streaming radio work. I started this with paths travelled and I'll finish with that. When something like this happens, stop for a moment, celebrate the insight, share it with others and who knows what other things will bubble up. When was the last time your brain surprised you and what do you listen to that's not Amateur Radio? Who knows, I might become a short-wave listener yet! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio You've always been taught that VHF communications are line of sight and that the height of your antenna determines how far your 2m communication might go. So if I tell you that last week I spoke with a station that was 300 kilometres away on the 2m band you might be forgiven in thinking that I had managed to climb up most of the side of Mount Everest to around 7 kilometres so I could make my line-of-sight communications 300 kilometres away. I'll give you a hint. I was at my home, my house isn't on the side of Mount Everest and we were both using normal gear, nothing crazy, no amplifiers, no glitzy antennas, just the basics. So what's going on? There'ss a phenomenon called "Tropospheric Ducting" that comes and goes and if conditions are right, allows you to extend your line-of-sight communications to distances far beyond your imagination. So, what is this thing and how does it work? First of all, this is something related to the lowest part of the atmosphere, called the troposphere. It has nothing to do with the ionosphere which we know and love and use regularly to make long distance communications on the HF bands. The ionosphere starts somewhere about 60km up, the troposphere stops at about 12km. Tropospheric Ducting happens much lower down. At the most around 3km up, but normally between 500m to 1500m. In essence a Tropospheric Duct is a layer of warm air trapped between two layers of colder air that acts as a tunnel for radio signals. These kinds of layers aren't caused by "weather" as such, but by climate conditions such as weather fronts. Normally as you go up into the atmosphere, the temperature drops. The rate is around 6 degrees Centigrade per kilometre. Without going into the fascinating science behind it, think about it as a phenomenon where you'll find different types of layers of air over the top of each other, each with their own density and temperature. When the conditions are just right, you get a tunnelling effect that allows you to make some very long distance communications. There's reports of signals travelling over 4000km and if conditions are right, you might be able to hear such long-distance signals on your house-hold FM radio. One aspect that you might not have considered is that the thickness of the sandwiched warm layer determines which frequencies can travel along this so-called tunnel. If the thickness is 15m, you can expect to hear 11 GHz signals, 90m thickness gives you 400 MHz propagation and 180m thickness gives your 140 MHz signals a path to travel. If you manage to find a layer that's 430m thick, you might even manage to make contact using 29 MHz using a Tropospheric Duct. Now, you might be forgiven in thinking that this is all voo-doo and unpredictable, but it turns out that there are plenty of things that you can use to observe that conditions might be right. If you have local fog, or smog trapped over your station, you might be able to take advantage of this phenomenon. It's not that the smog or fog is causing the duct, it's that they happen to occur at the same time as the ducts are created. If you see a sharp layer in the sky, then turn on your radio and have a gander. I won't guarantee success, and you can look online for William Hepburn's World Wide Tropospheric Ducting Forecast, but you really don't need that to get started. Tropospheric Ducting happens all over the planet and it might be happening right now. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is so much stuff associated with Amateur Radio that your family might be forgiven in thinking that your hobby is all about being in the middle of a junk-yard surrounded by the carcasses of disassembled gear, components, failed projects, obsolete equipment and scraps of wire, solder and countless screws, resistors and other bits and pieces that are just too valuable to dispose of. During the week I was given an incentive to reorganise my work-shop. I set aside an hour to do it and unsurprisingly, armed with 20/20 hind-sight, it took a day to complete. The upshot of this activity is that I can now walk into my work-shop, something which I couldn't last week, and to top it off, I could actually find things. I confess that I've reorganised my work-shop several times over the years, but each time I find that it returns to its natural state of junk everywhere. I have noticed that this state is taking longer and longer to achieve, which means that I am improving things, but not quite as well as I would like. The biggest improvement I found last time around was to install shelving. I also used cardboard boxes to put stuff into, but that turned out to be a mixed blessing, tidy, but unusable, since I had to keep stacking and un-stacking boxes to see what was inside and writing on the outside only helped if the list of what was in the box was complete, which I'm sure you know, is never ever the case. This week I made an incremental change. I have purchased a whole slew of transparent plastic boxes, about the size of a shoe box each, with lid, stackable and big enough for most of the things I need to store. I've arranged the boxes along several shelves, stacked two high, so you only ever have to lift one box if you need to get to the bottom one. When ever I go into a bottom box, I move it to the top, so over time the most used boxes will be on top and the ones I don't use often will be on the bottom. Now I have a box with Velcro straps, one with cable ties, one with electrical tape, one with self-tapping screws, one with audio connectors and so-on. Time will tell if this helps. You might recall in the past that I've also got a stack of fishing boxes. Not a whole tackle box, just a single layer box with square compartments, removable dividers, just large enough for about 4 PL259 connectors in each. They're also transparent and stackable. Each compartment has some unique component. Red Anderson Power-Pole shells in one, Black in the next, Green, Purple, Yellow etc, each in their own little space. The connector innards are in another compartment, the joiners in another, BNC male connectors in another, and so-on. I've seen similar attempts at organisation using glass jam jars, but in my experience they don't stack well, are never uniform, unless you have 100 identical jars and are not compatible with concrete floors and gravity. I'm sure that I've missed some salient storage advice, so feel free to drop me a line and share your experiences. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a fellow Amateur was relating their experience in the hobby. They spoke of interference, jamming, breaking in over the top of contacts and generally being hounded by special people who think it's their purpose in life to make life miserable for others. I have spoken in the past about similar experiences that I had with individuals jamming a weekly net that I've been hosting for new and returning hams, and occasions when I've been on-air with a special callsign with an individual yelling "pirate" at the top of their lungs in an attempt to get me off a particular band, even though I was operating in compliance with the license conditions. I've personally made complaints to the regulator about these occurrences, who then decided that being interfered with for over a year was something that the repeater owner should complain about. When they complained, they were told that there was not enough evidence, or some such excuse, I forget exactly the details, but the problem was never investigated or regulated. I contacted the regulator to advise them of interference of our National Broadcaster on a particular frequency, on a particular stretch of road and their response was that it wasn't their problem to fix - even though the Australian Communications and Media Authority is specifically the spectrum regulator. One particularly funny, though not in a hi-hi kind of way was when I was speaking with an investigator who asked me how I knew about interference. I explained that I was a licensed Amateur. His response was: "I'm a Professional". I can still hear the capital "P", years later. Compare that to complaints being raised about my use of a club call-sign, or the publication of my podcast on-line, or the inclusion of an audio stinger in the local news I produce, or the inclusion of a flea-market segment in the same news, or a podcast I made about the use of an Iambic Key by Foundation Licensees. In each of those occasions either the regulator or the peak representative body of Amateur Radio in Australia, the Wireless Institute, or both, jumped in feet first, making pronouncements, issuing decrees or directives without ever actually contacting the person about whom the complaint was actually about. It seems that there must be a special hand-shake in order for your complaint to be taken seriously, that, or they're both running scared because I venture to make an opinion publicly. No, it can't be that, we have freedom of speech in this country - right? Anyone? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was asked about what antenna should you get as your first one. This question is pretty simple, but the answer is likely much less so. You might recall that I've pointed out that we can prove you physically cannot build the ideal antenna, so by definition all antennas are compromises. You might also find yourself being bamboozled by claims about how an antenna is the perfect match across all or many frequencies. The same is true for a dummy load where the purpose is not to radiate at all. With that in mind and armed with a healthy dose of scepticism, you can now go hunting for the answer. On my journey through this minefield of mysticism I went from a self built wire vertical on a squid pole with a 16 radial ground plane and an electronic antenna coupler, through a set of purchased single band verticals, a wire dipole, a wire delta loop, a Buddi-pole, a magnetic loop, a multi-tap vertical, and many others along the way. Some of those antennas were bought, others were built, several were given to me and some have been loaned by fellow amateurs. I should mention that the antennas I named were all for HF frequencies. On VHF and UHF, 2 m and 70 cm, the list consists of four antennas, I started with a simple vertical and in my car I use that almost exclusively. I also have two larger verticals at home, depending on what I'm doing I'll swap between them but for the past year I've had a 10 m vertical which also happens to be resonant on 2 m, so I can swap between HF and 2 m without climbing on a ladder. Building an antenna can be very rewarding but also very frustrating. Similarly, buying an antenna is no guarantee for success. This means that every environment is different and many combinations of antenna and location are doomed before you start. Essentially you have to start a process to find what works for you and your environment, a fixed location, or a car, portable, mobile or something else, in my limited experience there really isn't a substitute for trial and error. That being said, getting your hands on a balun and some wire is a good place to start. If you're looking for something that takes up less space, a vertical is often another way to get going. Currently in my car I use a multi-tap vertical. At home I'm playing with a 10 m vertical and a magnetic loop. When I set up portable on my own I'll use my squid pole vertical and if I'm with others I'll help string up as much wire as we can. At my local radio club I'll use one of several Yagi antennas and if I'm at a friend's place I'll use whatever they have plugged into their radio. This confusing mismatch of antennas reflects about six years of experimentation and I've not even mentioned the pile of failures sitting in the corner of my shack. Two more comments. Getting or borrowing an antenna analyser is a good idea and the amount of money you spend on an antenna is no indication of success. That's not really an answer, but it's the best I have. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was browsing through the Amateur Radio Syllabus for Foundation Licensees, as you do, you know, when you're bored out of your mind, or in my case, looking for a topic to talk about. So, I came across this interesting point, if you want to look it up, point 2.2 of the Foundation Syllabus. It states that in order to attain your Foundation License in Australia you must: "Recall that an Amateur Licence primarily authorises the operation of an Amateur station for self-training in radio communications, inter-communications between Amateurs and technical investigations into radio communications." You might hear that and think, ok, so what's your point? Simple really. As an Amateur Radio community we have come to collectively understand that in order for you to do anything in the realm of building or research, you need to hold more responsibility and that if you're on the so-called bottom rung of Amateur-dom, you really are only a button twiddler, appliance operator and not much of an Amateur at all. It's funny really, since the Amateurs I know and consider to be my friends and peers, exist across the wide spectrum, from being licensed last week, through last year, through last decade onto before I was born, more than half a century ago, these Amateurs have one thing in common - curiosity. They like to explore, to investigate, to understand, to learn and to try stuff. Many of these Amateurs have a Foundation License like I do and their skill in exploring has very little to do with their level of license and everything to do with their approach and attitude. I know that I can just go about my business and ignore the noisy minority who continue to be derisive towards lesser Amateurs, but I think it's important to highlight that my personal experience does not match their vocal opposition towards those who hold different opinions, find different things interesting, bring different approaches and attitudes or continue to be excited by this hobby. I know that I often point out this element of nay-sayers, but I'd like to also point out that while they make noise, a much larger group of Amateurs continues to play and explore. A couple of years ago, when the ink on my license wasn't even dry, I was dragged, almost kicking and screaming, to a national Amateur Conference by a fellow Amateur and good friend. I resisted, but his insistence saw me pack my bags and head over to meet a group of people who share this amazing thrill that I experience with Amateur Radio on a daily basis. I'm immensely grateful for my friend and his badgering, and want to point out that if you find yourself surrounded by those who continue to tell you that you need to upgrade, that what you're doing has been done and failed, that what you're playing with isn't interesting, that what you're doing is wrong. If you find yourself in that place, then I urge you to find new friends in Amateur Radio, because we're not all like that, in fact, I'm pretty sure, most of us are not like that. It's just that the know-it-alls are good at telling you so and the quiet achievers just get on with it. Find a friend, explore an idea, try something new, visit a new club, or go on an adventure. Amateur Radio is and should be fun and if it isn't you're looking in the wrong places. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've explained how Radio-teletype or RTTY works from a technical perspective. If you recall, it uses a technique called Frequency Shift Keying, or FSK to encode digital information. It does this by transmitting a carrier across two alternating frequencies, allocating one as a SPACE and the other as a MARK, or as a binary 0 and a binary 1. There are several other ways of encoding information and today I'm going to look at Phase Shift Keying, or PSK, which I find humorous, because Phase is spelled with a P, but it sounds like an F, which links the FSK and PSK together, but then I've always had a strange sense of humour. Imagine if you will a sine wave. It's the one you learned in high-school, nothing sophisticated about it, just keeps going up and down over time. Now imagine another one. Also going up and down over time. If these two sine waves are synchronised, going up and down at the same time, the difference between them is 0. If one of the sine waves is going up, while the other is going down, then the difference between them is 1. That is enough to give you a binary 0 and a binary 1. One of the sine waves is a carrier, so it's transmitted continuously, and the other is changed depending on whether you're sending a 0 or a 1. These two sine waves are said to be "in-phase" when they're both going up and down at the same time, and "out of phase" when they're going in opposite directions. This is how Phase Shift Keying works. And the simple example I gave is known as BPSK, or Binary Phase-Shift Keying. There are countless variations on this. For example, you don't need to have them going in completely 180 degrees opposite directions, you could go only 90 degrees, or even 45 degrees, which would allow you to encode more information across a shorter time span at the cost of less accurate decoding at the other end. You could play with the carrier and instead have the signal be compared to itself, making it more robust in some circumstances, or you could have multiple of these signals happening at the same time. You could change the amplitude of the carrier and allocate specific byte values to each combination. For example, one variation, an encoding method called "16-QAM" allows you to create 16 different signals, which equates to sending 4 bits at a time. Each of these have different advantages and disadvantages, trade-offs between speed, reliability, error detection, impact of polarisation changes in the ionosphere, energy efficiency, etc. You might be surprised to learn that these techniques are not only used inside Amateur Radio and PSK31, they're also used in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, RFID and countless other places, like remote controls, hard-drives, tape recorders, satellite communications, mobile telephony, etc. If you get hooked, there's lots of maths that you can associate with all of this - if that floats your boat, but you don't need any maths to grasp how it works. Phase Shift Keying, one of the many Digital Modes that make our world go round. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The continued discussion in our community about Digital Modes got me thinking about what a Digital Mode actually is. At the most fundamental level, it's about encoding information into discrete chunks to exchange information. Morse Code is an example of a Digital Mode, made up from combinations of dits and dahs. If you change frequency whilst sending dits and dah's you invented RTTY or Radio-teletype. There are two frequencies involved, 170 Hz apart, where the lower frequency is the SPACE frequency and the upper frequency is the MARK frequency. If someone gives you a RTTY frequency, they're talking about the upper frequency. Instead of using Morse Code to send messages, RTTY uses 32 different codes, 5 bits, to exchange information. This isn't enough for the entire alphabet, with digits and punctuation, so two of the codes are used to swap between Letters and Numbers. Some radios can change frequency between the lower SPACE and upper MARK frequencies in a single transmission. This way of transmitting is called FSK, or Frequency Shift Keying. It's a lot like moving the VFO around whilst keying a Morse-key. Not something you'd do manually, since in Amateur Radio, this is generally happening 45 times a second. If your radio can't do the frequency shifting, then another way is to use Audio Frequency Shift Keying of AFSK, where instead of changing the frequency, you change an audio tone by 170 Hz. Without getting technical about how this works, if you've ever listened to Morse Code with a radio, you'll have noticed that as you change frequency, the sound changes. If you were to change the frequency of your radio by 170 Hz, the sound would also change by 170 Hz. So with that in mind, if you were to change the sound by 170 Hz, the receiver wouldn't care if you were changing the transmit frequency or the audio frequency, since it both sounds identical at the other end. Most of the time a computer is generating two tones, a tone for the SPACE, or lower frequency and a tone for the MARK or the upper frequency. It comes out of the speaker of the computer, which you feed into the microphone of the radio and your radio then generates a normal SSB signal that is experienced by the listener at the other end as a Radio-teletype. Pretty nifty and if you understand this, then most of the other Digital Modes in use today use similar methods. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Having a Digital Mode in your shack appears to be a special privilege, at least in some parts of the world. If you'd like to learn all there is to do with using a Digital Mode you need to pay attention and I'll share the secret, it won't take long. If you want to distinguish yourself as a Digital Mode Diva, you need to know that Morse, RTTY, FSK and PSK are digital modes and you must also remember that the bandwidth of a data transmission is dependent on speed and mode. At this point you've covered all the syllabus requirements for holding a Standard License in Australia in relation to operating a Digital Mode. If you want to climb the Mountain of Digital Mode Magic, you need to remember two acronyms, FEC or Forward Error Correction and ARQ or Automatic Repeat Request. You also need to remember four numbers, 31 Hz for PSK31, 250 Hz for RTTY, 730 Hz for Packet Radio and 300 Hz for FSK. And if you want to get really fancy, I should point out that there are several versions of each of these modes and different ways to implement them, so those numbers will change depending on who's teaching you. If I go on to tell you that a Terminal Node Controller or TNC is a black box with two audio leads, one for the microphone and one for the speaker and that you plug those into the appropriate sockets on your radio, you know all that is required to hold an Advanced Certificate in Australia for using a Digital Mode. If you don't want to blow up your radio, then you should also remember that there is a thing called Duty Cycle that will come to haunt you if you get it wrong. That's it, now you know everything there is to know about using Digital Modes. Actually, I'm lying. When you say the letter A on air you use the word Alpha. You're sending extra information so the other end has a better chance of understanding what you said. That's Forward Error Correction. And when you say the same thing repeatedly, like saying CQ, CQ, CQ, if you don't get an acknowledgement from the other end, that's Automatic Repeat Request. Now you really do know all there is to know about Digital Modes according to the syllabus for both Standard and Advanced Licenses in Australia. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a whole new world opened up to me when I came across the idea that Voltage is the same as Force and Current is the same as Velocity. It all came about when I installed two mechanical filters into my radio. You heard that right, in my shiny solid-state radio, I added moving parts! The purpose of this was to improve the way the radio ignores unwanted signals and as a result has an easier time hearing what it is you really care about. The radio already has filters built-in, but mechanical filters offer a cleaner output with less distortion across a wider range of temperatures. Another way is to say that - mechanical filters have a much higher Q. Think of a pendulum swinging through oil, it's losing lots of energy for every swing and has a low Q. The same pendulum swinging through air retains most of its energy and has a high Q. The same is true for mechanical filters, less energy loss, better reproduction, better outcome for the things you want to keep and hear. So how does this then work? Turns out that our electrical theory with inductors, capacitors and resistors have mechanical equivalents, specifically mass, stiffness and damping. As I said when I started, Voltage is Force and Current is Velocity. It turns out that all the maths we use to design electrical filters can also be used to design mechanical filters and 1946 Robert Adler from Zenith did exactly that. This worked so well that in 1952 the Collins Radio Company started manufacturing them and today we still use them in many different radios. As an aside, you might be surprised to learn that the first filter that Robert Adler invented in 1946 was for a 455 kHz filter, which I could technically still use in my radio today, since the same Intermediate Frequency or IF is used. The mechanical filter - vibrating bits of metal - resonate with specific frequencies, much like a tuning fork does, but your radio deals with electrons, not movement, so the electrical signal is first converted into movement by a piezoelectric transducer, a piece of material that distorts when you apply an electrical field and when you use it in reverse, distortion creates an electrical field. So, you have a box with a wire at one end and a wire at the other and in between are two transducers and a bunch of mechanical resonators, much like a string of pearls on a necklace. I mentioned earlier that mechanical filters have a much higher Q. An electrical Q might range between 100 and 500, the mechanical Q in 1946 using steel was several thousand and in today's filters using Nickel-Iron alloys, a Q of 10,000 to 25,000 can be achieved. Without going into the maths, what is this Q really describing, other than the pendulum in oil and mechanical losses? One way to explain Q is to say that it describes the "goodness" of a resonant circuit, the higher the Q, the better the circuit. In our case, "goodness" means that it resonates better where we want it to and not where we don't want it to. Before you start wondering, why the letter "Q"? Turns out all the others were taken when K.S. Johnson was looking for a letter to describe the attributes of coils in 1920. Today we think of "Q" as Quality, but that's the cart before the horse. Anyway, back to Amateur Radio. If you look at a theoretical filter, you'll see a lovely curve that lets through the bits you care about and ignores the bits you don't like, but when you then start looking at the real world where damping and resistance come into play, you'll soon learn that there are all manner of ugly spikes on this lovely curve. A typical tuned electrical circuit will have artefacts, or distortions along the way, dipping down, instead of staying straight, or having an ugly peak when it should be smooth. This in turn results in something that you can hear, distorted audio where low frequencies are under or over represented and strange distortions occurring along the audio range. It also means that adjacent signals, the ones you're trying to ignore get caught up in this same distortion and you'll hear some of those when you don't want them. So when I say that a mechanical filter offers a higher "Q", it means a whole lot less distortion and a better representation of what's going on. As an aside, in transmit, a mechanical filter will also help contain the energy coming from your signal and transmit it where it's needed, rather than waste it where it's not helpful. As a QRP station, every little bit helps. I just love this hobby, every turn is another surprise. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio For the most part of my Amateur Radio life I've been an active contester. I have spoken about why I love contesting and why I think it's an important aspect of this amazing hobby. Today I want to talk about how contests are run, specifically how complaints are handled and how we could improve. I must at this time acknowledge that organisers are volunteers, just like many other Amateurs, giving of their free time, in this case, to manage and score a contest. Like much volunteering it's an invisible, sometimes thank-less and unenviable task, often akin to herding cats. To set the scene, a contest is an organised activity run by one or more people or groups that has a published set of rules, a set of aims and objectives as well as the mechanics of things like on-air conduct, point scoring, etc. A contester who decides to participate in a contest is expected to read the rules, abide by them and conduct themselves in an appropriate manner, that is, keep accurate logs, follow the log submission rules, etc. What happens after the logs have been submitted to the organiser is rarely spoken about. There is an assumption that the results are published, that complaints are handled fairly and in a timely fashion and that the outcomes are fair for all participants. In my experience, it's understood that if the rules don't specifically exclude a particular event, like say, using a Satellite contact during a VHF contest, those are fair game. Of course the response to such a thing is to update the rules to exclude that interpretation for the next contest. So, there are rules for the contesters, but are there rules for the organisers? What happens if they don't do their part? What process exists then? What if the results take over a year to be published, or you witnessed cheating, or you submit a log that has a score that differs from the results? If you bring that to the attention of the organisers, what is a reasonable response and how would you expect the issue to be resolved? In the past, any suggestion that there could be a place for a standard set of rules for organisers has been, in my experience, ignored or ridiculed with the notion that "We're all Amateurs here, stop taking things so seriously." In my opinion, that's not a reasonable response and it makes for uncomfortable interactions between contesters and organisers who are attempting to resolve a dispute in a civil way. In sailing, where the participants are amateurs, as in non-professional sailors, contesting is alive and well. Most weekends see a sailing race on a local water and protests are common. A standardised set of rules exist to handle disputes in a formal manner and raising a protest flag is the beginning of a set of steps that ends up with a ruling. In the case of contests in the Amateur Radio field, no such thing happens. As an example, I have personally raised a protest with a contesting organiser and have spent the past months attempting to get the results updated to reflect my actual score. I'm patient and persistent, I document every step, but ultimately I'm at the mercy of the organiser. Their decision to handle my protest is entirely arbitrary. In my opinion, this is not how contesting should work. It should be a fair contest between stations to apply the rules and come to a score. I've purposefully not named the contest or the organisers, since this is not specific to my protest. This is an issue that affects contests in Amateur Radio everywhere. What about looking at the sailing community and learning about their protest procedures? Are there contests that you participate in that have a formal complaints process and how well does it actually work? Have you ever had a contest protest that needed adjudicating and how did it work out? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I made a point of coming up with three different names for License Classes in Australia. I proposed Low Power, Medium Power and High Power and then went on to suggest that this could also be a mechanism to update the framework that is Amateur Licensing in Australia. As it turns out, I'm told that this idea is mostly already active in the United Kingdom. My idea started as a response to an increasing clamour for more privileges for Foundation Licenses. These calls include demands for digital modes and more power. I understand this demand, though I don't particularly share it. I think that licenses evolve and the world in which they operate changes and that digital modes are an example of that. I have a much bigger problem with the way that licensees are using their level of license to look down on those who have "only" achieved their Foundation or Standard call. I have personally been told that I should get rid of my silly license and upgrade and it's unusual to meet a new Amateur who doesn't straight off the bat ask me why I haven't upgraded yet. I've seen the same behaviour toward Standard licensees and I think it's a fundamentally wrong attitude and approach to have. In my opinion this is a hobby for participants to do what they want to do within the constraints that they have. For some that means getting a higher level of responsibility, for others it means spending time doing deep learning and investigating the boundaries of their achievement. The notion that there are different levels of license is completely arbitrary and the idea that some are better than others is ludicrous in my opinion. Just because I have a Foundation License, doesn't mean that I am ignorant and just because others have an Advanced License, doesn't make them all-knowing or expert. If that wasn't enough, the boundaries between license classes are completely subjective, drawn from historic demarcations between VHF and HF, between Build and Buy and between Morse-Code and Not. These lines are getting so silly that they have become meaningless, to the point of absurdity. If I as a Foundation License holder can go to a shop and buy a Software Defined Radio, then update the software on that radio by using my skills as a programmer, I have fundamentally changed the way the radio operates, even-though I didn't once touch a soldering iron, or open the case. Our regulations have nothing to say on the subject, nor is there any sane way to police such an activity and nor should there be - this is an experimental hobby after-all. If I buy a radio in kit form and get it shipped to me, put it all together and turn it on, did I build something, or buy a commercially available radio? Where's the line between building and buying commercially available and what at the end of the day does it really matter? What is so special about the 20m band that prevents me as a mere Foundation Licensee to access that band and what is so amazing about digital modes that make it that I'm not allowed to use it, even though all digital modes are really just analogue audio and there is no certification, training or assessment related to digital modes for any class of license? My point is that the current licensing system is in my opinion obsolete, it's broken and the persistent baying from the sidelines by Amateurs who think that I'm demanding more privileges is getting tiresome. It's ludicrous to think that we should remain back in the 1970's, when Novice Licenses were introduced, perhaps while we're at it, should we go back to a spark-gap transmitter too? The idea that your enjoyment in the hobby is affected by my privileges is absurd to the level of being offensive and if you're threatened by my participation in the hobby, it seems to me that I must be making valid points. I don't want more privileges. I'm happy with what I have. What I want to do is make this hobby better, make it relevant, make it useful, make it accessible and make it stronger. That's why I proposed to make three license classes, Low Power, Medium Power and High Power, to make some common-sense where none currently appears to exist. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a time for everything. Mostly when it's most inconvenient, like in the middle of a rare contact, or while you're running a pile-up like you have never done before, or while you're getting a multiplier during a contest. For two years I've been using an antenna on my car that on occasion has the ability to remind you of it's presence. In this case, there is a lead, a so-called wander lead, that runs from the base of the antenna to one of the various connectors that are spaced along the length of the antenna. In case you're wondering, it's an Outbacker antenna and it's the first antenna that actually worked on my car. This lead has two banana-plugs on it, and those are connected to the lead with little screws which have an uncanny ability to come loose when you least desire it. This ability of an item connected to your radio to make itself known to you is not limited to my wander-lead. I've seen the same behaviour on microphone connectors, interface adapters, baluns, speaker leads, power leads and the like. Often you cobble together a quick fix and off you go again, doing what you were doing. Only the quick fix turns into "the fix" and nothing is ever actually fixed. I've been to many shacks where a quick fix has been applied that lasted days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, but at some point it will fail again, perhaps with disastrous results, like letting the magic black smoke out of your radio - and if you're not sure what I'm talking about, ask a friend, but the smell is memorable and often there is a matching invoice to pay. During the week I did something novel. I remembered the last quick fix I did and instead of thinking: "I should do something about that", I actually went to my car, got out the antenna, pulled off the wander lead and actually fixed it, that is, got out a proper screw driver and actually tightened the screws. Mind you, as I'm thinking about it now, I have started to think about if I should solder the lead and remove the screws from the whole thing. I'll let you know how I go. The point I'm making, badly perhaps, is that the hobby we are engaged in, Amateur Radio, is about more than making contacts and building stuff, it's also about doing maintenance and thinking about how to make your station safer, more reliable, more usable and fixing those niggling little things that will come and bite you at some point in the future. Before I go, I should anticipate some responses which will be along the lines of: "Well, it was a quick fix, but it lasted for years." - good for you, you're a better fixer than I am. For the rest of us, have a good look at your station and think about some quick fixes you've applied. I know I'd prefer to complete the QSO with that rare DX station, rather than have them vanish and later learn that their microphone packed up mid-contact. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio For a long time I've struggled with the way we differentiate between the different license classes in Amateur Radio. In Australia, the three levels of license are Foundation, Standard and Advanced. In the United States, they're called the Technician, General and Extra. In the United Kingdom they're called Foundation, Intermediate and Full. These naming conventions convey that more and more is gained as you progress though the ranks, but they also convey that you are incomplete if you're not at the top of the food chain with an Advanced, Extra or Full license. This naming convention is not universal. The license classes in the Netherlands are called the N or Novice Class and F Class, but generally they're referred to as the N and F classes and in Germany they're called Class A and Class E. Of course if you're making a complaint about what something is called then coming up with a new name is one of the first things that you'll be asked and that has stopped me from even beginning to make this observation out loud, let alone spend some time talking about it. Today I have a response to the question: "Well, if you don't like what it's called, what would YOU call it?" Here's what I came up with, if we're staying with three license classes, the three names I'd adopt are Low Power, Medium Power and High Power. The names are chosen to distinguish the power levels associated with the license which then also allows for another radical idea. What if everyone had the exact same privileges and the only difference between the licenses was how much power you could use? This in turn would require a person who moves from one power level to the next to learn specific skills. For example, RF safety with Low Power is completely different from High Power. Antenna efficiency has a completely different impact on a high power radio, than it does on a low power radio. Interacting with high voltages doesn't happen with low power but you can bet your RF burn that it happens with high power. EMR, or Electro Magnetic Radiation issues were the single largest hindrance to introducing more than 400 Watts into Amateur Radio in Australia. What if getting a High Power License came with a built-in EMR module and that the energy was built-into the licence system? If all licenses were the same, except for the power output, it would mean that all Amateurs could experiment with new modes and invent new things and the only hindrance to such experimentation would be the imagination of the person using the radio. We have artificial boundaries between the various classes of license which bear no relation to reality. In my opinion the boundaries hinder the progress of an amateur and external factors such as the changing of the solar cycle impact different license classes in different ways depending on when they got their license. Skills that are gained could be gathered as points or modules and could incrementally allow the progression to higher power. Of course, 100 Watts on 160m does not have the same impact from an EMR perspective as 100 Watts on 10 GHz, but I'm not advocating that the Low Power license is limited to 10 Watts across all bands, nor am I saying that a Medium Power License should have 100 Watts on every band. But there's no reason that the power level cannot be proportional to the amount of energy involved, rather than a fixed power output at the transmitter. For my money, lets ditch this Foundation, Standard and Advanced system and move to Low Power, Medium Power and High Power. Who's with me? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A little while ago I had the chance to use a mobile radio with high power. I used it to learn about the coverage of our local repeater, but also to hear what the effects were when two local radios were both using the same repeater and high power at the same time. I made all manner of observations and wondered how much of what I observed was real and how much was a case of me adding two and two together and coming up with five. Immediately after I made those observations I received emails from around the globe explaining in great detail what was going on. Suffice to say that there was some disagreement among the emails, but overall they lead to a few new things that I'd not considered. One comment was that the two radios, not quite side-by-side, but in two cars nearby was similar to the operating environment of a repeater, that is a receiver and a transmitter sitting in close proximity. Initially I didn't cotton on to the analogy and it took several readings to understand, but the outcome is that, as I suspected, the receiver is being overloaded by a local transmitter which is putting out a big signal that is overwhelming the electronics in the receiver, something that a repeater deals with every time you key it up. The short version of this is called de-sensing. I'm still reading about how it exactly works on the inside, something for another day. In a repeater the issue is dealt with by filtering the outgoing signal and filtering the incoming signal, making sure that only the desired information makes it to where it needs to go. Two random radios bolted to two cars don't have any such filtering and no way to reject the unwanted signals. Adding filters to both cars might fix the issue, but then we weren't trying to fix anything, just to learn what was going on. Another thing I learnt was that FM receivers don't need an AGC, since the volume of a signal is related to how much it deviates from the central signal, not how much signal there is, which is why the microphone gain setting on your radio determines the volume, not the level of power. To be clear, enough of your signal needs to get to the other end for it to work, but after that, you're just wasting electrons. If you need a visual for that in FM the height of the signal doesn't matter once it's high enough, the wobble determines how much volume there is. In AM, there is no wobble, the height determines the volume. Incidentally, if not enough of your signal gets to the other end, then your weak signal might be overtaken by another signal and the so-called "FM capture effect" happens, where the low signal gets effectively rejected in favour of the higher one. Interestingly Amateur Radios can have an FM AGC which can be used to determine the signal strength, which makes your S-meter behave more like it does on HF, but if you recall, an S-meter is really a guess-o-meter since every manufacturer has their own "standard" and two radios are unlikely to experience the same S-level for the same signal. Don't misunderstand, I'm not maligning the S-meter, just pointing out that your S-5 and my S-5 are unlikely to be the same. So, the more I peel away from my little mobile experiment, the more I unearth in the wake of the experiment. Such is the joy of Amateur Radio. Be curious, investigate and learn. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio You know you've been at something for a while if you come across a topic that you want to dig into and discover that you already covered it in great detail a year ago. For me that topic was the "FM capture effect", which I covered in great detail a while back - the research says: "This happens, we know it happens, it happens under these circumstances, but precisely how, we're not sure." I finished off with a quote by Arthur C. Clarke who wrote in 1973: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- by that definition, Amateur Radio and the "FM capture effect" is clearly magic. For me Amateur Radio is about the constant quest of learning, the ongoing pursuit of explanation and understanding, the relentless curiosity that burns a hole in my mind waiting to get filled with information and knowledge about anything and everything. In that same environment I am the holder of the beginner's license in Amateur Radio and that is the cause for some members of our community to scoff at my skills, to demand that I upgrade, to ridicule the level of licence that I hold and to brandish their higher level certificate of proficiency as a weapon against my meagre understanding of this hobby. How is it possible that this irrational belief that one license is more valid than another can exist in a world where something as basic as the "FM capture effect" is not understood, not documented, not explained and not taught to those holding the summit of knowledge, the highest level of Amateur License? I've been a student all my life and truth be told, that's true for most people I meet. There are a few people who know everything already, but the rest of us are able to understand that learning is a continual process. The level of license you hold has nothing to do with your ability to learn, your ability to understand or your ability to be a higher class of human. A high level license is a privilege to incur a higher level of responsibility and acknowledgement that at some level you're able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Clearly for some it's the ultimate expression of their superiority, but for the rest of us it's a token that affords us extra access to radio spectrum and technologies. One reason I'm raising this is because if you're a new entrant to our hobby, you might be confronted by Amateurs who demand that you update your license at their insistence, rather than your interest, which can lead to you leaving our community which is a regrettable and undesirable outcome. Another reason I'm raising this is because there are many things in Amateur Radio like the "FM capture effect", phenomenon we know happen, but have little understanding about. These things have implications far beyond our hobby. For example, the mobile phone in your pocket, or the laptop on your knees or the wireless headphones on your head, all use technologies that are subject to the "FM capture effect" and understanding and research in our hobby can and will help the wider community. So, don't let your lowly license deter you from learning, from participating, from being curious and researching things that interest you. Who knows, one day you'll add to the body of knowledge that we call Amateur Radio and we'll all be better off. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The quest for the perfect antenna is likely to be one of the things that you'll carry with you during your entire Amateur life. In the past I've explained how the perfect antenna cannot exist and that the amount of variation inside just one antenna is infinite, so there is lots to choose from. One of my friends loaned me an antenna called an Alex-Loop. It's a so-called Magnetic-Loop Antenna and while the physics of the antenna is fascinating, I'm not going to go into it today. Suffice to say that there are hundreds of articles on the subject on-line and if you do dive in, read at least 20 or so before you decide that you understand how it works or how to build one. Until I used the Alex-Loop, I'd been using antennas that are set-up for a single band, or ones that require switching between bands, or using long-wire antennas with an SGC antenna matching unit. I've also used so-called antenna tuners, a topic worthy of discussion some other time. When you use your radio to pick a frequency, so too do you pick an antenna setting with a magnetic loop. In this case, the user-interface is a knob that changes a variable capacitor to make the antenna match between 7 MHz and 30 MHz. As I said, I'm not going into the physics of this, but the outcome of turning the knob is that at one point for each frequency, the sound coming from the radio will peak. As you turn the knob on the radio, you also turn the knob on the antenna. The two go hand-in-hand and the experience is a pretty satisfying one. No need to switch bands, get out of your operating position, change the band on your antenna, or switch a coax switch to another antenna, or transmit to make the antenna matching unit do it's thing, or to peak the antenna tuner, nothing like that, just a simple turn of the dial will get you to where you need to go. The reason I'm discussing this is because it's the first antenna I've used, and I have played with hundreds of them, that is able to match the user experience of turning the dial on your radio with turning the dial on your antenna. So far, operating from my QTH, where the noise is an abysmal S9, I managed one contact, which I have to tell you was great. It wasn't earth shattering, not even that far or noteworthy, but as contacts go, it was very satisfying. Hopefully in the not too distant future I'll be able to find some time and go to a more RF quiet location and have some more fun. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There's a phrase that I use quite often, "Get on air and make some noise!" In terms of Amateur Radio that makes people think that I mean that they should turn on their radio, pick a band and call CQ, for hours. I can tell you now, if you're a QRP station, this is going to be a frustrating experience unless you're lucky or happen to be located in a place where other Amateurs want to talk to you, like an uninhabited island, or a low-tide reef, or some other place on the DXCC most wanted list. I liken operating a low power or QRP station to fly-fishing. To get a fish takes patience, skill and persistence. Would you start fishing in an industrial sewer in the hope that you catch something, or would you attempt to learn something about the fish that you're trying to catch, before seeking out its hiding place and throwing out a bait? Operating your Amateur Station should be more of the baiting and less of the industrial sewer. So what does this look like in your day-to-day operation of your station? Well, for starters you'll need to figure out where all the other Amateurs are. You can do that by listening for other stations, or by finding automatic beacons and seeing if you can hear them. That takes care of the first problem, is it at all possible to catch anything here? The next challenge you're faced with is when to find these stations. You'll need to do some reverse investigation. If you're trying to contact the other side of the globe, it's likely that the station you're looking for is going to be asleep when you're awake. So, calling a station during your lunch break is likely to mean that it's midnight over there. So, pick a time when they're likely to be awake, the beginning or the end of their day, which happily coincides with the grey-line, when the sun is just on the horizon, when radio propagation goes through some magical transformations. If you call on a Wednesday, it's likely that they're also in the middle of their work week, so think about how to plan for this. If it's a public holiday, check to see if they have one too, or plan for operating during the public holiday at the other end. If there is a large Amateur Radio contest at the other end, you might find that your station is desirable as a contact, or the opposite might be true, so check that out. Of course, I'm not able to cover all the variations of this and it will be specific to your station, so spend some time planning and learning about what a contact might look like. Now, if you take this advice to the extreme, you'll end up never getting on air and calling CQ, which means that you'll never get a serendipitous contact, nor will you capture the exception where an insomniac operator is trolling the bands to talk to someone, which would be a shame, so, do your homework, learn about when and where to operate and in the mean-time, get on air and make some noise! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The evolution of Amateur Radio is a constantly changing landscape. I've previously described the transition from spark-gap to surface-mount and the ongoing progression of inventiveness that brings this amazing hobby together with the leading edge of science and technology. If you think of software defined radio as a linear increment on the radio scale you'll end up where we see some of the manufacturers today are placing their bets. You'll find a radio that has knobs and buttons like a traditional radio, but behind the scenes there is a computer and a new way of accessing the radio spectrum. A little further along the scale is the proverbial black-box, often with a single button to power it on, a few connectors for antennas and a network connection to get information to a computer. The software on the computer often attempts to resemble a traditional radio with similar controls and the combination of the box and the computer with the software running makes for an Amateur station. If you have no rules for how the user must interact with the radio, you might come up with interactive waterfall charts that display the radio spectrum as a graph, showing frequency along the horizontal axis, time across the vertical axis and colour as a measure of signal strength. Each of these experiences are attempting to achieve the same purpose, making the radio spectrum available to the station operator. If you completely decouple the concept of radio from this and look at the spectrum as a source of data, then processing that data, often in real-time, becomes less constrained by the limits of our current perceptions of how a radio works and moves into the realm of data science. To give you a concrete example, if you've scanned a photo on your computer and are confronted by little dots of dust, there is software available to remove that dust and re-create the image in much the same way as the original might have been. The process is called noise reduction. That same process could also be used to process radio spectrum, or audio. There are many concepts that exist outside radio that can be used in this new world. You could do live analysis of the bands, determine which signal had the best chance of getting to the intended recipient, you could decode information spread across multiple bands, with bandwidth use that could be measured in gigahertz, rather than kilohertz. With the limits of your mind as the only barrier, what other inventions might be arriving at our doorsteps in the near future? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The hobby that we call Amateur Radio has been around for over a century. During that time we've seen it evolve from capacitors, inductors, through valves, then diodes and transistors, through to integrated circuits, chips and surface mount components. Along the way we collected a vast body of knowledge and experience which combine to make the hobby what it is today. You might have noticed that the progression of our hobby didn't stop with surface mount components, it's still evolving through software and the next frontiers are already tentatively being explored and offered for sale to curious amateurs. In my day job I'm a software engineer and I adopted Amateur Radio as my hobby of choice because it was technically diverse, had a rich history, a large community and had little to do with my day to day pursuits in computing and information technology. How wrong was I? This morning I started writing code to visualise audio, specifically in my case to make a video version of this weekly segment, but also to experiment with how we as humans use our senses to decipher information. As I was buried inside the decoding of audio it occurred to me that what I was doing was the equivalent of soldering together a circuit for the purposes of learning more about some aspect of my hobby. This in turn made me realise that as we dive deeper and deeper into the software defined radio universe, more and more of what we as individuals can do will be based on computers, algorithms and maths. On the face of it, this is an enormous shift in perspective, but I'd hazard that it's no different from moving between a spark-gap transmitter and an AM transmitter, or moving from AM to SSB, or the introduction of transistors. Each of those changes now look pretty small with hind-sight, but at the time that they occurred their impact must have been immense. I made contact with the software defined radio community a few weeks ago and in between my work I'm slowly beginning to explore this new universe that is beginning to unfold. Of course, as this evolution happens, while we're in the middle of the transition, as-in right now, there'll be discussion about the difference between digital and analogue, between hardware and software, about the benefits and pitfalls, no-doubt mirroring prior discussions that have been had across the past generations of amateurs. A new dawn has come and the future is here, come and join the fun. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I had the fortune of using a club station with an Advanced License whilst mobile using more than my usual 5 Watts. I was driving in convoy away from the main local 2m repeater and was interested in finding out what the coverage might look like and how high power might make a difference. When I say high power, that's 50 Watts FM on 2m. I learnt several things during my journey. First of all, line of sight is still true, even with more power, but there is more margin for error. Little obstacles that would cause a 5 Watt signal to be absorbed before it got to the other end are all but invisible with full power. Don't get me wrong, a hill is a hill and a radio signal won't go through it, but trees, houses, and all the other little things we humans build on the planet each obstruct a little bit of signal. Higher power gives you more margin and less effect on the resulting audio. The next thing I learned is that two cars, travelling in convoy can overwhelm each other with power. The way you experience this, is that the other car starts talking, and all you hear is mush. As they drive away from you, at say a traffic light, their signal becomes clearer, to the point where it's back to normal. The way it sounds is almost as if the signal to noise ratio is being adjusted, more signal, less noise as the distance increases - a very strange sound to hear. As it was explained to me, the phenomenon relates to the receiver being overwhelmed by the very strong signal nearby. I'm guessing that the AGC, Automatic Gain Control is reducing the sensitivity of the receiver, to compensate for the strong transmission nearby, which in turn means that it is unable to hear the repeater which is relaying the same signal on the receive frequency. As the distance from the strong transmission increases, the AGC compensates, increasing the gain, thus making the receiver able to hear the repeater. There wasn't the opportunity to experiment too much, being in a moving vehicle, but I wonder if changing the AGC setting would have made a difference. I suspect that there is more going on than just the AGC, since the signal from the nearby transmitter, the one in the other car, is still exciting the receiver, even if the gain is being adjusted. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that theoretically, I would have been able to hear both signals, the outgoing one from the other car, even though it's 5 MHz off frequency and the incoming signal from the repeater. Likely there was a minuscule delay between the two, perhaps even to the point of suppressing each-other. Another question that comes to mind is a phenomenon called the "FM Capture Effect" as well as the so-called "near-far problem" and I'm wondering if this is another aspect of what I was hearing and if we had a local AM repeater, would it exhibit the same behaviour? Now, as you might have guessed, there is very little in the way of research in my comments here, but that wasn't the point of what I'm talking about. The point was that a slightly new operating environment introduced me to concepts I'd never considered, never even really knew about, other than in a theoretical sense and I was able to actually see, well, hear, this in real life. Given my track record with over 300 different episodes, you can take for granted that I'll be digging deeper into the experience to see what I can learn and to see if my initial observations bear any relationship to reality, or if I'm adding two and two together and coming up with five. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There's a confession I'd like to share with you. Chatting on air is something I rarely do. When I'm working distant stations, so-called DX, my typical exchange is: AB0XYZ, you're 5 and 9. If the station has some questions to ask, I'll answer, but often times there is no conversation and I'll move on to the next one. Some of that can be explained by my initial training as an Amateur. I started working lots of stations in a contesting environment. I took to it as a duck to water and never looked back. No doubt I have lots to learn and I cannot guarantee that my callsign recollection is as good as I think it is, not to mention being able to detect an incorrect callsign, since I still have little knowledge in which callsign prefix, the first part, belongs to which country. Another explanation is that I'm often QRP and just very happy to be able to make the contact in the first place. I hear stations on-air having a great chat, a so-called rag-chew, but I never seem to find something interesting to say or relevant story to share with a stranger. Sure I can talk. As you might have gathered from listening to me here, I'm never short of something to say, or an opinion to venture, but being sociable is not one of my stronger traits, never has been. A few of our local Amateurs have a tendency to tell stories that go on for so-long that they time-out the local repeater, to the point where one repeater has been set to a 15 minute time-out just to cater for verbose exchanges. I immensely enjoy the stories, but often find myself wondering what I might contribute without sounding like I have tickets on myself. I recently was asked by a new Amateur what to talk about. Their daily commute is a 30 minute car ride to and from work and chatting on the repeater seems like a logical thing to do, but they asked me what to talk about. Stuffed if I know. Seriously though. The very first part of chatting is to actually turn on your radio. The next part is telling others that you're there. Then when they do, ask what they've been up to and before long there is a conversation under way. The funny thing about all this is that while I'm pretty quiet when it comes to being on the local repeater, I do host a weekly 'net for new and returning Amateurs and when asked I'm more than capable of standing my ground and venturing my opinion. Perhaps I just need to practice more and perhaps if you find yourself at a loose end on a topic of conversation, feel free to make fun of me or to raise a topic that's something I've talked about. Who knows, we might both learn something. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The Amateurs Code, originally written in 1928 has been quoted for almost a century. A Radio Amateur is Considerate, Loyal, Progressive, Friendly, Balanced and Patriotic. There is something almost romantic about that, but in my short life as an Amateur I've been exposed to much that leaves that as just a sentiment, rather than a social code. I'm not alone in that. I have numerous emails from Amateurs around the planet who share their negative experiences, often being bullied by self-proclaimed experts with an axe to grind. Our 1928 Amateur Code brings with it a sense of decorum, etiquette, but other than some true Gentlemen I've had the pleasure to meet, there are aspects about our community that just don't translate into today, even if the Amateur Code could lead the way. Our community of Radio Amateurs represents an opportunity to engage with society, to attract new blood, to include new ideas and to lead the way in community engagement. As one path towards growth of our hobby we have started talking about STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths as one way to relate to a wider community. That's a great sentiment, but I think we need to do some housekeeping before we embark on that journey. Amateur Radio is steeped in tradition. We use quaint terms such as OM, Old Man to describe each-other, YL, Young Lady to describe women in general and XYL for wives of Amateurs. We have a thing called a "Gentleman's Agreement" and we generally refer to Amateurs as He and Him. By doing that we've essentially limited our audience to 50% of the global population. We alienate women before we even start to engage them and when we do have female participation we get Facebook posts full of sexual innuendo, or outright sexist comments, not to mention the girlie pictures spread around the globe, sniggeringly exchanged as contact QSL cards. On air we alienate women, make disparaging or sexual comments or express our amazement that a mere female could achieve a license. What are we, pubescent boys? Is that the best we can do? The irony is that we as a community rarely discuss politics or religion. It's just not the done thing. In general day-to-day exchanges we use inclusive language. In our workplace we are sensitive to people who are different and in our laws and rules we champion equal rights for all humans, be they men, women, gay, straight, yellow, black, purple or intersex. Why is our Amateur language not inclusive in a hobby that is based around communication, where Amateurs clamour to work a pile-up on a rare DX station in some war-torn part of the globe, where science and rational thought are expected and where an Amateur Code written in 1928 encourages us to be Considerate, Loyal, Progressive, Friendly, Balanced and Patriotic? I think we need to take a long hard look at ourselves before we start going into schools and sharing what our amazing hobby is about. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is something magical about getting a new radio. I remember it well. Fondly even. I had done the research, consulted my bank account and picked my radio. It arrived in a courier delivery and I sat at the kitchen table, opening the box and marvelling at the parts that made up my first purchase as a radio amateur. I'd joined my local radio club a month earlier and proud as punch I took my shiny new box of joy to the club and showed it off to anyone who came near. I vividly remember one member's first comment: "Wow, that's an ugly radio!" I was heart broken, insulted, confused and didn't quite know what to do with that experience. My radio was beautiful, tiny, special. It was just what I wanted, it wasn't ugly and besides, it was mine. As irony would have it, several months later I saw their radio and thought that it wasn't something that I would like to bring home. Fast forward six years. The other week, I went to a local Ham-fest, it's a place, often a local hall with tables around the edges stacked full of an amazing array of stuff, where amateurs come together to meet and exchange their obsolete junk, uh, surplus equipment. It's not uncommon to arrive at a Ham-fest with one box and to leave with two. Among the tables and amateurs I was introduced to a new radio. I looked at it and in my head I thought: "Wow, that's an ugly radio!" - fortunately I managed to keep the thought to myself and instead asked the amateur who was showing it off about how it worked, how they liked it and what it cost. The amateur was excited to share their thoughts and I learned something from the exchange. When I got home I searched the 'net for some more information and found that this particular radio was more than it appeared and that my initial dislike of the visual translated into an interest that might yet see me as the owner of that radio. I know you're busting to ask which radio and which amateur, but I'm not here to advertise any particular radio, just to observe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that things can change once you know more. I wish I had those words to share with the first person who told me that I had an ugly radio, but I'm pleased that I have them now. So, beware, ugliness is an emotion, not always accurate and if you experience it, bite your tongue and learn something first. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The Hobby of Amateur Radio is a curious mix of technology, rules and people. If you're new to this you're likely to find yourself being swept up in the scale of the experience and more than I think is appropriate you'll find yourself at the pointy end of a barb by another member of the community. It's taken me over six years to begin to understand what is going on that is causing this. Let me start by saying that there is no place for bullies in this society. Correcting a mistake is one thing, but causing interference, transmitting insults, abusing people on air, ignoring new-comers or using social media to vent is just not appropriate. Bullying aside, after looking at posts on social media for a while, it occurred to me that much of what lies at the root of this behaviour is a fundamental mismatch between how licensing is achieved today, compared to how it was achieved historically. I see regular references to the type of examination. For example, historically examinations were conducted using full written exams, where today we are likely to use multiple-choice methods and even those are being reviewed. It occurs to me that historically, the process of becoming a licensed radio amateur was a slow and steady process, infused with deep contact with an existing amateur, regular training, exposure to the community, on-the-job training, interspersed with study and then finally an examination. Today, the process is more likely to be a much quicker affair, with initial exposure to the hobby, a visit to the local training facility, either face-to-face, or on-line, followed by an examination. If we assume for a moment that both examinations are the same in terms of assessment, and I know that in and of itself is controversial, what else is different between these two processes? The answer is the deep contact while learning. In the United States this is referred to as Elmering, in Australia it's called Mentoring and it isn't the same as it used to be. Today there is mentoring going on, lots of it, but often that's after someone has actually received their credentials as a licensed operator. We assume that the examination prepares us for the hobby, but actually, the examination just prepares you for the law. That is, holding a certificate of proficiency means essentially that you are now legally aware that you can create interference and that you are liable if you do so. As I said, the deep contact during the learning process is different. That deep contact exposes a new amateur to the unwritten rules and customs that form part of the community of radio amateurs across the globe. For example, we use Lower Side Band or LSB below 10 MHz and Upper Side Band or USB above 10 MHz. There is no technical reason, just historical ones, that make that this must be so. There are many, many such un-written rules about amateur radio. Often they are referred to as the "Gentleman's Agreement" - and I'll leave aside for a moment the gender issues related to that notion. This so-called "Gentleman's Agreement", is not written down, it's passed on from amateur to amateur, or assumed to have been magically acquired by the process of osmosis. So, a newly minted Amateur, truth be told, I'm one of those, steps into the stream and gets swamped by rules that appear from no-where and instead of getting chapter and verse on how to learn, the amateur gets insulted and ostracised. It is clear to me today - more than it has ever been - that old hams die hard. They are responsible for their legacy and if they want to maintain the hobby in their image, they're required to be inclusive and assist new amateurs, rather than insult them and drive them away. I know that there are many wonderful amateurs in our community who do just that. However, the noisy ones just want the new amateurs to get off their lawn and go and play with something else, preferably not in their patch. I have no doubt that I'll get flurries of people who feel insulted by what I have observed and to those I can only say: "If the shoe fits..." For the rest of us, it's time to get on air and make some noise. Document any rules you come across and perhaps one day we'll have a code of conduct that radio amateurs can hold up to the world as an example of tolerance, inclusiveness and encouragement. If we're lucky we can even incorporate the Amateurs Code, originally written in 1928. A Radio Amateur is Considerate, Loyal, Progressive, Friendly, Balanced and Patriotic. We can dream. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One question I get asked regularly is: "What's the point of Amateur Radio?" Today I'm going to begin to answer this perennial question. As you know, this activity is a hobby, something you do for your personal enjoyment. People get pleasure from a vast range of undertakings and if you combine multiple such adventures into your life all the better. Amateur Radio is a hobby in and of itself, but it's also an enabling hobby. What I mean by that is it often can act as an excuse to do something else - under the guise of being Amateur Radio. For example, you can use an activity called SOTA to add some fun into your life. I've spoken in the past about SOTA, Summits On The Air. It's a way to enjoy being outdoors and climbing across the globe, as well as an excuse to participate from the comfort of your shack to encourage climbers and even as an unlicensed radio enthusiast, you can also participate. SOTA started in 2002 with the publication of the General Rules which outline all that the community expects and needs from you if you participate. In the intervening years the document has grown to 23 pages and I confess I was not looking forward to reading it all and truth be told, I've not yet digested the finer points, but I will before I next climb up a mountain. Don't get me wrong, it's not an onerous document, it's laid out well, describes precisely what's involved, how it's structured, who to ask questions of, what code of conduct is expected and what constitutes a valid SOTA activity. As I said, before I next climb up a mountain - more precisely, in SOTA terms - it's a prominence, something sticking out of the earth. Before you start gathering maps and looking at tall rocks, a prominence isn't just about how tall it is, but also how close other peaks, there's a whole definition of this idea, but the SOTA volunteers have done all the work, so you don't need to get technical to get on-air. There's rules about getting to a peak, about being there, about the environment, about how to use callsigns and the use of cars and other things, so before you get yourself into strife, like I did, read the rules. There's three kinds of participants, an Activator, someone who climbs up the mountain, gets wet, gets snowed in, gets hot and sticky, eaten by mosquitoes, breaks stuff and does all the hard work. The second type of participant is the person in the shack behind their radio, on the listen-out for new activations, making contacts, logging them and gathering points. The final group of participants is the Short Wave Listener or SWL, who logs contacts, showing both sides of the communication, both stations heard, etc. An awards system exists for all three participants. SOTA is a global activity. On the face of things it might seem daunting and my highlights of the notion that there are rules should not deter you from actually participating. The rules are to ensure that people don't get into trouble and die, to make sure that everyone has a good time and to deal with disputes as and when they arise. Many resources about Summits On The Air can be found online, but your starting point should be http://sota.org.uk where you'll find a welcoming and active community of enthusiasts who also like being on-air and making noise from weird and wonderful locations on top of big rocks. The point of Amateur Radio is to find something that you enjoy doing and making it a shared experience by incorporating your radio. A bit like Mark Twain said: "Golf is a good walk spoiled", SOTA is a mountain climb enhanced. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio To sign or not to sign, that is the question. Last week I spoke about operating with low power, or QRP which sparked a lively discussion which evolved into a conversation about adding bits to your callsign to indicate some extra information. For example, some stations will add stroke QRP to their callsign when they're operating low power when others don't. Other examples are adding stroke Portable or stroke Mobile. Let me start by saying that I'm not familiar with the rules in countries outside Australia, but I'd be surprised if they're much different, since callsigns follow a global standard, but check your local laws before you start getting on-air to make noise. In Australia the rules, the Radiocommunications Licence Conditions (Amateur Licence) Determination 2015, commonly referred to as the LCD has nothing to say about any such addition to a call sign. There is no mention of low power operation, mobile operation, marine operation or any such thing. The reference to portable operation discusses how long you're allowed to operate a portable station without notifying the regulator. So, from a legal perspective, there is no such thing as a stroke anything. So where does this addition of stroke QRP, or stroke Mobile or any other variation come from? The regulator maintains a website that has a page called "Amateur operating procedures" which "can help prospective amateur operators". It details types of transmissions, discusses code words like QRP and has one set of comments about adding something to a transmission when operating mobile or portable. It suggests that you can say something like: This is VK6FLAB operating portable on Wave Rock, and if you're operating outside your state, suggests that you might shorten that to VK6FLAB/5 when operating in South Australia or VK5. So, there is no such thing as stroke Portable, stroke Mobile, stroke QRP and the only suggestion from the regulator is that you indicate that you're mobile or portable and help by indicating your state if you're not operating within your home state. In the past few years I have signed with VK6FLAB/QRP but after realising that this causes much confusion in logging, I have stopped doing it. These days you might hear me say that I'm operating QRP during a CQ call, to help other stations a little, but I've often found that it's really not worth the extra breath. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A phrase I hear regularly is "life's too short for QRP" and today I think that it's appropriate to start a conversation about that sentiment. When propagation is poor the high-power amplifiers get on air and use it to prove that you need power to get out and about. Far be it for me to deny another amateur the pleasure of working a thousand stations at the same time, a so-called pile-up. It's a thrill. I've done it during contests. It's fun. You call CQ and the biggest problem you're faced with is deciding on which station to pick. In the past I've mentioned that I've made a contact with Cuba, about 18,000 km away using 5 Watts. Over the weekend I managed just under a third of the distance, Perth to Tuvalu, 7,000 km with a wire and 5 Watts. You could take away from this that I like bragging about my contacts and it's true that I'm proud of having achieved those things, but that's not actually what I want to talk about. Amateur Radio is a lot like fishing. You can go out and throw a stick of dynamite into a pond and pull out all the fish, or you can stand up to your armpits with a reel in your hand casting a fly to catch a fish. Operating QRP is like fly-fishing. It takes practice, patience and perseverance. Of course it's not for everybody, but then neither is fly-fishing. If you hold an introductory Amateur Radio license like I do, the rules of engagement restrict how much power you're allowed to use. For some this restriction appears to inhibit their ability to enjoy the hobby. This podcast started life some six years ago precisely because a new entrant was expressing their need for more power. My contact over the weekend wasn't particularly earth shattering. It was made with a minimum of equipment, a wire antenna on a squid-pole strapped to a house, simple radio, running off a battery in preparation for a contest that was happening the next day. The thing to note is that it happened on 40m, using 5 Watts and the distance was twice the maximum distance within my own country. This means that any amateur who is starting out can achieve the same thing. It means that you might need to review your assumptions if you think of a 4,000km distance between stations as a hurdle that cannot be overcome. The take-away should be that while QRP is not for everyone, it's a perfectly valid way of enjoying the hobby and smelling the roses along the way. In case you're wondering, yes, I was wearing a grin from ear to ear after making my contact. Better still, I didn't have to kiss any fish. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week I was casually asked "What is a resistor?" Now if you're into electronics like many radio amateurs, you'll instantly have a picture of a little blob with two wires with pretty colours painted on the outside, the size of a grain of rice and if you're not into electronics, you now know what a resistor looks like. Before I talk more about resistors, I'm going to talk about a stick. If you pick up a stick and poke something with it, some interesting stuff is actually happening. You move your hand at one end and the other end moves at the same time. Obvious right? It's a stick. On a molecular level something else is happening. The atoms under your hand inside the stick move back and forth with your hand as you move it. The atoms next to those atoms do the same thing. The atoms next to that, all the way to the end, also do the same. Now you likely have a picture in your mind of a solid stick. On a molecular level, this isn't solid at all. Instead of a solid stick, imagine having a row of ice-cubes with a little space in between each one being bumped by the previous ice-cube. The ice-cube closest to you moves with your hand, the one next to that gets bumped, all the way to the end. With ice-cubes there is a noticeable delay if the gaps are visible, but the delay gets smaller and smaller if the cubes are closer and closer together. In an electrical wire a similar thing is happening. You might have a picture in your mind of electrons travelling from one end of a battery, through a wire to the other end of a battery. Except that's not what is happening. While electrons do move, very slowly, it's called the drift velocity, think centimetres, or inches per hour, turning on a light is instant. It's instant because each atom affects the one next to it, which does the same to the one next to that and so-on. While not exact, this happens roughly at the speed of light. This is beginning to look a lot like a stick. Push at one end, something happens at the other end, almost immediately. Instead of ice-cubes, but in much the same way, we're actually moving an electrical charge from one end of a wire to the other. It takes energy to keep a charge moving along a wire. The amount of energy used is the resistance of that wire. Not all materials act in the same way. Some, like silver or copper, use little energy or have low resistance, while others like carbon, use more energy and have high resistance. You'll find resistors made in many different ways of various different materials. Each one is made for the specific purpose of using a defined amount of energy to pass along a charge. There are resistors made of carbon and of thin film of conductive material sometimes with laser cut paths to make them appear as a long maze of conductive material and of very thin wire, tightly wound together. This kind of wire resistor has a side-effect in that a tightly wound coil like that has some properties that we use in Amateur Radio, we often think of these kinds of devices as inductors. But that's another story for another day. As a side note, I started using coulombs, joules, volts, amperes and ohms to explain this, but I figured that it wasn't needed to understand how it actually works. If you have some time, look into it, the maths is fascinating and pretty straight forward. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I managed to achieve a little personal milestone. I heard myself on-air. Before you get all misty-eyed, yes, I've heard myself on-air before - probably on thousands of occasions over the years, but that's not what this was. This was my own transmitter, in my shack, transmitting my voice via SSB and it being received and me hearing it. In broadcast radio this is a common thing. Every radio station I've ever been in pipes the audio from a normal radio receiver into the studio, so you can confirm that your transmission is in fact going to air as expected. There are funny stories associated with experts who decided that they didn't need to wear headphones and promptly broadcast silence because their microphone volume was turned down or not plugged in - gotta love the helpful announcer in the previous shift. So, what was so special about hearing myself this time? Well, for the first time I heard my SSB voice. Not AM, not FM, SSB. I'd tried this before using two radios and a dummy load, but that just ended up in distortion, not much fun. Let me tell you how I managed this and what I learned along the way. Online I found a local Software Defined Radio, or SDR, that had the ability to tune to a frequency that I am allowed to transmit on. That seems pretty straightforward, but in actual fact getting those three things, Online, Local and Frequency all together has proven to be a bit of a challenge. I started listening to the station to see how their signal compared to mine. I have a project sitting on my shelf to put together my own SDR, but that ran into some procurement issues, so I've been limited in my ability to experiment. I started out trying to listen to the local HF beacon, part of the Northern California DX Beacon network. Turns out that the SDR and I can hear that pretty equally. I did notice that there was about a five second delay between what I heard off-air and what the SDR sent to me across the Internet. I don't know if the delay is because the Internet signal travelled back and forth across the country a couple of times, or because this particular SDR has some delays. I tuned the SDR to 28.490 and my radio to 28.490 and after checking if the frequency was in-use started some test transmissions. Nothing was working. No noise, nada. It does help if you plug the right antenna into the radio. Tada, look Ma, it makes noise! I could hear myself. It became clear that there was a difference in what I was expecting to hear and what I actually heard. Playing with different modes didn't seem to make any real difference, so I was a little stumped. I recalled that during a contest I had been advised that I was off frequency, so I played with my Tuning Dial, known as the VFO, and adjusted my frequency to 28.489.50 and there I was, just like I expected. Five second delay and all. At that point I wondered if this meant that the SDR frequency was wrong, or mine, or both - how could I prove it? Some hunting around for suggestions revealed the idea of tuning the SDR to one of the time frequencies, on 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 MHz, better known as WWV and WWH. On these frequencies a 24 hour a day transmission happens that encodes the time. You'll hear a ticking clock, voice indicating time and it has all manner of extra information encoded in the signal. It's used as a time standard but also as a frequency reference. Best results are when you use AM and you can use it to get a sense of propagation between you and Colorado in the United States. Mind you they are using a few extra Watts. Zooming right in I could see that the SDR was indicating that it was bang on frequency, so I'm about 50 Hz off, high as it happens. Which just means that I need to tune a little lower than the frequency I want to be on and I'm good to go. Only I'm not yet convinced. I came across settings on my radio, the TX Carrier Point for USB, menu 18 on my Yaesu FT-857d. Other than various wild guesses by others, I still don't know what it actually does, all I do know is that it was set to 150 Hz. Setting it back to 0 didn't make the problem go away, but it did appear to improve things. Not sure yet if my radio is in need of a doctor, or if I am in need of some instruction, either way I'm sure you or a friend knows and is willing to share. Turns out, I sound just as sexy on SSB as I do on FM. At least my wife thinks so. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio There's a quote from a television show that speaks greatly to me. "If they're shooting at you - you know you're doing something right!" I've been producing this weekly recording since May of 2011. It started life as "What use is an F-call?" and the first episode was recorded in response to an Amateur who bemoaned their transmitter power restrictions associated with their beginners license - when I used the same power to speak to a station 15,000km away the week before. I named the segment after the common term for my license - a Foundation License - in Australia known as an F-call. It's the so-called beginner's license, something you can get by spending a weekend with a book and passing a test that introduces you to the hobby of Amateur Radio. Since that first recording I've produced 296 different episodes, it was renamed to "Foundations of Amateur Radio" and I started putting the recording online as a podcast. In those episodes I've covered many different topics, from what to spend your money on, how to get started, what antenna's do and how you can build them, how different technologies work and what the Amateur Radio community is like. A recurring theme in my recordings is the attitude of other Amateurs to those who are starting in the hobby. I come back to it regularly because I keep getting emails from listeners who are subjected to varying levels of abuse by other Amateurs. I've taken to going to the Amateur Training College to explain that Amateurs are a mixed lot, many wonderful people and some rotten apples who make a lot of noise. I have had messages detailing abhorrent behaviour and read messages of those who left the hobby because of it. Fortunately the opposite is also true. I have messages from people who came back to this amazing adventure and got inspired by some of the things I've said and used this to rekindle their interest, or to finally go for their license, or to finally pluck up the courage and press the Push To Talk button on their radio and speak. We all make mistakes. I know I do. Sometimes I even find out that I made a mistake. For example, last week an Amateur told me that I'd claimed to have had 45 years of Computing Experience, which would make me a toddler when I started. Turns out he's right, I did claim that. Whoops. I meant to say 35 years, but wait for a bit and 45 years will be close enough. It's a shame that he didn't comment on the actual content of the segment, namely that we have a pre-conceived idea of what constitutes an Amateur, even though that is a changing thing. The episode is called "We should stop requiring electronics to be amateurs.", episode 28 of Foundations of Amateur Radio if you're interested. It's also a shame that he didn't point out a much larger error, in my episodes about chickens, but another Amateur, who sat on this for some time because he wasn't sure, caught up with me for lunch and we discussed in great detail what our common understanding was. We're still working out how exactly I explain what I said and how it differs from reality, suffice to say, I'm a curious kind-of-guy and I like to learn. That learning is also a regular topic of attack. It seems that some Amateurs who in the words of a wise-man - "who's only achievement in life was to pass their Amateur License" use my continued status as holder of a Foundation License as evidence that I'm clearly not able to pass my exam and ridicule my excuse of a License to claim that I want to talk to the world using 5 Watts before changing license. I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is your hobby. If you gain pleasure from getting a higher level of responsibility, then by all means do so. If you need something that your current license doesn't have, go for it. For me, my license does exactly what I want today, nothing more, nothing less. I have enough privileges to achieve what I want from this hobby today and my lowly license did not prevent me from spending every week learning something new about this hobby. As this recording gains in popularity I'm expecting more and more people to take pot-shots at me. As I started, "If they're shooting at you - you know you're doing something right!" - taking pot-shots as keyboard warriors is pretty easy to do. Seems that it's much harder to actually engage in a meaningful conversation about the topic at hand. You might be listening to this and wondering why I'm bringing this up. Simple really. You are an Amateur, you're likely to be interacting with other Amateurs. Some of those will be helpful and friendly and others will be the opposite. I'm talking about this to make sure that you don't loose track of why you became an Amateur and to keep enjoying this wonderful hobby. I love this hobby. It challenges me every week and it gives me a thrill every time I learn something new. I hope that I'm not alone in that. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past six years or so I've single mindedly been producing a weekly segment about Amateur Radio. Over time this has evolved into a podcast which gets about half a million hits a year. Naturally I receive emails and I do my best to respond in a timely fashion. One of the other things I do is announce a new edition of the podcast on several different sites where listeners have the opportunity to share their views about what ever is on their mind. Sometimes their response is even about the podcast itself, though I confess that some comments appear to indicate that listening isn't part of a requirement to actually form an opinion about what it is that I have said that week. All that aside, I find it immensely fascinating that the responses I receive vary so much in perspective. It's not hard to understand and observe that our community comes from people along all walks of life. From nine-year olds to ninety-year olds and everything in between. I tend not to comment directly on such feedback, since everyone has their own opinion, but I came across one post recently that made me sad about the spirit of some Amateurs. In a seemingly bygone era there was a sense that Amateurs would help new people join the community and help them find their way into this vast range of discovery. A place where no question was wrong, where shared experiences are cherished and where the lack of knowledge was an opportunity for learning. It seems that the moniker that we carry, that of HAM, supposedly because when compared to Professional Telegraphers, we were considered HAM-fisted, went on to form the basis of a proud tradition of experimentation and renewal. Across the globe we see a refresh of the license conditions on a regular basis. We saw that here in Australia with the introduction of the so-called Z-call and K-call, looked down upon by Real Amateurs who had a much more stringent licensing regime. We discontinued Morse Code as a requirement for an Amateur License as part of a global treaty agreement in 2003. In Australia this meant that from the 1st of January 2004, Morse Code was no longer required if you wanted to obtain an Amateur License. As you know, that didn't signal the end of Morse, just that it wasn't legally required any more. I'm one of many Amateurs learning Morse because I want to, not because I have to. I'd also point out that it was discontinued by global agreement, not two random guys in Canberra. Back to my point about the spirit of this hobby. The point that was being made is that the Foundation Class license isn't a real license and that it is just being handed to anyone who asks, not like their requirements for Morse Code and a written exam, rather than a multiple-choice test. Essentially conveying that my undignified license and that of my fellow Foundation Licensees isn't to be confused with the noble one that a Real Amateur holds. This kind of response saddens me and frankly I hear it too often. It's as-if we as a community still have not learned that the world moves on. Technology, in many ways the basis of Amateur Radio, evolves. For example, in the current requirements for an Amateur License there is a long-winded discussion about the impacts of spurious transmissions on Analogue Television. In Australia, the last Analogue TV broadcast happened on the 4th of December 2013, that's years ago, but it's still required reading on the Amateur License Syllabus. Similarly we learn about Valves, but attempting to actually obtain such a device is nigh-on impossible. Should we still be learning about those aspects of Electronics, or should we move on? Amateurs are an inventive lot, we make up new modes, link up new technologies, experiment with all manner of stuff and sometimes we end up with something new, like IRLP, AllStar, SDR, Digital Modes and the like. All because someone got curious, couldn't help themselves and started to fiddle. As things fall off the radar at one end, Analogue TV, Morse Code, Valves, the other end picks up things, JT65, Digital TV, Lithium Polymer Batteries and whatever else comes around the corner. So, I'm sad that there are people who feel that my license isn't a real one. As many of my peers, I have a piece of paper from my regulator that begs to differ and a community of enthusiastic eager people who are attempting to find their home among our hobby as it evolves into the future. Last week I talked about the death of our hobby and that it was vastly mis-represented. As I said, year-on-year, more and more Amateurs join, but overall the numbers decline. I think that opinions expressed about the lack of real licensing, decrying the death of Morse etc. is a symptom of why it is that we have a retention problem in our hobby. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but that doesn't mean I have to agree. This is my hobby too and disdain is my fuel! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I was told that Amateur Radio as a hobby is dead. This isn't news. It's often repeated and the story goes like this. The hobby is full of old dying men who when they finally shuffle off this mortal coil, or as we like to say "become a silent key", will take their hobby with them. There is anecdotal evidence to back this up. An organisation that tasked itself with the preservation of Morse Code in the tradition of Telegraphers and Seafarers is forecasting their demise due to the age of their membership. Other comments along these same lines talk about the futility of Amateur Radio in the face of other communication tools such as the Internet, Mobile Phones and the like. Emergency Services often ignore the Amateur Radio Service because they have all the communication infrastructure they need. People point at the declining numbers of Amateurs and say: "See, I told you, the numbers don't lie!" If you listen to this you might wonder why it is that you're fascinated by this endeavour and what it is that these tales of doom and gloom for the future of our hobby mean for you. Let's start with the numbers. In Australia in 2005 a new class of Amateur License was introduced. It's called the Foundation License and the purpose was to attract new people into the hobby of Amateur Radio. Looking at the numbers we see a year on year increase in the number of Foundation Calls. Many of those go on to gain extra responsibilities by getting a Standard or Advanced License. Some Amateurs let their Foundation Call lapse, so the increase of people entering is actually higher than a simple count of callsigns might suggest. So, we're getting more and more people into the hobby every year. But the overall numbers are declining. How can that be? Well, simple really. We don't have a problem with growth, we have a problem with retention. This means that as a community we're doing great things about getting new people into our wonderful hobby but doing a poor job at making them feel welcome and keep coming back. Those are numbers, but there are other things happening as well. The Internet today is a connection, actually an Inter-connection of networks. You might be surprised to learn that these networks started when we figured out how to use Morse Code on wires to send messages across the globe. While the original copper is probably not being used, though that in itself would be an interesting research project, the Internet today has its roots in the Morse Code driven Telegraphy network. The very first one of those was set up over 200 years ago in 1816. There is a long history of explaining the relationship between wire Telegraph and Radio Communication, featuring long cats, dogs and a war between Austria and Prussia. Suffice to say that Telegraphy and Radio Communications both form part of a symbiotic relationship. It still does today. The Wired Internet and the Wireless Internet are the same animal dressed up with fancy technology. Amateur Radio is the experimental arm of Radio Communications, so as long as humans want to communicate with each other we're here to stay. Time and again, Emergency Services need operators in the case of an actual emergency and historically they have been drawn from wherever experienced bodies could be rousted, suffice to say, the Amateur community keeps on giving. As for the old and dying men. Sure, we have some amazing history that senior members of the Amateur community have to contribute, with many lessons to be learned for the likes of young'ns like me, but I'm getting older every day and with me the rest of the population too. At some point we'll all be older and wiser, perhaps we'll even be Amateurs. Another way of looking at this is as the global population gets older with more free time on their hands, the more opportunities exist to introduce people into our hobby. As for the retention. As a community we really need to investigate what it is that makes people leave, since that's where the growth of our community is working against our achievements to promote and encourage new entrants. If you're not an Amateur today, I'd like to encourage you to investigate. If you are, then I'd like to encourage you to welcome new members, tell your stories and use your experience in this amazing hobby to share your excitement and sense of wonder. Perhaps consider if there is something you can do to help new Amateurs flourish in our community. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur Radio as a hobby is one of those activities that covers a wide range of pursuits. A fellow Amateur once referred to it at 1000 hobbies in one. I like that as a description, but it really doesn't cover how wide and extensive this hobby really is. You've heard me talk about radios and on-air activity, about contesting, about out door activities, about electronics and antennas, about the grey line and about decibels. Today I'm going to talk about the Sun. Using a hand-held radio you're often using higher frequencies, 2m, or 144 MHz or higher. These radio waves mostly travel along line-of-sight. If you look at the lower frequencies, called HF, 28 MHz, 21 MHz, or lower, then those radio waves also travel line-of-sight, but they also travel up into the ionosphere surrounding the earth. If you manage to hit the angle just right, then some of those will reflect off the ionosphere back to earth. It's a lot like skipping a stone on a pond. If you get it right, you might make it skip several bounces, if you get it wrong, it will go "plop" and vanish. The same is true for these frequencies. One of the things that makes the ionosphere reflective to radio waves of a certain frequency is the level of ionisation in this area around the globe. Typically the ionosphere is somewhere between 50km and 1000km above you right now. At different heights the ionosphere reacts differently and the Sun shining on it will alter the properties as the day unfolds. This is why when night turns into day and day turns into night, special things start happening along the border between day and night, the so-called grey line where it's not quite day and it's not quite night. One way of looking at this is that the ionosphere heats up during the day. Now heat is an interesting thing. The Sun shining on your skin is experienced as heat, but what's actually happening is that the radiation from the Sun is exciting the electrons on your skin and you experience that as heat. As a matter of interest, the Sun generates about 650 Watts per square meter in the middle of the day coming through the atmosphere. That's about 650 Joules of Energy per second per square meter. Lots of excitement. At the outside of the earth, there's about 1300 Watts per square meter. The difference, 650 Watts, is absorbed by the atmosphere. So, the equivalent of the heat you feel on your skin is also heating up the atmosphere. Now, this "heat" is really energy that's exciting electrons and thus also exciting the ionosphere. At the simplest level this is making the ionosphere more reflective to radio waves. I'm deliberately simplifying this because I don't want to get bogged down into how precisely, because my point is about the Sun and more specifically about Sun-spots. There I said it, Sun-spots. What are they and what do they have to do with anything? Well, a Sun-spot is a cool place on the Sun. When I say cool, it's about half as warm at a Sun-spot than the area around it, only 3000 degrees Celsius, instead of 6000 degrees. Sun-spots appear in pairs on opposite sides of the Sun and represent a point on the Sun where an intense magnetic field comes through the Sun. You can think of it as a huge race-track through the Sun that accelerates particles from the Sun into space. These particles represent energy and if they happen to hit the earth, they add a whole lot of extra energy to the ionosphere, making it much more reflective. The more Sun-spots, the more energy, the more excitement of the ionosphere, the more reflection, the better radio communications. Sun-spots generally appear in groups and the density of these groups varies over time. To get a uniform sense of how much energy there is around, scientists came up with a Sun-spot number. It's indicative of how much activity there is, not an actual count of the number of dots on the Sun, since some spots are large and others are relatively small. The increase and decrease of solar activity repeats over time. Using carbon dating we can get well over 11,000 years of solar activity which has lead us to say that we have a solar cycle that lasts about 22 years. Of course that isn't exact, since this is nature, but it gives us a simple way of better understanding a very complex topic. The final bit of information you need is that when the amount of solar activity has peaked we have hit solar maximum and when it's hit the bottom, we have hit solar minimum. Since you cannot see those while you're in the middle of it, you can only really look back in time to determine what the exact point in time was that this occurred. Another way to detect that we've hit a minimum is that the magnetic pole of a Sun-spot reverses. As I said, they come in pairs. One is the North Pole of the magnetic field, the other is the South Pole. When these reverse, that's an indication that we're starting the next solar cycle. All that being said, it means that Sun-spot activity is strongly related to your ability to use HF

Foundations of Amateur Radio In my travels along the highways and byways of the Internet I came across several references to MARS in relation to Amateur Radio. Being the curious soul that I am, my interest was sparked. I must warn you, today there is a lot to cover. First up before I tell you anything, let me start by pointing out that what I'm talking about has different levels of application depending on where you are on the planet. I also need to inform you that in some parts of the globe this is considered illegal, where in other parts of the same globe, it's perfectly fine. So, MARS, or MARS/CAP if you want to get more precise. What is it, how does it work and what do you need to know about it? MARS is an acronym for Military Auxiliary Radio System and CAP is an acronym for Civil Air Patrol. Given that we don't have such things in Australia, this phenomenon relates to the United States of America where MARS/CAP is used to coordinate search activities and relay messages on HF and VHF frequencies near Amateur Bands. As an interested party you can join up, do training and participate. That aside, the term MARS/CAP is more widely referred to as a way of modifying your radio to allow it to access to frequencies outside the Amateur Bands. Now at this point if you're a licensed Amateur your ears should have pricked up when you heard the words "modifying your radio" and "outside the Amateur Bands". This is as I already said, legal in some parts of the globe and not in other parts. So, a MARS/CAP modification extends the frequency coverage of your radio. Some modifications involve extending what frequencies you can receive, others extend the transmit frequencies. Often these changes are separate, but not always, so make yourself aware of what you're doing before you do anything. Now why am I telling you about something that some might consider shady or illegal? First of all, I've not actually told you what to do or how to do it. Second, if you're trawling through the Internet and you come across such a thing, how would you know what it means in your situation, other than a list of instructions shown on some random website? There are several different aspects to this. As I mentioned, the legal aspect which I'll discuss a little more later. There's also the technical, performance and warranty aspects to consider. Not to mention, emergencies and other exceptions. From a technical perspective, there are generally two types of MARS/CAP modifications. There are hardware ones where you pull out your soldering iron and modify the circuit on your radio by adding or removing something. There are also software modifications where updating the version of the software on your radio, or changing a flag, or setting a memory will make the modification. The hardware changes are generally pretty permanent, the software ones are often able to be reverted back to normal, but not always. While I'm warning you, some radios when opened up reset their memories, so you may need to reprogram all those channels when you put it back together again. Now, your Amateur Radio is a finely tuned animal. It's specifically configured to work within the specifications of the Amateur Bands and regulations and as you should know, there isn't a single piece of hardware that exists that isn't subject to the variation of its components. This means that if you compare two identical radios, the same batch, the same builder, they still are not identical. If you put them on a testing bench, you'll notice subtle differences. They'll be close, but not the same. Each one is specifically set with preferences, variable capacitors, inductors and resistors to respond just so, and meddling with the hardware or software can - and likely will - change this finely balanced piece of gear. If you're fiddling to fiddle, be aware that you might never get your radio back to the way it was before you changed it. If you let the magic black smoke out of your radio and return it to the manufacturer for a warranty repair, be prepared for a rejection letter or a hefty bill if you make any modifications. So, on the no side, there are lots of things to consider. On the yes side, there are others. In the case of an emergency all is forgiven. If you need to call an emergency on some random frequency, then that's fine, but make sure it's a real life threatening one. If that's the case, does that mean that you need to carry a soldering iron around or a computer with a piece of software to reprogram you radio when that emergency hits? Another thing is that many Amateur Radios, including the one sitting on my go-kit, a Yaesu VX-7R has a receive range of 500 kHz to 1 GHz with a few little gaps to exclude some mobile phone frequencies. There is no need to do any modifications to receive anything, just to transmit. There are many websites dedicated to MARS/CAP modifications and for some people these are perfectly fine, but you won't find much in the way of disclaimers on those sites, nor

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you have the need to switch something on and off, a likely first candidate is to get a switch from the local hardware store. The principle is pretty straightforward. You put the switch into the power supply lead and by pushing it on, the two halves of the switch make contact with each other, completing a circuit, and the thing you're switching turns on. It's a lot like having two bits of bare wire that you can touch the ends together. What if you want to remove the human touch from the equation, that is, switch something without having to actually push a switch? A potential candidate for this is a relay. In essence it's exactly the same as a manual switch, except the pushing is done by an electromagnet. The way it works is that you send a current through a coil that is wound around a metal core which results in a magnetic force. This force is used to push or pull the switch open or closed. Now both a manual switch and a relay have moving parts. That means that there is a limit to how fast you can switch something on and off. You can probably push a manual switch several times a second, lets say 10. So the switching speed is called 10 Hz. A relay can likely get you switching around 100 times per second, or 100 Hz, but if you want to switch something at a much higher speed, say at 1000 Hz or more, some other form of switching comes into play. At its simplest, a transistor is like a relay without any moving parts. There's no actual switch, no coil, no electromagnet, none of that. Without going into the physics of how this all works, let's look at an analogy. Imagine a water-pipe with a valve on it. You can open or close the valve and water flows or not. In a transistor, the same principle applies. There are three legs, two of them act as the water pipe, the third one acts as the valve. You open or close the valve by putting a current onto the valve - or base - leg and a current flows between the other two, the collector leg and emitter leg. Now, so far I've just told you that you can open or close a transistor with a current, but it's actually more nifty than that. You don't need to have it all on or all off. In our water pipe you can set the valve to any setting and control how much water flows. In a transistor you can do the same by changing how much current you put onto the switching or base leg. You might have heard a description that says that a transistor is both a switch and an amplifier. If you haven't don't fret, I'll explain. Let's go back to water for a moment. Imagine a huge water pipe connected to a dam. Lots of water all pushing into our water pipe. The valve we have can be controlled by you blowing water through a straw into the valve. The more water you blow into the valve, the more water flows out of the dam through the pipe. If you blow hard into the straw, the result is a wide open valve and lots of water from the dam, if you blow softly, less water. In essence your little water flow from your straw is being amplified by the dam. A transistor works just like that. As I said, you don't have to use a transistor just to switch something completely on, or completely off. If you vary the current into the base, you can vary the amount of flow between the collector leg and emitter leg. The current you use to control the flow is tiny, so you can use a really weak signal to control the thing. In essence that's how a transistor radio works. The small signal that we use to control the flow is the tiny one coming from an antenna, the dam is the battery and the speaker is connected to the output. So, a small electrical current coming from the antenna controls the transistor which in turn controls the amount of current coming from the battery onto the speaker. A hearing aid also works in the same way. A small current coming from a microphone controls the transistor which in turn controls the amount of output from the battery to a speaker. The reason I mention transistor radios and hearing aids is because that's how the invention of a transistor in 1947 was popularised, since it was seen as a nifty gadget in the days of valves with little application in the real world. Since then, we've combined billions of transistors into chips that we use daily to see what time it is, what the weather is like and to write emails, control rockets, save lives and do all the things we take for granted in our electronic world. The transistor is an example of a nifty idea that you may think of as being a difficult concept, but in reality is not that hard. Don't get me wrong. There are many different types of transistors, each with different characteristics and limitations, the physics don't work like water, but knowing the basics of how it works will be sufficient to get you on your way. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I look at an antenna and marvel at what it implies. A simple piece of conducting material made into some particular shape and size that harnesses the radio spectrum. I find it fascinating that this can and does exist and my fascination translates into a thing of beauty. I recall being on a camping trip and being introduced by a friend to an antenna that was strung between two trees in the middle of the bush. For some reason that escapes me we needed to lower the antenna and I got to have a look at the feed-point. Let me describe this to you. Picture a ceramic fence insulator. The two legs of the wire dipole are each fed through the insulator at a 90 degree offset, in just the same way as you would install it into an electric fence. Looped around this is a piece of RG213 coax which is soldered onto each leg of the dipole, shield to one side, centre to the other. No traditional balun, but there is a piece of wire wrapped around the coax, holding it all together and I have no doubt that it acts as some form of choke. This thing looks absolutely horrible. It's weathered, it's rough, it's nasty, has spider-webs and other little critters living in the insulator, the soldering is quick and dirty, the shield is roughly attached to one of the legs. If you've been in the Australian Bush and visited a farm there you'll know exactly how rough and ready this antenna is. I seem to recall that its proud owner (Hi Kim) put it up temporarily in a hurry to get on air one day, a decade or so ago. So, what of this ugly mess? It was the best antenna I've used in a long while. It allowed me to make my first QRP contact across the length of Australia into New Zealand. It allowed me to contact the 7130 DX net for the first time and we talked to a globe circumnavigating sailor on this antenna. So, as ugly as this thing is to look at, from an antenna perspective, it's the most beautiful thing I've seen in a while. Now, you need to know something. I saw this antenna nearly four years ago. I have photos of it. Every now and then I go back to those photos and marvel at it. In our hobby we have people from all different walks of life. It's been pointed out on more than one occasion that as a community, the single piece of glue we have is our Amateur License. Of course some of us have more in common than just that, but it would be smart to remember that every member of our community has a different view on aesthetics, a different perspective on what is good and what is bad. I recall coming into a new radio club, I had been an Amateur for less than a month, and bringing along my shiny new Yaesu FT-857d, I was so proud of my acquisition. It was everything I liked in a radio. I'd bought it with hard-earned cash and I was chuffed to show it off. One of the first comments I received was: "Well that's an ugly radio!". Suffice to say that I was unimpressed with that assertion. Their perspective was based on their love of the FT-897, which has a different shape, one that didn't particularly appeal to me. Since that experience I've attempted to subject myself to many different radios. It's become apparent to me that everyone has a different thing they like about their radio. For one it's the layout, for the other the filters, another likes the colour, the price, the number of buttons, the history, its power consumption, the brand, the whatever. Each to their own. I'm pretty sure that I'm also biased. I recall at least two instances where friends of mine purchased a radio that I would not have considered since they lacked a particular feature that I felt was essential. I'm not sure I was gracious in my assessment of their new purchase, but I hope to make amends. In some workplaces there are policies of tolerance in place. There is an assumption that people are going to be together in the same place for long stretches of time with different cultures, different outlooks, needs and desires and different life perspectives. Some employers have attempted to codify this into a workplace diversity policy. It occurs to me that in Amateur Radio, our attempt at doing such a thing is outlined in something we refer to as "The Amateur's Code", written in 1928 by Paul W9EEA. The language is a little stilted, reflecting its origins, but it's an interesting take on what it is to be an Amateur. If you've never heard it, let me share with you the words written by Paul. I should add some disclaimers about gender and country here, but I'll leave the text as it was. The Radio Amateur is: CONSIDERATE, never knowingly operating in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. LOYAL, offering 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. PROGRESSIVE, with knowledge abreast of science, a well built and efficient station, and operation beyond reproach. FRI

Foundations of Amateur Radio About ten minutes ago I was blissfully unaware of the existence of James K2MIJ. It's unclear if this bliss will ever be returned because it's obvious to me that James and I share several things, a sense of humour among them. Mind you, I've not yet actually spoken to James, other than me saying "Hello" right now, but his QRZ page is a thing of wonder. Last week I was talking about weird and wonderful antennas. As you know, Amateur Radios don't particularly care what you plug into the back, as long as it looks like a 50 Ohm load, the vast majority of transceivers will happily transmit into them. I've heard of people making contacts with dummy loads, bits of wet string, chairs and as I said last week, bridges and rail-road tracks. James has made it his mission to tune up strange things. He's made a lawn chair dipole and is using it to contact all states across the US, with only 5 Watts. He's added more countries to his DXCC than I have - 53 - and while he's at it, he also made some other contraptions, a fork dipole, from two actual kitchen forks, his in-the-shack dipole and his latest contraptions, a collection of five and a half inch and nine inch antennas. You heard that right, a five and a half inch antenna for 40 meters. If you go to James' QRZ page, you'll find a kitchen table, holding an antenna farm that rivals those of many stations. Antennas for 40, 30, 20 and 17 meters. One thing that piqued my curiosity is a photo of his 20m antenna sitting on the ground. Picture something like a peanut butter jar lid with a piece of copper stuck in the middle, standing up. It's wound around in a spiral with two windings, sort of like a big loading coil you'd find on a 2m vertical antenna. The base of the contraption has about 30 or so windings on it which you connect between the copper and the feed-line. The thing that got my interest was what was on the other side of the feed-line, a tape measure. More precisely, a steel tape measure. As I said, I've not yet spoken to James, but it might be that his mini-antenna is mostly made of tape measure. Don't get me wrong, I think experimentation is wonderful and he's clearly made more contacts that I have, but I'd love to learn what effect the tape measure has on his contraptions. I noticed a few other things that people have tuned up, beer cans, especially helpful with Fox Hunting, when one of your friends, or should I say Fiends, sets up a secret transmitter that you and several teams have to track down. The more devious the antenna installation, the better. There's the quintessential flag-pole antenna for those times that your neighbours need to see that you're patriotic and not a nasty radio amateur with unsightly antennas that reduce the value of their home and remove the enjoyment of their life because your hobby affects their ability to sleep at night. I've seen people tune up their gutters, even tried it myself - the noise floor in my shack prevents anything sensible, but I'm working on it - and of course there's the proverbial boat on a trailer antenna. No interest in sailing as such, just a nice tall aluminium construction that could perhaps be connected via some feed-line to a nearby radio transmitter. It's not even a permanent structure, so it'll add value to the neighbourhood. Making a weird and wonderful antenna as an experiment is great for learning, it's great for experimentation and dealing with emergencies and it might keep your neighbourhood happy too - mind you, why anyone would think that an antenna is ugly is beyond me. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I received a funny picture from a fellow amateur. This particular image was one titled "Multitap Antenna" and it featured a Four Wheel Drive vehicle with a bull-bar and a spring base mounted antenna. The antenna was made from pipe and at suitable intervals the pipe had a t-piece with a tap. Nothing too peculiar, right? Well, other than that the taps were standard brass garden taps with a hose-quick release clip and hose fittings. Made me laugh. Anyway, that reminded me of a series of postings on Social Media about the random things people have used as antennas, from emergency bits of copper wire attached to flag-poles to get a local station back on the air during an emergency to tuning up wire fences, bed frames and the like. There's even a "Strange Antenna Challenge" with suggestions of ladders, baby chairs - presumably without the baby, umbrellas in trees and other fun stuff. Suggestions to contact your local TV station to promote the activity to bring back some fun into Amateur Radio. Now, why am I even talking about this? As Amateurs we take ourselves very seriously, so seriously that any idea that isn't following the norm is scoffed at. "This is how we do things around here" and "That will never work" are often heard in group discussions among the knowing elite of Amateur Radio. Here's the thing. We're Amateurs, experimenters, licensed to test, to play, to learn. What if you find yourself on the side of the road with an up-side-down vehicle with a perfectly working radio, but a broken off antenna? What would you do? What if a storm blew your antenna down, or it was destroyed by a flood? How would you cope? Would you bring out your trusty spare antenna and plug that in, or would it be helpful to have some experience with tuning up weird stuff and seeing what happens? For my money, I'd rather know an Amateur who can make the proverbial wet piece of string work, than the one who has the latest gadgets and gizmo's ready for that day that the emergency arrives. Hopefully their spare antenna will be in their car and not sitting in the Garage waiting for the emergency to arrive at the right time and place. So, if you did in fact have some fun and started playing, some of this is going to fail and some of it will work poorly and some of it won't work at all and you might damage your radio if you pump full power into a random piece of conductive material, but, you might also just come across some skills that you could use when it becomes essential, or when you're up a creek without a paddle. So, when you've done everything and are looking for the next challenge, have a look at the Strange Antenna Challenge, there's been activity going back over a decade featuring two cars as antennas, rail road tracks, a bronze statue, exercise machines, a football stadium and a bridge. The only requirements are that no wire and no metal pipe allowed. Remember to take a photo of your contraption, so you can share your adventure. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I was going to talk to you about Grid Dip Oscillators. Some research later I realised that I don't yet understand the topic enough to explain it to myself, let alone explain it to you. I then set my sights on a simpler thing, an SWR Meter. Pretty standard fare in a radio shack. You plug it in and off you go, nothing to it. So I then set about learning how this actually works. As you know, if it's written on the Internet, it must be true, and in this case, there must be a thousand different explanations and ways that this common black box works in your shack. Since I found so many different explanations that made me recall a quote: "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother." So, at this point I should sit down and explain it to you as if you're my grandmother, right? Unfortunately I'm not yet at that level of understanding, so I'll not add to the noise of explanation until such time as I do understand it. Instead I'm going to take a left turn and observe that Amateur Radio is full of explanations. Some of them great, many of them horrendous. I see Amateurs on-line arguing about how something works and then I hear them on-air doing more of the same. It occurs to me that where ever there is argument about how something works there is one of two things going on, lack of knowledge or lack of understanding. I'm not saying that every Amateur doesn't understand, I'm wondering if it's possible that our collective understanding of how our hobby works appears to be lacking in scientific rigour and that it's incomplete. I'm wondering how much of our hobby is actually understood and documented. While I'm here, I should point out that taking observations of a phenomenon isn't an explanation of how it works. The observations will get you places, but the unexpected or unobserved might get you killed along the way. I've said in the past that this hobby is like Magic and I still think that. The more I learn and understand about it, the more Magic comes in to play. This is what keeps drawing me back to this wonderful world of Amateur Radio. While I was searching for my SWR explanation I came across this little gem which speaks to me greatly and goes a long way to explaining why some of our hobby is so misunderstood: "the reason that your friends and ours cannot understand mathematics is not because they have no head for figures, but because they are unable to achieve the degree of concentration required to follow a moderately involved sequence of inferences" So, next time you sit down to explain how something works, bear that in mind, since following along a string of things that lead to an explanation might not be something your, or my, friends are willing to put up with. I wish I'd seen that quote before I attempted to explain why I had several antennas on the roof and couldn't just have one. Still learning... I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week I went on an adventure and came home with an experience. I've been wanting to go out and play radio for a while. Work has been spectacularly unhelpful in making time available to achieve this, not to mention the 17 million other things vying for my undivided attention. Last week the planets aligned and my outing came to pass. I'd set my sights on doing a SOTA activation. If you're not familiar with that, SOTA is an acronym for Summits On The Air and the aim is to get to the top of a mountain and make contacts from there. I've previously been under the tutelage and presence of some very experienced SOTA hams and during a conference in Canberra last year I managed to activate several summits with others. I even managed to survive walking up one peak on my own, using my hand-held to make some contacts. I use the word survive in less than ironic terms because I relied on Google Maps to navigate me up to the peak and for reasons best known to Google, it walked me up the side of the peak that didn't actually have a track, even though the map was adamant that I should follow the path. Many, many hours later, not properly dressed, not enough food, weather coming in, batteries running low, I managed to get back down safely and hobbled to a taxi who brought me back to my hotel. It was memorable, but not for the right reasons and it didn't involve HF communications and at the moment I'm struggling to recall if I actually logged those contacts. That will be a job for another day. Anyway, as I said, the planets aligned and I had a day to myself, access to the car, a charged radio battery pack, a working antenna and a map that worked. Mind you, I spent an hour fighting technology. First to register on the SOTA web-site, then to activate the software on my phone, then to get Google Maps to actually navigate me to the peak and for it to download the off-line maps, so I could navigate whilst out of mobile phone range. Lesson learned, plan to do the technology before the day. So, I set off an hour later than planned, but I was finally on my way. Google Maps again let me down by navigating a different route than I wanted, since I had the choice of more or less dirt road and I wanted less. Google picked the other one, even though I pointed it at the one I wanted. Another lesson learned, make sure that you add markers to your route before Google Maps starts you on your way, since there is no changing it once you're driving. After an hour and a bit I arrived at the top of the peak. If you're interested, it was Mount Dale, or SOTA peak VK6/SW-036, but before you go looking for my log, stick around, there's more to the story. So, I set-up my antenna, a multi-tap Outbacker and set it to 40m. I appeared to have mobile phone coverage, so I added my spot to the SOTA-watch website and started calling CQ. I managed my first contact within 8 minutes of my advertised time start time, so I was pretty chuffed. For the next few hours on 40m and 15m I managed contacts with 23 stations. The biggest distance I managed was 5353 km, or 1071 km per Watt. Not bad for a vertical antenna mounted to my car. I did some experiments along the way with turning my car around, getting better and worse signals, but overall it was great. I had a little play with 2m, but didn't manage anything other than talking on the local repeater, which is located 24 kilometres away and about 250 meters lower down. One friend suggested that there was a satellite pass coming over later in the day, but by the time I'd been there for four hours I was cooked. It wasn't spectacularly hot or anything, but it was time to go. No satellite this time, but something to add to my list of things to check. I came home and basked in the enjoyment of having gone out and made contacts, more than I'd managed for most of the year. Very satisfied. The next morning I found an email from the SOTA manager in VK6 who asked me about my operating environment. After some back and forth it was determined that I should have read the rules before going on my trip. If I had I'd have known that I couldn't operate from within my car, nor could I operate with anything attached to the car. In later discussions one person said that the guideline they used was that if someone drove the car away, would they still be able to operate their station. It seems even shade from the car is frowned upon. So, another lesson learned, read the manual before going outside. In my discussions it emerged that my trek did qualify for WWFF, or World Wide Flora and Fauna where the rules are different. Of course I've not yet read those rules either, but you know, radio. I should point out that the local Flora and Fauna group is called VKFF. So. I swallowed my pride, sent an email to the SOTA email list and posted on the SOTA group to tell my contacts that I wasn't able to submit my contacts as valid SOTA contacts, but that I would be cherishing their contact in my log. I've not yet sent off

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I want to talk about Politics. I can hear you groan from here, so hold your horses, stow your tar and feathers and put your pitchfork back in the barn. Amateur Radio is a hobby. It's to do with electronics and physics and the ionosphere and other cool stuff. Some people call Amateur Radio a thousand hobbies in one and that's a pretty good description. Underlying Amateur Radio are the people. Those who have spent their time studying, learning new skills, doing tests, passing exams, as well as people who are interested bystanders, not necessarily licensed, but drawn towards the bounty that Amateur Radio as a hobby represents. An interesting phenomenon among people is their varying level of passion. Some people are passionate about their dog, others about their children, others are passionate about cars, or baking, or in our case, passionate about Amateur Radio. Passion has been explained to me once as a "big elephant". You sit on its back and it takes you where you want to go. Gentle nudging makes the elephant change direction, but if it gets excitable or startled, it'll go where ever it wants and all you can do is be a passenger and hold on tight. If you mix passion and Amateur Radio, there are times when that will result in heated discussion about the merits or pitfalls of a particular radio, an antenna or some other aspect of the hobby. If you group people together into radio clubs then those clubs are made of passionate individuals who come together to promote the objects of their club. As people group and discuss, opinions differ, goals morph and change and aims and objectives are blurred. Before long, you get special interest groups, proponents and opponents, elections, board meetings, stoushes, mis-management, legal action and the whole gamut of life. To complicate matters, Amateur Radio uses a public resource, radio spectrum. This is generally managed and maintained by a regulator, which in turn is generally managed by, politicians. What this means is that as a Radio Amateur you should not be surprised to learn that politics plays a part just as it does in the rest of society. I can still hear you muttering from here. My In-Box hasn't yet seen any derisive emails, but I can picture their arrival. What does this all mean? It means that Amateur Radio is not one thing. It never has been and never will be. For each individual there is a personal path to find and a journey to travel. For some this means that they'll become the Contester of the Year, for others it means that they'll invent a new gadget, others will use Amateur Radio as an excuse to travel the globe and others will use it to be the big cheese in their club. Your role is simple. Remember that this is a Hobby. That it's your hobby and that you have as much say in it as the next person. Remember also that this Hobby exists because we've been given access to a public resource and it's our responsibility as Amateurs to conduct ourselves in a manner that befits that public trust. I'm Onno VK6FLAB