Foundations of Amateur Radio

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

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I celebrated my sixth birthday, no not that one, the one that reminds me when I first became licensed as a Radio Amateur. It caused me to reflect on what I've done with my license and what I've learned and where I'm heading. A recurring theme in my Amateur life is one of upgrading. Not a month goes by when someone makes a comment about my license status. As you might know, I hold the entry level license in Australia, the Foundation License as it's called. Other countries call theirs different things, but the aim of this license type is to introduce new entrants into the hobby and for me it's done that in spades. If you've listened to some of my previous mutterings and musings, or if you've listened to all of them, heading for 300 now, you'll have noticed that it's rare that I'm not talking about something I learned, something new, or something that interests me that I've found and I want to share with the community. This quest for knowledge, learning and curiosity is something that I've always had and I'm sure I'm not alone with those traits. It occurred to me that my newly minted Amateur License achieved exactly what it intended to, Introduce me to Amateur Radio. It did more than that. It set me on a path that I'm travelling down today where I'm learning a new thing most weeks and telling others about it. I don't yet fully grasp the difference between an NPN and a PNP transistor, nor do I understand the workings of a Valve to the point where I can explain it to you, but the truth of the matter is that I haven't had the need to, or at this stage the curiosity to. That's not to say that a day will come when I do want to know. So here's the thing. Would you rather I have the highest level of license, having passed my test, cramming for my exam, guessing answers on a multiple-choice form, or would it be better if I came to know and understand the body of work that makes up the foundations of our hobby? As an aside, I have taken a mock test at some point. If I recall, I managed a score of 75% or so, might have been higher, but it outlined the areas of knowledge that I don't have at this time and that was why I took it in the first place. There are Amateurs who pass tests and then there are Amateurs who learn. One final comment about upgrading. When was the last time you upgraded your car license to the next level, say rally driver, or Formula-1 driver? When was the last time you got called out on not having upgraded and admonished for being a lowly car driver? Onto Amateur stuff. First of all, the wheel bearing has gone to a better place. It drove away on a big blue truck on Wednesday morning and is no longer. So sad. In antenna news, you may recall my experiences with the installation and tuning of an antenna for a friend of mine. I made all manner of what some would call outlandish statements, one Amateur all but called me a liar and accused me of making it all up to promote my podcast. All this excitement because I dared query the documentation of an Antenna. I've reached out to the manufacturer, but I've not yet received a response. I'm told that my hunch that this was a vertical dipole was correct. That in itself is curious since I've been experimenting with a vertical dipole made from coax, not enough to talk about success yet, but enough to be told that it will never work. Gotta love the doubters. As I suspected, the cut-off piece of inner coax, if you recall, the one that was a centimetre or so too long, is half of a capacitor, the other half is in the base of the antenna. Note that all this is based on what I've been told by a fellow amateur, and I'm looking forward to hearing from the manufacturer what they have to say. So, my vertical coax antenna idea started off with the idea that I wanted to use a vertical dipole for working portable. I realised that some of the designs I've seen knocking around the 'net are cutting off long chunks of shield, or folding it back, or doing all manner of funky things to a piece of coax. I wondered what would happen if I took a piece of wire, cut it to the length of one half of a dipole, attached a banana-plug to it and stuck it on the end of a piece of coax. One half of the antenna would be the wire, the other half would be the shield of the coax. If I could come up with something like a choke that would stop RF travelling all the way back to my radio, I might have myself a vertical dipole with the benefit of not having to cut up coax, no extra connectors and if I made it possible for the choke to slide up and down, my antenna would be simple to transform into something for any band. As I said, I'm not yet at the success stage. I did some testing with something called an ugly balun, but it's pretty clunky and results are mixed. I tried ferrite-clip-on-beads, but they didn't seem to do the trick - though that could have be the nature of the particular clip-on's that I had at the time. When I have some more play time free, I'l

Foundations of Amateur Radio Let me start completely off-topic today with a thank you for emails and other expressions of concern regarding the demise of the bearing last week from my messy desk. I did not loose my marbles, other than the ball bearings in the disposed item and my sanity is as intact as it ever was. I was also asked for photos of the messy desk and as a concession to that I'll use a photo of the ball bearing for the podcast edition this week. How am I able to produce a photo of the disposed ball bearing? Truth be told, it's in the bin, the bin is in my office, but it wasn't emptied last week, since there was so little inside, so the ball bearing lives - until Tuesday when the bin will surely be emptied. Now, on to Amateur Radio matters, since that's why I'm here, though based on your emails, I'm not quite yet sure why you're here. Yesterday a good friend of mine, who tragically has yet to see the light and become a licensed Amateur came to me with a non-functioning antenna. He had purchased a so-called "Ground Independent Monopole" suitable for 380 to 520 MHz. You get no points for guessing that this was to be used for a CB installation on his vehicle. When you read the accompanying material, this magical antenna has a 4 dB improvement when compared to a 3 wave whip in the centre of a metal roof. But then when you look at the foot note, it talks about a 4 dB improvement over a 1/4 wave whip, but pattern tests only deliver a 2 to 2.5dB actual gain. I can hear you groaning from here. It leads me to several observations. As a licensed amateur you should be able to already spot holes as wide as a semi-trailer in those few statements. As amateurs we're often dismissive of the CB community, but how can they be held to account if manufacturers publish what looks to me like drivel of the highest order. The design itself is curious. There appears to be a loading coil in the base, the centre of the coax is trimmed to a specified length and inserted through the coil and electrical continuity exists between the radiating element and the coax shield. After spending some time trouble-shooting the installation I determined that the PL259 connector at the end wasn't actually soldered to the coax, so we fixed that. Using my antenna analyser we trimmed the vertical as specified, a couple of millimetres at a time, but it wasn't setting the world on fire with the updated SWR charts I was generating. We stopped trimming when we got close, since cutting off length is easy, cutting on length not so much. I then re-read the instructions and queried the length of the trimmed bit of inner coax that was inserted into the loading coil and found out that it was about a centimetre too long. Fingers crossed we trimmed that to length and the SWR chart improved. It still didn't set the world on fire, but at least the SWR wasn't 8 to 1 on CB Channel 40. Of course I've urged my friend to get an Amateur License, but that's ultimately their own choice. What I took away from the experience is that even a very basic Amateur License like the one I hold is sufficient to understand better what is going on and to be able to begin the process of trouble-shooting antenna installations. I thought I understood that this antenna was basically a vertical dipole, but at the moment I'm not sure and I'm wondering if the loading coil is actually a matching circuit and I wonder why the coax shield and the radiator are connected to each other. I'm sure the antenna is designed with the best intentions and I'm moderately confident that it works as intended. Now all we need to do is train the marketing department to talk to the engineering department before publishing their materials. For me the take-away is two fold. Don't blame a CB-er for their lack of knowledge, sometimes the manufacturer is to blame. The other take-away is that with a basic understanding of Amateur Radio you can help your fellow radio operator. Now, where on my desk is that thing I was looking for? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In my time as a member of the radio community I've been in around 30 different shacks and a similar amount of camp-out style activations. I've operated at least a hundred different radio set-ups with different operating styles, logging systems and power sources. I wouldn't say that I was particularly experienced, but I've seen enough to make some observations. My first observation is that radio shacks and set-ups tend to be messy. It's not unusual to see several radios, antenna tuners, amplifiers, switches, computers, power supplies, soldering iron and accumulated cruft in the form of resistors, wires, spare antennas, connectors, screws, knobs and globs of solder, all vying for space on the same bench at the same time. I'm looking at my own desk right now and I can count a hundred different objects within 60 seconds with no effort what-so-ever, and that's on a desk that's barely larger than a square meter in size. I'm not particularly messy in the scheme of things. There's no food on this desk - other than the cup of coffee I've just made and there's no globs of solder or other sticky things like oil and glue, but still. One of my friends remarked the other day that no matter how much space we have, we always seem to run out. He wondered why. At the time, my reply was something along the lines of: "Well, it's for the same reason as your bank-account never has enough money in it." While that observation is probably valid, I'd like to point out some side effects of a messy desk. If your intent is to operate the radio and get on air to make noise, there needs to be a working station. You need to be able to test it without having to move stuff around and fault finding needs to be part of the way the thing is set-up. One station I visited had solved this problem by moving their operating station away from the wall so they had two access points. The front where you operate the station and the back where you test it. That way you get to have your cake and eat it too. The set-up worked really well. Picture a few racks with gear, an operating desk arranged in an L-shape, but moved away from the wall, rather than pushed into the corner. Space limitations prevented you from walking all the way around it, but you could get to all but one side of one rack. All this was arranged into the space of a standard spare bedroom, pretty much the same as most shack's I've visited. I find myself looking around my own environment with this front-and-rear idea in mind and I'm having a think about how I might apply it. Another observation is that we never ever throw anything away, ever. I have seen antenna projects that were doomed to fail from day one, spare screws, bits of wood, drawers and drawers of random electronic components, bits of wire, cut-off connectors, damaged bits of coax, half-wound baluns, empty tubes of silicone, failed micro-switches, bent wave guides, broken windings, arced air-gap capacitors, empty boxes, plastic bags, old radio magazines, all waiting for the day that they become useful, likely never. I'm not saying that this cruft is never useful. I'm saying that the chances of them being useful is inversely proportional to the amount. That means, the more junk you have, the less useful it is. Perhaps culling is a way to increase the usefulness of what's left. The ultimate example of something like this is a Go-Cart wheel bearing that I have lying on my desk. It's a piece of precision engineering, but it's stuffed. It has completed it's useful service life, was discarded in the dirt and I picked it up, cleaned it, oiled it and now it sits on my desk. It looks great, feels nice to play with, but as objects go, it's one of the least useful items on my desk, otherwise filled with paper, computer gear and radio gear. I just made the bold step to toss it in the bin. Not yet sure how I feel about it, but I'll try by saying that it's the beginning of making the remaining cruft on my desk more useful. Perhaps our communal messiness is a thing to do with amateur radio as a hobby, or perhaps we have more than our share of messy members of society. The very nature of our hobby is that we test and trial things whilst doing on-air stuff like making contacts and chatting with friends. Perhaps we should arrange our work-spaces to match. If you've found a way to make it work for you, please feel free let me know and perhaps send me a picture or two. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are moments in your life when you say to yourself, duh, why didn't I think of this earlier? I had one of those last week. As you might recall, I have a hard time using HF communications from my home. There is lots of noise around and I've been going out mobile and portable to make contacts. As satisfying as that is, nothing beats sitting at home in your comfy chair with all the other home amenities. Ideally I have this notion that I should be able to do my hobby from home and have my cake and eat it too. Turns out, my duh moment was just that. I speak regularly on the local 2m repeater, in fact I host a weekly net called F-troop that encourages new and returning hams to get on air and make some noise in a friendly environment where no question is too silly and mistakes can be made on-air without subsequent yelling and carrying-on. So, I have a fully working HF radio at home, but it works just fine on 2m and 70cm. My duh moment was when I realised that there are a multitude of 2m and 70cm transmitters around that I could add to my tally of things heard and worked. There are websites dedicated to these transmitters and schedules exist to highlight when, how and where these things are. So, what am I talking about? The wonderful world of Amateur Radio Satellites. There are lots around, sending out idents, having uplink and downlink, sending out digital packets, you name it, the wide variety of Amateur Radio in a 90 minute orbit around the planet. I'll confess that I thought there were one or two doing the rounds, but there are a few more. Just counting the active ones, there are 85 satellites designed to be used by Amateurs at the moment, of course that changes all the time, going up and down as more are launched and others stop responding. In addition to this collection, there are other things you can listen out for, like weather satellites, the International Space Station and a bunch of other objects. I came across the N2YO website which shows you what's up in your sky right now, the foot print and direction, when it clears the horizon, in which direction and what the highest elevation is and when it vanishes again, all very helpful in getting half a chance to hear the transmission in the first place. I've said this before, this hobby is magic. I can't do HF, so now I'm playing with satellites. Looks like I'm going to have to sort out some digital decoding software as well, since many of the satellites have all manner of non-Morse code transmissions, APRS, digital modes, graphics, etc. Lots to learn. Did I mention that you could do much of this with a hand-held radio? Power is not a problem and an external antenna is likely all you'll need. By the way, this is what I like about Amateur Radio, there are so many different aspects to this hobby, so much variety, so many things to learn and experience and I have only just scratched the surface. It bears repeating that a beginner's licence in Amateur Radio gives you access to all this and most of the things I've been talking about since I started talking about the hobby back in 2011. I've been licensed now for a little more than a minute and a half, but I still get a pleasant surprise on a regular basis about the size and scope of my chosen hobby. There's no excuse, getting bored with Amateur Radio is just not an option. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Ingenuity is the name of the game in Amateur Radio, building, inventing, solving and helping are all part and parcel of this hobby. We like to lay claim to being the source of all that is good in the world, all that was invented came from Amateur Radio first, right? Seriously though, sometimes we pick up a technology along the way from other places. If you've ever picked up your microphone and pushed one or more buttons on it whilst the push to talk button was down, you've likely used this technology that's set out in an ITU recommendation called Q.23. It has the quaint title of: "Technical Features of Push-Button Telephone Sets". It's a brief document as such, all of four pages, two title pages and one mostly dealing with why this Push-Button idea is a great one and how it relates to international phone calls etc. The meat is in the final page, showing eight frequencies and how you combine them to generate voice frequency signals. If you've been paying attention, you might recognise this as DTMF or Dual Tone Multiple Frequency signalling. It's pretty nifty. Send two discrete frequencies at the same time across some link and decode it at the other end. It's nifty because these frequencies might happen during a normal conversation, but not at the same time for a particular duration. As Amateurs we use this to communicate with our repeaters, to send signals to it, to activate links, to power on and off stuff and all manner of other interesting things. So, how does it actually work? Well, you have two sets of four non-overlapping frequencies which you can combine into 16 different combinations, enough for 10 digits, four letters and two symbols. To make this work, the frequencies must be pretty stable, the ITU recommends less than 1.8% off the nominal frequency and distortion must be 20 dB below the fundamental frequencies. Today producing such a thing is trivial, a chip for a dollar will do the job and another one at the other end to decode it. Four bucks and you're good to go for two-way DTMF at both ends. Bargain. Being the curios type I went looking to find out what a DTMF circuit might look like before we could buy such products. The closest I came was a build-your-own voice mail system in BYTE! magazine of April 1982 using LM567 tone decoders, but a quick look at the box shows that these are also something that we'd call an Integrated Circuit. I'm going out on a limb here, since DTMF has been around since it was first supplied to customers in 1963 and suggest that the original DTMF decoders were not quite as trivial as a dollar chip. They likely contained many discrete components including eight separate filters and ways to combine them so signals could be added to each other to detect the existence or absence of a specific tone, but I've yet to actually lay eyes on anything more fundamental than the tone decoders. That being said, you can connect your all-in-one dollar chip, the CM-8870, to something like an Arduino and do your own decoding of DTMF signals. Seems that the 1982 BYTE! magazine article was just the beginning of the revitalisation of DTMF, robot controllers, home automation, in-vehicle signalling and more, not to mention, using it to activate IRLP and other wonderful radio services. Before you start sending me email about this non-Amateur invention, I'll point out that Amateurs also didn't invent copper wire, that was two Scots, or was it Dutch, I forget, fighting over a coin. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week over dinner I was chatting with a friend about Amateur Radio in a discussion about things that take your fancy. I was attempting to explain what it specifically was about this hobby that keeps me coming back. I talked about invention, about exploration, about fishing and catching that elusive station, but looking back over that discussion it occurred to me that none of that is what "does it" for me. Sure, those things are part of it, but it's not what makes me turn on my radio, what has my face light up in delight or allows me to get out of bed in the middle of the night to explore the bands. A brief phone call with another Amateur to wish him Happy Birthday twigged me to what's going on. He asked me: "What's new in your world?", and my answer, innocuous at best was: "Well, last weekend I heard a Japanese station from my QTH." In the past I've mentioned that I've made many contacts with Japan, looking at my log, 63 of them, on 10m and 15m, so the fact that I heard Japan wasn't particularly special. I don't recall the band on which I heard the station, so that's not it either. What was different was that I heard it at home, my QTH. The place where there is S7 or higher noise all the time, where I cannot put up a full antenna and make do with a dipole in the garage and a single band vertical on the roof. Looking back at the conversation it occurred to me that what I like about Amateur Radio is the unexpectedness of it, the surprises that come your way, like little gifts waiting to be unpacked. It reminded me of a journey coming back from a club meeting last year when I spent the time going through the entire frequency range of my radio. There's quite a bit to visit. The radio in the car does 100 kHz through to 56 MHz as a single range, then has several other ranges. My hand-held is capable of 500 kHz through 999 MHz. Between the two I have the ability to pick up most of the stuff that's around. If that's not enough, there are many online radio receivers to connect to using all manner of different tools, the simplest to get running is probably WebSDR, where you visit a web-page and pick out the frequency you want to hear. All this RF activity is happening all around us all the time. There's the local Top-40 radio station, the talk back shows, the local community stations, single frequency specialist broadcasters, the local public transit authority, etc. etc. You never know what you're going to find and what you're going to hear. Many Amateurs I speak to started off as short-wave listeners. I had a short-wave radio when I was growing up, but it never much did anything for me. Now that I'm an Amateur and I understand what's happening to make those distant signals arrive at my ear, I'm becoming the short-wave listener I never was. That's what I like about Amateur Radio. Unexpected gifts being shared across the globe from people, cultures and experiences that bring us all together. For me, Amateur Radio is about the thirst for curiosity, the never ending supply of wonder and the joy in hearing them arrive un-announced at my doorstep. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Being on air and getting on air are part of the journey that you undertake when becoming a Radio Amateur, but what happens before all that, what do you need to get your foot in the door as it were? If you're listening to this via a radio, you're already on the journey, but if you've downloaded this as a podcast, you're not far behind and your journey towards becoming a Radio Amateur is just around the corner. Let's start with a few things before I start with the journey itself. First of all, every country is slightly different, so while I can give you specific examples, they'll be valid for only a few people. In becoming a Radio Amateur you'll have to undertake some learning, pass a test and get a license. This license is specific to you and for most, if not all Amateurs, the license itself is for life. That means that if you have already passed an Amateur License Test in your past, you're likely still a Licensed Amateur today. Being a Licensed Amateur, or having a License, doesn't actually mean that you can operate your own station, for that to happen, you need a callsign and the requirements for a callsign are that you have a license. It's like learning to drive. Once you've passed your driving test you're able to drive a car, but you need a current drivers' license to actually get behind the wheel. In most cases there are different levels of license. Going back to the car analogy, you can drive a car, a moped or a truck, but not with the same license. In Amateur Radio there are several different types of licenses. For example in Australia there are three, in increasing level of responsibility, a Foundation License, a Standard License and an Advanced License. In the United States there are also three, The Technician License, the General License and the Amateur Extra License. In the United Kingdom there are also three, the Foundation License, the Intermediate License and the Full License. Germany has two types and calls them Class E and Class A. In essence the idea is that with more learning comes more responsibility and a change of license. To muddy the waters a little, as time passes and Amateur Radio evolves, license types change and merge, new ones are introduced and old ones vanish. For example, to my knowledge there are no countries requiring Morse Code as a skill for an Amateur License. That wasn't always the case and until 2003 the World Radio-communication Conference essentially left it to individual countries to decide if Morse Code was a requirement for specific privileges. As an aside, Citizen Band or CB, where anyone can walk into a shop, buy a CB radio and use it without passing a test and getting a license is fundamentally different in that the license is linked specifically to the radio itself. There is still a license, and to operate, the license needs to be current, but it's intrinsic to the radio itself. Amateur Radio has the license linked to the person, rather than the radio. Now that you know a little about the landscape, the next step on your journey towards becoming an Amateur is a little less nebulous. It's probably a good place to start at the beginning and work your way through that and as time goes on and your confidence and experience improves, to add to the learning and do the next thing as it occurs to you. I should point out that there are Amateurs who believe that it should be your goal to get the highest level of responsibility, but my perspective on this is quite different. This is a hobby, your hobby. If you want more responsibility, then go do some learning and pass a test. If you're happy to do what you're doing, then do that. Don't let anyone tell you that you must increase your learning, just because they tell you to or that it's the done thing. For me, I've set a personal goal to work a hundred countries using 5 Watts and every contact I make counts towards that. If you've been listening for a while you might have noticed that I've not bragged about any remote contacts and that's because I've hardly been out and about on-air using my own callsign. Too many other things to do and I'm in no hurry while I'm learning and having fun. So, what's next? The simplest is to find yourself a local Amateur and get them to point you to the local training group, but if you're not able to do that, contact your National Amateur Radio Association and ask them who provides training for you. You're likely to find a local website with information, or you might listen to the local Amateur Radio News Broadcast where the local training organisation tells you about upcoming courses. The first level of license is likely to be pretty simple, think a weekend of listening and playing with radios, followed by a written and practical test. If you have issues with travel or learning, you're likely to find that there are ways to help you get on air, so don't give up, just because you can't drive to the big smoke, don't have a local training organisation or are hopeless

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the recurring topics in on-air discussion is that of antennas and if we were to graph the topics of conversations, antennas would be the clear winner in any line-up. As a beginning Amateur this phenomenon bamboozled me for a very long time. Why are these people talking about antennas all the time and what's there to know that you can't say in 30 seconds? From the mouths of babes... I've mentioned in the past that Amateur Radio is to a very large degree magic. Another way of expressing that is to say that there is an Art to being an Amateur and antennas play a big part. A friend of mine loaned me his antenna kit called a Buddipole. It's a portable set-up that is akin to Meccano or Lego in that you can build up an antenna from parts and make a large range of antennas from the same basic parts, two coils, a feed point, a balun, two telescopic whips and some extension pieces. For me this particular antenna has been temperamental and I couldn't get my head around how to make it work. This all changed last weekend when I had a spare 15 minutes, literally, 15 minutes when I went into the shed to have another look. This was spurred on by a note that I'd read that pointed out that the Buddipole is asymmetric, that is, both legs and coils are not the same. This important tid-bit of information made things click in my mind and all of a sudden I realised that I didn't need to make both sides the same length, or adjust both sides in the same way. Until that moment I'd always thought of the Buddipole as a dipole on a stand and expected like any traditional dipole it would have both legs at the same length. What if you could move the feed point along the length of your dipole, what would happen? What if you kept the overall length the same, but by making one end longer and the other end shorter, you in effect were moving the feed point along your dipole? Wonderful things start to happen, that's what. What I'm saying is that you don't have to make a dipole have equal length legs and that sometimes this is desirable. Previously I've mentioned that the height of a dipole, the wire thickness, the ends, the angle and so on all affect the feed point impedance. Turns out, that where you place the feed point also affects this. If you recall basic antenna theory, you might recall that the middle of a dipole is the lowest impedance and that the end of a dipole is the highest impedance. Each of these values are on a continuum, that is, they vary as you change things. That means that between the two extremes of impedance there are other in-between values. If you have a balun, you can use this to get a great match for your antenna by tweaking these values. Another example of this continuum is a loop antenna. If you make it twice as high as wide, the feed point impedance is 50 Ohm, but if you use the same loop and squash it flat, the impedance is 300 Ohm. Varying the shape changes the impedance. In essence this means that there is an infinite number of antennas that can be made just as a dipole and another infinite number of antennas that can be made as a loop. So, just two antenna types alone already gives you a lifetime supply of options and that's ignoring the height, soil or wire. Now you understand why antennas are tricky and why we talk about them so much. It also explains why the Internet is full of different explanations on antennas, since they are all based around the local conditions under which the author is describing their adventure. Next time you hear an Amateur going on about their antenna, perhaps there's something to take away. I know I won't be anywhere as impatient listening to others talking about their contraptions. Final thought. A vertical is a dipole too. The radials are one half, the vertical the other. You can change the length of either, or both, but you can also feed the antenna in a different location. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever been on air and in the middle of a wonderful discussion that all of a sudden and often unexpectedly erupts into a heated argument about nothing? One of those conversations that came to mind was about what the term DX means. I'd been taught that DX means outside the country and if you're calling CQ DX, I was taught that this means that you're looking for a contact in the next country. So. What's the argument? Simple really. In a nutshell, making a contact between Perth and Sydney, nearly 3300 kilometres apart is inside one country, but making a contact across the same distance between say Amsterdam and Lebanon, is about nine countries away. This really means that for every station DX has a different meaning. So, this DX caper means different things for different people. I've said in the past that I'd laughed when a station made a big deal about contacting Japan, when that's something I do regularly. The opposite effect happened when I contacted Cuba. For me it's a contact on the other side of the planet, for them it's next door. I asked around for explanations from others about what they thought DX meant: - Receiving signals & station from remote locations - Long distance, harder to achieve contacts. - Doesn't have to be international, all frequency dependant. - VK[234] to VK6 is DX ;) - Outside of my suburb ! - Anything hard I suppose, or anything "overseas" The take away should be that DX-ing is an activity that means different things to different people. You could put it down to kilometres, or countries, it really doesn't matter. Just be prepared that your measure may not apply to the other station. Ironically, thinking back to one of my earlier on-air experiences. I called CQ-DX and got a reply that said something along the lines of "What kind of DX are you expecting?" to which I replied: "Anything I can get." is put into a different context by the knowledge that DX is not a fixed idea. At the time I thought that I had done something wrong and that my activities were some how incorrect. Checking with the amateurs nearby at the time, it transpired that this wasn't the case. My insight into the variation of something that looks like a simple concept, DX, puts a different light on the subject. I'm highlighting this because I think it's important to understand that when you're on air, you're bringing with you the experiences you have and you're communicating with others who may, or may not share those experiences and understandings, even for something as obvious and common as the concept of DX. It also spurs me on to continue to develop my QSL card. If you've sent me one and I've not sent you one back, it's because I'm still very unhappy with the design I've got and I'm working on something that's more me, more Australia and captures the essence of the idiosyncrasy that is me. If you're wondering what a QSL card is, think Amateur Radio Postcard. The name derives from something called the Q-Codes, shortcut names used originally in telegraphy, then by Amateurs in Morse, now also heard in all general conversation on air. The code "QSL" means "Can you acknowledge receipt?" when asked as a question, or it means "I am acknowledging receipt." when used as an answer. The card was named after this as a way to confirm contacts between stations. A QSL card generally contains your callsign, their callsign, the time, date, the band or frequency, the mode and signal reports of the contact. Some go overboard with whole novels, include general information about the station, perhaps a picture of your friendly face, or some other image. Traditionally, interesting locations, like say Amsterdam Island, activated as FT5ZM go all out in making their cards, since the location is desirable and the card should be as well. One final comment. To work DX, you need to be on-air, so get your station in good working order, turn it on and make noise. Making contacts, local and DX is about being lucky and the only way you can do that is by actually being on-air and making your own luck. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I talked about making a propagation map in your mind by listening to the various NCDXF beacons across the globe on various HF bands. You're not limited to listening to a beacon to learn what propagation is like. If I tell you that listening to a band gives you an indication on what's going on, you're likely to respond with: "Duh". But what if I suggest that instead of listening to a DX station running a pile-up, you instead listen to the stations calling? Back in January 2014, episode 133, when this series was still called "What use is an F-call?", I explained what "Listening 10-up" means and how you operate in a so-called split mode. As you might recall, working split is about dealing with the phenomenon that a weak DX station working in some desirable location is likely to be overwhelmed by stronger signals, to the point of no longer being heard. It's a good skill to learn and you should try and work both sides, being the station calling a DX, but also being the one getting swamped. As I said, normally you're the one calling the DX station and you don't particularly care about the other stations swamping the band. What if you did? What if you used their signals to figure out where propagation was happening? If you did that, you could perhaps point your antenna in the correct direction, or specifically focus on calling for stations in that area, or listen out for stations in that region in other parts of the band. The thing is, propagation doesn't care what the signal is. As long as you can decode it in what ever way you prefer, Mark I ear-drum, or some fancy decoder, it doesn't matter. If you can hear the signal, it means it's getting from them to you. I should note a word of caution here. It's taken me several years to realise that I could often hear many stations that had no chance of hearing me. I'd crank up the volume on the radio, listen out for anything and try to work what I heard. Sometimes you get a great result, and you shouldn't discount those, but often all I got for my trouble is a sore head from decoding mush. What I learned, especially as a low power operator - I use 5 Watts - if the other station isn't coming in with a reasonable signal strength, S5 or higher, then there's little point. There is a concept of reciprocity. The idea is that if you can hear them, you can work them. For some power levels that might actually be true, but for the rest of us, a fine grain of salt should be added to the mix. Before you start in on me telling me I'm wrong, perhaps consider the variations in local environment, antenna differences, not to mention variation in the Ionosphere or alligators, all mouth and no ears running several kilowatts. The take-away in all this should be that propagation is everywhere. You can use it to hunt for likely contenders and no signal on the band should be ignored as a potential source of propagation information. One final thought. You can also reverse this. Turn on a web based receiver in some desirable part of the world, pick a frequency and then using your radio, call CQ and see if you can hear yourself across the web. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Technology is a moving feast. New ideas spring new inventions which in turn change our lives. Amateur Radio is at the forefront of such inventions. Radio Amateurs have been until recently the only soldering iron brigade around. We've been building things for over a hundred years and we continue as a community to think of new ideas and ways to make them happen. For example, we take technologies like AllStar Link, EchoLink, Wires and so on all in our stride. We think nothing of having our radios connected to each other using techniques other than radio spectrum. In November 1997, when iPhone still meant Internet Phone, an inquisitive 22 year old amateur called Dave Cameron VE7LTD came up with a way to link a radio to the Internet and the first three Internet Radio Linking Project stations were connected to each other and the now global network of IRLP nodes was born. Dave built a DTMF decoder which allowed remote control of a computer and the radio that was attached to it, and made it possible to send the audio from the radio to the sound-card of the computer, which in turn sent that audio in digital format across the Internet to a similarly equipped system where the audio was turned back into a radio transmission. This bridging idea took off and many different systems were developed, many of which are in active use today. The various systems all use some form of Voice over IP to transmit audio across the Internet, but there are many variations on how the audio gets to the system in the first place. In IRLP - as I mentioned - the audio can only come in via an Amateur Radio. EchoLink uses a similar system, but in addition to Amateur Radio as a source, you can register your callsign and use several different applications on your computer or mobile phone to link into the network. AllStar takes this idea further, instead of making a point-to-point connection, the AllStar system is based around an open source telephone exchange called Asterisk and it's used to link together the various systems. Other variations also exist. The idea of using Voice over IP techniques spawned a whole set of radio technologies that use similar methodologies to compress voice and then instead of transmitting it across the Internet, use radio waves to send them from one radio to the next. Technologies such as D-Star, System Fusion, MotoBro and DMR built on this idea. Of course these technologies also use the Internet to share information and connect users across the globe. There is some contention around these systems. Many Amateurs consider them to be "Not Real Radio", but then I suspect if you look at the birth of SSB, you'll find die-hard CW operators with a similar complaint. The same is true for low power propagation modes like WSPR which aren't real radio because you cannot have a QSO. Other issues in the technical sphere also exist. The IRLP software is closed source. You can only buy IRLP hardware from one place and it doesn't allow you to connect in any other way than via a radio. EchoLink now charges for conferences being registered in the system. In the past I've already spoken about Fusion, D-Star and MotoBro and their restrictions around interoperability, licensing and closed source nature. From a practical perspective, there are also concerns about the use of these systems in the case of massive failures during local disasters and the like. If the Internet is down, many of these systems will simply become local radio networks. Coverage could perhaps be extended by creating a local mesh network, but HF radio still very much has its place in our world. For me this is all about learning and innovation. Ultimately which system you use is up to you. I live in a software world where Open Source rules for good reason and my vote will always go to Open Source. To be clear, I'm not adverse to making money, we all have to pay the rent, but making innovation and invention secret is not the way to go in our hyper-connected world. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The world is your oyster, but sometimes you need to find a way to test what is going on with your station and determine what is working and what isn't. Often I turn my radio on to scanning mode and I set it to scan the Northern California DX Foundation beacons. These beacons, perhaps better known as the NCDXF beacons can be heard across five different HF frequencies, on 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m. These beacons repeat in a cycle that lasts three minutes, covering 18 different transmitters located in countries scattered around the globe. Beacons exist in New York City at the United Nations, in two other locations across the US, in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Israel, Finland, Madeira, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela. Each beacon rotates through each frequency and then waits three minutes to transmit on the same frequency again. Each transmission contains the station callsign, sent in 22 words per minute Morse code, followed by four one-second beeps. The callsign and the first beep is sent using 100 watts, the next one uses 10 watts, the third beep is sent with 1 watt and the final one uses 100 milliwatts. What this does is give you a pretty accurate map of what you can hear on what frequency at this time with your station. Another way to think of this is as a propagation map that actually uses your station as the receiver. If you can't hear 'm, you can't work 'm. If your radio doesn't scan across frequencies very well, there's nothing wrong with listening on one frequency for 3 minutes, switching to the next and so on; 15 minutes later you'll know what propagation is like around your station. You can find full details about this whole beacon system on ncdxf.org and I should mention that there are many other beacons around that provide signals for you to listen to. As an aside, this system is precisely what prompted me to start the process of learning Morse Code. I'm still at it and you should not take my slow progress as anything other than me being distracted by the other things that are happening in my life. If you need something more active and participatory to get a sense of the operation of your station, you should have a listen to the 7130 DX net. It happens every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:30am UTC on 7.130 MHz +/- QRM. Next time I'll talk about how that works and what you might gain from having a go. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I made a comment about melting your coax and that this was a bad thing. Today I'm going to talk about some of how this comes about and what kinds of parameters we're dealing with. Let's start with coax itself. The operating temperature of coax is somewhere around 80 to 90 Degrees Celsius, or 176 to 194 Fahrenheit. Soldering is at 230 Celsius, or 446 Fahrenheit, so for starters, soldering coax is a risky adventure. For argument's sake, let's assume that you managed to solder your coax without damaging it. What else can go wrong? Let's have a look at high voltage transmission lines. Why do we move power around the place using high voltage lines? The answer is that in a high voltage line, the current is low. Where the current is low, heating is low, so more of the energy gets from the power-station to your shack and less of it is used to heat up the power line between the power station and you. So, that means that high voltage and low current is less heat loss. The opposite is also true. Low voltage and high current is more heat loss. Now if you look at a dipole antenna, you'll know that this contraption is moving energy around at some or other frequency. As it's doing that, there are high and low voltage points and high and low current points. In a half-wave dipole, the high voltage points are at the ends of the antenna, and the high current points are at the feed-point. Guess where your coax is? So, you've got your connection to your antenna located at a high current point, in the place where high current has the potential to create problems, things like heating up your coax and potentially melting it. So, when does this heating happen? Well, you need high resistance and high current. This typically happens when you've got a bad connector at the feed-point. In practical terms this means that if you're using QRP, 5 Watts, you're unlikely to come across a situation where this becomes an issue, since the currents aren't that high and a bad connection typically means no contacts. If on the other hand you're using high power, then make sure that the connection to your antenna is strong, solid, and water proof so it doesn't deteriorate to the point of melting and then killing your radio. It's best to keep an eye on the SWR meter when you're working, since a high SWR might be indicating that the resistance at your antenna changed for the worse. Final comment. When you've set-up your station, create a note of the SWR at different frequencies and refer back to that regularly. Spotting a problem early might just prevent some expensive maintenance later on. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about SWR or Standing Wave Ratio. As amateurs we use this term all the time, we expect to see it on a meter or display near our transmitter, we buy specific gadgets to measure it and often we seek to find the lowest possible SWR. As I've said in the past, the perfect antenna cannot exist, in the same way, a perfect connection, the feed-line, between an antenna and transmitter can also not exist. The perfect match is a 50 Ohm match, but a dummy load is a perfect match and its purpose is specifically not to radiate. So what's all this about then? Lets start in a swimming pool for a moment. Imagine that this pool is really long and skinny. Say 100m long and 1cm wide. Stand on one side and make a splash. The ripple of the water radiates from the source of the splash, you, to the other end of the pool. The end wall bounces the ripple back to you, and bounces back and forth until all the ripples have dissipated. Now, if you kept splashing about, and waves were rippling back and forth while you were splashing, some of the ripples would happen at the same time as a splash and some of the ripples would happen at the time between two splashes. That means that at some times the splash and the reflections would sit on top of each other, making a higher wave and at some times splashes and reflections would be sitting below each other, making the troughs between splashes deeper. If you replaced the water with electricity and the pool with a transmission line, the same is true. If you made an electronic splash, say a transmission from your radio, into the feed-line, the ripple would travel along the feed-line, bounce off the end, come back, bounce off the radio and so on. In the same way, reflections and transmissions can add to each other, and they can also subtract from each other. This difference between the addition of signals and the subtraction of signals is what we call the SWR. There are two ways to get to the SWR. If you connect a 50 Ohm feed-line to a 100 Ohm antenna, the SWR is 2:1. This is a theoretical SWR and it tells you is that there will be a ripple coming back from the antenna that is both adding and subtracting from the original transmission. Alternatively we could use an SWR meter to measure the voltage differences between the high and the low part of a wave and indicate on a dial what the SWR is. This is an actual SWR. The two are indicating the same thing and we can use that to get from a measurement to an understanding of impedance matching between the feed-line and the antenna. As a point of reference, if there are no ripples bouncing back, then there is no addition or subtraction, and the resulting SWR is 1:1. For completeness, I should point out that the rabbit hole is much deeper than this explanation and I'll revisit this topic in the future. Now for the final piece of the puzzle. A piece of coax in Amateur Radio is 50 Ohm. If you have an antenna that is 50 Ohm, that's perfectly fine as an antenna system. Of course, antennas are not so accommodating. A dipole has a feed-point impedance of about 75 Ohm. A folded dipole has a feed-point impedance of about 300 Ohm. Each different antenna system has a different impedance and thus needs a different transmission line connected to it. So, if you look at a 50 Ohm coax connected to a 300 Ohm folded dipole, you know that the SWR is going to be 6:1. However if you connected a 300 Ohm ladder-line to the same folded dipole, the SWR would be 1:1. What this means is that the coax would have waves rippling back and forth and the ladder-line would not. The coax would have a particular loss and each ripple going back and forth would be subjected to that loss, where on the ladder-line, the loss would only apply once, on the outbound leg, since no energy would be bouncing back. As an aside, this loss is experienced as heat and if you're not careful it will melt your coax or worse. That's not to say that SWR kills everything, but you need to be aware of what's actually going on. Now I should point out one more thing. These bouncing waves, the ripples coming back have information embedded on them. If you're transmitting voice, or some digital mode, the ripples that bounced back would be broadcast with a slight delay and the second bounce with another slight delay, and so-on. This phenomenon could actually make your signal into gibberish. Coax has its place. It's a very flexible way of getting a signal from A to B, it's not affected by crazy nearby signals and it's robust, not to mention cheap. If you actually need to get your signal somewhere, then it will pay to look at how best to use it, when to use ladder-line and how to organise your shack in such a way that the best signal makes it outside to the working end of your radio. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the tick boxes we're required to deal with is the one titled "Station Security". As licensed amateurs we're required to secure our station from use by unauthorised people. What form does that take, how do you do it, what makes it secure and how much security is enough? I spent a bit of time looking around to see if there were any guidelines I could unearth to actually describe in detail what this might actually mean, but my Google Fu is clearly broken, since I was unable to find any such documentation. That's not to say that it doesn't exist, just that it's well hidden among the hits about encryption, broadcasting music and other spurious results. What form does this requirement take in your shack? Do you tick the box and move on, or have you taken specific actions to comply with this requirement? For me, I have two shacks. One in my office and one in my car. Taking the car first, the security of my mobile shack is based around the notion that my car is locked when I'm not around. Technically my partner also uses the car and it's not directly under my control at that time, but the flip side of that is that the radio needs to be manually connected to a battery, the head of the radio needs to be connected to the patch lead, the antenna needs to be screwed in and the coax switch needs to match the band you're trying to operate on. These things are not complicated for an amateur, but for a member of the public they form several barriers to entry before they could actually operate my station. In my office, where I mostly operate on VHF due to the high noise level on HF, security takes a similar form. It's in a locked house, that is, if I'm not home, the house is locked. Similarly, when my partner is around they technically can get to the station. The same is true for any guests to our house. Security again is a multi-level activity. The radio needs to be connected to power, the antenna needs to be connected to the correct port, the remote head needs to be connected correctly and if all that is done, you can operate my station. There are no specific locks on my radio; the same is true for any station I've ever visited. All of the clubs I'm a member of have a room or a box with a lock on it which is one barrier, but once that is breached, the radio behind it is good to go. This whole topic is an example of how we legislate for a particular thing, in this case preventing use by an unauthorised person, but don't actually specify what that means. So, what type of security does your station have? What's enough security and what isn't? Is my station legal or not? What makes it so? What about your station? It's easy to read the rules and tick the box, but sometimes the tickbox is a deep rabbit hole. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Radio Waves travel in straight lines. They go from point to point and that's it. Except that Radio Waves also reflect off certain surfaces, like light does. So, Radio Waves travel in straight lines and they also reflect and that's it. Except that Radio Waves also change direction when they pass through some change of medium. So, then, Radio Waves travel in straight lines and they also reflect and refract and that's it. Except that Radio Waves also bend when they encounter an obstacle or a slit. So, ok that's it. Radio Waves travel in straight lines and they also reflect and refract and diffract and that's the end of it. Except that they turn slightly due to gravity when they pass by a large mass. So, this phenomenon that we use in our hobby every time we key up a transmitter or listen to an off-air signal is doing much that is invisible. It bends and wobbles, bounces and shifts, reflects and refracts and somehow we still manage to make our signal get from here to there. The reason I'm raising this at all is that all new entrants to the hobby often scratch their head when they start transmitting. Antennas and propagation aside, the humble hand-held portable radio, the walkie talkie, or handitalky, or whatever you call it, does some weird stuff. Some people use it like a mobile phone, other talk into it like they're summoning the oracle, others wave it about and hover around metal doorways or hold it close to their body and walk about while they're talking. I host a weekly radio net, you should check it out some day, Saturday Morning, 0:00 to 1:00 UTC, it's called F-troop and we get lots of different skill levels and experiences sharing stories and answering questions. Many times we have amateurs who are using a hand-held and getting unexpected results. This variable, fluid nature of radio waves is why this happens. Each tiny variation causes some effect and some outcome. Resulting in a wildly fluctuating signal that varies between loud and clear and inaudible and all steps in between. And that's not even talking about flat batteries or trying to talk through a hill to a local repeater. My point is that radio waves are unpredictable. If you are using your radio in an unpredictable way while using an unpredictable medium like radio, then all bets are off. Next time you key up your hand-held, spare a thought for what's happening between your antenna and mine. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio To do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome is the definition of insanity; so how do you avoid making the same mistakes on-air in Amateur Radio? During the week I was wading through some old photos and videos on my phone to make some space and I stumbled on some old videos taken by others and sent to me whilst I was on-air. It was a lovely look back at some previous activity, but they also made me cringe. Here's one example, the very first time, back in 2011, I did a local contest, using the club callsign VK6AHR: == One One. My number to you is uh, one zero four, uh V K Six Alpha Hotel Romeo to V K Six Alpha Romeo, my number to you is one zero four. == It's only that I know I was using the club callsign that I know who I am and who the other station is, in this case the other station was VK6AR. My exchange was 104, but clear as mud and twice as thick. These days I'd say something much less convoluted, something like: VK6AR, 59104 from VK6AHR Here's another attempt from me in my early days, calling DX using my own callsign: == "CQ DX, CQ Delta Xray, this is Victor Kilo Six Fox Lima Alpha Bravo calling CQ DX" == CQ Delta Xray, what was I thinking? Actually, I was emulating another amateur. So what you say, while there are new amateurs in your shack, matters. Also, I noticed that I started the bad habit of saying Fox instead of Foxtrot. Fortunately one of my listeners wrote in to nip that in the bud early on. My point in sharing these evolutions of my on-air style is that you might experience me as a practiced amateur, but just like you, I had to learn by making mistakes and being told I was making mistakes. Fortunately there was some video evidence to help in my innocent education stages. So, from your perspective, next time you get on air, try and record some of your activity and have a listen back. I've done this with new amateurs and old-hands and it's absolutely staggering how much you learn from having a listen to yourself. So, when you get on air to make some noise, record it for education purposes and listen back. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There was a time when I took my computer out into the field to do my portable logging. That's still true for contests, but when I'm hunting for an elusive DX station, I no longer take with me all the bits that are required to make that level of technology work. I've come to the realisation that less is more. Especially with portable operations in parks and on summits. This move to paper will actually simplify your life whilst you're enjoying the rare stations you can hear. So, if you're using paper logs and you are wanting to make actual contacts, how do you do this without going insane? Normally you'd find a station, log their call, put down the frequency, scratch it out when the contact failed, rinse and repeat. The end result is a page full of scratched out callsigns with no structure and little chance to accurately log these into your normal station log. The best way to overcome this is to take a leaf from N1MM, a brilliant piece of logging software that deserves a whole separate segment and when I'm sufficiently proficient with it, I'll do just that. In the meantime, one of the things you can do with N1MM is mark a station. This mark consists of a callsign and a frequency. Technically it also consists of a mode and a time-stamp, but lets not get too carried away. On paper, if you format your log-sheet appropriately, you can use a separate line for each station you hear. Log the frequency while you're writing down the callsign. If you're inclined, you can also write down their name and any other salient details you hear as you're browsing past. What this does is set up a framework for you to log your calls. When you actually make contact, then you can enter the signal report and the time. That way you can instantly see which of the lines contain actual contacts and which of them contain stations heard. Sometimes I write down their signal strength as I note the station, but that's a pretty variable thing, so do that in moderation. When you've actually completed the contact, make a mark, either an exclamation point or two, or an asterisk, or something that you recognise. That way when you're sitting in front of your station log, you can quickly log those specially marked contacts and add them to your DXCC tally. This same technique works well during search and pounce operation during a contest, though I personally am unlikely to use paper for contest logging; N1MM is very helpful in keeping track for you. As a bonus, N1MM allows a station to expire, so your screen isn't filled with stations that are no longer there. I should point out that I'm making the assumption that you're the one responding to another station, rather than sitting on a frequency calling CQ. If you're doing that, just log their callsign as they come past, keep track of the time and write down any signal reports when they're happening. That way you don't get ahead of yourself and you'll end up with a log that still makes sense later on. Logging is important for your own benefit. Some jurisdictions require a station log, for others it's optional. If you're interacting with other stations, logging their call is a courteous thing to do. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about magic. In the past I've made mention of the magic that is Amateur Radio. There are those who think that our hobby isn't magic and that everything that we do in this field is understood and documented. I think that this is both wrong and unhelpful, since there is much to learn, much to discover and much to invent. Amateur Radio isn't dead, it's full of life, full of things that are continuing to develop, evolve and grow. Let me give you an example. In radio there is a phenomenon called the "FM Capture Effect". Explaining how you experience it is simple. If you have two FM transmitters on the same frequency, and you're using an FM receiver, one of the FM transmitters will win, that is, you'll hear one and not the other. Unlike in AM and SSB transmissions, where you hear both at the same time, the FM Capture Effect causes the receiver to pick one over the other. As an aside, it's because of this effect that aviation and HF communication mostly prefer AM based communication. Imagine two pilots trying to talk to the tower at the same time, one is heard and the other not. Back to the magic. We can describe that this thing happens. We can show it happening, we can even measure the signal strength difference that causes it to happen, 0.17dB according to one document I read. We can use formulas to describe our FM signal, we can use simulations to emulate it, but in the end, the closest we can get to the how and why is: This happens, we know it happens, it happens under these circumstances, but precisely how, we're not sure. A thesis I read on the subject by Park Soon Sang at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, published in 1989, spends many pages saying all these things and finishes off with: "The simulation results establish that the low pass filtering portion of frequency demodulation accounts for the capture effect of FM receivers." and goes on to say: "It is recommended that the capture effect be verified using an operating experimental system in which system parameters can be controlled and accurately measured." Or in other words, we built a software simulator to learn about this phenomenon. This simulator suggests that the low pass filter causes this, but you really should make an actual set-up to test this. If I'm less vague, we simulated it, it looks right, but we're really only guessing, so test this in the real world. Now, before you get all huffy. I'm saying that a phenomenon that has existed since the first FM transmission in 1936 is still being explored and investigated and the jury is still out as to what precisely causes it and what the parameters are. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1973: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- by that definition, Amateur Radio is clearly magic. So, when you next scratch your head about what the future of our hobby has in store, the answer is almost certainly covered by the very same author: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." Amateur Radio, it's magic and there is more to discover. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio This technology driven community of radio enthusiasts makes me laugh on occasion. Today I had to laugh when I realised that we spend an awful lot of time talking about antennas and radios and feed lines and impedance and propagation and electronics and a whole lot of subject in-between and around that. It stuck me that one conversation that we don't have, is the one about microphones. Specifically how to actually use one. I've been around hundreds of radio amateurs, seen them speak into their microphone, witnessed them standing at a lectern presenting their latest project, observed them attempting to rally the troops during a HAMfest by yelling into a microphone and heard them on-air. I came to the realisation that despite our familiarity with the technology, by enlarge, the amateurs I observed are no better than the general public when it comes to using a microphone. Actually, I think as a community we're worse, because we won't be told how to do it. So, I'm going to tell you. You can switch me off, or in the secrecy of your own shack, stick around and see if there is something to learn. I'm coming at this from a background in broadcasting. I've conducted some 1800 interviews in my time, have spoken in public, on-air and in myriad different environments, including large event venues and sports arenas. I won't say I've seen it all, but I've seen my fair share of how it's done, what it sounds like and what doesn't work. The very first thing to note is that yelling into a microphone will make it worse. Let me say that again. Don't ever yell into a microphone. The second thing to note is that you should keep the distance between your mouth and your microphone as static as possible. A good rule of thumb is to clench your fist and put it between your chin and the microphone. That's the distance that you should start with. Some microphones need you closer, others need you further away. Eating your microphone is only for very experienced operators in specific environments, since every thing your mouth does will be captured. A microphone is in essence a device that converts movement into electricity. This sounds obvious, but it means that waving the microphone around is also movement. The cable that's attached to the microphone moves, and makes sound. The desk on which the microphone is placed moves when you touch it, that's sound. Anything you can hear with your ears and much that you cannot, will be captured by the microphone. Not all microphones are equal. The ideal microphone converts all frequencies equally well, but this isn't actually possible, so, some frequencies are better captured than other frequencies. This means that your voice will not actually be captured in exactly the same way as it comes out of your mouth. Speaking of which. What you hear from a recording of your voice often sounds wrong. This is because the sound that's coming from inside your mouth is also travelling inside your head and your ears pick it up from the inside as well as from the outside. Listening to a recording of your voice doesn't echo inside your head. On an FM repeater, if your signal is captured by the repeater, the volume is not due to your antenna, it's due to your microphone. So make sure you set the microphone gain appropriately and when people tell you that you sound soft, fix the gain. Microphones will pick up breathing and the sounds your lips make when you smack them together and when you say the letter P as in PaPa. The best way to deal with this sound is to learn not to make it. In the mean time, you can speak across the microphone, rather than directly at it. This means that you should keep the same distance, but tilt the microphone slightly. Speaking into a lectern microphone, a radio microphone or a hand-held all follow exactly the same principles. If you get the opportunity to hear yourself via headphones while speaking into a microphone, use it to listen to what exactly is captured. You'll get distracted by how your voice sounds, but have a listen to the smacking and the breathing and the popping of your voice. Final tip. If your voice gets tired from speaking and you run out of breath, you're doing it wrong. Touch your belly while talking, don't press down, just touch it. You're aiming to use your whole body, feeling your gut participate in the speaking. Technically what you're doing is making your diaphragm move, but that's hard to imagine. Touching your belly does the trick. No more excuses. When you get on air, make sure that the beginning of the link between you and the other station is fully functional, start with getting the microphone right. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a curious phenomenon related to how we operate that is pervasive within our community. As an inexperienced ham, I would turn on my radio and tune around and hear nothing. I'd change bands and do it again. Over time I'd work my way through the bands I'm allowed on and find no activity. On rare occasions I'd venture into the wide unknown and see what other bands were doing, ones where I wasn't allowed to transmit due to my license restrictions, and find lots of people talking to each other, making noise and having fun. More often than not, this band of feverish activity was 20m. For a long time I ascribed magical properties to this 20m band. There was always propagation, people were always there and it seemed that if you wanted to make contacts, that was the place to be. Over time I participated in contests with other amateurs, operating a club station and finding myself on 20m making contacts. I began to believe that 20m was this amazing place where stuff was always happening. This seemed to be reinforced by other amateurs who would use as their sole reason for gaining extra responsibilities, access to the 20m band. Now before you start, 20m is special. It has some interesting properties which make contacts appear and vanish at short notice. Just like other bands with their different peculiarities, practice makes perfect. But, 20m isn't that special. It's not a band that is always open, or always closed, just like 15m isn't, nor is 10m, neither is 6m, 80m, or 160m or whatever band you prefer to operate on. No band is always open and no band is always closed. Guess how I know this? Whenever there is a contest, activity blooms all over the place, the bands are full of stations, making contacts, having fun and annoying those stations who hate contesters with vehemence, so, clearly there is something else going on. There is. It's you, and me, and everyone else. We're all listening. While listening is good, you also need people to talk, otherwise there is nothing to listen to. There are automated stations around using beacons and WSPR modes and all manner of cute software to determine if their station is being heard. And if you look at the maps, they clearly are being heard. So, as I've said before, go on air and make some noise. If you want to make contacts, you need to make noise. Your friends need to make noise. You need to setup regular contacts with friends somewhere on the planet and actually use the bands. Yes, having access to 20m is fun, but lamenting that is frankly a waste of time. Whatever band you're on, whatever you're doing, you need to make noise. Yes, of course there are variations in propagation throughout the day and the solar cycle affects how far and wide you'll be heard, and sun spots and solar flares affect the ionosphere as well, but it's not the only variable. Just because no-one is heard, doesn't mean that no-one is there. So, repeating myself, go on air and make some noise. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The thing I like about our community is that there is always something new brewing, someone is inventing something, making something or doing something. It amazes me that the level of ingenuity is boundless. During the week someone asked the question, "What's the difference between AM and FM?" and while answering that could incorporate hand waving, arrows and drawings, I came across a much simpler explanation, which simply says it all. Credit goes to redditor EmmetOT. Imagine replacing radio with light, this isn't a stretch, since it's part of the same spectrum. Replace a radio transmitter with a light bulb. AM is using a dimmer, changing the brightness, to send information. FM is changing the colour of the light to send information. I could stop right there, but there is so much more going on in our community. If you've been out of Amateur Radio for a while, and I know, this happens to the best of us, you'll be forgiven in thinking that nothing is the same as it was, while wondering if anything ever changes. Both these things are true and I think that's good. The first AM voice transmission was made in 1900, SSB experimentation began in 1915 and FM experiments were happening in the early 1930's. These three modes, AM, SSB and FM are still with us today. We've done other cool stuff since then, stereophonic and quadraphonic FM. We think of RTTY as a relative new kid on the block, but it has its origins in 1874 and the first on-air RTTY was heard in 1922. Without going into too much detail, other modes that we are beginning to think of as ancient are surprisingly new. PSK31 for example joined us in 1998, but Hellschreiber, is from the 1920's, MFSK comes from 1962 and Packet Radio hails from the 1970's. JT65 comes from 2003 and JT9 is from 2012. My point is that whatever the mode you're using, someone is extending it, modifying it, improving it or inventing something new. Your level of familiarity with a mode has little or nothing to do with the age of the mode. As is the case with everything in Amateur Radio, horses for courses. In your Amateur pursuits you'll come across those who will tell you that there is nothing new to be invented, that everything has already been thought of and that we are a hobby of old people harking back to the golden era of something or other. I'm here to tell you that nothing is further from the truth. Amateur Radio is a hobby of invention of people asking the question: "I wonder what happens if I do this...", often followed by a big bang and the magic smoke coming out. Don't let that deter you. Keep on with the experimentation, even if you've only been a member of this community for a minute and a half like me, you too can make a contribution. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you use your trusty multi-meter to measure resistance across a 50 Ohm resistor, it shows 50 Ohm, but when you use it across a piece of 50 Ohm coax, you see either infinity, or 0. Similarly, when you measure across a folded-dipole, you see 0, not 300 Ohm. Does this mean that a 50 Ohm resistor is somehow different than a 50 Ohm piece of coax and why is the feed-point impedance of a folded dipole 300 Ohm, when your multi-meter clearly says it's 0? Does this mean that there are two types of Ohm? Today I'm going to explain why this is and what's going on. Yesterday I started reading up on the subject and every single explanation I came across went into deep ju-ju with scary maths, using complex and imaginary numbers. I did a bit of that in my dark past, but none of that is needed to understand what's happening. As you know, there is such a thing as Direct Current or DC - we use it with batteries and little power supplies, in simple circuits and all manner of day-to-day activities. There is another world that we as amateurs use, the world of Alternating Current or AC. In house-hold wiring we use 50 or 60 Hertz and different voltages depending on where on the globe we are. In radio terms we use it for our transmissions, on HF at several Mega Hertz and beyond. These two different worlds, the DC and AC world don't appear to have anything in common. Here's the kicker though, they are the same thing. Yup. DC and AC are the same thing. What? Yup. I'm not making this up. As you might recall, if you look at an AC voltage, it goes from plus to minus and back again. A 50 Hertz alternating current does this swap 50 times per second. When you're rag-chewing on 40m, or 7 MHz, it happens 7 million times a second. From plus to minus and back, 7 million times. Clearly there has to be some impact on this massive level of activity. Think of direct current as an alternating current with a frequency of 0 Hertz, that is, over time, DC doesn't change. So, DC is a short cut for saying AC at 0 Hertz. If you understand that explanation, then some really cool stuff starts to happen. Before I get to the cool stuff, you might recall Ohm's Law, commonly expressed as: "Given a current and a resistance, we can determine a voltage". Said in another way, the resistance of a circuit is related to the voltage and the current in the circuit. Now, in this simple form of Ohm's Law, the voltage doesn't change from plus to minus and back again. That is, over time, there is no change. Now if you start doing funky stuff with your voltage, like change it from plus to minus and back again, an additional type of resistance comes into play, called reactance. This reactance is the part that is affected by voltage change over time. So if you swap the voltage from plus to minus and back again a million times a second, the reactance has a big part to play. In short, there are two types of resistance, one that is independent of time, called resistance, and one that's dependent on time, called reactance. Both of these, resistance and reactance, happen within a circuit. If the voltage doesn't change over time, then the reactance part is zero and similarly there are circumstances where you can have a resistance of zero but have a reactance that's not - one example is a folded dipole. Now, if you combine the resistance and reactance, you get something called impedance. Now you have all the bits. Resistance is expressed in Ohm, Impedance is expressed in Ohm, and thus Reactance is also expressed in Ohm. If we look at our folded dipole with a feed-point impedance of 300 Ohm, you now know that this 300 Ohm comes from a resistance of 0 Ohm and a reactance of 300 Ohm at the resonant frequency, which is why your trusty multi-meter shows it as 0, since the voltage it uses to measure is alternating at 0 Hertz, which is not the resonant frequency of this antenna. Before I go, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Reactance itself is made up of Capacitance and Inductance, which each deal with the reactance in a capacitor and an inductor, but I'll leave that for another day. So, next time someone tells you that the feed-point impedance of your folded dipole is 300 Ohm, you'll now understand why your multi-meter says it's 0. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm concluding my breakdown of the contest that I participated in recently as a mobile station. I planned to make my contacts on one band and I did that. Feedback indicated that there were other contacts to be had on other bands, but switching bands is a non trivial affair with my current set-up. I planned to have a common frequency that would be a local cluster of activity, except it never happened that way because others decided to do their own thing. This meant that my antenna was tuned for the top end of the band, rather than the more typical centre of activity. I expected to work several home stations and managed to do so with two, but that was much lower than I expected and planned for, so my overall score didn't reach the planned levels, even if it was triple last year's effort. I planned to drive a circuit in about 90 minutes, instead it took about three hours. Fortunately there were lots of mobile stations about which helped me much more than expected. I keep telling myself that I need to sort out a voice-keyer because each time my voice gives out about half way through the contest, but again I keep forgetting to make that happen. My laptop power worked pretty well, but the location of the device, sitting on the passenger seat and then during on air activity, parked at the side of the road, it was balanced on my knee. Not ideal and not comfortable. My phone worked really well as my live GPS map and the boundaries I'd drawn using Google My Maps really helped to show me where I was in relation to the boundaries for this contest. I'm a relatively new arrival into the Amateur community but I often forget that I've been contesting almost from day one. My first on air experience was a club station during a field day camp out where the activity centred around a little folding table with Amateurs crowded around it. On air I have lots of broadcast experience, which means that I'm experienced in multi-tasking, coordinating frequencies, logs, callsigns, navigation and strategic objectives. I forget that this is not true for others on air. I love contesting, seriously, I love it. This activity puts me right on the bleeding edge of my capability and it's exhilarating to explore the peaks and troughs of the activity. I used rope to prevent my heavy antenna from breaking my boot lip mount and was worried about strange looks I might get. The rope worked well, the mount did not suffer from the experience and I didn't get much in the way of strange looks. In fact, much less than when I'm parked up with my 12m squid pole. Food and water worked great, but I will add public toilets to my map for next year, since it's not fun having to hunt. Mind you, a petrol station is a good option when you're in a hurry. At the end of the day, I managed to triple my score, I achieved all my objectives and proved to myself that my strategy, which came about thanks to discussion with fellow contesters, was solid, workable and a better performer than last year. I'm not yet sure how I'll change what I did, perhaps more antennas, parked at places longer, working more bands at the time might be an improvement. Time will tell. I hope that this adventure made you look at your activities and gives you some ideas on what to try, what to investigate and things to look out for. Hopefully I'll hear you on air during the next contest. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to look at the actual on-air activity of the contest. Previously I've talked about the preparation and planning, as well as the doing, in terms of mechanics, what to bring, where to put it and how to power it all. At the most basic level, a contest is a combination of two things, making and taking calls. It's an important point, so I'll say it again. A contest is two things, sitting on a frequency and call CQ and have other stations call you, and, it's also hunting up and down the dial finding other stations who are calling CQ. These two sides, being the instigator of the contact, and being the responder, are needed to make points. Even the most advanced contest station with multiple operators and transmitters will do both these things and when you're on your own you too need to do this. One reason for this is that in a contest others are doing the exact same thing. They're also swapping between both these activities to pick up extra points and multipliers. Another reason is propagation. Your station is unique. It has a unique radiation pattern, a unique location, a unique audience of stations that can hear you at any one time. Across the duration of the contest this will change as day turns into night and night back into day. If you're mobile, there is an additional variable, your location which will affect your audience every time you move. If those two reasons were not enough, here's one more. How do you know if the band your on is working or not? How do you know if there are others nearby, or on a completely different part of the band, or, if the band is open or closed, or if solar conditions have shifted and a band has been affected? For my contest I had a vertical antenna mounted on my car. I can use it to operate on the bands I'm allowed to use, 10m, 15m, 40m and 80m. For this contest, my go-to band was 40m. Local conditions dictate that when dusk arrives, the lower part, 7.0 to 7.150 is all but unusable due to heavy interference from non-amateur stations overseas, so I picked a spot near 7.190 and used that as my calling frequency. Of course, as was expected, not everyone got the memo that I'd be up at that end of the band, and the little flag I posted saying that this was my frequency was dutifully ignored by everyone. What I'm saying is that there is no such thing as "my calling frequency", just the place where you like to call and you have to manage this along the duration of the contest, since others will find your little hidey-hole and use it at the drop of a hat. And if you're QRP like me, they might even just start calling CQ right over the top of you and you'll find that you think you're making contacts with stations that are not actually talking to you. In other words, be flexible. As a rule, for myself, having been bitten by this many times, I don't QSY to another band if a station I've just worked asks to do so, since the aim for your contest is for you to make contacts, not for someone else to make them. That's not to say that if it's 3 o'clock in the morning and nothing much is happening this won't change. Again, flexibility is key. I tend to use both VFO A and VFO B on my radio. It's a quick way to swap between frequencies or bands and it allows you to both sit on a frequency, calling CQ and hunt up and down the band at the same time. If that doesn't make sense to you, this is how I do this. I set my calling frequency up on VFO A and copy that to VFO B. I call CQ a few times on VFO A, swap to VFO B, scan up or down a little way, find a station that I'd like to work and swap back to VFO A, call CQ a few more times, swap back to VFO B, hear the station finish their call and hear them call CQ. I respond and if they hear me, I make the contact. If not, I swap back to VFO A, call CQ and do it all again. This way I can be in one place calling CQ and pick up contacts at the same time. If you have multiple radios, even as a single operator, you can do this and pipe the audio from one radio into one ear and the audio from the other radio into the other ear and do both at the same time. You can even combine the two and have four frequencies you work on. This requires practice, and you must make sure that both radios are not on the same band, ever, otherwise you'll likely blow up the second one while transmitting on the first. Next time I'll look at what worked and what didn't, the aftermath. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about the doing of a contest. Previously I discussed the preparation and you can go back to that and have a listen online, search iTunes for my callsign, VK6FLAB. The contest I participated in was a 24 hour contest. It started at 2pm local time on a Saturday and ran the whole 24 hours. If I was sitting in a shack, I might have and in the past actually have, operated during most of that. Seeing that this time around I was planning to be mobile, I needed to get sleep in between driving from location to location. In my car I have a suction cup stuck to the front windscreen which holds the head of my radio. It's mostly within reach, but if I operate for a little while, extending my arm gets tiring, so if that's the case, I drop the steering wheel, push it forward and modify my seat position. A better solution would be to find a better location, but I've not managed that yet. I keep looking at other set-ups, but haven't found one that works for me. I'll let you know if I do. My logging is done on a computer. A net-book. It's small, light and pretty responsive. It's running Windows XP, never connects to the 'net and it works. I balance it on my knee when entering contacts, or have it on the passenger seat and tap into it that way. Also not ideal. I saw a series of photos where a fellow traveller had used a plastic sewer pipe, and bend, to push into the cup-holder of the centre console and mount their computer on that. I've not yet travelled to the hardware store, but I can see a future where that might occur. Power for the laptop comes from a 12V power supply. It's plugged into the cigarette lighter, set to the voltage of my computer and plugged in. It has a handy USB socket on the power supply that I use to keep my phone charged. That sits on another suction cup on the dashboard in a mount. It showed me where I was and where the boundaries of operation where. Every now and then I even used it as a phone. Speaking about power. I power my radio with a 12V battery that's sitting in the boot. At night, finding the right keys to press is a challenge. The interior light of the car is one option, but I find it makes too much light, draws too much attention and uses more power than I'm willing to use. Instead I use an LED headlamp. I was wearing it for a while, but a better solution turned out to be attaching it to the sun visor where it still is. In terms of feeding and watering, for water I had about six bottles of water lying in the passenger seat foot-well. For food, a small insulated bag with fruit, apples, pears and a banana. I stayed away from nuts, sugar and other traditional stay-awake foods, because I find that I over eat, get sleepy and become less productive. In between locations I'd turn the radio volume down, turn on some classical music and let my mind relax a little. I drove about 300km during the 24 hours. Operated from 2pm until about 10pm and from about 5am to 2pm, a total of 17 hours. I managed to have a sausage roll for breakfast, not recommended, a few cups of coffee in the morning - keeping my eyes peeled for a coffee place at 5am paid off at 7am. I wore comfortable shoes, a t-shirt and jeans. Next time I'll wear shorts or tracksuit pants. The belt really didn't work for me for that extended period of time sitting in a car. Next time I'll talk about the operation during the contest. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Training is a word that is steeped in tradition, it conjures up images of classrooms, teachers, chewing gum stuck to the bottom of your desk and being called upon to attend the front of the class to explain something based on the misapprehension that you did your homework. Fortunately this is a hobby and training is something you can do yourself, to yourself, by yourself at your own pace. Of course, you can choose to do it with others, but it's not required as such. We talk about being prepared for doing stuff, but what do we actually do to make that happen? I've said many times that I like to do contests. In fact, I'm preparing for one right now. This particular contest awards points for making a contact and doubles the points, a so-called multiplier, every time I work a different area. So, what does my training for this look like, what preparation have I done and what am I doing right now? My first step was to read the rules, the specifics of what is proscribed, what is permitted and what is counted and what isn't. This sets up the training ground, the framework under which I have to operate my station. My next step was to pull out a map and draw the boundaries of the areas that affected my score, showing those regions that I'd likely be in and likely make contact with. The crucial part for this was to see where the boundaries were, because it's likely that while driving around, having situational awareness will pay a good part of being successful. Then I looked at the band conditions. I set-up with my multi-band antenna, a multi-tap Outbacker, and set it up on the 4 HF bands that I'm allowed to operate on, 80m, 40m, 15m and 10m. I set out to make a single contact with each, based on another station a couple of kilometres up the road. We both have vertical antennas to increase our chance of success. Based on that I determined a few things. One, that this particular antenna and my car make for some pretty specific directionality on some bands. Two, that 10m and 15m were working close in, but not 20km away, that 80m sort of worked but that 40m was a winner. Based on this test I decided that 40m was going to be my frequency band for this contest. Then I went about getting tools together. I have a laptop for scoring and a power supply that connects to the car for the laptop. I've charged my radio battery, so it will run for a week on 5 Watts, got together pen and paper as a backup, found a USB charger for my phone and will shortly be packing fruit and water for while I'm on the road. Last night I fuelled up the car, ready for the contest, and this morning I dug out a few spare antennas in case one of my friends is able to come out and play on-air as well. I've looked at the map closely, did maths on how best to operate, added markers to my map where good operating positions might be found, likely they're completely rubbish, but going there is when I'll find that out. I've told others what I'm going to do, encouraged others to get on air and play and by the time I start I'll have had a healthy lunch, a hot shower and comfortable clothes to keep me on the road. I've packed a warm coat, and gone through the contest in my mind to see if I can think of other things that I might need. All this is only the pre-cursor to actually doing the contest. Call it Part 1. Part 2 is the contest and Part 3 is figuring out what worked and what didn't. I'll tell you about that next time we meet. Training, it can be fun, or it can be traumatic, you decide. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about getting started. In the past I've mentioned that it's a good idea to find a community, a club or a local mentor to get you going in this hobby, and that still stands. You really need to find some like-minded, available humans to share this experience with. That being said, there are some things that you can do on your lonesome. An often asked question is: "What radio should I buy?" The answer to that question can be long and involved, but it boils down to this: "What ever you can afford." That answer in and of itself isn't that helpful. Do you get a $40 cheap hand-held or a $4000 all-singing and dancing radio? My best answer to that is: "Buy your second radio first." What I mean is that if you spend your money on a $40 radio today, how long will you enjoy it and how long will it be until you spend your next bit of money and is that $40 investment a waste of money? I'm not making a value judgement here, the answer is still: "What ever you can afford." When I asked that question of my mentor, Hi Meg, she explained that her first radio was a hand-held radio and that she quickly settled on a Yaesu FT857d as her second radio. She went on to say that picking a brand is like choosing between Mac or PC, Ford vs. General Motors, vi vs. emacs, Debian vs. Red Hat, Tomato vs. Tomato. There are followers in each camp and nay-sayers in every other camp. I picked my radio based on whom I had around me for support, who was nearby for silly questions, advice on accessories, experience with settings and knowledge of costs, faults and other intangibles that I was completely unfamiliar with. Once you get into this hobby, you'll come across people who have technical reasons for picking a particular radio, or sentimental reasons, or financial ones, or what ever reason they come up with. When you get started, not much of that matters. If you have money to burn, then sure, you can by the top-of-the range radio, but if you're never going to use it, what's the point? Once you've picked your radio, other choices follow. What power supply do I need, how much space do I need, what kinds of connectors does it come with, has it got a built-in antenna, or do you need to erect one, does it have a tuner built-in, or do you need to get one, do you need programming software, a microphone, etc. etc. Each of these follows from the initial selection of your radio. What now? You have a radio, presumably an antenna of some sort and your radio is actually turned on and you can hear stuff. If you've come from a short-wave listening background, you'll know where everything is, have a familiarity with the bands and an idea of how things work. If you're new to this hobby, then these things are not so obvious. Things to mention are that each band is unique, that is, they all have their own characteristics. Some are always noisy, others are always quiet, some are active during the day, others only at night, some have stations all day long and others only for short periods. A lot of this depends on things outside your control. Propagation is a variable animal and depending on what our Sun is doing, propagation will change, sometimes substantially, as time goes by. Forecasts for the weather are getting better. The same is true for propagation forecasts. A forecast is just that, a prediction of the environment, but not a guarantee of conditions. There is no substitute for turning on your radio and having a listen. If you're in someone else's shack, have a listen on their equipment, use the opportunity to learn something about different set-ups. If you get the chance, operate on that station and see what happens. Getting started isn't a magical invisible unattainable thing, it's taking the first step on your journey into this hobby of Amateur Radio. Get to it already. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio This crazy hobby keeps sending curve balls to me. You've heard me talk in the past about missed opportunities. There are times when you look back and ask yourself: "What was I thinking?" Over the past, oh boy, I just looked it up, two years, I have been struggling with an antenna system that I could use while mobile. I took delivery of 4 single band antennas, one for 80m, one for 40m, 15m and one for 10m. I also purchased a boot-lip mount and some other things like coax switches and adapters. I've been attempting to make these antennas work with very, very limited success. They work just fine, they tune up as expected, show the SWR curve that the manufacturer has helpfully printed on a little card that comes with each antenna and generally are sturdy, compact and wonderful, but only if they're installed on something other than my car. In desperation a year ago I purchased a tuner for my radio, so at least I can trick it into transmitting. I have made very few contacts, added one or two DX countries in the past year and really got no-where. So, during the week I recalled that one of the things I purchased was an adapter. It's got a PL-259 socket on one end and a CB-thread on the other. I dug it out, found the thread that goes into the hole and attempted to attach it to the CB antenna I was given within a month of becoming an Amateur. It had been modified to work on 10m and most of my DX contacts had been with that antenna. So, I attempted to attach the adapter and it doesn't fit. So I look around my shed and notice another antenna that I was given at the same time that never worked, it's a multi-tap antenna. Picture an antenna that is a big stick, has wire would around its entire length with points where you can attach a lead to bypass some of the antenna. You plug the lead into the bottom connector, then pick the band you want to work on, put the other end of the lead into the right tapping point and off you go. It came with a big spring mount, was intended to be bolted to a bull-bar, but using a family sedan, makes attaching this contraption pretty hopeless. It'd tested it where I could, measured it, tested more, made a new wander lead with a solid connector and nothing I did made it work. It turns out that the thread in my adapter fits properly into the base of this multi-tap antenna. I took it out into a local park, put the antenna with the lead on 40m, bolted it to my boot-lip mount, halfway pulled out the tuning end, a little metal spike that you can use to adjust the length of the antenna and turned on my radio. Guess what happened next? Nothing, that's what happened. I was stunned, into silence, imagine that, me silent. It worked. No adjustments, no trimming, no fixes, nothing. Just plugged it in and it worked. Propagation was pretty poor, so no contacts as such, but oh my. The point of all this is that when you least expect it, a surprise might come your way. Look at the assumptions you've made in your shack, think of the things you've tried and failed to achieve and use that to take a fresh look at what you have. Hopefully your delight will be just as surprising as mine was. I'll be back on air a lot more, who know's I might even get the opportunity to have a chat with you. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever had your radio on, listening around, say on 40m and heard the following: "CQ, CQ 40m, this is VK6FLAB, calling CQ 40, CQ 40m, calling CQ" Apart from the fact that the station calling seems pretty desperate for a contact, you're tuned to 40m, why on earth would you actually mention that, what's the point of telling me what band you're calling on, when clearly I'm hearing you on that band? The answer to this question is in harmonics. At the heart of every radio is an oscillator, set to some or other frequency that forms the basis of all that happens around it. In order to arrive at different frequencies, we add and subtract, double and halve frequencies, all combining to arrive at the various frequencies and bands we use. I'll use some fictitious numbers here to give you an idea of what's happening. Imagine that you have a 3.5 MHz oscillator. With it you can double it to 7 MHz, double that to 14 MHz, double it again to 28 MHz, that's 80m, 40m, 20m and 10m, just by using doubling. You could use the same oscillator and a doubler with a frequency tripler to get 21 MHz and so on. A side-effect of doubling and tripling frequencies is that this process isn't perfect or linear. This in turn means that some of those imperfections also get doubled and tripled. These imperfections are called spurious emissions and we reduce them as much as possible; in fact it's required by legislation to be below a certain level below the wanted emission. As technology improves, these spurious emission standards evolve. The US FCC as an example says that for radios built before January 1, 1978 they're exempt, radios until 2003 must be 30 dB below the wanted emission and current radios must be 43 dB below. What this means is that in effect your radio is transmitting on multiple frequencies at the same time, but filtering prevents most of this from coming out. Now, imagine that you have a series of dipoles connected to your radio, one for 160m, one for 80m, one for 40m, one for 10m, etc. Imagine that your radio was built before January 1, 1978 and you're calling CQ. The harmonics are being generated, and because you've got an antenna connected that can transmit those harmonics, they go out into the wide blue world outside. It's entirely possible that someone listening on 20m, 15m or 10m is hearing you calling on 40m through your spurious emissions at some or other harmonic. So, next time you hear a station calling CQ 40m, they're either rusted on die-hard amateurs on a modern radio, or they are using a so-called boat anchor, having fun on air. Either way, it's a great idea to say hello while you have the opportunity. Perhaps even use the experience as an excuse to learn more about their station, or even check out their harmonics and let them know if you can hear them. Propagation be damned. I'm Onno VK6FLAB