Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was packing the car to go on a little trip an hour out of the city to see the Milky Way. I briefly entertained the idea of bringing my radio gear with me to get on air to make some noise. I resisted the urge, mainly because thinking about this didn't fill me with joy, rather it made me groan. Now to be absolutely clear, I adore going out into the scrub with my radio gear. I love getting on air and making noise. I like doing this with friends. If the time spent is about amateur radio, in other words, if I'm doing this with other amateurs, preparation and set up are part of the experience. However, if I'm on my own, or with my non-amateur SO, significant other, then preparation and set up often take more time than the actual on-air activity and by the time that things are humming along, we're ready to do something else, fine food, nice view, coffee, you name it, anything other than radio. So, how can I make the preparation and set up to be something much less time consuming? I don't really want to take over our car and bolt the radio back into it, nor do I want to strap a multi-tap antenna to the roof. At the other end, I also have no desire to bring a wire, look for a tree, do some throwing, find a place to sit and do the rest of the preparation to get on air. In other words, I want my cake and eat it too. What might that look like? One of my fellow amateurs has a telescopic whip, looks like a transistor radio antenna on steroids, but using that requires that you bring something to tune it, given that the ground is going to influence the antenna in unexpected ways. I could go out and buy a QRP radio with an in-built tuner, make the whip as long as it goes, perhaps even make it into a vertical dipole by combining two and start playing, but I'm not there yet. Of course I'm not the first to try any of this. The Parks On The Air and Summits On The Air activators are all over this type of activity, hopefully they've written some of their learnings down. I confess that I haven't found anything yet. How much of this have you achieved? What compromises did you make, what modes do you use when you're operating like this, mind you, I can hear my friend Charles NK8O from here, "Use Morse Onno", so I can take that as a given. All I need to do is learn it. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past few months I've been investigating the history of the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, to help it celebrate a century of amateur radio achievements. If you're a radio amateur and you pay anyone a membership fee, I have questions for you. Let me set the stage with a quote from the IARU: "All licensed radio amateurs benefit from the work of the IARU, whether or not they are members of their national IARU member-society. But every licensed radio amateur should be a member. Only by combining our efforts in this way can we ensure the future health of amateur radio, for ourselves and for future generations." That's straight from the IARU website. It seems like a lofty and worthy aspiration. Before I proceed, let me assure you that I'm absolutely committed to improving this hobby and this community, committed to strengthening its representation, its reach and increasing its activity levels. The IARU has existed for nearly a century. It consists of a global organisation and three regional ones, each working towards improving on, and advocating for, the amateur community. Governed by different constitutions each organisation pursues similar but not identical roles within its sphere of influence. Most, if not all IARU organisations are run by volunteers, people like you and I, who stick their hand up and help out, writing documents, attending meetings, updating websites, managing membership information and all the other things that the IARU apparently does. I say apparently because getting anything other than motherhood statements from any of the IARU organisations is like pulling teeth. To construct a historic list of elected office bearers, President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer and various regional Directors is an exercise in archaeology and much of the information doesn't appear to exist. That also seems to be true for what the IARU is spending its money on, your money. The IARU is funded by the fees that we pay to the representative body in our country, either directly, or as a member of a club who contributes. In my case, if I was paying a membership fee to the Wireless Institute of Australia, like I did for a decade, some of that would pass to IARU Region 3 and then from there, some would pass to the global IARU secretariat. Multiplied by every country and every paying member in that country across a century, there are significant, and to the best of my knowledge, unaccounted for sums of money involved. Then there is the list of things that the IARU has achieved. I don't doubt for a moment that people have been working very hard, giving it their all, helping, working late, doing things above and beyond to make outcomes appear, as-if by magic, without any of the blood sweat and tears associated with the process. I suppose it's like sausage, nobody wants to see how it's made, and I understand the sentiment. What of the outcomes, the published results? Should they be secret too? At the moment the IARU claims that it represents amateur radio on the global stage and on its website lists its achievements, namely: 21 MHz, Amateur Satellite, WARC bands, more Amateur Satellite bands, more 7 MHz frequencies, easing of restrictions in relation to disaster communications, 136 kHz, 472 kHz, 5 MHz, 50 MHz in Region 1, international roaming, and emergency communications. Impressive list right? There's twelve achievements listed in all, across 100 years, with meetings in cities all over the globe, with hundreds of people participating. Mind you, it appears that only recently has some level of coordination emerged between where meetings are held, by and large, each organisation meets every few years, staggered so there's always a meeting in a different country every year. Those frequent flyer miles must be adding up. If only there was another way to communicate across the globe. So, let's look at this in terms of effort and reward. Let's say that across the globe that at any one point in time there are 100 people part of the IARU infrastructure across the four organisations, or 25 in each. It's a modest representation. Let's say that they each volunteered 1 hour per week, so 52 hours a year, 5,200 hours across the entire IARU per year, or 520,000 hours across a century. This means that each achievement took more than 43,000 hours of volunteer effort. Unless of course there was more achieved that is undocumented. Mind you, 52 hours a year per volunteer is also probably light on, potentially by orders of magnitude. I note that for example there's no mention of things like quashing the 2m proposal by France where the local aviation authorities were looking to acquire some extra spectrum, or negotiations in relation to 1.2 GHz at the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 or WRC-23 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, held between 20 November and 15 December 2023. My point is this: What is the IARU doing? Is it really effective, or is it burning volunteer hours like

Foundations of Amateur Radio As I sit here, away from my shack, I'm overlooking a picturesque valley that I'm visiting for a couple of days to see the stars. I learnt recently that my SO, Significant Other, had never seen the Milky Way with their Mark One Eyeball and we thought that it would be fun to remedy that. One of the challenges in accomplishing this is that we're surrounded by light almost everywhere we go. Street lights, porch lights, car lights, stadium and building lights, traffic lights, even emergency lighting on various towers dotting the landscape. Last night we laid on our backs on a picnic blanket tucked into a sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. The valley where we are is pretty good, there's much less light pollution than in the city, but it's not pitch black. We fantasised about knocking on neighbours' doors to ask them to turn off their porch lights, but quickly came to the realisation that this was not going to be either acceptable, or reasonable. While I entertained the notion of creating a community Milky Way watching event, increasing local awareness of the new moon, light pollution and making it a local monthly event I discovered that Astro Tourism is a thing and our location happens to be part of the local scene. Of course I couldn't help myself and started explaining to my SO about how light and radio are the same thing when it struck me that in our hobby we have a similar issue. We don't refer to it as light pollution, instead we call it noise, specifically, QRM, or man-made noise, as opposed to QRN, natural noise. I wondered what a community event might look like if we did this with radio amateurs, rather than star gazers. How far would we need to go to get away from noise and could we realistically make something that was actually noise free? In reality the radio gear we bring, the power supplies, the solar panels, generators, inverters, computers and pretty much all the other stuff to make life come with radio noise to more or lesser degree. How could you set up an event where that type of noise was contained? Could it be done? What would it take? On a small scale, I can go to my local park with a fully charged 12 volt battery and a radio and get some sense of what it might look like, but all that really does is whet your appetite. What does this sound like if it's really quiet? For star gazers, there is a project called DarkSky with a .org website. It documents where designated Dark Sky Places are and promotes the protection of communities from the effects of light pollution through outreach, advocacy and conservation. We as radio amateurs could do with such a thing. What would our radio quiet spaces look like? How would we find them, how would we coordinate our efforts and what would outreach, advocacy and conservation look like for a radio quiet space? From a star gazing perspective, I've experienced the middle of nowhere, Lake King in Western Australia, in a paddock, lying in my swag, looking up. The sight is overwhelming. I felt like I was falling, even though I was lying flat on my back, physically not moving. I wonder what such a level of quiet looks like with a radio? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was handed a sheaf of paper. The person handing it to me, an amateur, was insistent that I take custody of this little collection. I asked what it was that they intended for me to do with it and the response was that because I did things with history, I should do this too. Aside from taking on a new project, trying to juggle life and income, their observation was pretty spot on, even though I had never quite seen it in that way. Over the years I've often explained things in the context of the era in which it came into being, the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, the first 20m contact between the UK and Australia, back in 1925, the founding of the IARU, also in 1925. For some years I've been playing with the idea of documenting the journey from Spark Gap to SDR. I started writing down milestones, collecting information about the various protagonists along the way, attempting to capture their life milestones and their radio related accomplishments. One friend went so far as to take photos of the replica spark gap transmitter in Hobart, Tasmania as used by Douglas Mawson between 1911 and 1914 during their Antarctic expedition. Between being entrusted with the written history of 28 Chapter of the Ten-Ten International Net and today I've started a spreadsheet. If you know me at all, you know that I love a good spreadsheet. This one is pretty simple, date, event, event type, protagonist, note and source. So far I've got about 85 rows. I'm using it to capture milestones directly related to our hobby, when the first EchoLink node went live, when RTTY came to be used on-air, the invention of FM, when we got access to the 2m band, when 160m was taken away during World War II, ultimately, all of it. There is already a website that documents some of this but it's USA centric, even though our community is global, and it does not include any sources, so there's no way to verify any of the events, which I think is essential if you're going to capture this in any meaningful way. I want this list I'm creating to include all manner of amateur related things, the first time F-troop went on-air, the first CQWW, perhaps even every CQWW. I have also set-up a form so you can contribute your events and over time grow it into something that captures what it is that we've done over the years. Perhaps it will grow into a section on Wikipedia, perhaps it will become its own thing, it's too early to tell. As I've said many times, if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. So, this is me, or us, writing it down. Perhaps we'll be able to find a way to make it through the next 100 years. You can find the Amateur History Project under Projects on my home-page at vk6flab.com - I look forward to reading your contributions. So, thank you Christine, VK6ZLZ for pushing that sheaf of paper into my hands. I hope I'm worthy of the history that it represents. I'm Onno Vk6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio To get into the hobby of amateur radio is easy, but that doesn't mean it's simple. I was introduced to the hobby three times. The first time I was a Sea Scout in the Netherlands. It was JOTA, the annual Jamboree On The Air and radio amateurs across the planet were set up at various Scouting locations with their stations showing off how to make contact with far away places. My memory of it is brief. I recall a green heavy army tent with radios on a table. There was noise everywhere. I was told that I was hearing a station in Brazil, which seemed incongruous, given that I was standing on an island surrounded by other Sea Scouts, a place where I had been camping and sailing for several years. We trooped out of the tent and ten minutes later I broke a finger playing a game where you sat on a mast trying to upend the other person using a canvas bag with a jib in it. I was unceremoniously upended and landed poorly and broke the middle finger on my right hand. Being a teenager that was of course a source of immediate ridicule and innuendo and getting a dink, that's Aussie slang for getting a ride on the back of the pushbike of my boatswain to the local hospital, after rowing from the island to the mainland caused me to completely forget that amateur radio experience. The second time I came across the hobby was through my then manager, Ian, whom I now know as VK6KIH, but at the time he was a quiet spoken man thrust into the role of manager. The introduction came in the form of a Daihatsu Charade with a massive, what I suspect, was a 40m HF whip. The amateur radio aspect made little or no impression. The antenna, clearly much too large for such a tiny vehicle, did. I don't recall ever talking about amateur radio or even seeing his setup. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I ever have. The third time I came across the hobby was at a dinner table surrounded by fellow "dogcow" geeks. One of them, Meg, then with the callsign VK6LUX showed us her brand new shiny purchase, a drone, that could be controlled remotely via WiFi on 2.4 GHz. She went on to tell us that the range was pretty limited because it was WiFi, but because she was a radio amateur, she was going to experiment with an amplifier. This was permitted because as I learnt, the 2.4 GHz WiFi frequencies are shared with amateur radio. You might know it as the 13cm band. I asked about this thing called amateur radio. I wanted to know what was involved, how would you become one, what would it cost, you know, all the things everyone always asks. I was told that there'd be a course in two weeks with an exam the weekend after. I asked if we needed a group booking and was told to "just rock up". So I did. I got my license in 2010 and my world changed forever. I will add, just to make sure that if you're planning to do this, that during my course I discovered that my license wouldn't permit my use of the 13cm band, so I'd have to upgrade. I promptly purchased the requisite course material and started reading. In the mean time I got distracted by the activities at a local club, then I bought a radio, then I was told I wasn't a real amateur because I only had a beginners' license, so to prove a point, I started having fun with my license. I haven't stopped since. Now, some, or maybe all of this, I've shared before. Here's something new. I'm a so-called A.F.O.L, or an Adult Fan Of Lego. It's not a guilty pleasure, I'm happy to admit it. I have too much Lego around me. My oldest set is from 1964, House with Garage, number 324-2. It's not complete any longer, the car is long gone, the garage door weights are broken off, but it has pride of place in my living room. History does not reveal how I came into possession of it. Best I can reconstruct is that in the deep dark corners of Australia it takes a little while for kits to arrive, since I was born after the kit came into existence. I do know that I had it before 1976. The other day I was watching a documentary about Lego and one thing stood out to me. I'll share the entire quote by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen the then President and CEO of The Lego Group: "During the 1990s, we kept thinking that much more should be done for the adult "hobbyist builders," as we called them at the time. Most people on the management team thought we should concentrate on children instead, but I felt that a person could have an inner child at any age." Why this is important is because of my activities as a radio amateur. We as a community keep saying that we should grow, that we're losing too many people, that we need to engage with S.T.E.M., or Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Whilst that may be true and whilst JOTA and Scouting might give us exposure to fresh new people, there's a massive community of adults who already know about our hobby. They just don't yet know how it might interact with them, personally, or how they might find it interesting, or engaging, rewarding, and all the other things that

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I lamented to a fellow amateur that my shack was not functioning well. Specifically, my main workstation died three months ago and ever since I've been struggling to reclaim my productivity. One aspect of that is my desk. For half a decade or so I've had my computer clamped to a rolling lectern. It allowed me to move around my office as my mood and the light from the window changed. During the weekly net I'd move my lectern and computer next to my radio and host the net whilst logging on my computer. That's no longer possible because of a number of reasons, so instead I was trying to accomplish the same thing on a tiny 13 inch screen which didn't work for me. My friend asked me why I hadn't just extended the microphone lead from my radio, so I could sit at my now stationary computer and still key the microphone. I located an Ethernet joiner, an Ethernet cable and did just that. Simple. Job done. Then I started wondering why I wasn't on HF with my station and if there was a simple solution that was eluding me. Spoiler alert, it still eludes me. The requirements are not too complicated, well at least in my mind they're not. I want to operate on HF. I want the computer to not be physically, or specifically, electrically connected to the radio, in any way. I need to be able to use logging software that tracks the radio band, mode and frequency. I'd like to use digital modes, I'd like to have a computer controlled voice keyer and I do not want to run Windows and if I can at all help it, I'd like to spend as little time as possible doing this without spending an arm and a leg. So, then I started wondering what this looks like for other people. What kinds of compromises have you made in your shack? What have you accomplished and how did you get there? What choices of hardware and software did you make, and why? Did you give up, or face the challenge head on? How did you gather information and how did you find out what others did? Not for a moment do I think that this is a simple thing to solve, but it's clear to me that I'm so far down the complicated rabbit hole that I'd like someone to show me the light at the end of the tunnel to make some progress. Of course I've not been idle while all this is happening. I configured a Raspberry Pi, a small single board computer, to talk to my radio via USB. I connected a sound card to the audio connector on my radio. Theoretically this should give me all that I need, but the difference between theory and practice is common knowledge, in theory it works, in practice it doesn't. The Pi is a few years old, but it's not doing much at all. It connects to my network wirelessly, so my main computer isn't physically connected to the radio, but it's still pretty unreliable and I have to say, calling CQ, either using voice or digital modes, should be rock solid. You don't want your radio to keep transmitting after it's supposed to and other little issues like that. So, how did you do this? I'm interested to know. I'm not the first person to run into this issue and I'm not the last. Your experience might help me and it might help others. Drop me an email, [email protected] and I look forward to hearing about your adventures. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The International Amateur Radio Union or IARU, is the governing body of our community. It represents us on the world stage through the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU. As I've discussed before, it consists of four separate organisations working together, the International Amateur Radio Union, the global body, and three regional ones, Region 1, 2 and 3, each representing the hobby of amateur radio. Previously I've looked at the constitution of the IARU to get a sense of its purpose in the world. At the time I mentioned the notion of comparing the four organisations against each other, since ostensibly they're doing the same thing for a different part of the world. Each of these regional bodies was created separately by different groups of people and their constitutions reflect that. The Global IARU constitution, last updated in 1989 consists of nine pages. The IARU Region 1 constitution, with proposed amendments from 2020 has 31 pages, the English version of the Region 2 constitution, since there's also a Spanish one, was amended in 2019 has six pages including two copies of Article 2, and refers regularly to the Global IARU constitution and finally, Region 3, amended in 2012 has 15 pages. What is striking at first glance is just how poorly these documents are constructed. Formatting, inconsistent spelling, indentation, general layout and all are lacking attention to detail. I think that this reflects poorly on the internal workings of the IARU, but I digress. Curiously, the Region 3 website has a whole section on proposed changes to the constitution. Many of those changes are around the election of officials and voting procedures. It also includes the use of modern communications like email and remote conference facilities on internet platforms. One paragraph stood out: "It was also realised that changes would need to be made to formally recognise that we will (as happened at the online conference in 2021) have females as well as males taking responsible positions in IARU Region 3." It must have come as quite a shock to the delegates to learn that there are females in our hobby. This must have already happened in Region 1, since there is a reference to "he/she" in relation to being elected. Mind you, use of the word "they" must not have occurred to the authors. But don't worry, we shouldn't rush these things, the International body and the Region 2 constitutions both use "he" for roles. I will point out that the International body has a weasel clause where it states, among other things, "words importing only the masculine gender include the feminine gender and the neutral gender". It's a good start, but falls short of standards expected today. If you're not sure what all the fuss is about, let me illustrate: "The term of office of the President shall be for a period of five years from the date of ratification of porcupine nomination, and porcupine shall remain in office until the nomination of porcupine successor has been ratified." If that felt jarring for you, you might get some sense of what it feels like for someone reading that with gender pronouns that don't match the text. A better solution would be: "The term of office of the President shall be for a period of five years from the date of ratification of their nomination, and they shall remain in office until the nomination of their successor has been ratified." It's not the first time we've struck this type of issue. It's high time that we did something about it. Over a year ago, I pointed out that OM, Old Man, and XYL, eX Young Lady, were derogatory and we should replace them with OP, operator, and SO, significant other. A year before that I proposed a revision of the Amateur's Code to make its language inclusive and reflective of the wider community in which we operate. I've had discussions with people who identify across the gender spectrum about much of this and the overwhelming feedback I received is that our community is Old White Men clamouring to grow the hobby without a clue that the words they use are part of the problem. So, credit to Region 1 for implementing some of this and to Region 3 for starting this conversation. I don't doubt that there are members in the Global IARU and Region 2 who would like to see this implemented and to you I say: It's time, high time, to review what language our community uses to identify itself to the wider community. More generally, as the governing and representative global bodies you should be leading the way and providing guidance to the member societies. So, next time you promote our community, refer to others, link to articles, and attempt to encourage participation, you should take a moment and ask yourself if what you're saying is truly speaking to people who are not Old White Men and if that's the case, what you might do to embrace the wider community. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Getting started in our hobby can be a challenge. Even if you've got a shiny new license and you've been taught what the legal requirements are, you might even have your first radio, but after that it might feel like you're all on your own in this bright and shiny new world. It doesn't have to be that way. First thing to know is that you are exactly where all other amateurs have been before you. In other words, don't stress too much about what you don't know or what mistakes you might make. I recently read a comment from a new amateur who was so scared of making a mistake that they hadn't made their first contact. You should know that there is a massive difference between making an accidental mistake and knowingly interfering with another service. Here's some mistakes I've made. My license permits a maximum power level of 10 Watts. I dutifully set-up my radio to do just that, made my first contact on HF using 10 Watts, only to learn later that power levels are set separately for HF, 6m, VHF and UHF on my specific radio. So, the second time I keyed up my microphone, I was using 50 Watts. Not only that, I didn't quite understand how to set-up my radio for repeater use, so I keyed up on the output frequency and happily talked to the other station, blissfully unaware that I wasn't actually using the repeater. It wasn't until several years later that I learnt that the minimum power level was 5 Watts on all bands, except UHF, where it is 2 Watts. And as icing on the cake, one day I managed a 2m contact across about 70 km, from my car. It wasn't until later in the night that I discovered that all the settings on my radio had reset and it was again using 50 Watts. Another time I was in the club radio shack and having some fun with the club station. I tuned to a 2m frequency and called CQ. Didn't hear anything. Then I discovered that I'd missed a decimal point and was actually transmitting on the 20m band, where I'm not permitted with my license. Each of those things are outside the restrictions of my license, but made by mistake, not on purpose. Instead of stressing about it, I went, oops, and carried on with a new lesson learnt. I will point out that I'm certain that there are more, mistakes, feel free to let me know. Those concerns aside, finding people to talk to is another barrier to entry. We have all these bands and there's nobody about. It reminds me of a funny story I've shared before, told by Wally VK6YS, now SK. In his early amateur radio days he operated from Cockatoo Island, an island off the north coast of Western Australia, near Yampi Sound, which is where his callsign came from. With a new radio and transverter for 6m, Wally had been calling CQ for weeks, but nobody would talk to him. Occasionally he'd hear a faint voice in the background. Meanwhile it transpired that amateurs across Japan were getting upset that he wasn't responding to their 20 and 40 over 9 signal reports. His transmission was getting out just fine, his receiver wasn't working nearly as well. Turns out that during manufacturing, a pin on the back of his transverter hadn't been soldered correctly. Oops. Once he fixed that, he worked 150 Japanese stations on the first day and a lifelong love of the 6m band was born. One hard learnt lesson is that the bands are constantly changing. If you cannot hear anything on one band, try another. If the band is quiet, it's likely because the conditions for that band are bad, but generally this is only true on HF. On VHF and UHF, the opposite is often true. Some bands, like 10m and 6m behave more like VHF, but not always. 20m can go from brilliant to abysmal and back in seconds, sometimes during the contact. Each band has its own idiosyncrasies that you'll need to explore before you can hope to improve your chances of success and even years of playing will often get you surprises. I recall trying, for giggles only, to call CQ on a pretty quiet band only to score an unexpected contact with a Central European station on the other side of the globe. A good rule of thumb is to go where the action is. If you can hear others, they're much more likely to hear you. While this is not universally true, it's a good starting point. Of course, you don't need to physically have a radio to experience any of this. There are many websites that provide you with access to radio tuners. If you search for WebSDR or KiwiSDR you'll come across hundreds of online receivers that you can tune and operate on the frequencies they support using just your web browser. Some have the ability to decode digital modes within the web page, so you won't even have to install any extra software to play. You might think that using such a receiver is not really amateur radio, but I'd like to point out that a transceiver is both a transmitter and a receiver. You can get the receiver right there in your web browser. The transmitter is a little more complex, but technically also possible. Many amateur clubs have

Foundations of Amateur Radio Internet access across HF radio In the mid 1980's there was this thing called a Bulletin Board System or BBS. You would connect your computer to a gadget called an acoustic coupler that you would sit next to a telephone. You'd pick up the handset, dial a phone number and wait until there was a squeal in your ear. Then you'd push the handset into the rubber cups on the coupler and watch as your computer started putting characters on your screen. Now, truth be told, my first foray was the next generation of this, an actual modem where you didn't actually have to touch the telephone, instead, the device could dial on your behalf using so-called AT commands. And if we're being totally honest, I never actually connected to a BBS. My adventures with global communications started with Usenet News in 1990, but I'm here to make a point, I promise. Amateur radio is a hobby that is for experimentation. One such experiment is a thing called packet radio. Before you roll your eyes about ancient technology, this gets very cool, very fast. At its most basic, packet radio is about digital radio communication. Until not that long ago to play you needed a thing called a TNC or a Terminal Node Controller. When I got my license in 2010 I was told that this was a magic box to make digital communication possible between a radio and other radios and amateurs. Right now, many people are playing with WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter as well as FT8, both examples of things intended to get specific chunks of information exchanged between two stations. What if I want to chat, or send a file, or a picture? There are tools like "js8call" which is experimenting with the idea of using FT8 to chat, but what if I told you that there's a better way? Written by John WB2OSZ, named after a canine that became extinct 9,500 years ago, "direwolf", is software that implements an expensive piece of 1980's hardware, a TNC, that runs just fine on a $5 Raspberry pi. It's been around for over a decade, the oldest date I can find is March 2013 though undated versions before that exist. It's an example of a so-called software-modem, simple to get started, and it implements the essential pieces of packet radio. It's currently running connected to my radio and I can see packets of information scrolling past. In this case I'm tuned to the local APRS, or Automatic Packet Reporting System frequency of 145.175 MHz. It's the same information that you can see if you point your web browser at aprs.fi While that's great, it's just the beginning. Tune to another 2m or 70cm frequency and you can use it to connect to a BBS being run by a local amateur, or, you can tune to a HF frequency and connect to one run somewhere else. Direwolf also supports a technology called KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, yes really, developed by Brian WB6RQN, Phil KA9Q, Mike K3MC and others. KISS allows you to connect a modem, like direwolf, to a computer and use technologies like TCP/IP, the primary language of the internet, across a radio link, any radio link. Let me say that again with different words. You can use your HF radio to browse the internet. No proprietary modes in sight, weak signal, error correction included, all open source, all free, all ready to go. While we're singing its praises, direwolf can also act as an iGate, an interface between radio and services like aprs.fi, a digipeter that receives and re-transmits APRS data and plenty more. It gets better. What if you wanted to use something like RTTY, PSK31, Olivia or some other mode? You could use "fldigi" instead of direwolf since it too supports KISS. To be fair, there are lots of moving parts here and I've glossed over plenty. This isn't intended to discuss precisely how to do this, rather that it's possible at all and has been for quite some time. I can't wait to attempt to browse the internet using my radio, for nothing other than the thrill of attempting it. I wonder if I can do this with Morse Code as the underlying protocol. Only one way to find out. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Having been a licensed member of this community since 2010 I feel qualified to answer a recurring question: "What kind of hobby is amateur radio?" The single best answer I can give is that it's big. The deeper you become involved, the bigger it gets. I stole the phrase, "amateur radio is 1000 hobbies in one" and I've remarked that I suspect that it's underselling the experience. Point being, whatever you've heard about amateur radio is likely true and guaranteed to be only part of the story. There was a time when amateur radio was a concept regularly seen in general discussion. That's no longer the case, but you'll soon discover that amateurs are everywhere and the things we get up to still make the headlines from time to time. That said, as a community we tend to use complex language and in specific ways. For example, a radio amateur is unlikely to broadcast, instead they transmit. From the outside looking in the two are synonymous, but within amateur radio the two couldn't be more different. Broadcasting is one to many, transmitting is one to one. Broadcasting separates the operator from the equipment, transmitting has the operator actively engaged with it. Amateur radio is about curiosity, about trying things, about learning and sharing, it's about technology, electronics, nature and physics, it's about software and hardware, about camping and competing and plenty more and with that come friendships that seem to last a lifetime, perhaps forged in the fire of fascination, perhaps made almost perchance in passing. I have more amateur friends than not and among us we have a massive variety of interests. Unlike most hobbies, you need to obtain a government issued license to become a fully licensed amateur, as-in, be permitted to transmit. For some this requirement might be a deterrent, but once you understand why, since radio waves don't stop at political boundaries and every human shares the same radio spectrum, licensing becomes a necessity, not an obstacle. That said, you can start long before then by receiving, no license required. Amateur radio is a global activity. It's centrally regulated, but administered locally in each country and locality. As a result I cannot tell you specifically how much things will cost where you are, but the fees are generally not cost prohibitive and in many cases they are low or even free. You become licensed by completing a training course, passing an exam and receiving a certification that lasts for life. Once you are certified you can apply for a callsign and operate an amateur station. The closest equivalent to a callsign outside the hobby is a car license plate. It's a unique combination of letters and numbers that identify an amateur. For example, my callsign is VK6FLAB, said phonetically, it's Victor Kilo Six Foxtrot Lima Alpha Bravo. We use phonetics because often individual letters are lost due to interference which comes in many different forms. Depending on where you are, a callsign might be subject to a renewal fee. If doing a course and passing an exam seems scary, getting started at the introductory level is generally a weekend worth of effort. That introduces the notion that there are different levels, or to use an amateur phrase, classes, which, again depending on where you are, permit different access to the radio spectrum where your WiFi, mobile phone, garage door opener, emergency services, aviation, satellite and free to air television all share the same limited resources with radio amateurs. The higher your license class, the more access you get, but the more you become responsible for. Again, using a car analogy, you graduate from moped to car to truck. If you've come across this hobby before, you should consider that one of the historic international license requirements hasn't existed for decades, namely Morse code. Mind you, some countries still require Morse, but their numbers are dwindling rapidly. There is an often repeated concept that amateur radio is old white men sitting in the dark talking to each other about the weather, their station and their ailments. While there's some of that around, you'll soon discover that there's people from all walks of life, all ages and interests and backgrounds. Given that this is a global experience, you do not need to limit your interactions to the people within your local community. I've been contributing a weekly article about amateur radio since 2011. Detailing the many and varied aspects of this hobby and if you're curious about what you might find here, warts and all, jump in. There are two series of articles, "What use is an F-call?", which covers 2011 to 2015 when it was renamed to "Foundations of Amateur Radio". Available as an audio podcast, as text, as email and there are eBooks too. You'll find plenty of amateur radio resources online and social media communities with different interests and sensibilities. As with any community, amateur radio has its share of gatekeeper

Foundations of Amateur Radio The International Amateur Radio Union or IARU was formed on the 18th of April 1925 in Paris. Today, split into four organisations, consisting of one for each of the three ITU Regions, and the International Secretariat, are said to coordinate their efforts to represent the globe spanning activity of amateur radio. Each organisation has its own constitution, which at some point I might compare, but for now I'll focus on the International Secretariat. Last updated on the 9th of May, 1989, the constitution has nine pages detailing how the IARU works. After defining its name, it describes its purpose. Its objectives shall be the protection, promotion, and advancement of the Amateur and Amateur-Satellite Services within the framework of regulations established by the International Telecommunication Union, and to provide support to Member-Societies in the pursuit of these objectives at the national level, with special reference to the following: a) representation of the interests of amateur radio at and between conferences and meetings of international telecommunications organizations; b) encouragement of agreements between national amateur radio societies on matters of common interest; c) enhancement of amateur radio as a means of technical self-training for young people; d) promotion of technical and scientific investigations in the field of radiocommunication; e) promotion of amateur radio as a means of providing relief in the event of natural disasters; f) encouragement of international goodwill and friendship; g) support of Member-Societies in developing amateur radio as a valuable national resource, particularly in developing countries; and h) development of amateur radio in those countries not represented by Member-Societies. Those are lofty goals and no doubt they have changed over the past century. The objectives as described have been in effect for over 35 years, so we can safely say that they are part and parcel of the current workings of the IARU. This leads me to several questions, mostly uncomfortable ones. Over the years I have witnessed the incessant cry for the growth of the hobby in the face of apparent global decline. What I haven't seen is any evidence of the IARU actually doing much towards its own objectives. At this point you might well be chomping at the bit to enlighten me, please do, and you might well be right that the IARU is doing stuff, but the key here is seeing evidence. As I keep saying, if you don't write it down, it didn't happen. You do this for contacts between stations, why should the IARU be any different? While the IARU is a recognised United Nations organisation, it's entirely volunteer run and paid for by its members. The International Secretariat is funded by its three regional organisations, which in turn are funded by the member societies in each country like the WIA in Australia, ARRL in the U.S., RSGB in the U.K., JARL in Japan and VERON in the Netherlands; over 160 organisations in all. Those in turn are funded by their members. For a decade or more I contributed to the funding of the IARU through my WIA membership. I note, as an aside, that organisations like the Radio Amateur Society of Australia or RASA and the European Radio Amateurs' Organization or EURAO, which are not recognised by the IARU, do not fund it, unless they're making donations on the side. That's important because this hobby, despite its amateur nature, runs on money. If you want to help the IARU, the only way to do so is as a volunteer. That's great if you have money to pay for food and housing, less so if you don't. Similarly, member societies are also, by enlarge, run by volunteers, each doing so in the face of big business and government attempts to increase their spectrum allocation at the expense of amateur radio at every turn. This leaves us with an organisation with lofty goals to foster, promote and grow our community, funded and run by volunteers, with in my opinion little to show for its century history. Is this the best model? Is this how we make a robust, representative and effective organisation? Speaking of representative, in 2018 Don G3BJ, former president of the RSGB and then president of the Region 1 IARU, talked in some detail about how the IARU operates in an enlightening video you can find on YouTube called "RSGB Convention lecture 2018 - So what has the IARU ever done for us?". In that lecture Don makes the statement that "the ARRL provides significant additional funding" and "without that [the] IARU would be in very serious problems". If you're not a member of the ARRL, what does that mean? How much is significant funding? Is it real money, or is it paper money in the form of office space provided within the ARRL offices in Connecticut? If a member of the IARU International Secretariat is also a member and office bearer of the ARRL, does that buy access? For example in 2021 the ARRL executive committee nominated their past president to become the

Foundations of Amateur Radio The story goes that the name of our hobby, at least in some parts of the world, ham radio, stems from the notion that we as a community were perceived as being ham-fisted in our ability to operate a Morse key. We apparently claimed that slur and made it our own. I've never actually been able to verify this narrative, but it goes to the heart of what it is to be part of the hobby of amateur radio, as opposed to Professional radio, which is what I once heard someone refer to themselves as. This notion that we are playing outside our sandbox, that we're doing something less than real, that we're somehow not whole as a result is absurd, especially in the context of how we are an integral part of how spectrum is allocated around the globe. It's fun to remember that playing outside the box, trialling things, exploring, inventing and learning, is the reason we're here. The whole thing is incremental, much like learning to walk, sometimes you fall flat on your face, yet here you are perambulating like a champ. As an aside, did you know that how you get up off the floor is pretty much how you learnt to do it as a toddler, it might not be the most efficient, but it's how you do it. Speaking of falling down, making mistakes on-air is part and parcel of being an amateur. There's no protocol police, nobody to issue a fine if you make a mistake, just dust yourself off and try again. The urge to optimise pervades our hobby. We optimise our antennas, our gear, the time and band we choose to communicate on, the modes we use, the places we operate from, even how we participate in contests, all of it is a cycle of optimisation. During contests I've regularly attempted to flex my imagination to optimise my activities. For example, the VK Shires contest rewards you for combinations of shires, so, I created a map of all the shires, then looked for places to activate, preferably on or near borders, so I could change shire with minimal effort. There are contests that reward different maidenhead locators, so I set about finding spots where you could activate four at once. By the way, a maidenhead locator is an amateur radio geo-locator which I'll dig into some other time. Contesters regularly use multiple radios to optimise their ability to talk to stations that double their points, so-called multipliers. Over the years I've come across many different excuses for getting on-air and making noise. Popular activities like Parks On The Air, or POTA, Summits On The Air or SOTA, and plenty of others are all programs that aim to get you out of your shack, set up your station at a particular location and make contact with anyone and everyone. On occasion you'll hear a station combining activities, doing both a POTA and a SOTA activation because the summit is inside the boundaries of a national park. Ian M0TRT took this idea to a whole new level. He wondered if you could qualify for multiple programs simultaneously and if so, how many. Gathering data from Summits, Parks, Islands, Beaches and Bunkers on the Air, together with UK Castle and Lighthouse awards and adding World Wide Flora and Fauna or WWFF, eight programs in all, he set about exploring. For some programs like Castles, Lighthouses and Bunkers you need to be within 1 km of the entity and summits need to be activated within 25 meters altitude from the peak. For other programs, beaches, parks and islands plenty of extra work was needed. Ian's code is available on GitHub, in the "weeaaoa" or "Worked Everything Everywhere All At Once Award" repository. If you have time to head out to the beach just east of Devil's Point near Plymouth you'll be able to activate 21 different programs at the same time. The Maidenhead locator is IO70WI06. As with any outdoor amateur radio activity, take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints and kill nothing but time. Be mindful of creating obstacles and trip hazards for your fellow humans and be prepared to have a park ranger turn up as soon as you sit down. Oh, and if you think that's not in the spirit of amateur radio, you haven't been paying attention. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of my recurring, you might call it, regrets, but probably not quite that strong, is that I often find myself discovering that an amateur radio contest came and went, or worse, I found out on the day, preferably at midnight UTC when many contests start, which happens to be 8 am Saturday morning where I live, right when my weekly radio net for new and returning amateurs, F-troop, begins. Often by that time I already have plans for the weekend and now I know I'm missing out on some or other activity that might encourage me to go outside and get fresh air whilst playing radio. Don't get me wrong, it's my own responsibility to manage my time, but that doesn't explain what's going on, so I started exploring what might be causing this. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard, there's pretty much a contest on every weekend, so I could sort out my radio and get on-air to make noise at any point of any day. That this doesn't happen can only partially be explained by the state of my shack, which I have yet to get working the way I want, but it doesn't explain everything. I'm subscribed to several contest calendars. The most prominent of these is one maintained by Bruce WA7BNM. The contestcalendar.com website is a great place to start. Another is the personal site of prolific contester and contest manager, Alan VK4SN. Both sites offer a calendar feed file that you can subscribe to. So, subscribe to the calendar, job done, right? Unfortunately not. As it happens, for several years I have in fact subscribed to both those calendars. I even shared these with my partner, which results in a fun exchange at the breakfast table that goes something like this: "Hey, do you need the car on Saturday?" "Why?" "Well there's an amateur contest on." So, my partner is often more aware of contests than I am and supposedly I'm the amateur in this household. It occurs to me that I need an alert to point at an upcoming contest. Preferably one that I can configure that's specific to me. I don't tend to look that far into the future, I have plenty of stuff that needs to happen today without worrying about next month. I started exploring what I might do about this. Be the change you want to see, so I contacted Bruce and asked what views he might hold on the addition of an alarm in the calendar file he publishes. I also asked if there was a way to configure what contests are visible in that file. Whilst hunting through his site, I discovered that there's plenty of Australian contests not on the site, so I created a list of contests I know about that I thought should be on the calendar. I might point out that Bruce's job isn't easy. Trying to get information out of contest managers can sometimes be like powering a spark-gap transmitter using a pushbike. Here's an example of one contest that has an algorithm to determine when the next contest is, I kid you not. There's a Winter, Spring and Summer version of this contest, for Winter, when the June solstice is on a weekday (Monday through Friday), the weekend following shall be the weekend of the event, if not, that weekend shall be the weekend of the event. The Spring and Summer versions are even more involved, counting forwards or backwards four weekends from the December solstice. It helpfully includes a link to the solstice dates for this century, because really, that's how the dates are determined. If I'm feeling particularly sparky, I might even make a calculator, since the contest manager for that contest hasn't announced the dates for the next contest, though my previous experiences whilst attempting to calculate moon bounce windows using the Python Astropy package was challenging. I did find PyEphym which has several solstice and equinox functions. So, now all I need to do is make my shack work as I want it, bolt a radio back in my car, win lotto and something else, I forget what. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Australia has a long relationship with callsigns. Over time the regulator, today the ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, has seen fit to introduce different types of callsigns and restrictions associated with those callsigns. The change that made the most waves most recently was the introduction of the so-called F-call. It's a callsign that looks like mine, VK6FLAB. It has a VK prefix for Australia, the number 6 indicating my state, Western Australia, then the letter F, followed by a suffix of three letters. This type of callsign was introduced in 2005. To this day there are plenty of amateurs on-air who don't believe that this is a real callsign, to the point where some refuse to make contact, or worse, make inflammatory statements about getting a real callsign, and that's just the letters, let alone those who think that the callsign denotes a lack of skill or knowledge demanding that the amateur "upgrade" their license to a real one. At the time of introduction, the apparent intent was to indicate that the holder was licensed as a Foundation or beginner. In 2020 this was changed, and existing F-call holders were able to apply for a new callsign if they desired. Some did, many did not. Currently there are 1,385 F-calls active and there are 3,748 Foundation class callsigns in the registry. After this change, you might think that all callsigns in Australia are now either two or three letter suffixes, as-in VK6AA or VK6AAA. Actually, the F-call continues to exist and there are now also two by one calls, VK6A, intended for contesters. A popular idea is that the F-call is for Foundation license class amateurs only. There are currently 10 Standard and 16 Advanced license classed holders with an F-call. There are also two special event callsigns that sport an F-call. With the addition of contest callsigns, new prefixes, VJ and VL, were introduced which brought with it the notion that you could use those new prefixes for your callsign. Currently, only contest callsigns are allocated with VJ and VL prefixes. An often repeated idea is that we're running out of callsigns. Well, there are 1,434,160 possible callsigns if we count each prefix, each state, single, double, triple and F-calls across all prefixes. As it happens, there are at present 15,859 assigned and 53 pending callsigns. If not all, then surely, we're running out of real callsigns. Nope. If we look at the VK prefix alone, less than 10% of available callsigns have been allocated. Okay, we've run out of contest callsigns. Nope. There are 1,040 possible contest callsigns and only 188 allocated. Another popular notion is that we've run out of two-letter callsigns, that is, the suffix has only two letters. Again, no. There are 3,553 allocated out of 6,760, less than 53% has been assigned. Surely, some states appear to have run out of two-letter callsigns. Well, maybe. Theoretically each state has 676 two-letter callsigns but none have all of those allocated. For example, VK3, with 675 allocated two-letter suffixes, is missing VK3NG for no discernible reason. More on the missing ones shortly. It's impossible to use the current register to determine how many amateurs hold more than one two letter callsign. Another notion is that you can have a special event callsign as long as it starts with VI. As it happens there are currently special event callsigns registered with VI, VK and AX prefixes. Just over half of them have any online activity to promote the callsign for their event. You might think that a callsign can only be "Assigned" or "Available". According to the register a callsign can be "Pending", it can also be "Reserved", more on that in a moment, and it can not be in the list at all, "Missing" if you like. Take for example JNW, it's assigned in VK2, it's available in all other states, except VK3 where it simply doesn't exist. This oddity doesn't restrict itself to VK3. Take XCA, available in all states, except VK4. TLC doesn't exist in VK2. Many more examples to go round. And that's not looking at exclusions due to swear words and reserved words like PAN; but SOS is an assigned callsign. Combinations that you think might be unavailable, like QST, are fine, except in VK2 where it doesn't exist. It's thought that reservations are only for repeaters. Nope. Suffixes with GG followed by a letter are reserved for the Girl Guides, those that start with S followed by two letters are reserved for Scouts, those starting with WI are for the Wireless Institute of Australia and those with IY are for the International Year of something. Interestingly there is no reference to repeaters or beacons at all in the callsign register since they fall under the old license regime, rather than the new amateur class. And you thought that the system was getting simpler and cheaper to run. You might think that every state has the same number of callsigns. Ignoring F-calls, VK5 has the most callsigns available and VK3 the least. No

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past week I've been attempting to work out what the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, actually does and how it works. I started looking into this because the IARU is this year celebrating a century since its foundation in 1925. You might think of the IARU as one organisation, but behind the scenes there are actually four, one for each so-called "Region" as well a Global organisation called the International Secretariat, headquartered at the ARRL in Connecticut. The Regions have been negotiated by members of the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union. As early as 1927 the ITU documented differences in frequency allocations between Europe and Other Regions. In Cairo in 1938 it defined boundaries for Europe. In Atlantic City in 1947, the ITU defined three Regions, with specific boundaries, essentially, Europe and Africa, the Americas and the rest of the world. As a surprise to nobody, this is purely a political decision, especially since radio waves don't get to have a passport and pass border control. The impact of this continues today, generations later. We still have this patchwork of frequency allocations, we still have exclusions, different band-edges and other anachronisms. The Regions are further divided into Zones. When you start looking at the ITU zone map in detail it gets weird. For example, Iraq is in Region 1, neighbouring Iran has been specifically excluded from Region 1 and moved to Region 3. In case you're curious, Iran has been represented at the ITU since 1938. Antarctica is part of seven of the 90 ITU zones and all three Regions, because of course it is. Zone 90, jammed between zones 35, 45, 61, 64, 65 and 76, almost as an afterthought, contains one landmass, Minamitorishima, an island that sticks 9 m above the water, has a 6 km coastline and is generally off-limits to the general public. The nearest land in any direction is over 1,000 km away. It's got an IOTA, Islands On The Air, designation, OC-073 and despite its isolation, has been activated by radio amateurs using JD1 prefix callsigns. I live in Australia, ITU zone 58, part of Region 3, together with the two most populous countries on the planet, India and China and the rest of eastern Asia, but not the Former Soviet republics and most, but not all of Oceania, you know, because .. logic. From a population perspective Region 3 is the largest by several orders of magnitude, but you'd never know it if you went looking. Why am I telling you all this? Well, that's the international stage on which the IARU is representing amateur radio. In 1927 the underlying assumption was that each service, Amateur Radio included, had a global exclusive allocation. The reality was different. Spectrum was in such short supply that individual exceptions were carved out, which as I've said resulted in splitting up the world into regions, starting in 1938 and codified in 1947. The IARU in 1925 is a different organisation from what it is today. In 1925 individual amateurs could become members. As soon as enough members from a country joined, they'd be grouped together. When there were enough groups, the IARU became a federation of national associations. Over time, the IARU as a single body, evolved into the structure we have today. In 1950 in Paris, the IARU Region 1 organisation was formed. In 1964 in Mexico City, IARU Region 2 was created and in 1968 in Sydney, IARU Region 3 came to exist. You can see their online presence at the various iaru.org websites. How it works is no clearer now than it was when I started. What it has achieved is equally unclear. I'm currently trolling through ITU World Radiocommunications Conference documentation going back to 1903 to discover references to Amateur Radio, but it's hard going. At least it's something. The IARU documentation is not nearly as extensive or up to date. It appears that many, if not all, of the people working behind the scenes at the various IARU organisations are volunteers. If you feel inclined, there is an ongoing request for assistance, and before you ask, yes, I looked into helping out, but that will have to wait until funds permit. If you have insights into the functioning of the IARU, don't be shy, get in touch. [email protected] is my address. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio So, I have a confession. I don't know everything. Shocking right? Over the past too many months, actually, come to think of it, years, I have not been on-air with my station on HF using FT8 or Olivia, modes that use tools like "WSJT-X" and "fldigi". This has not always been the case. For a time I used a tiny computer running those tools. It had plenty of issues related to its size and capacity. Overwhelmingly it was slow, unsurprising since it was released in 2009. After one particularly frustrating session where I had to recompile WSJT-X on an older 32-bit operating system using an Atom processor, I decided that this was not helping me, and I put it away. The idea was to use my main computer that could do all the heavy lifting without cracking a sweat. To make this happen the traditional way, I'd be expected to physically connect the radio to the computer. I'm not a fan of doing that, given the potential damage that RF could do to my computer, not to mention that I have a sit-stand desk on wheels that I move around my office as the mood or the light takes me, if you're interested, I found a mobile lectern that the computer is clamped to. Works great, been using it for years. RF aside, moving around the office is not conducive to plugging in a radio that comes with power, coax, audio, control, microphone and expects to have some space around it to actually use it. No problem, I have a RemoteRig, a device that comes in two parts. You connect one unit to the radio, the other to the head, that is, the removable faceplate of the radio, and using a network connection, you can have the head in one place and the radio in another. The two units don't have to be in the same room, let alone the same country. I figured that I could replace the second half of the system, the head and its unit, and instead use software on my computer to get the same functionality and be up and running in minutes. That was several years ago. Interestingly, whilst I'm putting this together I did a search for "RemoteRig protocols" and learnt a few things, so perhaps this path isn't quite as dead as I feared. I've reached out to Mikael SM2O and if that comes to anything I'll let you know. In the meantime I've been trying to figure out how to operate my radio in software only. I can control the radio if I physically connect a computer like a Raspberry Pi to it and use "rigctld" to interact with it. This gives me access to all the standard CAT, or Computer Assisted Tuning commands. In other words, I can change band, mode, frequency, trigger the transmitter, all the stuff that you need to get on-air to make noise. There's only one bit missing, the noise, as-in audio, either coming from the radio, or going to it. I suppose I could trigger a carrier and use it to send Morse, but that doesn't give me receive capability. I've tried using network audio using "pulseaudio" - it never worked right. I've made USB hot-plug scripts that allow you to connect a USB device into a computer and access it across the network on another computer - it mostly works for sound, but reliable is not a word I'd use. I've looked at using the USB sound card in the audio mixer on my desk, but it's subject to all manner of funky restrictions and random audio dropouts. I could use a virtual screen and connect to a Raspberry Pi that's physically connected to the radio, but that's leaving all the hard work on the Pi, rather than the computer that I'm currently using with several orders of magnitude more capability. Whilst we're discussing this, one of the reasons I like the idea of a software defined radio like a PlutoSDR, is that the stuff coming out of the radio, and going into it for that matter, is already digital. It takes away a whole lot of complexity, admittedly replacing it with software, but that's where I feel more comfortable. Which brings me to you. As I said, I don't know everything. What are you doing in this space? Are you actually on-air with your contraption, or is it still in the planning stages? Are you sending audio, or digital data across the network? Does your system have the ability to swap out a radio and replace it with something completely different? Do you rely on functions available on the radio, or could it be used for a 1950's valve radio, a twenty year old one, a current model, or any number of software defined radios without issues? Finally, is it Open Source? I confess that I'm not holding my breath for an answer, but there is a chance that you're similarly intrigued by this collection of questions that you will poke your head above the fence and make yourself known. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The recent "incident" at the ARRL in which it disclosed that it was the "victim of a sophisticated network attack by a malicious international cyber group" brings into focus some serious questions around our community in relation to identity and privacy. Let's start with your callsign. Right now in Australia you can use the official register to look for VK6FLAB. When you do, you'll discover that it's "Assigned to Foundation". That's it. No mention of who holds it, where it's registered or how to contact the holder, none of that. In the case of my callsign, because I haven't surrendered my apparently now legally useless license, you can still search the previous system, the Register of Radiocommunications Licenses and discover that it's held by me, but as soon as it expires, that record will vanish and the relationship between me and my callsign will be lost to the public. Also, there are no dates associated with any of this. You cannot use the current or previous system to discover if I held my callsign in November 2010 or not. In case you're wondering, no, I didn't, I was licensed a month later. Right now if you look for VK6EEN on QRZ.com, you'll see that it's linked to CT1EEN, but when was that information last updated? I know for a fact that I became the holder in November 2020. It appears that Sam CT1EEN used it around the turn of the century, about 24 years ago, but precisely when and for how long, is unclear. So, from a public disclosure perspective, the links between me and my callsigns are tenuous at best. Before I continue, I will point out that this is not unusual. For example, you can see the number plate on my car as I drive down the street, but most people don't have the ability to link it to me. Similarly, Ofcom in the United Kingdom released a list of allocated amateur callsigns after a freedom of information request. It's unclear if this information is updated, or if it requires a new request each time. Like Australia, the dataset contains the callsign, the type of license and when the record was last updated. Nothing else. In contrast, the United States has a full license search that returns name, address, issue and expiry dates. Japan offers both a search tool and downloads. Interestingly you can see if a callsign was previously licensed and when, but not by whom. No doubt each country has their own interpretation in relation to how this is handled and as was the case in Australia, this is ever changing. This leaves us with an interesting phenomenon. We use callsigns on-air to identify ourselves, but the relationship between the callsign and our identity, let alone when, is not guaranteed for a significant proportion of the amateur community. So, how does this relate to the ARRL incident? Radio amateurs like to make contacts with each other and collect those contacts like you might collect stickers or postage stamps. For decades we've used QSL cards, essentially a postcard sent from one amateur to another to confirm a contact. When you collect enough cards, you can apply for an award, like the DXCC, showing that you made contact with one hundred different so-called DX entities. In the era of computing, some organisations, like the ARRL, came up with the idea of using the internet to exchange these contacts instead of using a postcard. This reduced delays and was presented as a system to make the process more secure by requiring that people electronically sign their contacts, but could only do so after identifying themselves using traditional means, like providing copies of their license, their passport, etc. The ARRL called it Logbook of the World, or LoTW, and it was adopted by the amateur community around the globe. While the ARRL continues to state that it only holds public information on its member database, it has made no such assurances about the LoTW system. There is personal and private information that the ARRL has and there is no indication at all what happened to it. Other systems such as QRZ, eQSL, Clublog and Hamlog offer similar systems with various levels of authentication and verification. A new player, HQSL, is confusing the issue by offering cryptographically signed QSL cards, boasting that their system is decentralised and not restricted to any single service, but immediately requires that you sign-up with Hamlog to get going. So, we have several organisations offering electronic logging, contact confirmation and security which claim to guarantee that this callsign contacted that callsign at a time and date, on a band, using a mode. One problem. None of this is real. For starters, there is no guarantee that the station operating VK6FLAB was me. There is also no record guaranteeing that I'm the holder of VK6FLAB, or any proof that I am who I say I am. There is also no guarantee that the person confirming a contact between VK6FLAB and you is me. So, we're creating a phantom secure system that's attempting to fix the wrong problem. In golf, when

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've heard the phrase "shortwave listeners", you might have wondered what on earth that was all about. It relates to the length of a radio wave used to transmit information. The length of a radio wave is tied to its frequency. The longer the wave, the lower the frequency. When radio amateurs talk about bands, like for example the 40m band, we're talking about a range of frequencies where the wavelength is around 40m. From a frequency perspective, this is around 7 MHz. The 160m band, at about 1.8 MHz, or 1,800 kHz is considered the beginning of the short wave bands. This implies that there are longer waves as well. If you've ever seen or owned a mid 1980's transistor radio, you'll have seen the notation MW, which stands for Medium Wave, today it's called the AM band. Older radios might have the notation LW, or Long Wave. The medium wave band is a broadcast radio band that runs between about 500 and 1,700 kHz. The wave length is between 600 m and 170 m. When radio was still in its infancy, there was also a popular long wave band, with wavelengths between 800 m and 2,000 m, or 150 to 375 kHz. Today much of that has gone by the wayside. With the advent of digital radio, in Australia it's called DAB+, Digital Audio Broadcasting, the whole idea of "wave" has pretty much vanished. Some countries like Japan and the United States are in the process of discussing the phasing out of the AM broadcast band. Much of that appears to be driven by car manufacturers who claim that the AM band is no longer useful or used, but forget to tell anyone that they really want to stop having to put AM radios in their cars because it's difficult to isolate the electrical noise from their modern contraptions in order to make it possible to actually listen to that band. If you ask me, it's a good incentive to make electronics RF quiet, something which is increasingly important in our wirelessly connected world. This might lead you to believe that all activity on air is moving to higher and higher frequencies, but that's not the case. The properties that made long wave and medium wave radio possible in the early 1900's are still valid today. For example, there are WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacons on the 2200m band, or at 136 kHz. Whilst your RTL-SDR dongle might not quite get down that low, most of them start at 500 kHz, you don't need to spend big to start playing. My Yeasu FT-857d is capable of tuning to 100 kHz, plenty of space to start listening to the 2200m band, even if I cannot physically, or legally, transmit there. If you want to build your own receiver, you can check out the weaksignals.com website by Alberto I2PHD where you'll find a project to build a receiver capable of 8 kHz to 900 kHz using a $50 circuit board. If that's not enough, there's radio experimentation happening at even lower frequencies. Dedicated to listening to anything below 22 kHz, including natural RF, with a wavelength greater than 13 km, Renato IK1QFK runs the website vlf.it where you'll find receivers and antennas to build. Given that most sound cards operate up to around 192 kHz, you can start by connecting an antenna to the microphone port of your sound card and use it to receive VLF or Very Low Frequencies. On your Linux computer you can use "Quisk" to tune. There are VLF transmitters on air. For example, SAQ, the Grimeton Radio Station in Sweden opened on the 1st of December 1924. Capable of 200 kW, today it uses about 80 kW and transmits twice a year on 17.2 kHz. While we search for higher and higher frequencies, there is still plenty of fun to be had at the other end of the radio spectrum. Consider for example that VLF or Very Low Frequency radio waves, between 3 and 30 kHz can penetrate seawater. I'll leave you to explore. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I want to talk about something that might feel only tangentially related to our hobby, but it likely affects you. Recently the ARRL announced that it was "in the process of responding to a serious incident involving access to our network and headquarters-based systems". A day later it sought to assure the community that the "ARRL does not store credit card information" and they "do not collect social security numbers" and went on to say that their "member database only contains publicly available information". Five days after that it's "continuing to address a serious incident involving access to our network and systems" and that "Several services, such as Logbook of The World(R) and the ARRL Learning Center, are affected.", but "LoTW data is secure". Over a third of the latest announcement, more than a week ago, was to assure the community that the July QST magazine is on track but might be delayed for print subscribers. Regardless of how this situation evolves, it's unwelcome news and much wider reaching than the ARRL. LoTW, or Logbook of The World, is used globally by the amateur community to verify contacts between stations. The IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, is headquartered at the ARRL office. I've been told that I should have empathy and consider that the ARRL is only a small organisation that may not have the best of the best in technology staff due to budget constraints and finally, that LoTW being down for a few days is not going to kill anyone. All those things might well be true and mistakes can and do happen. The ARRL has been in existence for well over a century, bills itself as the answer to "When All Else Fails" and has even registered this as a trademark, but hasn't actually said anything useful about an incident that appears to have occurred on the 14th of May, now over two weeks ago. By the way, that date is based on the UptimeRobot service showing less than 100% up-time on that day, the ARRL hasn't told us when this all occurred, it didn't even acknowledge that anything was wrong until two days later. This raises plenty of uncomfortable questions. What information did you share with the ARRL when you activated your LoTW account? For me it was over a decade ago. I jumped through the hoops required and managed to create a certificate. What information I shared at the time I have no idea about. As I've said before, I do know that security was more extreme than required by my bank, even today, and the level of identification required was in my opinion disproportionate to the information being processed by the service, lists of amateur stations contacting each-other. Something to take into account, on the 30th of October 2013, Norm W3IZ wrote in an email to me: "Data is never removed from LoTW." - I have no idea how much or which specific information that refers to. If you used the ARRL Learning Center, what information did you share? If you're a member of the ARRL, or you purchased something from their online store, what data was required and stored? Is the data at the IARU affected? What infrastructure, other than the office, do they share? While I've been talking about the ARRL, this same issue exists with all the other amateur services you use. QRZ.com, eQSL.cc, eham.net, clublog.org, your local regulator, your amateur club, your social media accounts, all of it. What information have you shared? Do you have an internet birthday, address and middle name? Recently I received a meme. It shows two individuals talking about life, the universe and everything. They discuss their favourite books, the first movie they ever watched, the name of their pets, what car they learnt to drive in, their interests and other things you talk about when you meet someone new and interesting. The last image of the meme shows the heading: "Security Questions Answered, Welcome Amanda." So, my question is this: What's your favourite colour and your mother's maiden name? Seriously, next time you access a service online, have a look at what data that service has. When you sign up, consider the requirements for the service and how much information that's worth. Do you really need to send your birthday, your gender and your physical address with a copy of your passport or another government approved identity document? If you're being asked for the name of your first pet, consider answering something unique. In my case, I generate a random string of characters to use as an answer for each security question. The ARRL "incident" is the tip of the iceberg. This problem is't going away, it's only going to get bigger and happen more often. Final observation. With the potential of a global shopping list for thieves coming out of the database at the ARRL, will you be sharing your station address next time and if you're subject to the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, perhaps it's time to ask your online service providers just exactly what they're doing to protect yo

Foundations of Amateur Radio The origin of our amateur bands It's hard to imagine today, but there was a time when there was no such thing as either the 80m or the 20m amateur band, let alone 2m or 70cm. Picture this. It's the roaring 20's, the 1920's that is. Among a Jazz Age burst of economic prosperity, modern technology, such as automobiles, moving pictures, social and cultural dynamism, the peak of Art Deco, we're also in the middle of a radio boom where the world is going crazy buying radios as fast as they can be constructed, there are hundreds of licensed broadcasters, the bands are getting crowded, radio amateurs have been banned from the lucrative radio spectrum above 200 meters, and can only play in the "useless short waves" using frequencies greater than 1,500 kHz. And play they did. On the 2nd May 1925 amateurs proved they could communicate with any part of the world at any time of the day or night when Ernest J. Simmonds G2OD and Charles Maclurcan A2CM made a daylight contact between Meadowlea, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England, and Strathfield, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia on what we now call the 20m band. This contact occurred not once, but regularly, for several days, using 100 Watts. To give you a sense of just how big news of this feat was, on the second scheduled contact the Prime Minister of Australia, Stanley Bruce, sent a message to England's Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin: "On occasion of this achievement Australia sends greetings." If you recall, the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, was a fortnight old at this point. Less than a year later contact was made using voice. Between the banning of radio amateurs from frequencies below 1,500 kHz at the London International Radiotelegraph Conference in 1912 and the Washington International Radiotelegraph Conference in 1927 the world had irrevocably changed. In 1912 the discussion was almost all about ship to shore communication. By 1927, the world had tube transmitters, amplitude voice modulation, higher frequencies and what the 1993 IARU President, Richard Baldwin, W1RU calls, "literally an explosion in the use of the radio-frequency spectrum". In 1927 individual countries were beginning to control the use of spectrum, but there was no universal coordination, no international radio regulation and as we all know, radio waves don't stop at the border. Richard W1RU, writing in 1993 says: "In retrospect, the Washington conference of 1927 was a remarkable effort. It created the framework of international radio regulation that exists even today. It had to recognize and provide for a multitude of radio services, including the Amateur Service. It was at this conference that amateur radio was for the first time internationally recognized and defined. Bands of harmonically related frequencies were allocated to the various radio services, including the Amateur Service." While the IARU was two years old, it really hadn't represented amateur radio on the international stage, until now. The 1927 conference defined an "amateur" as a "duly authorised person interested in radio electric practice with a purely personal aim and without pecuniary interest." The harmonically related frequencies that were allocated to the Amateur Service are recognisable today. I'll use current band names to give you some context. 1,715 kHz to 2 MHz, or 160m, 3.5 to 4 MHz, or 80m, 7 to 7.3 MHz or 40m, 14 to 14.4 MHz or 20m, 28 to 30 MHz or 10m, and 56 to 60 MHz or 6m. Of those, the 20m and 80m bands were exclusive to amateurs. The 10m and 6m bands were shared with experimenters and the 160m and 80m bands were shared with fixed and mobile services. You'll notice the absence of bands we use today, the 2m and 70cm bands, 15m and the so-called WARC bands to name a few. The final ratified document goes into great detail about the requirements, the restrictions, how to deal with interference, how to allocate frequencies and numerous other provisions, many of which will look familiar, almost a hundred years later, if you've ever looked at the rules and regulations under which you operate as a licensed amateur today. There were various radio amateurs at the 1927 conference, but as Richard W1RU puts it: "much of the credit for the success of amateur radio at that conference has to go to two representatives of ARRL -- Hiram Percy Maxim, president of ARRL; and Kenneth B. Warner, Secretary and General Manager of ARRL." While Richard points to their roles in the ARRL, you might recall that Hiram was elected international president of the IARU and Kenneth its international secretary-treasurer. Whichever way you look at it, whichever organisation you credit, today we have amateur bands thanks to those efforts made nearly a century ago. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the years you've heard me utter the phrase: "Get on air and make some noise!". It's not an idle thought. The intent behind it is to start, to do something, anything, and find yourself a place within the hobby of amateur radio and the community surrounding it. Since starting my weekly contribution to this community, thirteen years ago, almost to the day, I promise, this wasn't planned, you'll see why in a moment, I've been working my way through the things that take my fancy, things that are of interest to me, and hopefully you. From time-to-time I don't know where the next words are going to come from. Today they came to me five minutes ago when a good friend, Colin, VK6ETE, asked me what inspires me, after I revealed to him that I didn't know what I was going to talk about. That's all it took to get me rolling. There are times when getting to that point takes weeks, I do research, figure out how something works, explore how it might have been tackled before, if at all, and only then I might start putting my thoughts together, often I'll have multiple stabs at it and if I'm lucky, sometimes, something emerges that I'm astonished by. Today is much simpler than all that, since the only research required is to remember the people I've interacted with. Last week I met an amateur, Jess M7WOM, who was in town. Until last week, we'd never met and interacted only online. We discovered that we have a great many things in common. A joy for curiosity, exploration, technology, computers and a shared belief that we can figure out how to make things work. That interaction, over the course of a day, continues to fuel my imagination and provides encouragement to try new things. The same is true for a friend, Eric VK6BJW, who asked what they should do with the hobby after having been away for a long time with family, children, commitments and work. Just asking a few simple questions got the juices going and provided inspiration to start playing again. Another amateur was bored and claimed to have run out of things to do. A few of us started asking questions about their exposure to the hobby. Had they tried a digital mode, had they built an antenna, had they tried to activate a park, or as I have said in the past, any of the other 1,000 hobbies that are embedded within the umbrella that we call amateur radio. Right now I'm in the midst of working through, actually truth be told, I'm starting, Okay, actually, I've yet to start, reading the online book published at PySDR.org. Prompted by a discussion with Jess last week, I started exploring a known gap in my knowledge. I likened it to having a lamp-post in front of my face, I can see to either side, but in-between is this post, obscuring an essential piece of knowledge, how one side is connected to the other. In my case, on one side, I can see the antenna, how it connects to an ADC, or an Analogue to Digital Converter. On the other, I can also see how you have a series of bytes coming into your program that you can compare against what you're looking for, but the two are not quite connected, obscured by that .. post. I know there's a Fourier Transform in there, but I don't yet grok how it's connected. Recently I discussed using an RDS, or Radio Data Systems decoder, called 'redsea', connected to 'rtl_fm', in turn connected to an RTL-SDR dongle, that is, you connect an antenna to a cheap Digital TV decoder, tune to an FM broadcast station and use some software to decode a digital signal. It turns out that the PySDR book serendipitously uses this signal path as an end-to-end tutorial, complete with all the code and example files to make this happen. I actually read the chapter, but it's assuming some knowledge that I don't yet have, so I'm going to start on page one .. again. So, what has this got to do with Inspiration, you ask. Well, everything and nothing. Inspiration doesn't occur in a vacuum. It needs input. You cannot see light without it hitting something, radio waves don't exist and cannot be detected until it hits an antenna, the same is true for inspiration. It needs to hit something. You need to react, it needs to connect. That is why I keep telling you to get on air and make some noise. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Much is made in our hobby about working DX, that is sending and receiving distant radio signals. How distant is up for debate. Depending on where you are, DX might be outside the continent, outside the country, or in my case you could easily say, anything outside of my state, since the nearest border is about 1,240 km away from here. For giggles, the distance between Albany in the South West and Wyndham in the North East of the state is 2,400 km and that's via radio wave. By car it's 3,570 km. To be clear, we're still inside VK6. All that to say, DX is in the ear of the beholder. If that's not enough, there's a group of amateurs who are of the strident opinion that for DX to count it must be a two-way contact. That is, both stations need to hear each other and as such, those amateurs believe that a mode like WSPR, the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter can't possibly be considered DX, even if you can discover that your station was heard on the other side of the planet. I'm going to skip right over those who tell anyone who will listen that FT8 isn't real radio because it's just computers talking to each other. This to give you some context when I introduce the next idea, namely FM Broadcast DX. I'm acutely aware that this isn't amateur radio, there's no two-way communication, it's probably not DX and besides, it's computers. That out of the way, let me tell you about something I discovered. Many, but not all, FM broadcasters transmit multiple signals when you tune to their station. One of those is a signal called RDS, or Radio Data Systems. It's used to show you the name of the station, sometimes what song is playing, what style of station it is and other information like road traffic alerts and emergencies. You can decode this using an RDS decoder. Recently I was browsing YouTube. I came across a video on the Broken Signal channel that digs into the world of FM-scanning to log any RDS information for the purpose of finding DX stations. The video goes into great detail on how to set this up with Windows, by copying files into various places, updating XML files, configuring sample rates, connecting virtual audio cables, running several tools simultaneously and it goes on to demonstrate how this all hangs together. While I was impressed with the idea, the implementation didn't speak to me, since I wince at the notion of copying random files into an application installation directory and besides I'm a Linux user. So, I went hunting. Turns out that there is an RDS decoder for Linux, called "redsea", written by Oona OH2EIQ. It's on GitHub. Compiling it is pretty straightforward, follow the instructions and it should work as advertised. You'll also need to have "rtl-sdr" installed so you can run a tool called "rtl_fm". Again Oona's instructions should help you out. I will add that I'm assuming that you have a so-called RTL-SDR dongle, it's a cheap USB device that can be coerced into pretending to be a software defined receiver with about 2.2 MHz of bandwidth. Based on the example shown, I immediately tuned to a local station and RDS information started filling my screen. To let you know how simple this is, you run the "rtl_fm" tool and send its output to "redsea" which decodes the information and displays it on the screen. That's it. No more moving parts, no XML files, no shenanigans with virtual audio cables and the like. Stage one complete, on to stage two, scanning. The "rtl_fm" tool has the capability to scan a range of frequencies. I tried this, but didn't really get anywhere, since for the scanner to work you need to set the squelch in order to switch between frequencies, but if you're aiming for a weak signal, it will never be heard if your local FM broadcasters are belting away 24 hours a day. So, instead I'm scanning each frequency between 87 MHz and 109 MHz, every 10 kHz, for 10 seconds, to see if there's any RDS data to be heard. I send that to a file and when I feel the urge, I can go check to see what I've heard. I haven't yet put this up on GitHub because I'm considering making it a contribution to the "redsea" project instead of a project of my own. Now, at this point you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Well, the same method could be used to decode your local amateur repeater idents, or the NCDXF beacons, or any other kind of interesting information. I saw one user link "rtl_fm" to "multimon-ng", a tool I've spoken about before. You should also check out Oona's website, windytan.com, there's a whole range of signal processing stories to be found, including dealing with flutter distortion on Steamboat Willie and a very cool spiral spectrogram. I'll leave you with one question. Why haven't you installed Linux yet? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Some life lessons require additional reinforcement from time to time. This week I was strongly encouraged to remember a lesson that can be summarised as: "A place for everything and everything in its place." It was first uttered like that to me a quarter of a century ago by a client who used it frequently around their staff. It means that all the stuff that fills up the space around you, in this case, physical stuff, needs to have a specific home and if you're not actively using it, that is where it should be. This is useful in a context where you have lots of little things that you need from time-to-time, or if you have several people dependent on the availability of a single thing, like say the labelling machine used to tag equipment. The other day an incident involving a tiny tablet that went flying across the kitchen bench, bounced over the edge and vanished, not helped by the fact that taking the tablet was time sensitive and the fact that the vacuum cleaner was right there - no the tablet was not inside, I checked. I walked around the bench to the other side and started rolling on the ground with the aid of the torch on my phone. Ten minutes in, still nothing. I remembered that my go-bag has a torch, so I went to get it from its place. One problem, it wasn't there. I turned the bag upside down and went through it. Nope, no torch. That's two things that vanished. Neither has resurfaced at this point. I went to the chemist to get another tablet and took it 40 minutes late. The torch however was not so easy to resolve. My, what I call go-bag, has a bunch of life affirming essentials. It started pretty soon after becoming a radio amateur. It has two jumpers, long-leg underwear, an under shirt, a towel and a microfibre cloth, leather gloves, mosquito net, medication, band-aids, toilet paper, soap and some empty bags. It also has a torch, well, not right now it doesn't. After failing on my mission to locate the torch, I started stuffing the contents of my go-bag, straight back into its bag, only to realise that I wasn't helping future me. I stopped, pulled everything back out and started folding everything neatly. Then I repacked the bag. I've put in a stand-by torch, in Dutch they're called a "knijpkat", or a mechanically operated torch. You squeeze it in your hand and in doing so you move a dynamo that charges either a battery or a capacitor. It's called a "pinch cat" because it sounds a little like that. The light is fine for getting around in the dark, but you wouldn't mistake it for a super bright, eyeball burning, LED torch. In case you're wondering why I'm going into such detail about this, it's because you never know when you need something. It might be urgent, or it might not be. Having your stuff organised in such a way that you can find it, can sometimes be the difference between life and death. Now I get it. Not everyone works like this. I have for decades had a system on my desk where I know where all the bits of paper are and it's not helpful if someone cleans it up, because at that point I have no reference to anything and I will have to go through the whole box of things to find what I need. When my partner and I travelled around Australia in an Iveco Daily stuffed to the gunnels with electronics equipment, clothes, food, camping gear, a two metre satellite dish and plenty of other things, I had a system that involved four filing cabinets bolted into the van, combined with a dozen or more crates, metal hooks, straps and a safe. I was forever putting things away in the exact same place, each time. It's not a process that comes naturally to everyone and so we settled on a process where I would pack the van so I could lay my hands on anything within seconds, from the socket set to the satellite signal finder, from a clean pair of shorts to a raincoat, from a fuel funnel to a water funnel. Pro-tip, don't mix the two. Tools aside, of course this system also applies to the first aid kit and the fire extinguisher, the fire blanket, band-aids and medication, and in this case a torch. You might ask how this could apply to amateur radio. Go-bag aside, looking around my radio shack, it has lots of little things, like adaptors, measuring gadgets, chargers, fly leads, microphone clips, coax switches and plenty of other stuff. If everything in your shack is in use, this isn't an issue, but if you're like me and don't have your NanoVNA, and all the SMA to something adaptors, or plenty of other things lying around for that "just in case" time, then having a place for everything and everything in its place is a very productive way to keep things organised so you don't spend half your life looking for things. Similarly, if you know where your portable shack is, your battery charger, an emergency antenna, or some other essential item, you'll discover that when it comes down to the pointy end of a situation, this might make a difference. So, how do you keep your life, and shack, org

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the early 1920's long distance communication using radio was a growing interest. At the time it was thought that communication that we take for granted today, over long-distance HF, was limited to long wave or extremely low frequencies, the lower the better. With that restriction came massive antennas and high power transmitters, available only to commercial and government stations. Then radio amateurs let the cat out of the bag by discovering that so-called "short wave" radio could be heard all across the globe. As an aside, today, "short wave" seems quaint, because we've discovered that even shorter waves can be used to communicate, right down to nanometre communication as shown by NASA in its XCOM technology demonstration on the 12th of May, 2019. On a daily basis we use 120 mm and 60 mm waves when we use 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi for example. As a result of the discovery of short wave radio, a gold-rush emerged. There was a hunger in the community for radio, businesses and communities adopted the new medium, there were radio courses being taught in Universities, church services and other forms of entertainment started filling the airwaves. Comedy, talk shows, music, concerts, serials and dramas spread across the electromagnetic spectrum and radio amateurs who had discovered the phenomenon were running the risk of being pushed aside by commercial interests willing to pay for access. As I've said before, in many countries at the time, amateur radio was actively discouraged, sometimes it was even illegal. Before we continue, I should quote some statements made about radio before the gold-rush which at the time was seen as "Telegraphy Without Wires". In 1865 a Boston Post editorial proclaimed: "Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, said: "Radio has no future." and went on to say: "Wireless is all very well but I'd rather send a message by a boy on a pony", he also said: "Heavier-than-air machines are impossible." and "X-Rays will prove to be a hoax." Not all statements aged as badly. The New York Times said in 1899: "All the nations of the earth would be put upon terms of intimacy and men would be stunned by the tremendous volume of news and information that would ceaselessly pour in upon them." Back to the IARU. Before a business trip to Europe, the board of directors of the ARRL asked their President, Hiram Percy Maxim, to encourage international amateur relations, which on 12 March 1924 resulted in a dinner given, at the Hotel Lutetia in Paris according to Hiram, a "certain dining room" by "the most distinguished radio men of Europe." Hiram goes on to say that: "This A.R.R.L. President has sat in at a good many very impressive radio meetings in the past, ranging from Maine to California, but he has never sat in at a meeting where there was quite as much thrill as at this meeting in Paris where the amateurs of nine different countries sat down together." The countries were, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Canada and the United States. Hiram remarks that "Denmark was represented by a letter in which regret was expressed at the inability to have a representative present and asked that the amateurs of Denmark be counted in." You should dig up a copy of the May 1924 edition of QST to get a sense of occasion where the ARRL president compares the thrill of the "hamfest" to the atmosphere during that dinner and pities those who have never experienced it. During the meeting it was decided to form an organisation which was going to be called the International Amateur Radio Union. A temporary committee was formed that appointed Hiram Maxim as the chair and Dr. Pierre Corret as secretary to take charge of the details to create a permanent organisation. The final decision was to call for a general Amateur Congress on the Easter Holiday of 1925 where the IARU would be formalised. On the 14th of April, 1925, 250 radio amateurs from 23 countries met in Paris and over the next four days the details of the new Union were hammered out. Among those details were that the organisation was chiefly for "the coordination and fostering of international two-way amateur communication, that it should be an organisation by individual memberships until strong national societies had been formed in the principal nations and a federation would be feasible, and that its headquarters would be located in the USA." The constitution was written over a day and night session and by the morning of the 17th of April, every delegate had a copy and then the hard work began, approving the constitution, section by section, by the entire Congress. On the morning of the 18th, elections were held and Hiram U1AW was elected international president, Gerald G2NM, international vice-president, Jean F8GO and Frank Z4AA councillors-at-l

Foundations of Amateur Radio A great deal of energy is expended on the notion of operating portable. I've talked about this plenty of times. Issues like power, antennas, suitable radios, logging, transport and time of day all come to mind. Some activities are framed specifically as portable operations. Things like Summits On The Air, or SOTA, Parks On The Air, or POTA, World Wide Flora and Fauna, or WWFF. There's field days, portable contests and specific activities like the 2014 activation of FT5ZM on Amsterdam Island and the 2016 activation of VK0EK on Heard Island. I mention those last two specifically since I had the distinct pleasure of meeting those teams and had the opportunity to interview each amateur whilst enjoying a typical Aussie BBQ. I'll point out that no shrimps were thrown anywhere. You can find those interviews with FT5ZM and VK0EK on my website at vk6flab.com. Each of these activities are framed in the context of the activity, as-in, you climb a mountain with a radio and then you make noise. That's not the only way to go portable. One of my friends checks in to the weekly F-troop as a portable station most weeks. Glynn VK6PAW gets in his car, drives to some random location and participates from wherever he happens to be at the time. In doing so, the radio part of it, is the add-on between leaving home and arriving at a destination for a cup of coffee. Charles NK8O works all over the United States. When he checks into F-troop, he's rarely in the same place two weeks in a row. In between work and sleep you'll find him activating a nearby park. He's been doing this for quite some time. While this is a POTA activity, he finds parks that fit into his life, rather than point at a park and make a specific trip there to activate it. Before I continue, I'd like to mention that I'm not dismissing making a specific trip. Far from it. The point I'm making is that making any such trip is extra work. It's an added activity in your life. Whilst entirely enjoyable, there's plenty of times where that's just not possible. Instead I'd like to look at this from the other side. Both Glynn and Charles have a radio with them. Perhaps not all the time, but often enough that they can activate their station when they happen to be in a suitable location. I've similarly put a radio into my luggage when going on a holiday. It might transpire that it stays there, or it might be that I happen to find a picnic table at the side of a water reservoir that happens to be in the shade and just begging to try a radio at. In other words, if you have a radio handy, you can handily use it when the opportunity comes to pass. So, what do you bring with you? If you're like Charles, you'll have a QRP radio, a Morse key, a battery and a wire antenna. Glynn has a vertical that lives in his car and the radio is bolted in. For a while I had my radio permanently mounted in my car and I suspect that will return there in the not too distant future. It was removed for a service that involved the transmission being replaced after it failed after only a 140,000 km on the clock. Thankfully a fellow amateur had a spare car we could use, but I wasn't game to drill holes for an antenna and I'm pretty sure they were pretty happy about that. The more I look at the activities that others report on, the more I have come to realise that the people who get on-air the most are the ones who have found a way to weave radio into their day-to-day life, rather than rely on specific amateur radio activities and plans. I confess that I miss sitting by a local lake making noise or finding a random car park with shade that is just begging for someone, anyone, to turn on a radio and have a go. So, how do you approach radio in your life, and how might you find ways to incorporate it into the gaps? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio As a self-proclaimed radio nerd I'm aware of the various amateur bands. Depending on your license, your familiarity will likely vary. I've never been on 6m for example, but I have a good working relationship with the 10m band. Amateur bands aside, there's plenty of other activity across the radio spectrum. It occurred to me that I've never actually stopped to take note of what specifically I can hear from my own station. Think of it as a station frequency survey. Obvious sources are AM and FM radio broadcasters. Then there's the aviation frequencies, the local control tower, arrival and departure frequencies as well as Perth airport ground on occasion. There's the ATIS, the Automatic Terminal Information Service. There was a time when I could hear various aviation non-directional beacons, or NDBs, that are near me, but many of them were switched off in 2016. I haven't yet found a current list of which of the 213 remaining navigation aids that form part of the Backup Navigation Network across Australia are still on the air. As it happens, there's currently some horrendous noise on HF with several new potential sources that I have not yet identified, a pool pump, a bank of solar panels, plasma TV, you name it. Staying with aviation, I've briefly played with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, better known as ADS-B, or ADSB, on 1090 MHz. If you have a PlutoSDR, I updated the dump1090 program to use Open Street Map several years ago. You can find it on my VK6FLAB GitHub page. If you want to see some very interesting visualisations for ADSB, have a look at the adsb.exposed website. Further up the frequencies are things like 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi. In a previous life, before I was an amateur, I played with Ku-band satellite frequencies in the range between 12 to 18 GHz, specifically DVB-S, or Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite. While that's an impressive list of things, it leaves an awful lot of unexplored territory. For example, the local trains and public transit authority, the fire and emergency services, the volunteer bush fire brigades, water bombers and the like. I've not even looked at local digital services like DVB-T, that's the terrestrial standard, or the local radio version, DAB+, or Digital Audio Broadcasting. Then there's pagers, and countless marine services and channels, the ubiquitous CB frequencies and a couple of pirate ones, and global services like GPS, weather satellite and other Earth monitoring services. Note that I'm specifically highlighting things that I can hear at my station, or more precisely, should be able to hear. I'm in the process of figuring out which particular tools I need to actually have a stab at hearing and decoding things like weather satellite. I wouldn't be me if I didn't try this with my hands tied behind my back. I'm limiting myself to things I can hear using the antennas that I already have. I don't, well not at this stage, want to start building and installing more antennas, probably because in the not too distant future I plan to finally erect a replacement HF antenna, but that's a story for another day. As for now, I'm plotting noise levels using a tool called rtl_power. I'm working on figuring out what extra noise has joined my environment. I'm also starting to make a concerted effort to document specifically what I've actually heard. Not so much a continuous log, more of a one-way log if you like, some might call it a shortwave listener log. What RF sources have you heard in your shack and how many of them did you document? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I had an interesting exchange with a contest manager and it's not the first time I've had this dance. As you might know, pretty much every weekend marks at least one on-air amateur radio contest. Following rules set out by a contest the aim is to make contact or a QSO with stations, taking note of each, in a process called logging. Using logging software is one way to keep track of who you talked to, a piece of paper is another. If your station is expecting to make less than a dozen contacts per hour, paper is a perfectly valid way of keeping track, but it's likely that most contests expect you to transcribe your scribbles into electronic form. Which electronic form is normally explicitly stated in the rules for that contest. While I mention rules, you should check the rules for each contest you participate in. Rules change regularly, sometimes significantly, often subtly with little edge cases captured in updated requirements. On the software side, using electronic logging, even transcribing your paper log, can get you to unexpected results. I participated in a local contest and logged with a tool I've used before, xlog. Contests often specify that you must submit logs using something like Cabrillo or ADIF. There are contests that provide a web page where you're expected to paste or manually enter your contacts in some specific format. Using xlog I exported into each of the available formats, Cabrillo, ADIF, Tab Separated Values or TSV and a format I've never heard of, EDI. The format, according to a VHF Handbook I read, Electronic Data Interchange, was recommended by the IARU Region 1 during a meeting of the VHF/UHF/Microwave committee in Vienna in 1998 and later endorsed by the Executive Committee. The contest I participated in asked for logs in Excel, Word, ASCII text or the output of electronic logging programs. Based on that I opened up the Cabrillo file and noticed that the export was gibberish. It had entries that bore no relation to the actual contest log entries, so I set about fixing them, one line at a time, to ensure that what I was submitting was actually a true reflection of my log. So, issue number one is that xlog does not appear to export Cabrillo or ADIF properly. The TSV and EDI files appear, at least at first glance, to have the correct information, and the xlog internal file also contains the correct information. Much food for head-scratching. I'm running the latest version, so I'll dig in further when I have a moment. In any case, I received a lovely email from the contest manager who apologised for not being able to open up my submitted log because they didn't have access to anything that could open up a Cabrillo file. We exchanged a few emails and I eventually sent a Comma Separated Values, or CSV file, and my log was accepted. What I discovered was that their computer was "helping" in typical unhelpful "Clippy" style, by refusing to open up a Cabrillo file, claiming that it didn't have software installed that could read it. Which brings me to issue number two. All these files, Cabrillo, ADIF, TSV, CSV, EDI, even xlog's internal file are all text files. You can open them up in any text editor, on any platform, even Windows, which for reasons only the developers at Microsoft understand, refuses to open a text file if it has the wrong file extension. This "helpful" aspect of the platform is extended into their email service, "Outlook.com" previously called "Hotmail", which refuses to download "unknown" files, like the Cabrillo file with a ".cbr" extension. With the demise of Windows Notepad, another annoying aspect has been removed, that of line-endings. To signify the end of a line MacOS, Windows and Linux have different ideas on how to indicate that a line of text has come to an end. In Windows-land, and DOS before it, use Carriage Return followed by Linefeed. Unix, including Linux and FreeBSD use Linefeed only; OS X also uses Linefeed, but classic Macintosh used Carriage Return. In other words, if you open up a text file and it all runs into one big chunk of text, it's likely that line-endings are the cause. It also means that you, and contest managers, can rename files with data in Cabrillo, ADIF, CSV, TSV, EDI and plenty of other formats like HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, XML and KML to something ending with "TXT" and open it in their nearest text editor. If this makes you giddy, a KMZ file is actually a ZIP file with a KML file inside, which is also true for several other file formats like DOCX to name one. Of course, that doesn't fix the issues of broken exports like xlog appears to be doing, but at least it gets everyone on the same page. Word of caution. In most of these files individual characters matter. Removing an innocuous space or quote might completely corrupt the file for software that is written for that file format. So, tread carefully when you're editing. What other data wrangling issues have you come across? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Did you know that on the 18th of April, 1925 a group of radio amateurs had a meeting in Paris? During that meeting they formed an organisation that still exists today. Before I get into that, let me share a list of names. - Wireless Institute of Australia - Radio Amateurs of Canada - Radio Society of Great Britain - Vereniging voor Experimenteel Radio Onderzoek in Nederland or if you don't speak Dutch, can't imagine why, the Association for Experimental Radio Research in the Netherlands, - Deutscher Amateur Radio Club, I'll let you figure out what that translates to, - American Radio Relay League Language aside, one of these is not like the other. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, at a moment likely before either of us was born, Hiram, wanted to send a message from his amateur station in Hartford to a friend in Springfield. That's 26 miles, or less than half an hour up the road via I-91. One minor problem. At the time, in 1914, using amateur radio for anything beyond 20 miles or so was considered a miracle, so Hiram asked a mate at the halfway point in Windsor Locks to relay a message on his behalf. Soon after he convinced his local radio club in Hartford that building an organised network of stations to relay amateur radio messages was worth doing and the American Radio Relay League was born. Co-founded with radio experimenter Clarence Tuska, Hiram Percy Maxim became its first President. He held many callsigns, most recently W1AW. At the time, longwave, the longer the better, was considered the pinnacle of communication technology. The airwaves were becoming crowded, so amateurs, in search of more space and always up for a challenge, started experimenting at the edges. The shortest wavelength available to amateurs at the time was the 200m band, or 1,500 kHz. In December 1921 the first successful transatlantic transmissions were achieved. Hundreds of North American amateurs were heard across Europe on 200m and several were heard in reply. In a dance that continues to this day, new technology replacing old, spark gap transmitters were replaced by vacuum tubes and using those amateurs were able to use even shorter wavelengths. While technically illegal to operate on higher frequencies, the authorities put their fingers in their ears and let those crazy amateurs play on those useless bands. This is a world without international prefixes, no VK, PA or G stations, so amateurs were forced to come up with their own system to indicate the continent and country. This was clearly organised chaos at the edges of legality, in many countries amateur radio operation was actively discouraged or even illegal. Soon the same person who came up with the notion of the ARRL led the way and organised a meeting in Paris. That meeting, on the 18th of April, 1925 marks the forming of the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union and as I said, it exists today. That date, the 18th of April is globally, well at least in the amateur radio community, uh, well, small pockets of the amateur radio community, known as World Amateur Radio Day. 2024 marks the beginning of a year of celebration for the centenary of the organisation that brought together this global rag-tag group of enthusiast experimenters that we fondly refer to as our community. The IARU theme for this year is: "A Century of Connections: Celebrating 100 years of Amateur Radio Innovation, Community, and Advocacy" and you're invited. So, what types of activities are you planning, what kind of celebration do you have in mind, and who is bringing the birthday cake? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the weekend I participated in a contest. Before you get all excited, it was only for a couple of hours over a few different sittings and while I had plenty of fun, of the eleven QRP, or low power, contacts I made, nine were on VHF and UHF, two were on 10m HF. Mind you, 3,200 and 3,500 km contacts are nothing to sneeze at. It has been a while since I've actually been on HF, so long that it felt like turning on a new radio and getting used to it all over again. If you're not sure what I'm describing, let me elaborate. A new radio takes a few goes to calibrate your ear and brain to learn what you can expect to hear and work. On some radios if you can hear the other station, you can work them. On others, unless they're pegging the S-meter, you've got no chance. QRP adds an extra layer of challenge. A few hours earlier I'd been discussing HF band conditions and one comment that stuck in my mind was that the bands appeared to be more quiet than normal. At the time, nobody could put a finger on why or how, but there appeared to be a general consensus that this was the case. So when I tuned to 10m, after having switched off my beacon, which I promptly forgot to turn back on for 36 hours or so, I went hunting for stations to contact. I heard a few, but their signals were very weak. Noise levels were amazing, very quiet, but stations were very low down. I thought nothing of it, given the discussion we'd just had, and persisted and as I said, I made two contacts. Since contacts were hard to come by, I started playing with another experiment I'm working on. Specifically I'm using something called USBip to connect to some USB devices across my network. The way it works is that you plug the devices, like a CAT cable and a USB sound-card into a Raspberry Pi, then using another computer, you can access those devices wirelessly as-if they're physically connected to the other computer. This is useful if you don't want to subject an expensive computer to any stray RF that might be coming in via a USB port. I've written some hot-plug support for this, so you can just connect and disconnect USB devices without needing to fiddle. You'll find the code on my github page. Given that stations were few and far between and not staying in one place, I moved to a local AM broadcast station, so I could test the USBip sound-card link and all I heard was absolute garbage audio coming from that station. I turned on another radio and it too had the same rubbish audio. After a couple of hours fiddling with RF-Gain and still not getting anywhere I started searching online for an answer. One thread, 27 posts long, seemed to describe what I was hearing. Bill N8VUL supplied the answer: "Make sure AGC is on" So, no. It wasn't, on either radio. Why it was off on both radios I will never know. It did make me start exploring again just what other settings I have access to on my radio and what they sound like. Turns out that there's not a lot to be found that has any basis in fact. There were a lot of videos showing amateurs pushing lots of buttons uttering phrases like: "Can you hear the difference?" with nothing much materially changing. The closest to something useful was a YouTube video by Doug N4HNH, called "ATT, IPO, [and] RF Gain" in which he shows some of the effects of each of those options on a Yaesu FT DX 5000. One thing I noticed is that the radio has a neat display that shows the signal path as it passes from a selected antenna through those options and more, highlighting which ones are in use. I started hunting around to see if such a block diagram exists for my FT-857d. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find any such diagram, not even for another radio. The closest I got was the image on page 30 of the FT DX 5000 Series Operating Manual. I did learn that the attenuator on my radio is 10 dB and it doesn't function on 2m and 70cm. As for the AGC, the user manual doesn't help much. It states that it's used to disable the Automatic Gain Control and normally it should be left on. There's some discussion around the interaction between the "RF Gain" knob and the AGC, but I must confess that finding useful examples of this managed to elude me. At this point I have no idea what the difference is between the block diagram on the FT DX 5000 and my FT-857d, other than the obvious single antenna port and plenty of missing features. I find it surprising that for a radio that was introduced over 20 years ago, this kind of information appears to be lacking. Especially since it would help any new amateur operate their radio better and understand the impact of each particular setting on the signal that they were hearing. If you know of any such resource, reach out, my address is [email protected] Meanwhile I'm going to spend some quality time with my radio and the manual and see what other hidden gems I can find and if you know me at all, you'll know that this isn't the first, second or even third time that I'm going throu

Foundations of Amateur Radio Whenever I'm out in the bush in the process of erecting some or other wire contraption, uh, antenna, I cannot help but think of the iconic Australian rock band, Skyhooks, not for their glam rock inspired music, nor for their pure mathematics and computer science degree holding guitarist, but for their name. In antenna erection, a skyhook is called for when you point at a spot in the sky and will into being an attachment point for the wire antenna in your hand. It's always in the perfect spot, holds any weight and of course it's made from unobtainium. Absent a skyhook, there are other ways of hoisting an antenna into the air. A recent discussion revealed that in some places catapults and trebuchets are frowned upon, if not outright illegal. Can't imagine why. Depending on their size, they may be difficult to transport. In the same vein, antenna launchers, lightly camouflaged spud guns, are essentially a gas pressurised tube, causing a projectile to be launched by releasing a valve. Those too are pretty restricted and for good reason. Fortunately there are plenty of other ways of getting things to be in the right place. Let's explore. One option is to bring along a pole, made from whatever is at hand, a multi-element fibreglass pole made by Spiderbeam, mine is 12m long, has always worked for me, though I will confess that I have managed to break one. It did take a 135 degree bend in the tip to achieve that. I'll hasten to add, I didn't set out to do that. Previously it had easily sustained 90 degree abuse in heavy wind. I purchased a new one. I've used it for years. It's not cheap, but it works. Alternatives, much less strong, are using fishing rods or much less flexible, aluminium tubes, pool cleaning extension poles, even painters poles and at a pinch, lengths of wood screwed together, or if you're a Scout, logs lashed into some contraption. Then there's using the nearby landscape. Getting a wire into a tree is an activity that's fun for young and old. Not so much for the person attempting it. Often this starts with throwing things at the tree. You might find a spanner, tie it to a rope and whirl it around, letting go at just the right moment to get it to where you're going. This is not a safe activity and not recommended away from emergency medical assistance, you've been warned. This graduates to using things like a monkey's fist knot. I was given a brightly coloured one, lovingly hand crafted by Alan VK6PWD. It's reminiscent of a Sea Scout woggle knot. Truth be told, it's too beautiful to use, or rather risk losing. Tie it to a line and whirl and throw. Then there's the arborist throw bag, same deal. Each of these whirling activities are fraught. Mainly because you need to strike a balance between the strength of the line, strong enough to be chucked, uh, thrown, but weak enough that you can break it if it gets caught and believe me, it will. There's the option of co-opting your dog's ball launcher. Tie a rope to the ball and hurl. Success depends on how quick your dog is in catching low flying tennis balls. The last time I went fishing was in 2003 when I used a string and a safety pin to catch an, admittedly, tiny fish at Harry's Hole using a tiny piece of bread, took all of 5 minutes. That said, I have a new fishing rod, well, it was new when I purchased it, but now it's a couple of years old. It was the absolute cheapest one I could find. I also bought a box of sinkers. Purchased on the advice of Bob VK6POP, I've used that rod many times to launch a sinker at a nearby tree and used it to pull through some line and then an antenna. It's still a balance between using a fishing line that's strong enough to handle the weight of a sinker and weak enough to break when you want to. The sinker needs to be just the right weight too. Too light and you'll launch it at the right branch where it will stay for the rest of the life of the tree. Too heavy and it will end up somewhere in the bush, never to be found. Grey sinkers tend to vanish in the grass, so if you can find it, look for something nice and bright, fluorescent is best. In a pinch you can use a couple of sinkers, like when you've run out, but in my experience they tend to wrap themselves around a branch. Of course you could also just climb into a tree, or hire a cherry picker, but I'm not that flexible, either in my joints or wallet, so those options don't do it for me. If you have a friendly arborist nearby, there's no shame in paying them to attach a pulley to the required branch in your backyard. Just make sure that the line you use on the pulley cannot escape the groove and get jammed between the wheel and the cheek, don't ask me how I know. So, what ways do you use to summon a skyhook and does it include a Siberian jukebox? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio So, the 19th of February 2024 came and went. As it was, my day started with the highest minimum that month, 27.5 degrees Celsius, that's the minimum overnight temperature. The maximum that day here in Perth, Western Australia was 42.3 degrees. The day before was the highest maximum for the month, 42.9. If you're not sure, that's over 109 in Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's scale. That same day the Australian regulator, the ACMA, launched a new era in Amateur Radio. Moving from personal amateur licenses we legally became part of a class license regime. We have the option to hand our license back and get a refund, but the cautious side of me prevailed and I've not yet handed back my license, since it's currently the only proof that my callsign is valid, the one issued to me in December 2010. I contacted the ACMA to ask about this and was told that they were having display issues with their system and was sent an image showing both my callsigns and email address. I'm not saying that I don't trust the person sending this to me, but I'm fairly sure that "but your honour, it was in an email" isn't going to cut it if push comes to shove. Curiously my name appears to be missing, showing the word "Blank" instead. Their IT team has been working on displaying F-calls for weeks now. I mean, seriously, these were first issued in 2005. Do we really need to spell this out? The ACMA continues to actively encourage amateurs to hand in their license and points out that any delay in doing so will reduce the amount that may be due. It also points at Schedule 4, Part 2 subclause (7)(1)(d) of the Radiocommunications (Amateur Stations) Class Licence 2023, to assure me that my callsign is mine and mine alone, irrespective of what's in the register. It goes on to say that the letter they sent back in January, the one they had to resend, since they got my callsign details wrong, explained that I could hand back my license and that my ability to operate hinged on my qualification, not my callsign. Here's the rub. Let's say that I'm qualified and that the letter I have proves it. I am required to identify myself on-air, the regulations say so. This means that in order for me to claim that I am who I say I am, there needs to be a register with that callsign. Apparently I'm in the register, but nobody other than the regulator can prove that. One thing that appears to be missing is a solid understanding that the register of callsigns is used by the amateur community to determine if a callsign heard on-air is assigned or not. I mean, I could call myself VK6EEN and without the register who's to say that it's mine? It's not confidence inspiring to say the least. Then there's the register itself. There's an online component, which you can use to search for a callsign. As I said, mine isn't visible, neither is any other four letter F-call. As a test, I've been scrolling, one page at a time, for the past hour, to get to VK6F, starting at VK6A, to see if it shows up, but I'm not holding my breath. For some reason the developers who built this appear incapable of rendering a simple table in anything less than 36 seconds per page, so much so that Chrome thinks that the page has crashed and offers to kill it, every time. Funnily enough, if you extract the URL from within the page and copy it, you can download all 176 pages for VK6 callsigns in less time than it took me to write this sentence. Unsurprisingly, F-calls are not there. Did I mention that this software, released a month ago, is already using depreciated features in my current web browser, which came out a week before the new register went live? It gets better. If you actually want to manage your callsign, you need to create an account on the regulator's portal, called ACMA Assist. When you load the ACMA Assist URL and click the "Sign up or log in" button, 134 different URLs from all over the Internet are hit, across 34 different domains, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Markmonitor, Monsido, several content, font, icon and javascript libraries, and plenty more. This is a Government website, requiring that I authenticate to it, and to do that, I'm required to provide more identity documents than the tax department needs and wait for it, authentication is outsourced to some random domain, so you're entering your details into a third-party service. You have the choice of using the Government identity provider, one that requires a mobile phone and an app, or use a Government owned company that prefers a mobile and a different app, but offers access via a website on yet another domain. Now it gets funky. If you pick "driver's license", you'll discover that everything that's on your license is information that the form wants. So anyone with a photo of your license can sign up and identify as you, like the chemist who required a photocopy of it so you could buy Sudafed for your debilitating hay fever, because instead, you might use it to create methamphe

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you operate your station portable, either for fun, or for points, you might be surprised to learn that getting on air and making noise isn't quite as simple as bringing a radio and turning it on. Aside from the need for a reliable power supply, batteries, generator, solar panels, or a magic mains socket, there is the requirement for bringing enough gear to get on air, but not so much that setting up takes days, or even hours. The decisions you make are influenced by where you decide to operate from. If you want to stay in your car, the location is not nearly as influential as when you decide to find a park where you want to have some fun. Finding a location is not a trivial process. If you only plan to get on air for an hour to activate a park, you pretty much get what you find, but if you plan to be on air during a contest for the day, other things start to come into focus. For example, what are the toilet facilities like, are we digging a hole, or is there a public facility nearby? Depending on the time of year, the temperature and weather will influence your choice. For reasons I'm still unsure about, most of the contests in Australia are in the middle of summer, so wearing long sleeves, sunscreen and a hat is the starting point for your adventure. Sitting in the midday sun for any period of time, absent a breeze is not fun, so shade becomes a requirement, not a nice to have. Mind you, at least we don't need to contend with meters of snow, well, not where I am. In other words, what works for me might not work for you. Finding locations is tricky. You can drive around, consult satellite maps, look for desirable attributes and still be rudely surprised when you get to the point of turning on your gear. One of the best lessons I learnt was operating from my car during a contest that awarded points for operating in as many different locations as possible. I used a satellite map to find a location within each boundary and then drove from point to point. If I recall, I set-up in over 30 locations across a 48 hour period. It taught me a great deal about discovering high voltage power lines on a satellite map, the impact of trains on your HF radio, the difference that geology has on your antenna and what a safe location looks like and what the typical hallmarks are for a scary one. My most recent discovery tool is a public toilet map. It's not perfect, the user interface is horrid and for some reason it needs to navigate from the Timor Sea to each toilet, but those issues aside, it does help eliminate locations that lack facilities. I am in the process of cross referencing the Parks On The Air map with the Toilet map to see if there are some nearby parks that have shade, a loo and the opportunity to park nearby to reduce the amount of lugging required for the gear we intend to bring to the next field day. So, what are your tips for finding a place to operate? What kinds of things have you learnt that influence what choices you make? Before I go, one pro-tip. Keep a record of where you actually operate and whilst you're at it, what you used, and not. You can thank me later. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever had a day when nothing you started actually got anywhere? I've had a fortnight like that. Several weeks ago I wrote a couple of articles about emergency communications and its tenuous relationship with our hobby. As a result I managed to get a week ahead of myself and started using that week to do some long overdue analysis of the WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter data set. I've started this process several times and I finally had a whole fortnight to come to grips with 6.7 billion rows of data. Spoiler alert, it hasn't happened yet. The data contains a record of every reception report uploaded to WSPRnet.org since Tuesday 11 March 2008 at 22:02 UTC. It's published in compressed comma separated value text files and after previously spending weeks of wrangling I managed to convert each one into an sqlite3 database. This wrangling was required because some amateurs used commas in their callsigns or grid squares, or backslashes, or both, and SQLite import isn't smart enough to deal with this. After doing this conversion, I could actually query 191 different databases. I could collect the results and three weeks later I'd have an answer, just in time to download the next month of data. Garth VK2TTY suggested that I look into parquet as an alternative. No joke, This Changed My Life. I managed to convert all the compressed CSV files to parquet, a process that took a day, rather than a week with SQLite, and then I could start playing. If you're going to do this yourself, make sure you have a big empty hard disk. After a few false starts, the report that previously took three weeks, returned in three hours, and if we're getting technical, since I know this will make at least somebody laugh, the parquet files are stored on a USB drive connected to an iMac that has the directory mounted via sshfs to a virtual Linux desktop machine that's running the duckdb binary inside a Docker container running on a different virtual Docker machine. If you're keeping track, the database travels across USB via two SSHFS mounts to duckdb and it still only takes three hours. So, impressed doesn't even begin to describe my elation. If you're asking "why?" - the answer is that I don't run untrusted binary executables on my host machine. This allowed me to start doing what-if queries when I discovered a fun issue. A chart I generated with minimum, average and maximum power levels over time showed that there was at least one station that was claiming that it was transmitting with 103 dBm. For context, that's multiple times the power of HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program which in 2012 was the most powerful shortwave station using "only" 95.5 dBm, or 3,600 kilowatts, and only 2 dBm shy of the 105 dBm or 32 megawatts used by AN/FPS-85, part of the US Space Force's Space Surveillance Network, able to track a basketball-sized object 41,000 km from Earth. In other words, 103 dBm is less of a whisper and more of a roar. Funnily enough, not every receiver on the planet reported these transmissions, but more than one did, so the issue is at the transmitter. Unfortunately, when I started looking for reports using more than 60 dBm, there were plenty to choose from, over 18 thousand. While that's less than 0.0003%, it made me wonder how much of the data is dirty and what should I do about it? There's other examples of dirty data. My beacon has been reported on 24 MHz, which is odd, since my licence conditions do not permit me to use that band. Odder still is that several other beacons, normally on 28 MHz like me, were also reported on 24 MHz by the same station. How often does that happen? I've previously reported the missing data from the hybrid solar eclipse in 2023, just under two hours and 12 minutes before the eclipse and the 38 minutes following it was missing. I've not yet checked to see if it magically reappeared. Then there's the faulty decodes. I've talked about this before. Different WSPR versions are better or worse at decoding and the point at which it breaks down varies. In other words, some decoded data is inevitably wrong. I have previously charted activated grid squares. Apparently, all of Earth, yes, all of it, has at one time or another been used both as a transmission or reception site. Including point Nemo, the top of Mount Everest, all of the arctic and antarctic and plenty more out of the way places, like say the Surveyor Generals Corner located in the Ngaanyatjarraku shire - look it up. Interesting patterns emerge when you split activations down per band. It's not clear if those are decoding artefacts or man made claims. I've asked the HamSci community for guidance, since dropping incorrect data on the floor doesn't seem to be the right way to go about things, and whilst correcting data seems obvious, what do you change it to and how do you know what's correct? So, no progress to show for two weeks of work and barely enough to whet your appetite to get on

Foundations of Amateur Radio A few weeks ago I discovered that the regulations for amateur radio in Australia had some definitions that caused me to wonder if 2,312 amateurs in VK, me among them, had been operating illegally? Specifically it appeared that using a WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter transmitter of any kind, both computer controlled and stand-alone beacons, was contrary to what was permitted in the rules, since in Australia an "amateur beacon station" means a station in the amateur service that is used principally for the purpose of identifying propagation conditions. The rules go on to say that you must have a specific beacon license and not having one is not permitted. I suggested that it was time to send a letter to the regulator, seeking clarification. Well, let me tell you, that set a cat among the pigeons, not at the regulator, but within the amateur community. Between posting a draft of my proposed email to a local mailing list before sending it to the regulator, and publishing my article, I received responses that ranged from "let sleeping dogs lie", "you are now on their radar", "you will be prosecuted because you admitted to breaking the rules", "carry on and ignore the rules because I am", and plenty more in that same vein. There were two amateurs that indicated curiosity about what the response might be while pointing out that none of this was legally binding since it hadn't been tested in court. I also discussed the matter on my weekly net and I learnt that DMR hotspots come in a duplex version, meaning that what you transmit into the hotspot is also transmitted by the hotspot on RF whilst sending it to the Internet. If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that this fits the definition of an "amateur repeater station", which also requires a specific license. I received a prompt reply from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the ACMA, the Australian regulator. Here's what the regulator had to say in response to my query: "I can confirm that you can continue to operate your WSPR beacon and Duplex Hotspot as described without requiring an Amateur Beacon or repeater licence." It goes on the say: "Operation of these types of amateur equipment is permitted under the current amateur non assigned arrangements and as such will continue to be permitted under the class licence arrangements." As a result, if you've been listening to WSPR on 10m, you'll have discovered that my 10 dBm beacon went back on the air 45 minutes after receiving this information. The letter confirms that both WSPR and Duplex hotspots have previously been, and will continue to be, allowed under the new rules from the 19th of February 2024 when they come into effect. The final paragraph from the regulator sets out the boundaries of where the rules apply. It says: "The definitions in the Interpretation Determination are broad definitions of amateur repeaters and beacons. For the purposes of amateur licensing the ACMA only considers apparatus assigned licence services, where individual frequency coordination is carried out and specific licences are issued, to be amateur repeaters and beacons." In my opinion this is significant because you only need to apply for a separate amateur beacon or repeater license in very specific circumstances related to frequency coordination. It makes me wonder if the local beacon operators require an ongoing license for all of their beacons or not. What I learnt from this process is that there is a high level of fear in the amateur community towards the regulator. I do not know where this originates, since I've interacted with the regulator on dozens of occasions since obtaining my amateur license in 2010 and in every case the response was courteous and informative. When the response wasn't what I expected I replied asking for extra clarification and received it. This enquiry was no different. Going back through decades of old publications I've previously seen letters between the community and the regulator and I have yet to see anything that warrants the level of fear that appears to permeate our community. So, why are we afraid of the regulator and why do we keep spreading that fear to anyone within propagation range? What have they ever done to you? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio I recently discussed some of the notions of amateur radio as emergency response. The idea that you might jump into the breach and be a hero is appealing and often celebrated. The American Radio Relay League, or ARRL, proudly tells the story of two amateur radio emergency communication events. One, of a person who fell in their bathroom and happened to have a handheld radio that they used to contact another amateur who contacted emergency services. The story goes on to say that being part of the Amateur Radio Emergency Services or ARES had taught the amateurs the ITU phonetic alphabet, as-if that's not a requirement for getting your amateur license. Then there's the story of two teenagers who were critically injured in a remote area and amateur radio rescued them due to a contact with a random local amateur. Never mind that there was a local off-duty EMT who actually stabilised the patients. While you might point at this as "amateur radio to the rescue", to me this is a case of people attempting to make the story about amateur radio. If the person in the bathroom happened to have a mobile phone nearby, the story would not have even made the nightly news and if the people in the remote area had actually prepared properly, they'd have had an emergency position-indicating radiobeacon or EPIRB and a satellite phone, rather than accidentally bumping into a random radio amateur. Moving on. Have you ever noticed that your mobile phone stops working after a couple of hours during a power outage? It's because mobile phone towers run on batteries that depending on load might last up to 12 hours, often much less than that, anywhere from down when the power goes out to 3 hours until the batteries fail. Note that I'm not talking about the battery in your phone, I'm talking about the ones in the tower serving your phone. I mentioned previously that there was a network outage affecting 40% of the Australian population. The get-out-of jail card was that the rest of the population still had mobile, landline and internet connectivity. What would happen if the other network operator also went down? Is there a place for amateur radio in those scenarios? Let's explore. If all mobile, telephone and internet networks were down, what would that look like? Could you call an ambulance or the fire department using amateur radio? Who would you talk to, on what frequency and on which radio would they be listening? Would you set up your portable shack in the local hospital or fire station? Would ambulances and fire services be able to coordinate during such an outage, or would you have your local amateur club ride-along on every ambulance and fire truck? What does such a system look like in actuality? Has there been any planning or training for this? Are there refresher courses and special certifications? Does your local community have anything like this in place, or are you starting from scratch? During widespread and long lasting fire emergencies in Australia, radio amateurs have acted as emergency services radio operators. There is at least one amateur club where, years ago, the members underwent special training with the local State Emergency Services to learn their language and procedures, just in case it becomes short staffed when an actual emergency occurs. I've often said that doing contests is a good way to learn how best to operate your station and how to work in adverse environments with lots of interference, man-made or otherwise. The reality is that it's more likely than not that you'll be using a line-of-sight FM radio in the emergency services communications bunker than sitting in the rubble of your shack using HF with a wire antenna running off battery trying to get someone, anyone, to help you and your community. There are official amateur radio emergency organisations, WICEN in Australia, ARES and RACES in the United States. Much is made by these organisations about joining and training, but very little in the way of actual emergency response. Is that a marketing issue, or are these types of organisations obsolete and waiting to be disbanded? My point is this. If amateur radio is really a service as the WIA states, "A Trusted Partner in Emergency Response", or as the ARRL puts it, "When All Else Fails", even making that a registered trademark, where is the evidence of their activity, where are the annual reports, the after action lessons learnt, the inter-team competitions, the talks at local clubs, the league tables of emergencies handled, lives saved and babies born? To give you insight into just how broken this is, any licensed amateur can become a member of ARES, but you can only read their newsletter if you're a member of the ARRL. In Australia, for a while, the WIA offered a course for Public Safety Training for Radio Amateurs, but only to amateurs with an Advanced license, which I discovered after spending $633.92 to print out, collate and bind the 973 pages of course material, as-if

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur radio is an activity that falls between two camps, those who think of it as a service and those who approach it as a hobby. I think that the notion of amateur radio as a service is often repeated, but in my time as part of this community, I've seen little evidence of actual service. That said, the idea of amateur radio as a service is often linked to emergency communications, for example, a phrase used by the Wireless Institute of Australia is "Amateur Radio - A Trusted Partner in Emergency Response" on a page outlining the long and fabled history of our hobby in service to the community in times of emergency, mind you, none of them in the past decade. If we look at the idea of amateur radio as an emergency response, what does that look like today and how might we best be of service? The question that prompted this discussion centred around the best mode to use for emergency communications and was presented in the context of a tool that links HF radio with email, but is that really the best way to communicate in an emergency? I mean, picture this, you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, it's the small hours of the morning, you're asleep, and your boat just sailed into a submerged container and now you're sinking, so the first thing you do is, fire up your laptop, your radio, and link the two to send an email over HF to get help? Alternatively, your community has just been hit by a natural disaster and the power grid went down, and the first thing you do is use as much battery hungry complex technology as possible to get the word out? So, until we can send email or a short message directly from our amateur radio transceiver, and I have no doubt that some bright spark is working on that, there are better ways to make contact in case of an emergency. From a mode perspective, at the bottom of the pile is Morse code. I say bottom, not because it's a poor way of communicating, but it doesn't require much in order to get working. You could essentially use a car battery and splatter your emergency communications around. One downside is that you'd need to learn Morse code and while you're in the middle of an emergency is probably not the best time. If you're on a sinking boat in the middle of the ocean, you're likely going to use a HF radio, or an emergency beacon, or even a satellite phone, but if you're on land, dry or not, and if you're not an amateur, your best bet is to find a 27 MHz AM Citizen's Band radio, so you can make enough noise to have people come and find you. The reality, more likely than not, is that emergency services are outside the danger zone waiting for authorities to permit entry. It should be clear by now that there are several levels of emergency communications before we get to amateur radio. That said, if you have an amateur radio, then you're likely going to use voice communications over SSB on HF or FM on VHF or UHF. Now you might ask about communications going the other way, from outside the emergency zone, where power and sunshine are plentiful, where you can use a computer without issues. Only thing is that if it's all peaches, why are you attempting to link your radio to HF when on the balance of probability there's a mobile phone sitting in your pocket? A couple of months ago there was a 12 hour network outage at one of the two main telephone networks affecting nearly 40% of the population of Australia. It was recently revealed that during that time almost 2,700 people could not call emergency services on either their mobile or land-line, let alone use the Internet. You could argue that this is an actual emergency, but is amateur radio really the vehicle for making contact? I mean, you're trying to call emergency services, your phone isn't working, so rather than use a telephone on another network, you go and find your nearest radio amateur and ask them to call for an ambulance, on their HF radio? Where does this leave us? In my opinion, the notion that your shack is going to be used for emergency response is fanciful. That's not to say that there isn't a place for radio amateurs. Far from it. If you really want to be of service, learn how to operate your radio well, make a plan to work through if you hear a distress call while you monitor emergency HF frequencies, visit the local emergency services to see if they offer training for radio amateurs and make yourself available in case of emergency and you're more likely to be of service than if you sat in your shack polishing your valves. If you're so inclined, planning for the next emergency, start asking questions. Find out what the plans are for your emergency AM broadcast network, learn how things might break and perhaps then you might consider amateur radio as a service to the community, just not in the way you might have thought. Next time I'll explore the reality of amateur radio as an emergency response. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I came across an amateur who expressed concern that someone was using a frequency set aside for repeater use with their hotspot. Band plan issues aside, and you are encouraged to send an email to [email protected] with the link to the official band plan that applies to your DX entity, in my experience it's not unusual for an amateur who is configuring their so-called hotspot to use such a frequency. While you might be familiar with the concept of a mobile phone hotspot that allows you to connect a computer through your phone to the Internet, in this case we're talking about an amateur radio hotspot. Similar in that it allows you to connect through the device to the Internet, but different in that this is essentially a device that connects radios to the Internet, and yes, if we're being pedantic then computers and mobile phones also have radio, well spotted. Anyway, an amateur radio hotspot is a radio with an Internet connection and in that it's much like a modern repeater. Often they use low transmit power, have limited range within a building or vehicle and because of that are hardly "unattended". That said, if you connect a more effective antenna and an amplifier, you could make such a device into a full blown repeater. In other words, the line between hotspot and repeater is likely in the eye of the beholder. Given that the regulator in many countries requires a license for operating a repeater, or a beacon, I wondered what the official definition of a repeater was, so I went looking. Note that this applies to Australia only, but you'll find the journey illuminating I'm sure. The current "Radiocommunications Licence Conditions (Apparatus Licence) Determination 2015" does not have either the word repeater or beacon. The new "Radiocommunications (Amateur Stations) Class Licence 2023" which comes into effect on the 19th of February 2024 uses both repeater and beacon several times but does not define what they are. It has an interpretation section with a note that lists both "amateur repeater station" and "amateur beacon station" and states that the regulator can define terms under section 64(1) of its own act. The "Australian Communications and Media Authority Act 2005" section 64(1) states that "The ACMA may make a written determination defining 1 or more expressions used in specified instruments, being instruments that are made by the ACMA under 1 or more specified laws of the Commonwealth." It should come as no surprise that neither repeater nor beacon appears in this document. I then thought to go sideways and search the "Register of Radiocommunications Licences" for a repeater license. It reveals a PDF for a license with all manner of detail, frequencies, power levels, location, antenna type, etc. for a license, but no definition of what a repeater is. I then looked at the 481 pages of the "Radiocommunications Act 1992". It uses both beacon and repeater. Unfortunately beacon is in relation to the operation of lighthouses, lightships, beacons or buoys. Repeater is in relation to two or more digital radio multiplex transmitters. I then searched through the "Federal Register of Legislation" for the phrase "amateur beacon station". It returns 27 results of which 9 are in force. I downloaded all 9, including any explanatory text if it was available. In all, 340 pages of legal documents. Finally we have progress. In the "Radiocommunications (Interpretation) Determination 2015" we find the following definitions: "amateur beacon station" means a station in the amateur service that is used principally for the purpose of identifying propagation conditions. "amateur repeater station" means a station established at a fixed location: (a) for the reception of radio signals from amateur stations; and (b) for the automatic retransmission of those signals by radio. So, if your hotspot is in a vehicle it's not a repeater, but if you have it sitting in your shack, it is. Similarly, apparently, my 10 dBm WSPR transmitter, which I use solely for the purpose of identifying propagation conditions, is a beacon. Apparently if you have your computer controlling your radio using WSPR, that's a beacon too. You can apparently apply for a license and pay the regulator for the privilege, the price of which went up by 510% according to their own documentation from $29 to $177, no idea if that's a once off or an annual charge. So, now we have a situation where, apparently, the rules state that I'm not permitted to use WSPR without a beacon license. In fact, the "Explanatory Statement to the amateur class licensing reform instruments" explicitly states that "Subsection 13(2) prohibits the operation of an amateur station for specified purposes, including for the purpose of obtaining a financial gain or reward. The subsection also prohibits the operation of an amateur beacon station or an amateur repeater station under the Amateur Stations Class Licence, and, subject to subsection (3), the transmis

Foundations of Amateur Radio From the 19th of February 2024, the ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the regulator, is modifying the rules for amateur radio in Australia by moving to an amateur class license where all amateurs will operate under the same license instead of under an individual one. You must be qualified to operate under the new class license and all currently licensed radio amateurs should now have been issued with a recognition certificate for their current qualification level. Keep this certificate safe, it authorises you to operate as an amateur and shows which callsigns you currently hold. I've just received a revision that now correctly identifies my callsign VK6FLAB as a four-letter callsign, rather than three-letters which caused concern over the longevity of my call. There's no annual charge to operate as an amateur, no charge to keep a callsign, and no charge to do an exam, however, if you operate a repeater or beacon, you'll continue to require a transmitter license. There are once-off charges for applications to consider and issue recognition certificates and callsigns but those are not new. The document that legally defines amateur radio in Australia, colloquially the LCD, is replaced by the Radiocommunications (Amateur Stations) Class Licence 2023. The regulator carefully states that: "To operate an amateur station under the amateur class licence, you must comply with the conditions within it", but doesn't clarify if those conditions have changed or not. External commentary claims they haven't, but it was completely re-written and it's difficult to compare the precise actual wording side-by-side. This has happened before, for example, when the regulator introduced the Limited license in 1954, the Novice license in 1975, abolished Morse in 2004, and introduced the Foundation, Standard and Advanced licenses in 2005. It was replaced again in 2015 and has been revised since, most recently on the 17th of November 2021. I suspect lawyers will find potentially unintended but material differences between documents, but to my knowledge, that investigation has not yet occurred. I think this is a perfect example of where the peak bodies claiming to represent amateur radio in Australia have a responsibility. There are many rules around the who, how and where to conduct a qualification exam. For example, the regulator has decided that online or residential exams are not permitted, leaving venues, printed exams and postal delivery as an ongoing cost and concern. There are plenty of questions left. An amateur at Advanced level can hold a club station callsign but it appears that at a Foundation or Standard level you can no longer hold a club station license like VK6BSG and VK7HSD. You still need to log usage of a remote club station. Describing the requirements the regulator uses both "revise their arrangements" and "current arrangements will be retained" in the same paragraph, apparently contradicting itself. The regulator will ask you every five years if you want to keep your callsign. This infers a system to contact you. What does that look like, how will it be maintained, are there requirements for keeping it current, does it need to have the location of your station, an email address, or just any means of contacting you, and is it public? The official register of radio communication licenses will no longer hold amateur licenses so it's unclear how you'll be able to contact another amateur, or how we'll be able to know who holds which callsigns at what level in which location and when a reminder is due. The details around the new callsign register are incomplete to say the least. What does breaking the rules look like? With individual amateur licenses your ability to operate is directly linked to you and if found in breach, your license can be cancelled. Under a class license, your ability to operate hinges on knowledge that cannot be taken away. The regulator publishes the relationship between some international amateur licenses and qualification levels in Australia and as an international visitor you can apparently operate in Australia for 365 days if your current license is recognised. After that, unless you hold a Harmonised Amateur Radio Examination Certificate or HAREC, you need to apply for a recognition certificate after either paying for recognised prior learning or passing an exam, even though you were already automatically recognised as having the appropriate qualifications when you entered the country. Does the list of recognised licenses get longer as more international amateurs pay for prior learning and if you leave the country and return, will the clock reset? There's more. For example, the date that you got your US Technician license determines your recognition. Before 23 September 2016 you're recognised at an Australian Advanced level, after that at a Foundation level. And finally, if I were an accredited unpaid volunteer assessor, authorised to admin

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I stumbled on a project called Maia SDR by Daniel EA4GPZ. Maia, spelled Mike Alpha India Alpha, is a star in the Pleiades cluster. The Maia SDR project homepage proclaims that it is "An open-source FPGA-based SDR project focusing on the ADALM Pluto". Now, I can completely understand if that collection of words is gibberish to you, but take it from me, it's not, let me explain. PlutoSDR or Pluto is the common name of a piece of hardware which is officially called the ADALM-PLUTO Evaluation Board. It's a sophisticated device made by Analog Devices that provides a radio platform with some very interesting properties. Specifically it's both a radio transmitter and receiver with the ability to use frequencies between 70 MHz and 6 GHz. It runs embedded software you can tinker with because it's all Open Source and it's all very well documented. Many people have used the Pluto as a remote transceiver by controlling the on-board radio with a USB cable. While that's neat, it's not what I have been wanting to do for a number of reasons. The Pluto has the ability to sample data at a rate of 61.44 mega samples per second or MSPS. That translates to a bandwidth of 56 MHz. A typical amateur radio has a bandwidth of 2.5 kHz. This bandwidth comes at a price. For starters, USB on the Pluto isn't fast enough to handle 56 MHz of data, so if you're using it as a remote radio over USB, you need to lower your expectations. However, the hardware itself can process data at that rate, as long as it stays inside the radio. So, if you had a way to process data inside the radio and a way to show what you did with the data across USB, you could use all of the 56 MHz at once. The Maia SDR project does exactly that. It processes the data and presents it to the world as a waterfall image, like the one you might have seen in WSJT-X, fldigi or SDR++. If you've seen the voice version of my podcast on YouTube, you'll also have seen a waterfall. It's an image that scrolls vertically, showing frequencies left to right, and signal strength by colour, traditionally, a rainbow that uses blue for low power and red for high power. Every time period the image scrolls adding another row representing the radio spectrum at that time. It's a very useful way to show massive amounts of radio spectrum data in close to real-time. The waterfall that WSJT-X produces is about 2.5 kHz wide. The waterfall that Maia SDR produces is 56 MHz wide. To give you some context, the entire HF spectrum, between 2200m and 6m easily fits within 56 MHz. Now, there's a wrinkle. As I said, the Pluto frequency range starts at 70 MHz, so that means we can't use it to listen to HF. Well, not without the help of another gadget, called a transverter. Essentially it moves a set of frequencies from one range to another. The gadget I have, a SpyVerter 2 HF Upconverter, translates anything between 1 kHz and 60 MHz and moves it to between 120 MHz and 180 MHz. If you combine the Pluto with Maia SDR and a SpyVerter, you can plug your antenna into the SpyVerter, connect that to the Pluto, connect to the Maia SDR website that's running on your Pluto, tune it to 120 MHz, and see 56 MHz of HF bandwidth scrolling past as fast or slow as you want. You'll find the 10m band at 148 MHz, the 15m band at 141 MHz and the 20m band at 134 MHz. Now if that's not cool enough for you, Maia SDR is as I said Open Source. This means that the project publishes all of the code that makes this happen. The Pluto comes with a number of devices on-board that process information. At the antenna end is an AD9363, essentially a chip that converts RF into digital and back. The digital information is processed by a device called an FPGA, a Field Programmable Gate Array. Field Programmable means that mortals like you and I can change the software that it runs. Essentially an FPGA is a programmable circuit board used for information processing. To scratch the surface of what that means, you could for example program an FPGA to behave like a microprocessor, or you could use it to do accelerated matrix multiplications used for neural networks like you can with a graphics chip, or in this case, a device that does all of the digital signal processing. Finally the Pluto has a dual core ARM processor. You'll find those inside most Android phones and Raspberry Pi's to name a few. It's used to extract data from the FPGA and present it on a web page. Oh, and there's a progressive web app for your phone, so you can see this waterfall on your mobile phone if you want. So, thank you to Daniel EA4GPZ for sharing your project, it's very much appreciated! There are some caveats. The Pluto is easily overwhelmed by strong signals, so you probably need filters. I'm using a wide 2m band pass filter between the SpyVerter and the Pluto, just so that my local WiFi network doesn't overwhelm the whole thing. You're receiving between 0 and 56 MHz, so you'll need an appropriate antenna. The frequency respon

Foundations of Amateur Radio The attraction to amateur radio for me lies in the idea that it provides a framework for experimentation and learning. There's never an end to either. Each time you go on-air is an opportunity to do both and every chance I get, I cannot help being sucked into another adventure. My weekly scribbles are an attempt to both document what I've been up to and to encourage others to take a step on the path that I'm discovering, moment by moment, week by week. One of the more, lets call it, comment inducing, activities I like to explore is low power operation. This is not to the liking of many operators who are happy to run their shack at full legal power. For me, full legal power is 40 dBm, or 10 Watts. That's not to say that I've never experienced the thrill of running a pile-up on a contest station, I have. What's not to like? You speak with people from communities far-and-wide, they're clamouring to talk to you and making contact is pretty easy, almost effortless. The lure towards more power, bigger antennas, more bands and more radio is always there, but it's not all there is to this hobby. My year-long efforts of running a 10 dBm, or 10 mW, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, or WSPR, beacon, is evidence that you can make it 13,945 km from me in VK6 to PA where it was heard by Jaap, PA0O in Zuidwolder, just outside Groningen in the North East of 't kikkerland. In fact, across 2023, my 10 dBm beacon was reported 4,849 times by 58 stations, many inside Australia, but there were reports from Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, Antarctica, Sweden, and as I said, the Netherlands. One of my friends, Charles NK8O, is a mostly mobile operator who loves to set up for both Parks On The Air, also known as POTA, as well as World Wide Flora and Fauna, WWFF. His chosen mode is CW, but you'll find him using digital modes like FT8 and even as a rare DX event you might strike it lucky and hear his voice. Most of his activity uses batteries, so you'll rarely make contact with him when he's using more than 47 dBm or 50 Watts. A couple of weeks ago during the weekly F-troop net he announced that for the duration of 2024, Charles intends to operate using low power, or QRP. Operating QRP isn't for everyone, but I'd hazard a guess that if tried, there's plenty to learn and experience by dialling the power down to play in a low power environment. Think of it like this. If you're into cars, it's the thrill of driving fast. It's not the only way to drive and enjoy yourself. Driving sedately, touring the back roads, will get you to your destination just as well and along the way you'll have the opportunity to look out the window, to even have the window down and to enjoy the environment, rather than spending every second being on a hair trigger. If fishing is more your thing, high power radio is like dynamite fishing. You'll easily catch all the fish in the pond, but once you have, there's nothing left to do. Fly fishing on the other hand gets you a different but perhaps just as satisfying experience. So, if you've never done this QRP thing, what can you expect when you turn the power down? First of all, reception works just the same. So, everyone you heard before will continue to be heard. Transmission is going to be a little different. If you've ever changed over radios you might already have experienced the jolt between what you can hear and what you can work which can differ significantly between two radios. If you're used to high power operation, you'll essentially work most stations you can hear, but when you're using low power, there's going to be stations that you have little or no chance to work. Most of those are obvious so-called alligators, all mouth, no ears. That said, plenty of loud stations have years of honing their skill and station and your QRP call can just as easily be heard as the next station. You'll likely sharpen your calling skills. There's no point in calling when other stations are blotting out your call, so you become adept at dancing around other signals. You'll spend more time considering propagation and the best band to make your signal count. Another side effect you'll likely notice is less wear and tear on your gear. There's also little chance of having RF inside your shack upsetting your computer, or getting complaints from the neighbours who happen to have a crappy TV that stops working as soon as you key up. If you make mistakes, your station is more forgiving and less likely to be damaged when an unexpected fault occurs. Speaking of faults. The other day a coax switch in my shack caused my radio to stop transmitting. Luckily with the power setting at its lowest, there was no permanent damage. After testing with a multimeter I discovered that it shorted the centre pin to shield in one position. When I opened up the switch, I discovered that the blade that gets moved between ports had become slightly twisted, which in turn caused it to ground against the body. A slight t

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to spend a little longer with you than usual, but then, I think this is important and it's good to end the year on a bang. Have you ever attempted to make contact with a specific DXCC entity and spent some time exploring the band plan to discover what the best frequency might be to achieve that? If you got right into it, you might have gone so far as to attempt to locate the band plan that applies to your particular target. If you have, what I'm about to discuss will not come as a surprise. If not, strap yourself in. When you get your license you're hopefully presented with a current band plan that is relevant to your license conditions. It shows what frequencies are available to you, which modes you can use where, and what power levels and bandwidth are permitted. It should also show you if you're the primary user or not on a particular band. If you're not sure what that means, some frequency ranges are allocated to multiple users and amateur radio as one such user is expected to share. If you're a primary user you have priority, but if you're not, you need to give way to other traffic. It should come as no surprise that this is heavily regulated but as a surprise to some, it changes regularly. Across the world, frequency allocation is coordinated by the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU, and specifically for amateur radio, by the International Amateur Radio Union, the IARU. It coordinates frequencies with each peak amateur radio body. The ITU divides the world into three regions, Region 1, 2 and 3, each with its own band plan. Within each region, a country has the ability to allocate frequencies as it sees fit - presumably as long as it complies with the ITU requirements. As a result, there's not one single picture of how frequencies are allocated. And this is where the fun starts. In Australia there's an official legislated band plan, cunningly titled F2021L00617. It contains the frequencies for all the radio spectrum users as well as a column for each ITU region. The document is 200 pages long, and comes with an astounding array of footnotes and exclusions. It's dated 21 May 2021. There's a simplified version published by the Wireless Institute of Australia, which comes as a 32 page PDF. It was last updated in September 2020. When I say "simplified", I'm of course kidding. It doesn't include the 60m band which according to the regulator is actually an amateur band today. The 13cm band according to the WIA shows a gap between 2302 and 2400, where the regulator shows it as a continuous allocation between 2300 and 2450 MHz. The point being, who's right? What can you actually use? Oh, the WIA does have a different page that shows that 6m "has had some additions", but they haven't bothered to update their actual band plan. To make life easier, the regulator includes helpful footnotes like "AUS87". This is particularly useful if you want to search their PDF to determine what this actually says, since it only appears 156 times and it's not a link within the document. In case you're curious, it's related to three radio astronomy facilities operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, better known as the CSIRO, two by the University of Tasmania and one by the Canberra Deep Space Network. Interestingly the Australian Square Kilometer Array and the Murchison Widefield Array don't feature in those particular exclusions, they're covered by footnote AUS103. If that wasn't enough. The regulator has no time for specific amateur use. You can find the word Amateur 204 times but there's no differentiation between the different classes of license which means that you need to go back to the WIA document to figure out which license class is allowed where, which of course means that you end up in no-mans land if you want to discover who is permitted to transmit on 2350 MHz. If we look further afield, in the USA the ARRL publishes half a dozen different versions, each with different colours, since black and white, grey scale, colour and web-colour are all important attributes to differentiate an official document. Of course, those versions are now all six years out of date, having been revised on the 22nd of September 2017. The most recent version, in a completely different format, only in one colour, has all the relevant information. It shows a revised date of 10 February 2023, that or, 2 October 2023 because of course nobody outside the US is ever going to want to refer to that document - seeing as there's only amateurs in the USA, well at least according to the ARRL. Interestingly the US Department of Commerce, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Office of Spectrum Management publishes a colourful chart showing the radio spectrum between 3 kHz and 300 GHz. You can't use it as a technical document, but it's pretty on a wall to amaze your non-amateur friends. The FCC has a band plan page, but I couldn't disc

Foundations of Amateur Radio Walking into your shack is often a joyous experience. You take a moment to smile at your setup and, at least mentally, rub your hands in glee anticipating some fun. Well, that is how it is for me, but recently it's been less of that and more of an audible groan at the accumulated cruft that makes it nigh on impossible to sit down, let alone achieve anything fun. It's not as bad as it could be. I'm forced to keep my station at least operational to host my weekly net, but if that wasn't there, it would have been overtaken by anything and everything finding a flat surface to put stuff on. It got to the point where I had to move some radio equipment off my desk, just so I could pile more stuff onto it. So, on Tuesday I finally had enough. It was a pretty normal day, waiting for others to get stuff done, deadlines be damned, but I took one look at the shack and snapped. This has happened before and I suspect that it will continue to happen throughout my life, but that day I'd crossed the line. Before I share what I achieved, I should mention a couple of other things. If you've been here for a while you'll know that I am an unashamed computer geek. Software Defined Radio, or SDR, appears to have been invented just for me, embedded computers, digital modes, networking, data analytics, Linux, Docker, you name it, I'm there. Mind you, this isn't new. It's been true for nearly forty years now, ever since I set foot into my high-school computer lab where I found myself looking at a bank of Apple 2 computers. Then I bought the first computer in my class, a Commodore VIC 20. Life was never quite the same. This to tell you just how much computing features in my day-to-day. I have a long term plan to use embedded computers like for example a Raspberry Pi to essentially turn my analogue Yaesu FT-857d into a networked SDR. The idea being that I use my main computer to do the processing and the Pi to control the radio and feed the audio in and out across the network. I want to make it so that you can use any traditional SDR tool with such a radio, and if I get it right, any other radio. For more context, I'm getting more and more deaf. I swear my SO is speaking softer each day and hearing tests tell me that audio above 2 kHz is pretty much gone. I have been playing with audio signal processing with a view to tailoring the audio coming from my radio into something more audible to me. On Tuesday I had an ah-ha moment. I could keep waiting until I got all that done and then set-up my shack just so, or I could embrace the analogue nature of my gear and use the mixing desk I have to feed the audio through its on-board audio processing and at least improve my audio experience today, rather than some nebulous future time. Finally, I purchased a peg board some time ago for the specific purpose of strapping my coax switches to so I would not have to contend with coax all over my desk whilst trying to remember which switch did what when I finally had a moment to play. All this came together in a new version of my shack, albeit an alpha pre-release, to be treated with extreme caution, if you break it, you get to keep both parts and it will kill a kitten without notice. To get started, I removed all non-radio stuff from my desk. Including half a dozen computers, a dozen patch leads and adaptors left over from the harmonics testing project, there were monitor cables, USB cables, a variety of power supplies and a stray binder with empty pages. I found all the radio gear that I really wanted to have on my desk, placed it where I could actually use it and figured out how to connect the audio output from each radio to the mixing desk which also found a home. Then I jumped on the RF side of things. Getting started was the hardest part. I decided that it would make sense to split the peg board in two, one half for HF, the other for VHF and UHF. I have two coax switches that I use as the entry point onto the board. They're each fed with the antenna coax and each have one port connected to the other. The idea being that during a thunderstorm I can connect the two antennas to each other and isolate the rest of the shack. It won't protect against an actual direct hit, but all charge being built up should dissipate between the two antennas. Feel free to give me suggestions on how better to do this in a shack located on the second floor of a house in Australia. Note that the rules for grounding across the world are drastically different, so don't assume that your laws apply in Australia. The HF coax side has a strapped down Bias-T which powers the SG237 antenna coupler that's outside. Then there's a switch so I can connect HF to a radio or to a beacon, which I also strapped to the peg board. On the VHF side there's just a second coax switch to select between two radios, but only one is currently connected. I plan to strap my PlutoSDR to the other port. I powered everything up and couldn't trigger the local repeater. I go

Foundations of Amateur Radio Cars have been here for well over a century and so has radio. Cars pretty much start when Carl Benz first applied for a patent for his "vehicle powered by a gas engine" on the 29th of January 1886 which is regarded as the birth certificate for automobiles. Radio starts as a thing when Heinrich Hertz proves that radio waves exist in 1888. Since then things have changed, a lot. Today, both these technologies, cars and radio, are everywhere. It's estimated that there are 1.47 billion vehicles on the planet today, in contrast, there are only 44 thousand broadcasters across the globe, serving about 4 billion people, or half the population. So, cars win, right? Not so fast. The Wi-Fi Alliance estimates that there's 3.8 billion Wi-Fi devices being shipped this year alone and there's about 19.5 billion in use. Many of those are mobile phones, so they're not only using Wi-Fi, but GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G or 5G radios. In many cases they'll have Bluetooth on board and will be receiving GPS information from the currently five constellations in orbit around Earth. Some will even have an FM receiver on board, just to cram another radio inside the same box. To give you a better sense of scale, 2022 saw 4.9 billion Bluetooth devices shipped. In 2010 it was estimated that there were a billion GPS users, today there are more than six billion users being served by GPS systems for positioning, navigation and precision timing. I haven't even talked about other uses of radio, like radar, astronomy, remote sensing, remote control, keyless entry and countless other related and interconnected technologies. So, while there's a car for every five or so people, there's at least two Wi-Fi radios per person and probably more like a dozen radios per person when you start counting those embedded in our daily lives. So, why is it that we have an estimated car enthusiast population of 10% and an estimated radio amateur population of 0.04%? It's not to do with the popularity of the topic. Google trends shows that both cars and radio are consistently trending downwards at about 2% each year since 2016. Radio is consistently twice as popular as cars. When you rank the global popularity of cars vs radio, out of 47 countries, 40 countries care more about radio than cars. South Africa and India care about cars 74% to 26% radio, even New Zealand, 56% vs 44%, cars to radio. At the other end of the scale, Peru, 2% cars, 98% radio. Germany, home for both Heinrich Hertz and Carl Benz, 92% radio, 8% cars. Popular search engines aside, there are other places to look for content. Take platforms like Prime Video, Netflix, Apple TV+ and YouTube. When you search for radio or cars on those platforms it's interesting to see what comes back and explore how relevant it is. I'll encourage you to do the experiment, but as a surprise to nobody, the results are universally woeful but illustrative. Searching for cars returns mostly relevant content, but a search for radio brings back results that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic. Seriously, on Netflix, two documentaries about Pele and Beckham, both famous footballers, neither known for their interaction with radio, rank higher than a documentary on Prime about radio astronomy, cunningly titled, wait for it: "Radio Astronomy". Even the initially promising Netflix result "Amateur" in response to the term "radio" is about a 14 year old basketball player navigating the dark side of sports. While we're at it, just for giggles, I checked the closed captioning for the movie and the word "radio" doesn't appear in the movie, at all. Speaking of representation, Netflix recently published their entire list of content for the first half of the year. The word radio appears exactly once, "John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City" and that doesn't even turn up as a search result when you go looking for "radio". The word "cars" appears 18 times in the Netflix library. So, why is it that topics like "radio", which is demonstrably twice as popular as "cars", and perhaps a dozen times more, let's call it, numerous, in society, has such a poor showing and what can we as connoisseurs on the topic of "radio" do about this? Cars are represented in a plethora of movies, series and shows featuring reviews, mods, restorations and entertainment. There's topic specific channels and social media. There's shops, events, races and so much car merchandise. Is that what's missing in radio, or more specifically, amateur radio, marketing, or is it something else? I'm keen to hear your thoughts. My email address is [email protected], get in touch. For my efforts, I'm publishing my podcast on YouTube and manually working my way through my back catalogue of over six hundred episodes, complete with a, YouTube imposed, limited five thousand character summary of the transcript, just to increase the chances of radio being a relevant search result when someone who's interested in our community comes looking. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a perception in the community that the hobby of amateur radio is an expensive way to have fun. While it's entirely possible to spend thousands of dollars on equipment, in much the same way that it's possible if your preferred hobby is golf, getting started does not have to require that you start planting money trees. Lots of fun can be had using cheap amateur radio transceivers that are used all around the world. If you do start with such a radio, the chances are good that you'll come across amateurs who make disparaging remarks about the lack of compliance of such radios. When I say compliance, I'm talking about specific measurements specified by the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU. When you transmit on a specific frequency, there are rules about how much that signal is allowed to be unintended, or to use the official term, spurious emissions. Specifically, the signal you transmit has to meet the requirements for the mode you're using and it must also stay within limits on other frequencies. For example, if you have a 2m handheld radio that uses FM, the transmitter must stay within the required width for FM and it's not allowed to transmit above a certain level on any of the harmonic frequencies. When someone claims that all cheap radios are non-compliant, they're saying that such radios are either not transmitting a valid FM signal, or that the levels of the signal exceed the limits specified by the ITU. Given that such radios are in wide use, Randall VK6WR, Glynn VK6PAW and I got together to see if we could come up with something a little more scientific in the way of comment about such radios. With access to Randall's HP 8920A RF Communications Test Set we came up with a repeatable way to test a radio and then went to the local HAMfest where we subjected a pile of radios to our tests. In total we did 75 tests. Overall we tested 39 distinct models across 12 brands. So, what did we learn? All so-called "name brand" radios were fully compliant. All radios that were sold in Australia by Australian distributors were compliant. Baofeng radios made up the largest sample of inexpensive radios. Seven out of the 26 tested were compliant, eight were non-compliant and the rest, 11 were borderline. More on that shortly. We also tested many radios that had been purchased online. We didn't test enough of each model to make specific comments, but it's worth pointing out that half of all the online radios were compliant. Now, I mentioned borderline compliance. What we learnt was that there were some radios that fell within 6 dB of being compliant. The HP test set hasn't been calibrated for a while and we felt that allowing for a 3 dB random measurement error and a 3 dB systematic error would prevent us from marking a radio non-compliant when in fact it was. We categorised 16 radios as borderline. Our report is of course public. You can find it on my GitHub page as both a PDF and a markdown document. Whilst we were writing our report, we discovered uncorroborated suggestions that some radios might fail an emissions test after suffering unspecified damage in the output filtering stages. We looked at the schematic of one radio that suggests that a simple capacitor failure might cause a filter to fail without preventing the transmitter from operating. This might mean that a non-compliant transmitter might be made compliant again by replacing the faulty capacitor. We haven't tried and we don't know if a failed capacitor actually makes a radio non-compliant or not, or even if such a failure could occur and if-so, how. In other words, this might be a red-herring, we just don't know. One other comment worth pointing out is that it was suggested that some radios might use a specifically designed antenna to suppress the second harmonic. Given that some radios failed only on the second harmonic spurious emission requirement, but not the third, this seems plausible. All radios we tested had removable antennas and were tested without an antenna, since compliance relates to the transmitter, not the antenna. It does raise a more interesting question. What happens if you fit a different antenna to the radio? One adage that stands is that "you get what you pay for", but given the amount of cheap testing equipment available, it's relatively easy to test every handset in your shack. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur radio is an activity enjoyed by many people around the world. How many exactly is cause for debate. The most recent official figure we have is from the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union. In 2020 it counted over 3 million people, but an article written a year later puts that figure at 1.75 million. In Australia there's a common narrative that the total amateur population is in undeniable decline, some think that it's on a stark decline. Interested in hard data, for years I've been collecting information around the amateur population in Australia and I can report that across the nine years that I have data for the total variation is within two percent and it's not a straight line down either. There was a dip in 2020, potentially associated with training and callsign allocation being moved from the Wireless Institute of Australia to the Australian Maritime College, something which is going to change again shortly when amateur licensing in Australia will revert to the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority. If you're familiar with amateur licensing in Australia, that's not the only change, but that's not what I'm looking at today, mainly because the available information associated with the upcoming changes are limited at best, seemingly buried in invective at worst. Back to the topic at hand. One of the often heard responses in relation to the decline of our hobby is recruitment of new amateurs. It's a topic that I've spent plenty of time over the past decade contemplating. How do you share the joy of amateur radio with a general public who is apathetic to the preconceived ideas associated with this hobby, you know, old white men sitting in the dark with Morse keys. For the record, I prefer a shack with light and I still don't know how to use a Morse key, other than to make my radio beep. The rest is genetic. In the quest for spreading the word there's a repeated emphasis on the young, often coalescing around the annual Jamboree on the Air, or JOTA, as organised between Scouting groups and radio amateurs. I have previously said that JOTA was how I first came across amateur radio, but at the time, aged 15 or so, I had no money for such endeavours and the experience didn't resonate with me until decades later. So, you could argue that this is what changed me into an amateur, but the reality is that I had to come across the hobby a few more times before I got interested enough to investigate, something which I have spoken about before, in short, Meg, then VK6LUX introduced me to the concept of controlling a 2.4 GHz drone using higher power than was permitted with standard Wi-Fi equipment. I was hooked and got my license less than a month later. I then discovered that I needed more permissions and set about studying, only to get distracted with everything I could already do. I'm still being distracted today. So, JOTA is a potential touch point, but I see little evidence that the initial spark goes anywhere in a hurry. I'm not dismissing it as a way to have amateur radio gain relevance outside our own community, but perhaps there are other ways to make this happen. In the early days of my journey I attended country fairs with my club and we'd set-up a radio or six to show and tell. There was talk of doing this in a shopping centre, at the local hardware store and even brief discussions about doing this at the local electronics store. As enjoyable as this was, none of it ever appeared to generate any permanent interest and I don't recall seeing new amateurs suddenly appear at the club after any outings. Last week Glynn VK6PAW and I, set-up at the local airport, YPPH, that's Perth International Airport if you're not familiar with the designation allocated by the United Nations arm, ICAO or the International Civil Aviation Organization. Perth has a public viewing area. It's situated at the south western end of runway 03/21. It's an elevated position with minimal shade, some seating and you're 320 m from the runway centreline. It's a place where plane spotters congregate and now a few radio amateurs. One thing we have in common is an interest in radio. We were told that the plane spotters often listen to one or two frequencies and if they're into video, they might record one radio channel to include on their YouTube videos. When Glynn and I visited we had a few radios with us. When I say few, in amateur terms we only had about five or so, but I suppose that comes with the territory. As it happens, admittedly not by accident, our radios could receive airband frequencies, so we could tune to Perth Tower, Perth Arrival, Perth Ground, Perth Departure and Melbourne Central, all at the same time. Next time we'll likely bring some HF gear so we can also listen to HF aviation frequencies as well. While I was hosting F-troop, the weekly net for new and returning amateurs, midnight UTC, every Saturday morning for an hour, Glynn was busy talking and sharing with

Foundations of Amateur Radio For years I've been hosting a weekly net called F-troop. It's a one hour opportunity for new and returning amateurs to get together and share their questions, and sometimes answers, about anything and everything amateur radio, with side trips into astronomy, electronics, circuit boards, testing gear and whatever else takes our fancy on the day. The net runs for an hour every Saturday morning starting at midnight UTC, which for some is a time when they're fast asleep, though truth be told, several of our regulars are night owls. In VK6 where I am, midnight UTC is a more reasonable 8am, unless we have another referendum when we can decide if we want daylight saving, or not. So far we've had four of those, yes, really, in 1975, 1984, 1992, and 2009, and each time daylight saving or summer time was rejected. All I'm saying is that the chances are good that midnight UTC is going to be 8am in VK6 for a while yet. Anyway, that time of the morning affords me the luxury of getting out of bed at a sensible hour, having a shower, making a cup of coffee with my Significant Other, or SO, and ambling into my shack to get ready. It's a comfortable process, something I've done for over 12 years with very little in the way of variation with the exception of the 500th and 600th episodes which I hosted outdoors at a local radio club, complete with BBQ and many visitors. That and the Friday Night Technical Net with Reg VK6BQQ, but that's a story for another day. Last week a good friend, Glynn VK6PAW, asked me if I wanted to go out and have some fun, and having been pretty much cooped up for several years now, of course I said "yes". We're going to the viewing platform at the Perth International Airport, that's airport code YPPH, where I'll host the net in whatever way we figure out at the time. It's not an event, we haven't told anyone about it, and telling you now won't ruin the surprise for anyone, since this weekly rambling hits the airwaves after F-troop concludes. I knew there was a reason. Anyway, at this point you have every right to ask me, "Onno, why should I care?" Indulge me and let me see if I can explain. Most, if not all, of my amateur radio activities are planned. From time-to-time I might get in my car and drive to a nearby park and get on HF, but truth be told, I haven't done that for several years. I have regularly told you about contests I've done, often whilst operating portable, often with friends, but sometimes alone. I have activated all manner of things, climbed summits, played in parks, gone to lighthouses and other such places. Every, single, time, those activities were planned, often to within an inch of their life. What should I bring? Where am I going to set-up? What gear do I need? What spares are required? What logging tool is needed? Will I need food and water? You know, a typical 7p activity, Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This time the plan consists of: "Do you want to go to the airport?" and "Sure!" Mind you, that's in the context of Glynn normally having several radios in his car and me not having a clue what to expect. The other day I actually had my first ever look at the location in Google Street View, only to discover that there's a shelter there, so hopefully we won't fry in the forecast 38 degrees Celsius, that's 100 degrees in Ray Bradbury's temperature scale, if you're wondering. Now, on the whole, this is a pretty low risk activity. Nobody is going to die if I don't manage to get the net going, though I do have Echolink on my phone, which reminds me, I should probably check if that still works. I'll put a pencil and a notepad in my pocket for logging and I'll bring a bottle or six of water and probably some coffee. Sorry, I can't help myself. In other words, it's entirely possible to get on air and make noise without having to go to the Nth degree of planning and still have fun. As it happens, fun is something that's been in short supply of late, so, that's also a welcome change. As an aside, in a completely unrelated and random observation, I recently installed a new font on my computer, called Hack. It's mono-spaced, sans-serif, intended for source code, and licensed under the MIT License. I'm using it right now and I'm in love. So secretly, between you and me, that's what goes for fun around here. Oh, in case you're wondering, no, I did not get paid to say that, the authors have no idea I exist, unless they're unexpectedly radio amateurs, I'm just a happy user. Also, if you're wondering about Echolink, no need to fret. I just tested and it just works straight out of the box. Gotta love that. Now, here's a question for you. When was the last time you spontaneously got on air to make noise? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I started a new project. If you know me at all, this is not unusual. Having worked in the IT industry for nearly 40 years it's also not unusual that projects have a way of surprising you and this project was no different. Recently I've been talking about antennas, a topic close to the heart of many amateurs and one that garners a lot of opinion and in my experience, much less in the way of facts, so being a firm believer of facts, I set out to add some of those to the discussion. After having described that the environment is not often discussed in the context of antenna behaviour, coupled with the personal experience that it has by far the biggest influence, I set out to discover if I could use my computing skills to simulate this problem to build a picture that would speak a thousand words. Prompted by a friend who shared with me a link to an opinion that stated that dipole antennas didn't have 2.15 dBi gain, but in fact, apparently, had 8.5 dBi gain, I was energised to find out where this number came from. I figured I'd spin up some antenna modelling software, use a standard model of a dipole, then simulate it at various heights above the ground and see what I could learn. Any good journey starts with a single step, so I started with looking for a generic model of a dipole antenna. I've played in this space before, so I was familiar with the fact that most, but not all, antenna modelling tools use a piece of software called NEC2 to do the actual calculations. Its models are described using text files ending in the .NEC extension. This software goes back to punch card days, so the format for the NEC2 files is essentially a stack of punch cards, so much so that every line in the text file is called a card and any software that uses the underlying NEC2 tool describes it in that way. I won't bore you with the syntax, it's, let's put it this way. If you've been around computers for as long as I have, you're familiar with a tool called "sendmail", which is known to be user-friendly, just very particular with whom it makes friends. The NEC2 card format is much the same. It's not that surprising, and for added nostalgia, NEC2 was written in FORTRAN, originally in 1981 at the Lawrence Livermore Labs by Jerry Burke and Andrew Poggio. It was later released to the public. There's translations to C and C++, but they use the same notion of cards, so no magic progress there. I started learning the syntax, and eventually came across a text-book with an example of cards that describe a dipole. Mind you, there were plenty of disclaimers around how poorly the ground was simulated and wouldn't you know it, the file format uses meters as the dimension, rather than wavelengths, so as far as I can tell, you can't simulate a quarter wave antenna, you have to simulate one of a specific length, so much for using a standard model of a dipole. I found a tool that uses Python to issue NEC2 commands and as a surprise to nobody, it too uses cards. I used it to discover that for a particular type of ground, at some unknown height, the optimum length for a 10m WSPR dipole antenna is 5,225.87 millimetres long, apparently. You know it's true, it says so right there on the screen. I'm skipping over having to compile the software that was supposed to be a ready made Python library, but I digress. There was a tool, written in TCL, that visualised NEC2 output, last updated 18 or so years ago and I unsuccessfully tried to make it work. Then there were those who suggested to fire up some random Windows tool on my Linux box, but as far as I can tell, I'd have to do the height adjustments manually, not ideal if you want to visualise from say, ground to geostationary orbit, one millimetre at a time and output an image at every step. I searched the net for others who would surely have trodden this path long before I came along, only to discover that my search-fu is clearly broken, or any website with promising information has long ago been booted off the Internet, leaving "For Sale" signs on the domain name. I came across one file which simulated a dipole in free space. It had, to use the NEC2 terms, 11 cards. When I run that through "nec2c", it generates a 12 megabyte file with over 104-thousand lines of output. Only takes 650 milliseconds to generate. If only I could visualise it. I also came across a whole range of physics programs, which is not that surprising, since essentially antenna design is physics, but those tools require that I start learning a whole new way of building antennas, apparently from electrons, preferably whilst getting a degree in physics with a specialisation in computational electromagnetics. Then there was the Wolfram Alpha notebook model for a simple dipole, only 3,200 lines of code, so, you know, trivial to use. So, here's the thing. Has nobody in living memory simulated a dipole at more than three heights and documented the process? Am I really the first human on the planet

Foundations of Amateur Radio Let's compare the same antenna in different locations... Over the years I've spent many hours building and testing antennas. I've talked about this and discussed how there is essentially an infinite variety of antennas that can exist. To give you a sense of this, picture a basic dipole antenna, two bits of wire, same length, connected to a feed-point. We're doing this experiment in space, so we're not concerned with trees or rope, or the ground for that matter, more on those shortly. We can make this dipole straight, or we can make it into a V-shape, or bend over the edges, or make each side into a half-circle and join them, or make them into a spiral, or kink the wires, or bend them over, or any number of variations. Every time you change something, the antenna radiation pattern changes and the antenna behaves differently. While at its heart the antenna might still be considered a dipole, essentially a change in radiation pattern effectively means a different antenna. In those changes or wire orientation alone we have already defined an infinite number of antennas, but that only scratches the surface. We can build an infinite variety of physical antennas. Consider the design of vertical antennas, loop antennas, log periodic antennas, yagi antennas, slot antennas, and beverage antennas to name a few. Once you start investigating antennas you'll discover just how many options there are and once you've acquired the antenna of your dreams, the work is only just beginning. To explain why this is the case, consider the process of finding an antenna to buy or build. You'll find breathless reports of how amazing an antenna is and how it allowed the operator to hear a mosquito land on the back of a container ship in the middle of a tropical cyclone whilst the sunspot activity was at an all time low. Right next to those reports you'll find another amateur describing how their dummy load performed better and cost less. If not those specific examples, you'll have no doubt found both positive and negative reviews for the very same antenna, often side-by-side and if you don't, you're not looking hard enough. Leaving aside the notion that someone is trying to discredit a commercial competitor or that the antennas are inadvertently physically different, because someone put it together incorrectly, there's plenty of opportunity for other reasons for this wide range of opinion. Let's take the popular G5RV antenna, invented in 1946 by Louis G5RV, who became a silent key on June 28, 2000. The antenna is a multi-band HF antenna and there are plenty of people offering plans and kits for this antenna. Ignoring the differences in plans, let's imagine that two amateurs purchased the exact same G5RV from the same batch from the same supplier. Both erect their antennas at their home shack, or QTH and get on air to make noise. At a local BBQ they get together and compare notes only to discover that the two antennas are behaving completely differently. How is this possible? What other factors might cause this experience? You're not going to like my answer, but "it depends". The height at which the antenna is erected, how tight you pull it between two trees, how you feed it, the type of coax you use, how much power your transmitter uses, how close it is to another object like a fence or a house, what type of ground is below the antenna, what the local noise floor is like, which direction it's oriented, which day you use it and finally, what colour clothes you're wearing at the time. That last one isn't strictly true, but it serves to highlight that some differences exist that are so innocuous as to be laughable, for example, have you considered the type of tree and how much foliage there is, when the lawn below the antenna was last watered, etc. My point is that some differences aren't obvious, but they can, and do, make an antenna behave differently. In other words, the environment around two identical antennas is hardly ever the same and thus the antenna system as a whole, since the environment and the antenna together combine into a system, are never the same. This means that when you go about finding an antenna that's suitable for you, the reviews you read are only part of the story. If the antenna needs ground radials that are physically not possible at your site, then that antenna is unlikely to be suitable for your situation, regardless of the glowing reviews. As I said, in my time I've built and bought plenty of antennas. I've also tried several by way of my local amateur radio club. I've operated a mobile station from my car, set-up a portable station in numerous locations using the exact same antenna, and learnt that while the environment is almost never discussed, it has by far the biggest influence on the performance of your antenna. My recommendation is to pick an antenna, any antenna, cheap is good, and start. Play with it, change how you erect it, set it up in different locations and I'd high

Foundations of Amateur Radio All antennas have a radiation pattern that charts on a sphere where it radiates more and where it radiates less than the theoretical isotropic radiator. This comparison is expressed as dBi antenna gain. There is a fundamental concept in antenna design called "reciprocity". Essentially it means that transmit and receive behaviour of an antenna is identical. In other words, the radiation pattern of an antenna applies for both transmitting and receiving of signals. Unfortunately, this does not mean that if two stations are communicating and one can hear the other, the reverse is also true. Let me explain why. Let's set the scene. Imagine two stations, me, VK6FLAB at Lake Monger, in Perth, Western Australia and Charles NK8O in the Lake of the Ozarks state park within the Ozark Mountains in central Missouri. We're both on the 10m HF band and in this story I've finally managed to learn Morse code and I'm "talking" to Charles, mind you, Charles apparently does have a microphone, so perhaps this might actually happen one day. To simplify things, we both have the same antenna, the same radio, the same power level, we both love low power or QRP operation, and while we're keeping it simple, we have the same ground conductivity and we're both experiencing the same very low noise levels. While we're constructing this fantasy, the communication paths for both our stations are identical. Note that I said paths, more on that shortly. In that situation, both Charles and I have the same experience. We can hear each other at the same level, our S-meter has the same reading, and apart from my current inability to actually use Morse code, our readability is identical. You might think this is "reciprocity", but it's not as simple as that. I'm parked near a lake in the middle of a city and often other vehicles come and go. One new arrival has a solar panel on the roof with a noisy inverter and suddenly the local noise in my location jumps from S0 to S6. The vehicle arrives whilst I'm transmitting, so at first nothing happens. Charles continues to hear my signal at the same level and at my end I'm blissfully unaware of any change, until I stop transmitting, when I hear the noise. Meanwhile, Charles starts his transmission and I cannot hear him because the local noise in my location is louder than his wanted signal. At this point, Charles still has the ability to hear me, but I can no longer hear him, even though our equipment is identical. The only change is the local noise floor at my location which interferes with my ability to receive the signals coming from Charles. This means that I can still send "again, again, local QRM" and I can do so as often as I want. Charles will hear this without any issue, but I won't hear his reply until the local noise stops. What this highlights is that two-way communication between two stations involves two signal paths. They might, or might not, follow the same journey through the ionosphere and be between two identical antennas, but the experience for either station can be, and almost always is, completely different. Because the ability to transmit isn't affected by local noise at the transmitter, it doesn't figure into the total path loss when you're calculating it for the receiving station. However, when the roles are reversed, it does. So when you're receiving, you need to take into account your local noise, but when you're transmitting, you don't. So, when Charles is transmitting to me, I need to take into account my local noise and ignore his, and when I'm transmitting to Charles, he needs to take into account his local noise, but not mine. This is how you can have so-called "alligator" stations, all mouth, no ears. The station is likely using high power with a high gain antenna in a noisy environment. This means that everyone can hear them, but because their local noise is so high, they can often only hear other alligators, but not the rest of the world who can perfectly hear them. If you encounter a station on-air that keeps calling CQ, regardless of how many people are calling back, that's an "alligator". So, the takeaway is that even if you can hear a station, it doesn't mean that they can hear you and the reverse is also true. You can be transmitting and heard all over the place, but if you're in a high noise environment, you might not be able to hear them. It's one reason that QRP stations prefer to work in low noise environments where they can hear many more stations. It reminds me of a funny story told by Wally VK6YS, now SK. In his early amateur radio days he operated from Cockatoo Island, an island off the north coast of Western Australia, near Yampi Sound, which is where his callsign came from. With a new radio and transverter for 6m, Wally had been calling CQ for weeks, but nobody would talk to him. Occasionally he'd hear a faint voice in the background. Meanwhile it transpired that amateurs across Japan were getting upset that he wasn't responding

Foundations of Amateur Radio After recently talking about noise, today I want to discuss gain, specifically antenna gain. When you say that your antenna has 18 dBi gain, what does that mean? This entire discussion starts with an isotropic radiator or antenna. It's often described as the perfect antenna, but rarely is there any description on how that actually works, so I'd like to start there. Before we dig in too much, it's worth remembering that an isotropic antenna is a thought experiment, it cannot physically exist, but it's a useful tool for comparing antennas. Antennas have a physical size. There's often a direct relationship between the size of the antenna and the frequencies for which it works best. A lower frequency means a longer wavelength and corresponding large antenna to handle that radio frequency. In contrast, an isotropic antenna is infinitesimally small and responds equally well for all frequencies. Similarly, unlike an actual antenna, an isotropic antenna is symmetric in all directions, that is, there's no difference between the back or the front, the top or the bottom, the left or the right. You can position an isotropic antenna in any orientation and there's no difference, not just no detectable difference, no actual difference. The radiation pattern is a perfect sphere. As I said, the isotropic antenna is an imaginary, let's call it, ideal antenna, that's used as the base reference to measure all antennas against. When you use the word gain in relation to an antenna, you're using the unit dBi and in doing so, you're comparing the antenna against this imaginary perfect isotropic antenna. When you see that the gain of an antenna is 2.15 dBi, you're saying that this antenna performs better than the isotropic antenna and does so by 2.15 dB. There's one "minor" detail missing in that statement. The full statement, often completely overlooked, is that this antenna performs better than the isotropic antenna and does so by 2.15 dB, in some directions, but not all. Said differently, antenna gain comes from distorting the ideal, perfect sphere into different shapes. For example, the 2.15 dBi gain of a horizontal dipole antenna distorts into a squashed doughnut on its side. In other words, there are directions where a dipole radiates better and has an increased gain when compared to an isotropic antenna, but there are also directions where it radiates worse, much worse, if at all. In the case of a dipole, it receives best from the side and worst in line with the antenna and I'll point out that the doughnut is also an idealised shape that in turn gets distorted by proximity to other objects, like the ground. Consider that a dipole has 2.15 dBi gain over an isotropic antenna. This means that, for some directions the gain is increased and for some directions it's decreased, perhaps even eliminated. In other words, in some direction, the antenna amplifies the signal and in other directions it attenuates the signal, potentially even to zero at a so-called null in an antenna radiation pattern. As I've said before, an antenna receives a combination of both wanted signal and unwanted noise. For an isotropic antenna all signals, from any direction, both wanted and unwanted, are treated the same. This is not true for an antenna that has gain. Consider an antenna that exhibits gain in one specific direction and loss in all other directions. If you were to point that antenna at a wanted signal, the incoming signal would be amplified in that direction and attenuated in all other directions. If noise comes from all directions equally, most of the noise would be attenuated and only a little bit of noise coming from the same direction as the wanted signal is amplified. Overall, this means that the total amount of incoming noise is reduced in comparison to the wanted signal. In other words, the noise floor is reduced and the signal level is increased, making the signal more audible above the noise. This means that the impact of antenna gain is that the Signal to Noise Ratio is improved for an incoming signal in comparison to local noise. Notice also, that the antenna gain works in multiple ways. It serves to improve the local signal to noise ratio, by attenuating noise and amplifying a wanted signal, but it also increases the transmitted signal that's sent towards the other station. Both affect your station's performance, but do so at different sides of the communication link and because we're talking about two separate signals, an incoming one and an outgoing one, the optimal direction might not be the same for both. So, now what do you think the impact might be of adding an 18 dBi Yagi to your station? I also have a supplementary question. If a commercial antenna is compared with a dipole, using the dBd unit, is the antenna compared to the entire radiation pattern of a dipole and if so, at what height from what type of ground and is that a useful comparison, or hiding the true performance of such an antenna? I'