Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'd like to start with saying thank you to the Wireless Institute of Australia for awarding me the Brenda Edmonds Education Award "in recognition of outstanding service in the education of the Amateur Radio Community and advancement of licensees." It's an unexpected honour and a thrill that leads me to a question about how we recognise the people around us. Over the years I've been a member of around a dozen radio amateur clubs and associations. To my recollection, the only one who has ever said thanks, and in my case, more than once, is the Wireless Institute of Australia. What of the other clubs? What about the clubs you're a member of, or the groups you meet-up, either for lunch or on the local repeater? What about when you go out on a field-day and set-up a barbecue? I look around me and I see activity that goes back more than a century. It's fair to say that every member of the community benefits from that effort. Memes on social media notwithstanding, there is real labour and toil, love and heartbreak, success and failure all around you. What process do you have in place to say thanks? Now before you start handing out participation trophies to everyone who turns up, mind you, they did when others didn't, consider what saying thanks might look like in your community? It could be a special QSL card, or a certificate sent in the mail that someone could hang on their wall. I'm not advocating for sending out monetary awards or trophies, or other such paraphernalia, I'm just asking you to consider who in your group is worthy of a thank you and what that might look like. You should also think about what you're saying thank you about. Is it for output, for the number of laughs, the level of participation, how many new club members were signed up, how many contacts someone made, how much fund raising they achieved, how many radios they fixed or how many nets they hosted, or something else? You can think about who in your community might serve as an example to strive for and name the award after them. It might be someone who is active right now, or it might be someone who has attained mythical status in the stories you tell each other around the campfire during an overnight activity. No matter what you call it, what it's for, how often you award it, what you present and whom you present it to, consider that it's a formal way of saying thank you, from the group to the individual, from all of you to one person in particular. Since starting F-troop, I've now hosted more than 600 weekly nets for new and returning amateurs, a feat which we recently celebrated with a morning breakfast on the local aptly named Wireless Hill, but I couldn't have done it without the local repeater group who maintains the repeater we use. I also couldn't have done it without the countless individuals who join in every week, or who quietly sit on the sidelines making sure that the various nodes scattered around the globe are up and running, or the people who did the catering and logistics for the event. Looking back, for me that event represents a missed opportunity to say thank you, something which I intend to do something about in the near future. So, ask yourself. When was the last time someone in your community received a thank-you for their contribution? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio As you might know I'm in the process of building a cross-platform, open source, contest logger. Right now that project is at the stage where there is a proof of concept that you can use and install as a progressive web app on any web browser. It's intended as a starting point for discussion. Note that this is a long way from the stage where you might want to actually use it for any contest, it's not feature complete and if it breaks you get to keep both parts. It's currently cunningly named "contest-logger". No doubt that will change. I'm collecting suggestions for features using the GitHub issue tracker, which you're welcome to contribute to. Behind the scenes, I'm writing the documentation that describes how I want to actually develop and design this application. What kinds of things are important, what will drive the process, all the planning stuff that sets up the project. Of course I'm doing this whilst writing articles, looking for work and dealing with the health-care fun and games associated with being alive. While my project is nowhere near finished, truth be told, it really needs to start first, I've come across a different tool written by a fellow amateur Michael K6GTE. This tool is written for Linux only in Python and is in Beta release at this point. This means that you can install and run the application and most of the functionality works. The application is called Not1MM. Here's what Michael has to say about his efforts: Not1MM's interface is a blatant ripoff of N1MM. It's NOT N1MM and any problem you have with this software should in no way reflect on their software. If you use Windows you should run away from this and use some other program. I personally don't. While it may be possible to get N1MM working under Wine, I haven't checked, I'd rather not have to jump through the hoops. Currently this exists for my own personal amusement. Something to do in my free time. While I'm not watching TV, Right vs Left political 'News' programs, mind numbing 'Reality' TV etc... Michael goes on to say that: The current state is "BETA". I've used it for a few contests, and was able to work contacts and submit a cabrillo at the end. I'm not a "Contester". So I'll add contests as/if I work them. I'm only one guy, so if you see a bug let me know. I don't do much of any Data or RTTY operating. This is why you don't see RTTY in the list of working contests. The Lord helps those who burn people at the... I mean who help themselves. Feel free to fill in that hole with a pull request. You can find Not1MM on Michael's GitHub repository ready for your testing and experimentation. It's also available as a PyPi package if you're already familiar with Python. In my opinion, one thing that this tool does well is consider how contest logging can be customised for individual contests and likely it will serve as inspiration for how I intend to implement the plugins in my own project. I've also submitted a patch to Not1MM so you can use Docker to install it on your own machine or at least see what the requirements are to make it run in your environment. I'm thrilled to have discovered this tool and hope that it solves some of your contest logging issues on your Linux workstation. What features are you hanging out for in your contest logging adventures? Feel free to share your bug reports and feature requests to either Michael's project, or mine, or both. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A curious thing happens when you become part of the amateur community, you start to talk like an amateur. This phenomenon isn't specific to being a radio amateur, it happens whenever you join any community. Lead by example, one word at a time, you start to inherit a vocabulary that represents that community. Amateur radio, rife with acronyms and so-called Q-Codes, a standardised set of three-letter codes that start with the letter "Q", does this in spades. If you've been around amateurs for more than 30 seconds, it's likely that you have already heard QSL, QTH and QRM, colloquially short for "Yup", "Home" and "Noise". There's an official meaning if you're keen. You can use the three letters as both a question and an answer, so QSL can mean "Can you acknowledge receipt?" and "I am acknowledging receipt." Similarly, QTH means "What is your position in latitude and longitude (or according to any other indication)?" and QRM means "Is my transmission being interfered with?" In those cases, used either with Morse code or Voice, they can make getting the message across simpler, faster, and more accurate, all important aspects of communication. It's easier to get QTH across to an amateur who doesn't speak English as their first language than it is to ask the whole question. Other letter groups also creep into common language of an amateur. You've likely heard the letters: "XYL", but if you haven't, let me explain. Given that amateur radio is an activity dominated by men, "YL" refers to Young Lady and "XYL", refers to eX-Young Lady, a less than complimentary way of referring to one's wife. I'd like to point out something curious. In Morse code, XYL is sent using: -..- -.-- .-.. It's intended to represent the word WIFE which is sent in Morse code as: .-- .. ..-. . Now, if you know anything about Morse, you'll know that a dit is one unit, a dah is three. Individual elements are spaced by one unit. The space between letters is three units and the space between words is seven units. Armed with that knowledge, XYL takes 39 units and WIFE takes 31 units to send. So, sending the shortcut actually takes longer and it's clear that this choice is not about efficiency. Describing someone as an eX-Young Lady to refer to your Significant Other seems very 1950's to me. In the situation where you are the female amateur operator, the apparently appropriate way to refer to your Significant Other is as Old Man or "OM". Are female operators supposed to refer to themselves as YL or XYL? Really? Sexism aside, this is extremely offensive in a same-sex and gender fluid community. Then there's the symbol "88", apparently meant to refer to "Hugs and Kisses", not something I'd feel comfortable sending to anyone other than my partner who is emphatically not an amateur, let alone the idea that it would be appropriate to send it to any random station or the connotations around males sending such a message to a random female operator. So, given that we now live in the 21st century and we're no longer in 1950, perhaps it's time to consider what language we teach new amateurs. One proposal by Chris M0YNG is to refer to the Operator as "OP" and the Significant Other as "SO". Seems like a good start. I will point out that this conversation was brought to my attention by Andreas DJ3EI who was participating in a Mastodon.radio conversation with Tim N7KOM who started the thread. I think it's a worthwhile thing to discuss such an evolution of our language, it goes to the heart of our community, you are what you say you are, and words matter. So, what words, acronyms and symbols do you use in your amateur community and what are you teaching new amateurs? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently the Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre issued an alert for a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME expected to impact Earth within 24 to 36 hours. This was presented within the context of seeing the resulting Aurora, but as a user of the HF radio spectrum, I'm subscribed to their email list, not for the pretty pictures, though I would be delighted to actually see them with my mark one eyeball, I'm on the list for the impact on propagation for my hobby. As a good citizen I shared the alert with my community both via email and social media and as a result I received some questions and comments. One question was, "What does this mean?", one comment was "it's not going to impact the United States." My response was to point out that HF propagation and the impact of the Sun is a very deep rabbit hole and encouraged further research by supplying several links, including a very detailed video by Rohde and Schwarz titled "Understanding HF Propagation", very, highly, recommended. Whilst watching that video I discovered that the Solar Flux Index is measured using a receiver tuned to 2800 MHz or 2.8 GHz. Being in the business of having receivers scattered around my shack, I asked myself if I had something that was able to receive on that frequency. My RTL-SDR dongle doesn't cut it without extra hardware, it tops out at 1.75 GHz. However, my PlutoSDR has a standard frequency range that goes up to 3.8 GHz out - of the box - and with some tweaks can make it to 6 GHz, so well and truly within range. Now, before I move on, I should mention that an RTL-SDR is a cheap, as-in $20, USB computer accessory that looks like a thumb-drive and is ostensibly built to receive digital television, or DVB-T signals. I've spoken about this previously. It can be used to receive radio frequencies outside the purpose it was built for. The PlutoSDR, or to give its official name the ADALM-PLUTO, on the other hand, something which I've also spoken about, is a single board Linux computer made by some smart people at Analog Devices, specifically for the purposes of learning and experimentation with receiving and transmitting RF. It comes with all manner of documentation and software and to be honest, I'm a little bit in love with mine. Back to measuring stuff. In this case I'm attempting to measure the power levels of radio frequencies at 2.8 GHz. I know of a simple tool called rtl_power that can measure RF power over time and started investigating if that tool had been hacked to be able to use the PlutoSDR, rather than the RTL-SDR dongle. It might have been, but I've not yet discovered it, however, that in turn led me to several other tools, most of which I'm still investigating. What it does tell me is that I'm not the first person to tread these paths, much has happened and been documented in the analogue sphere, some has been done using digital I/Q data and a transverter, a device that can multiply radio frequencies to make them appear in a different part of the radio spectrum, but I'm not yet sure if anyone has made a Solar Flux Index device out of a PlutoSDR. I recalled a wonderful little tool that I've also talked about before, there's a theme here, I'm sure, but the tool, "csdr", written by Andras HA7ILM, which allows you to do all manner of interesting things to a stream of raw data, specifically RF raw data. It has a function called logpower_cf which Andras describes as "useful for drawing power spectrum graphs", which is precisely what I'm looking for. Armed with that I'm now in the process of building a compiled version using Docker, so I can run csdr on my PlutoSDR and perhaps generate a power spectrum graph for 2.8 GHz. Of course that will now require that I learn how to extract raw data, known as I/Q data from the PlutoSDR command-line, process it through the logpower_cf function, output an image and hopefully show the result as a web-page. At the moment I'm still in the weeds with a Makefile, but that's not unusual. Needless to say that I'm working on it and the result will no doubt turn up on my github page when it's done. In the most innocent terms possible, how hard can it be? One takeaway that really needs to be expressed out loud, even if I've hinted at it. All the bits I've talked about here are things I've already been playing with. It wasn't until I came across a salient piece of information about the Solar Flux Index and how it was measured that all the puzzle pieces came together, the PlutoSDR, csdr, rtl-power, logpower_cf, the SFI and a web-server, that I could even imagine this happening. The point being that even if you have all of the puzzle pieces in your hands, it might still take one missing piece of information for your brain to go "Ah-ha, wow, yes, this makes sense, I can do this." So, keep collecting puzzle pieces, relevant to your own interests and one day you too will get to this point. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio On Thursday the 20th of April, 2023 at 04:17:56 UTC the world was subjected to a rare event, a hybrid solar eclipse. In Perth I experienced a partial eclipse and people lucky enough to be directly in line, places like Ningaloo Reef, Exmouth and Barrow Island, experienced a total eclipse. Timor-Leste had the experience of the peak total eclipse. At the time I went into my shack and refreshed the WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon map I have open and noticed that my beacon wasn't reported. I sagely nodded my head, that makes sense, no Sun, no propagation and I got on with my life. Last week a fellow amateur, Will VK6UU, asked if anyone had any VK6 specific HF propagation reports to make. Being the data geek that I am, I thought to myself, "Aha! I can do some data analytics on the WSPR dataset that I have." So, the die was cast for a few enjoyable hours of importing 2.4 gigabytes of compressed data into a database and constructing a set of SQL queries to see what I could learn. Before getting stuck in, I spent a few hours thinking about the problem. How could I go about doing this? Propagation information is notoriously fickle. You have to consider the obvious things like the Solar Index and the Geomagnetic Index which vary considerably. Then there's the nature of the various reports themselves. Not everyone has their beacon on all the time, not everyone has their receiver on all the time. Weekends are more popular than weekdays and popularity overall is growing exponentially. The solar cycle is on the way to its peak, so there's that variation to consider and if that's not enough, how should you compare the Signal To Noise ratio between weak and strong beacons? With all that in hand I set about constructing a plan. I created a folder to hold my charts and SQL queries, intent on uploading that to GitHub when the work was done. For my very first test I thought I'd count the number of reports per band in a 24 hour window around the eclipse. I imported all the WSPR records that had a VK6 callsign, either as the transmitter or the receiver, given that I was interested in learning if stations transmitting from VK6 could be heard elsewhere and inversely, could VK6 stations hear any other stations? As my first effort, I created a scatter-plot to get a sense of what kind of numbers I was looking at. The initial result was interesting. Around the eclipse itself there was no propagation. This wasn't unexpected, since that's what I'd seen on the day at the time on my own map. I changed my data to use a cumulative count per band to see if any band was particularly different and then discovered that there was no propagation at all, on any band. That seemed ... odd. So, I had a look at the source data and discovered a gap, which accounted for what my chart was showing. I added a fake record for the eclipse time itself, just so I could see where on the chart this gap was. Turns out that for VK6 stations, the gap is just over five hours, but it's not centred around the eclipse. There's a four hour window before the eclipse and a one hour window after it. Then I started looking at all the reports from across the world. To give you a sense of scale, across April 2023 the dataset has nearly 139 million rows. It's 12 gigabytes in size. By contrast, in March of 2008 when the first reports started, there were just over 93 thousand reports in a 7 megabyte file. Charting this shows exponential growth, hitting a million reports in July of 2009, 10 million reports in January 2016 and 100 million reports in October of 2021. So, the eclipse and global propagation. The results came in and the reports are that there was no propagation, on any band at any point during the just under two hours and 12 minutes before the eclipse and the 38 minutes following it. That ... or the WSPRnet.org database was down during the eclipse. So, unfortunately I cannot tell you what propagation was like during the eclipse, since it appears that those records don't exist. Looks like we'll have to wait until 2031 when we can try this again. We'll all be a little older and wiser by that time and perhaps we can come up with a way to ensure that the global central WSPR data server is running without downtime, scaled to match the growing requirements and paid for by a benevolent organisation with deep pockets. I did start considering making lemonade from my lemons and charting the kinds of down time the WSPR server has, but just looking over the various discussion groups showed that this is going to be painful. On the plus side, I learnt about SUM OVER and LAG functions in SQL, so there's that. I must confess that if we're going to seriously use WSPR as a propagation analysis tool we need to fix these kinds of issues. I have no doubt that running WSPRnet.org is a massive enterprise and that it costs real time and money to make that happen. So, who's up for the challenge and will the real owner of WSPRnet.org please raise the

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the years I've used the phrase, which I shamelessly stole, that amateur radio is a thousand hobbies in one. I've discussed countless different activities and adventures that all fall under the banner of amateur radio, in one way or another. Since becoming a licensed radio amateur I've had the opportunity to speak with many different amateurs and hear their views on what amateur radio means to them. Based on their responses I've often found myself exploring new aspects of the hobby and discovering new and interesting ways to participate in this community. Recently I put together a list of projects that are currently underway in my shack. I discovered that over time this list has evolved from physical radio activities, like portable activations, building antennas, camping, and going to HAMfests, the amateur radio version of a swap meet, into more computer related things like data analytics, writing software, fixing bugs and learning how the insides of a Software Defined Radio works. That's not to say that I've given up on camping, or any of the other things, just that my priorities have shifted over time as I discover over and over again, just how big this hobby really is. I mention this because one of the recurring observations I encounter is that others are doing the same thing day in and day out. That in and of itself isn't an issue, it's that they begin to describe that they're bored, that they've lost interest, that the hobby is in stagnation, that there's nothing new, that they're frustrated with their progress towards whatever goal they've set themselves. For me, the key motivator in this hobby is learning. Everything else follows from there. That might not be your thing. You might be here for the emergency service aspect, or the hill climbing, the soldering and electronics. It really doesn't matter why you're here at all. What keeps it fresh is trying new things. For example, if you're here for emergencies, have you set up a disaster event simulation in your community, or attempted to set-up your station 100 km from home and make contacts, using just the very basics? If you're into soldering and electronics, have you ever designed your own circuit board, had it manufactured, or even manufactured it yourself, built the project and tested it? What about documenting it and making it available as a project for someone else? If you've climbed all the hills in your state, have you tried doing this across the border, or overseas? What about testing with different antennas, or modes, power levels or logging tools? The point being that it's easy to keep doing the same thing. What's harder, but potentially more rewarding, is to try something new and experience what happens. One thing to keep in mind is that things will go wrong. That's where all the learning happens, so keep at it. So, are you doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, or are you excited like a newborn puppy, wagging your tail ready for the next adventure? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the more perplexing things is the nature of radio regulation. If you're a licensed radio amateur, you'll be familiar with this idea, but if you're not it's bewildering and apparently absurd. To explain, let me start with a light bulb that your neighbour put on their back porch. It's bright. It's pointing at your house. Like the apparent radiation from a gazillion suns it lights up the bedroom and sleep is hard to come by. Pretty annoying right? As it happens, radio is a lot like that. If you know physics, it's exactly like that, but I'll ignore that for today. In our modern world we have many different radios that each rely on a specific, let's call it colour, of light. In radio terms this is known as frequencies or radio bands and the entire collection is known as the radio spectrum. You've likely seen this without knowing. Your 2.4 GHz WiFi has an in-built frequency, 2.4 GHz, as does your 5 GHz WiFi. Your FM radio in the car has frequencies as well, 97.7 on the dial indicates 97.7 MHz. If you have an AM radio, 720 AM refers to 720 kHz. Hidden in plain sight is why radio is regulated. Those numbers, 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz, 97.7 MHz and 720 kHz are all radio frequencies, or as I suggested, colours. Now imagine turning on a really bright light in the middle of that. All of a sudden your WiFi, FM and AM are wiped out. It doesn't stop there. As I said, there are many different radios, and sources of radio frequencies. Radio transmissions come from your mobile phone, Bluetooth headset, microwave oven, computer, television, remote control, key-less fob, power supply, car, power meter, solar panel, battery charger, LED light bulb, and the list goes on. Essentially anything electronic has a radio component. Some of these are transmitting unintentionally, like an electric motor or a switch mode power supply. Other things are transmitting on purpose, your microwave oven, your Bluetooth headset and your mobile phone. As I mentioned, they're all sharing the same resource, the radio spectrum. At this point you might ask about the impact of a single transmitter among all that. Well, there are a few phenomena that you should know about. Radio waves don't stop. They keep going. There's no boundary. To illustrate that, I have a tiny beacon, a transmitter, that every two minutes sends out a signal that shows my amateur callsign and location. It uses 10 milliwatts. To give you a sense of scale. A typical incandescent light bulb is about 60 Watts. My transmitter uses sixty thousand times less power. It has been heard 13,455 km away, about a third of the way around the planet. I will point out that different frequencies can be absorbed differently depending on how they're used, but you cannot rely on the idea that any radio frequency stops anywhere. Another phenomenon is a thing called harmonics. Radio waves not only share the same space or spectrum, they're related to each other. Unless you take very specific precautions, a transmission made at 100 MHz, will be heard at 200 MHz, 300 MHz, 400 MHz, 500 MHz and so-on. While each of those transmissions gets progressively weaker, they still exist. Now imagine that someone else is using one of those other frequencies to communicate emergency information. It's like their backyard just got hit with a bright light. To give you a specific example of why this can matter. Consider a radio amateur who uses 7 MHz. This is a licensed amateur radio frequency. Unless that amateur takes specific precautions, the 16th harmonic for 7 MHz is 112 MHz. If that doesn't mean anything to you, it's in the middle of the so-called air-band, frequencies used by aircraft around the planet to talk to each other and the ground. Very bad things could happen if safeguards weren't made. As a result, radio is highly controlled and regulated. I'm not going into the laws or legalese here, given that this is a global phenomenon and the rules in their specifics are different in each country. There's a whole hierarchy of regulation, arrived at by international cooperation and agreement. These regulations are not identical in each country, far from it. Each country has their interpretation of the rules and balances those with its own use of radio. For example WiFi, a very popular use of the radio spectrum, can be bamboozling in the endless variation of something so seemingly simple. Most of this is invisible to most people. You go to the store and buy a WiFi base station and you go on your way. With the advent of online shopping, you can click "buy" on any window, regardless of which country the device comes from. If you're not careful your shiny new device, imported from somewhere is actually illegal in your country and fines and punishment can be severe. If you start digging into this, you'll come across rules that for example say that you cannot change the antenna on a particular device. This is because the transmission power of the hardware is strictly regulated so it doesn't interfere

Foundations of Amateur Radio Several years ago I participated in a local contest. Over a 24 hour period I activated my mobile station in about 30 different locations. On my car, my vertical antenna screwed into a boot-lip mount connected to an antenna tuner or ATU, and my radio. I used rope to guy the antenna, threaded through the rear windows and held tight by closing the car boot. Setting up consisted of parking the car, triggering the ATU to tune the antenna system and calling CQ. Moving to the next location consisted of driving there and setting up again. Although this worked really well, I'm skipping over what I'm interested in exploring today. The phrase "triggering the ATU to tune the antenna system" hides a lot of complexity. It was a surprise to me that there were several locations where the ATU just wouldn't tune. Despite my best efforts I was unable to get the system to a point where the radio was happy. In some cases I tuned off frequency and put up with a poor SWR. In others I physically had to move the car and park somewhere else. In every case it was completely unknown if a particular location was going to be a problem. I recall for example parking in an empty nondescript car-park and having to drive around to find a location where my set-up would work. Afterwards I considered that the car-park was potentially built on top of an iron ore deposit, an old industrial area, or a pipe-line, all of which were a good possibility. The point of this is that an antenna doesn't exist in isolation, it's called a system for a reason. We talk about the theoretical isotropic antenna and add disclaimers about that it cannot physically exist because it's infinitely small. One often overlooked aspect of an isotropic antenna is that it's in free space. Free space is defined as space that contains no electromagnetic or gravitational fields and used as a reference. It's a theoretical place. On Earth there is no such thing, there's a planet under your feet, but even in outer space there are both gravitational and electromagnetic fields that impact on an antenna and its performance. Staying nearer to home, recently we had a discussion about how close two antennas can be together. A suggested rule of thumb was that they need to be at least one banana or 30 cm away from each other. Similarly when we erect a dipole, there's recommendations around needing to have it mounted more than half a wavelength over the ground. Some sources say higher. I'll ask the first obvious question. Is that dipole completely straight? In other words, should the centre be half a wavelength above the ground, or should the ends, and how far should the ends be from their mounts? My point is that every antenna exists within the context of its environment and together it's a system. Some environments help the performance of your antenna system and some don't. Depending on frequency, this might not be the same for any location, or antenna design. To be clear, an antenna system consists of the antenna, the feed line and the clips that hold it, the tuner, the radio and its power supply, the mount and the space around it, the radials, the tower, the pigeon poop on the wire, all of it. Until recently my process to get any antenna to perform in a reasonable manner was to set it up, connect an antenna analyser, scan the appropriate range, tweak the antenna, scan again, rinse and repeat until it arrived at something approaching useful, or until it was good enough. If you recall, I recently added some loading coils to a telescopic antenna to attempt to make it resonant on 10m, so I could connect my Weak Signal Propagation Reporter or WSPR beacon to it directly and leave it running independently from my main station. I used the antenna analyser method, got it to the point where I had an antenna with a nice dip right at the required frequency and then watched it go completely sideways when I mounted the antenna in the window. Having spent several hours getting to that point, I walked away and left it for another day. Today was that day. I again started on the floor of my shack and got nothing but an infinite SWR and no amount of tweaking could fix it. Right until the coax fell out of the SMA connector I was scratching my head. After removing the faulty coax lead, I again tweaked the antenna and instead of using my antenna analyser, I fired up my NanoVNA, a tiny handheld open-hardware Vector Network Analyser or VNA. If you're not familiar, it's a standalone palm sized device with an LCD display and battery which will allow you to test most of your RF equipment. This little box came to me via a generous gift from a fellow amateur. It can repeatedly scan a range of frequencies and report in near real-time what's going on. Instead of waiting a minute after each adjustment, I could wait less than a second and immediately see the effect. This has been a game changer. I could mount the antenna against a metal surface and immediately see what the impact was. I cou

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you start in this hobby one of the most frustrating aspects is that of selecting the right antenna. If you've been around for a while, you'll discover that this continues to be the case, even when you've been licensed longer than I've been alive. In the past I've discussed at length why that is the case, but to recap, consider a dipole antenna. In essence it's two pieces of wire that are connected to the radio via some form of feed-line. Now consider the idea of changing the length of each wire. You could trim each end in the same way, or you could make one end longer than the other. You could fold the ends at an angle, or you could mount the dipole near the ground, or high up in the trees, you could position it vertically, or arrange the wires at an angle towards each other. You could make the wire thicker, or thinner, from different material or arrange the ends so they meet up in a circle, or a square, a triangle or some other shape. You get the point, there is endless variation arranging this single antenna and I've not even discussed things like feed-lines, traps, chokes, counterpoise and other RF shenanigans. With that in mind, amateurs around the world are attempting to improve their antenna system every time they get on air to make noise. Recently I reported that my 10 mW WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon was heard 13,455 km away in Sweden by Mats SM3LNM on the 10m band. The signal report was -25 dB, which means that with an experimental cut-off for a successful decode at -34 dB, I have 9 dB to play with, so at least theoretically, I could reduce my power even further, to 1 dBm, or just over 1 mW and still make the distance. The antenna I'm using is one built by Walter VK6BCP (SK). It's a 40m vertical antenna, helically wound on a fibreglass blank and clamped to the side of a metal pergola. The antenna is tuned to the 10m band using an SGC SG-237 antenna coupler, essentially a device that can add or remove inductance or capacitance to make my antenna appear resonant on the appropriate frequency. The antenna coupler in turn is attached to about 20 or 30 meters of 75 Ohm, quad shield RG6 which I have left over from my remote internet satellite dish installation days. That's all to say that the antenna system for my beacon is sub-optimal and it's likely that my actual power output is lower than the 10 mW that my beacon is reporting. So, with all that in mind, what else could I try? I have an indoor telescopic antenna stuck to the window and I've been wondering if I can attach my beacon to it directly and leave it running without the need to worry about disconnecting the beacon when I'm wanting to fire up my actual station to make other noises on air. A quick scan with the analyser reveals that the lowest frequency out of the box is about 60 MHz. I decided that adding some loading coils might help, so I set about fabricobbling an antenna, yes, you heard me, fabricobbling, fabricating and cobbling together. Anyway, using 7mm thick drip irrigation riser poly pipe as a form I wound two coils with 1.25mm copper wire that I had lying around. Depending on which calculator you used, that was either too much or not enough for my needs. I managed 53 windings, shy of the planned 60, but still a good start. Using the same irrigation riser, which as luck would have it managed to match the thread for the telescopic antenna elements and feed point, I separated each element by about 100 mm from the feed point, then used the two loading coils to connect the feed point back to each element. An hour later I now have a telescopic antenna, with two loading coils and as luck would have it, I'm much closer. The resonant point is now 30 MHz, down from 60 MHz, so I have a little more tinkering ahead of me. I might change the wire and use some eyelets at the ends to make assembly simpler, but the general idea seems to work as intended. If it doesn't work, I've come across a design for a 25.5 meter long End Fed Half Wave antenna that will work on anything between 80m and 10m and it appears that my driveway is just long enough to fit, but that will negate the indoor aspect of the antenna. All this reminds me of the ugliest dipole I ever saw, in a bush shack, a decade ago, consisting of two wires, haphazardly soldered onto a piece of coax, looped around an insulator, with a piece of wire holding it together, tied between two trees. It was only ever meant to be temporary, but it was there for years. I used it to speak to stations all over the pacific and in the process learnt a lot about the performance of both my radio and the antenna connected to it. The point being that experimentation in antenna building is what we're all about, even going backwards from multi-band, high gain antenna farms, back to basics and exploration. In case you're wondering, I haven't forgotten about the Hustler 6BTV antennas packed in boxes. They're still very much part of the grand plan, but in light of my

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a fascination with space that arguably started long before the first time that human spaceflight was proposed by Scottish astronomer William Leitch in 1861. Names like Sputnik, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Columbia speak to millions of people and organisations like NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to name a few, continue to feed that obsession. In amateur radio we have our own names, things like ARISS, or Amateur Radio on the International Space Station, or its predecessor SAREX, the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment. Today, stories about people making contact with the International Space Station continue to make news. We have school programs where amateur radio ground stations schedule a call to speak with an astronaut in space and we've been launching our own amateur satellites for a long time. Launched on the 12th of December 1961, OSCAR1, or Orbiting Satellites Carrying Amateur Radio was built by a group of California based amateur radio operators for 63 dollars. It operated for nearly 20 days, transmitting "Hi" in Morse on 144.983 MHz. The first amateur radio space voice contact was made on the 1st of December 1983, almost forty years ago. It's surprising that in the age of technology such a significant event has been so poorly recorded for posterity. If you go searching for the actual audio, you'll discover several versions of this contact including varying transcripts. I've attempted to reconstruct the wording, but I've yet to hear a complete and unedited version. For example, there's an ARRL movie called "Amateur Radio's Newest Frontier" with out of sync audio. There's also an audio file with a transcript from an archived copy of a website by W7APD. The most recent one is on a video called "HAM - Official Documentary 2022", produced by students from the School of Visual and Media Arts program at the University of Montana and broadcast on Montana PBS on November 24th, 2022. So, what follows is not necessarily complete, but calling from Space Shuttle Columbia it went a little like this: "..U.S. west coast and calling CQ. Calling CQ North America. This is W5LFL in Columbia. In another 30 seconds I'll be standing by. Our spacecraft is in a rotation at the moment and we're just now getting the antenna pointed down somewhat more toward the Earth. So I should be able to pick up your signals a little bit better in the next few minutes. So W5LFL in Columbia is calling CQ and standing by. Go ahead." "This is W5LFL in Colombia, W5LFL in Columbia, orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 135 Nautical Miles. Passing over the US West Coast and calling CQ. So W5LFL in Columbia is calling CQ and, ah, standing by. Go ahead." "W5LFL on STS-9, WA1JXN, WA1 Japan X-Ray Norway, WA1JXN, Frenchtown Montana, WA1JXN standing by." "Hello W1JXN, WA1 Juliet X-Ray November, this is W5LFL, I picked up your signals fairly weakly. I think our attitude is not really the best as yet, but you're our first contact from orbit. WA1 Juliet X-Ray November. How do you read? Over." On board STS-9, Space Shuttle Columbia, was Dr Owen Garriott, W5LFL, now silent key. On the ground was Lance Collister, then WA1JXN, now W7GJ. NASA published an Educational Brief for the Classroom that described Owen's set-up as a battery powered 5 Watt FM transceiver feeding a split-ring on a printed circuit board antenna that will be placed in the upper crew compartment window on the aft flight deck. Others reported that the radio was a Motorola handheld. Logging was done with a tape recorder velcroed to the transceiver. Owen describes the antenna as a "well-designed, hand-held antenna, known as a 'cavity antenna', which could be velcroed to the window. It was about 24 inches in diameter and looked somewhat like a large aluminum (sic) cake pan" There's an edited version of a similarly titled ARRL video called "Amateur Radio's Newest Frontier - ARRL documentary featuring Owen Garriot, W5LFL, on STS-9" showing the antenna as a copper tube, bent into a circle, mounted inside an open aluminium box that was hinged on the window to face outwards. The NASA brief also described a range of frequencies and designated 145.55 MHz as the primary frequency over the United States. It included a whole section about synchronising clocks using WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, odd and even minute transmission schedules and descriptions on how this should work. Operating during time off, when the antenna was facing Earth, and being on air for about four hours during the mission, around 300 contacts were made across the globe. Today we continue to experiment in space. The callsign N1SS is heard on-air regularly from the International Space Station, astronauts are often licensed radio amateurs, there's a permanent repeater on the ISS, we launch research spacecraft called nano-satellites or more popularly CubeSats for amateur radio at every opportunity. So far there's over 160 satellites and the adventure continues. Speaking of experiments, albeit earthbound

Foundations of Amateur Radio So, I have a confession to make. I'm a contester. I'm not ashamed of this. While I'm in a confessing mood, I'll also mention that I've not participated in many contests in the past few years. This is not for the want of desire, but for the lack of motivation to fix things in my shack that are fundamentally broken. On the weekend I participated in a local contest. I took part for six hours, got on-air and made noise, made about 30 contacts, had a ball. I wasn't playing to win, though I did use the opportunity to refresh and hone some of my rusty skills. The next day I spent much too long converting my log into something that the contest organiser asked for. I also discovered that there was a duplicate entry in my log, not something which I'd expect with only so few contacts, but a reflection on the tool I was using to create my log. I started writing down what I learnt from the experience, operating from my own shack, documenting what worked and what didn't. I commented on several things relevant to me, but to give you a flavour, my operator position is terrible because I'm logging on my main computer and the radio is side-on when I'm facing the computer. The sun was shining directly into my eyes when facing the computer. Holding a microphone I didn't have hands-free, I still don't have an auto-keyer to save my voice, my foot pedal didn't work and my data interface was on loan to another amateur. As I said, these things are specific to me. Logging was worse. It didn't quite bring me to tears, but as the contest went on, it became a problem. I started to write down what was wrong with the tool I was using with a view to submitting patches to fix it when I realised that it wasn't actually built as a contesting logging tool, so I stopped and instead started writing a new list, one that describes what a good contesting tool looks like. It builds on a decade of using different tools and participating in contests in all manner of different situations, from special portable event activations, through to the annual top-tier contests run from a purpose built contest station and everything in between. So, what does the ideal contesting tool look like, for me? It needs to be cross platform, as-in, I should be able to use it on whatever computer I have access to, my Linux workstation, a Macintosh Laptop, an Android phone or tablet and while I'm at it, Windows and iOS and I think it should be able to run on a Raspberry Pi. In other words, there shouldn't be a situation where you cannot run the tool because you have some random combination of operating system or CPU that the developer doesn't support. It must be open source. By that I mean, the code should be available to the entire community. There are too many stories of great tools dying or being held hostage by individuals or small groups. The tool should continue to exist and be usable regardless of the participation of the original developer. Users should be able to fix things, add functionality, change themes, whatever. You should be able to customise it because not every contest needs the same information. For example, the John Moyle Memorial Field Day, a contest run every year during March in Australia requires that VHF and UHF contacts record the maidenhead locator, a four or six character message that designates the location of the station. This is used to calculate distance between two stations and award points accordingly. Such a requirement isn't needed in most other contests. Some contests are considered friendly contests, like the Remembrance Day contest in August. It's common to exchange your name, details about your station and have a chat. You'd be unpopular if you used that approach for the Oceania DX, the CQ World Wide or the CQ WPX contests. In other words, some fields are expected for some contests, but not for others. The tool needs to be able to show if a contact is valid by whatever means the rules for a particular contest decide. It needs to automatically log the time, keep track of previous entries and know about the super check partial list to validate partial callsigns. The user needs to be able to use either a keyboard or mouse, or both, to do all the common contesting data entry. No dependency on crazy keyboard shortcuts, no requirement to click the mouse to make an entry, in other words, the tool needs to be able to get out of the way of the contester. I think it needs to have a plug-in system to accommodate different rules and it needs to be able to export data in whatever format the contest organiser expects. You should be able to use it without needing to be connected to the internet during the contest, it should be easy to update and have the ability to keep a station log for all the contacts ever made. It would be great if it could also import existing logs so you can start to consolidate older logs. Having spent quite some time looking for such a tool and failing, I've come to the conclusion that there's

Foundations of Amateur Radio We describe the relationship between the power of a wanted signal and unwanted noise as the signal to noise ratio or SNR. It's often expressed in decibels or dB which makes it possible to represent really big and really small numbers side-by-side, rather than using lots of leading and trailing zeros. For example one million is the same as 60 on a dB scale and one millionth, or 0.000001 is -60. One of the potentially more perplexing ideas in communication is the notion of a negative signal to noise ratio. Before I dig in how that works and how we can still communicate, I should point out that in general for communication to happen, there needs to be a way to distinguish unwanted noise from a desired signal and how that is achieved is where the magic happens. Let's look at a negative SNR, let's say -20 dB. What that means is that the ratio between the wanted signal and the unwanted noise is equivalent to 0.01, said differently, the signal is 100 times weaker than the noise. In other words, all that a negative SNR means is that the ratio between signal and noise is a fraction, as-in, more than zero, but less than one. It's simpler to say the SNR is -30 dB than saying the noise is 1000 times stronger than the signal. Numbers like this are not unusual. The Weak Signal Propagation Reporter or WSPR is often described as being able to work with an SNR of -29 dB, which indicates that the signal is about 800 times weaker than the noise. To see how this works behind the scenes, let's start with the idea of bandwidth. On a typical SSB amateur radio, voice takes up about 3000 Hz. For better readability, most radios filter out the lower and upper audio frequencies. For example, my Yaesu FT857d has a frequency response of 400 Hz to 2600 Hz for SSB, effectively keeping 2200 Hz of usable signal. Another way to say this is that the bandwidth of my voice is about 2200 Hz, when I'm using single side band. That bandwidth is how much of the radio spectrum is used to transmit a signal. For comparison, a typical RTTY or radio teletype signal has a bandwidth of about 270 Hz. A typical Morse Code signal is about 100 Hz and a WSPR signal is about 6 Hz. Before I continue, I should point out that the standard for measuring in amateur radio is 2500 Hz. This is significant because when you're comparing wide and narrow signals to each other you'll end up with some interesting results like negative signal to noise ratios. This happens because you can filter out the unwanted noise before you even start to decode the signal. That means that the signal stays the same, but the average noise reduces in comparison to the 2500 Hz standard. This adds up quickly. For a Morse Code signal, it means that turning on your 100 Hz filter, will feel like improving the signal to noise ratio by 14 dB, that's a 25 fold increase in your desired signal. Similarly, filtering the WSPR signal before you start decoding will give you roughly a 26 dB improvement before you even start. But there's more, since I started off with claiming that WSPR can operate with an SNR of -29 dB. I'll note that -29 dB is only one of the many figures quoted. I have described testing the WSPR decoder on my system and it finally failed at about -34 dB. Even with a 26 dB gain from filtering we're still deep into negative territory, so our signal is still much weaker than the noise. There are several phenomena that affect the decoding of a signal. To give you a sense, consider using a limited vocabulary, like say the phonetic alphabet, or a Morse character, the higher the chance of figuring out which letter you meant. This is why it's important that everyone uses the same alphabet and why there's a standard for it. To send a message, WSPR uses an alphabet of four characters, that is, four different tones or symbols. Another is how long you send a symbol. A Morse dit sent at 6 words per minute or WPM lasts two tenths of a second, but sent at 25 WPM lasts less than 5 hundredth of a second This is why WSPR uses two minutes, actually 110.6 seconds, to send 162 bits of data, lasting just under one and a half seconds each. If that's not enough, there's a processing gain. One of the fun things about signal processing is that when you combine two noise signals, they don't reinforce each other, but when you combine two actual signals, they do. Said in another way, signal adds coherently and noise adds incoherently. To explain that, imagine that you have an unknown signal and you pretended that it said VK6FLAB. If you combined the unknown signal with your first guess of VK6FLAB and you were right, the unknown signal would be reinforced by your guess. If it was wrong, it wouldn't. If your vocabulary is small, like say four symbols, you could try each in turn to see what was reinforced and what wasn't. There's plenty more, things like adding error correction so you can detect any potentially incorrect words. Think of it as a human understanding Bravo when the person at th

Foundations of Amateur Radio Our community is full of TLAs, or three letter acronyms. Some of them more useful than others. For example, I can tell you thank you for the QSO, I'm going QRT, QSY to my QTH. Or, thanks for the chat, I'll just shut up and take my bat and ball and go home. Acronyms arise every day and it came as no surprise to spot a new one in the wild the other day, SHF. It was in a serious forum, discussing antennas if I recall, so I didn't blink and looked it up. Super High Frequency. Okay, so, where's that? I'm familiar with VHF and UHF and as radio amateurs we're often found somewhere on HF, that's Very High Frequency, Ultra High Frequency and High Frequency if you're curious. Turns out that the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union has an official list, of course it does. The current ITU "Radio Regulations" is the 2020 edition. It's great bedtime reading. Volume one of four, Chapter one of ten, Article two of three, Section one of three, Provision 2.1 starts off with these words: "The radio spectrum shall be subdivided into nine frequency bands, which shall be designated by progressive whole numbers in accordance with the following table." When you look at this table you'll discover it starts with band number four and ends with band number twelve, between them covering 3 kHz to 3000 GHz. In position ten you'll see the designation "SHF", covering 3 to 30 GHz, centrimetric waves. A couple of things to note. The list starts at band four. There are of course frequencies below 3 kHz. The list ends at twelve, but there are frequencies above 3000 GHz. You'll also note that I'm not saying 3 Terahertz, since the ITU regulations specify that you shall express frequencies up to 3000 GHz using "gigahertz". Interestingly the same document has a provision for reporting interference where you can report using Terahertz frequencies, so I'm not sure how the ITU deals with such reports. Another thing to note is that this table doesn't actually define what SHF means. It's nowhere in the radio regulations either, I looked. I'm not sure where the words Super High Frequency came from. There is an ITU online database for looking up acronyms and terms. That leads to a document called "Nomenclature of the frequency and wavelength bands used in telecommunications", which also doesn't use "Super High Frequency" anywhere. That said, using the ITU band four, where its definition starts, the VLF band, or Very Low Frequency, followed by LF, Low Frequency, MF, Medium Frequency, the familiar HF or High Frequency, VHF, UHF, then SHF and beyond that, EHF, Extremely High Frequency and THF or Tremendously High Frequency, yes, Tremendously High. There's a report called the "Technical and operational characteristics and applications of the point-to-point fixed service applications operating in the frequency band 275-450 GHz". It introduces the term "THF which stands for tremendously high frequency" but adds the disclaimer that "this terminology is used only within this Report." Seems that there are plenty of documents on the ITU website using that same definition, so I'm guessing that the cat is out of the bag. THF by the way is defined as being for 300 to 3000 GHz frequencies. By the way, the ITU TLA finder exposes that THF stands for Topology Hiding Function. Where's a good acronym when you need it? Speaking of definitions, I came across the definition of a "taboo channel" which according to the ITU is "A channel which coincides with the frequency of the local oscillator in the single super heterodyne receiver which is tuned to an analogue channel." Anyway, we still have a way to go. Below band four, less than 3 kHz, we have ULF or Ultra Low Frequency, SLF, Super Low Frequency and ELF, Extremely Low Frequency, which is defined as band one, between 3 and 30 Hz. Below that, some have suggested TLF, or Tremendously Low Frequency which apparently goes between 1 and 3 Hz with a wavelength between 300,000 down to 100,000 km. Others have suggested that this is an internet meme, but so far it seems to me that it has just as much legitimacy as any of the other wordings, since it appears that the ITU explicitly excludes such definitions, even if internal documents introduce terms from time to time. It did make me wonder, what comes after Tremendously High Frequencies, Red? Turns out, yes, well, infra-red pretty much follows on from Tremendously High Frequencies. If you think that's the end of it, think again. The IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has its own definitions, of course it does. Unfortunately they decided that you need to pay for their standard. It was first issued in 1976 "to remove the confusion". There's an xkcd comic called "Standards", number 927 if you're looking. It goes like this: Situation: There are 14 competing standards. 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Yeah! Soon: Situation: There are 15 competing standards. Anyway,

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week I went outside. I know, it was a shock to me too. The purpose of this adventure was to test an antenna that has been sitting in my garage for nearly a year. Together with a friend we researched our options and at the end of the process the Hustler 6BTV was the answer to our question. Before the commercial interest police come out of the woodwork, I'll point out that I'm not providing a review, good or bad, of this antenna, it was the antenna I purchased and went to test. Between the two of us we have three of these antennas. I have the idea to use one as a portable station antenna and another as my base station antenna. Glynn VK6PAW intends to use his as a base station antenna. To set the scene. The antennas came in quite large boxes, just over six bananas long, or more than 180 cm. When they arrived I opened my boxes and checked their content, then sealed it all up and put the boxes on a shelf. Last week Glynn proposed that we set one up and see what we could learn from the experience. You know that I love a good spreadsheet, so planning went into overdrive, well, I put together a list of the things we'd need, starting with the antenna and ending with sunscreen to protect my pasty skin from the fusion experiment in the sky. In between were things like an antenna analyser, spare batteries, tools, imperial, since apparently there are still parts of the world that haven't gone beyond barley measurements. I jest, they authorised the use of the metric system in 1866. My list also included a magnetic bowl to capture loose nuts and washers, you get the idea, anything you might need to test an antenna in the field. Our setup was on a rural property where we had lovely shady trees and oodles of space to extend out a 25m radial mat. We tested many different set-ups. I won't go through them all, but to give you an idea of scale, in the time we were there, we recorded forty different antenna frequency scans. The 6BTV antenna is suitable for 80m, 40m, 30m, 20m, 15m and 10m. We tested with and without radials, raised and on the ground and several other installations. We learnt several useful things. For starters, sitting on the ground with radials the antenna measurements line up pretty well with the specifications and with a suitable base mount to protect the plastic base the portable station antenna is usable out of the box. Any variation on this will result in change, sometimes subtle, sometimes less so. For example, we came up with one installation where the SWR never dropped below 3:1. That's with the antenna on the ground without any radials in case you're wondering. Other things we learnt were that manually scanning each band is painful. When we do this again we'll have to come up with a better way of measuring. The aim for my base antenna is to install it on my roof, bolted to a clamp on the side of my metal pergola. This means that we're going to have to do some serious tuning to make this work for us. It might turn out that we'll start with installing the antenna at Glynn's QTH first, but we haven't yet made that decision. Other things I learnt are that I had actually put together the base clamp when I checked the boxes a year ago, so that was a bonus. The magnetic bowl saved our hides once when a spring washer fell into the lawn. The hose-clamps that come with the antenna require a spanner, but there are thumb screw variations of those that I'll likely use for my portable setup. Other things we need to do is learn exactly how the traps work and how adjusting them affects things. In case you're unfamiliar with the concept of a trap, think of it as a radio signal switch that lets signals below a certain resonant frequency pass and blocks signals above that frequency. In other words, a 10m trap resonates just below 28 MHz. It lets frequencies below 28 MHz pass, but blocks those above it, essentially reducing the length of the antenna to the point where the trap is installed. One test we did was to only use the base and the 10m trap. We discovered that this doesn't really work and that the metal above the trap, as-in the rest of the antenna, isn't just for show, even though it's on the blocked side of the 10m trap. Given that I intend to use my base antenna as my main WSPR transmission point, I need to adjust things so the antenna works best on WSPR frequencies. I intend to use a tuner for when I want to work outside those frequencies. One unexpected lesson was that the awning that Glynn attached to his vehicle was an absolutely essential item. I don't think I'll ever go portable again without one. Life changing would be an understatement. I'm investigating if I can fit one to my vehicle. Having had some health issues over the past months I was anxious about going outside and being somewhat active. I paced myself, protected my back, took regular breaks, sat down a lot, drank litres of water and slept like a baby that night. No ill effects, very happy. As a bonus, I even tran

Foundations of Amateur Radio The world is filled with antennas. You'll find them on towers, buildings, cars and on your next door neighbour's roof. They come in an astonishing variety, to the point where you might start thinking that antennas are a fashion accessory that vary with the season and if you start digging through the history books you'll come across designs that dial that variety up to eleven. Possibly the most visible antenna today is the television antenna and when you start noticing them, the more variation you'll discover. Their basic shape consists of a vertical pole, the mast, with a horizontal pole, the boom. Attached to the boom are various different shapes, or elements, that often vary in length according to some pattern. The shape is designed to collect as much electromagnetic radiation from a particular direction, or in the case of a transmitter, focus as much energy as possible into one direction. This focus is called gain. The more focus, the more gain. One of the oldest designs for this kind of antenna, still in use today, is the Yagi-Uda or Yagi antenna. It was invented in 1923 by Shintaro Uda at the Tohoku Imperial University in Japan and popularised to the English speaking world by his boss Hidetsugu Yagi who claimed to be the sole inventor in his Japanese patent application. He went on to file similar patents in Germany and the United States. Gain for a Yagi varies depending on design. Generally more elements means more gain. Sometimes you'll see a Yagi with weird shorter elements along the boom. This is a design to make the antenna work across multiple frequencies. Another way that this can be achieved is by adding traps along an element. They look like a thick stubby tube at some distance along an element. You can have more than one of these to allow for more frequencies. These improvements allow for several Yagi antennas to share elements and boom space, essentially combining several independent antennas into one. It can be tricky to discover in which direction a Yagi is pointing, but essentially the boom indicates the direction and the end with the shortest element is the front. There's another type of antenna that to the casual observer looks similar. It's called a log periodic dipole array, LPDA or log periodic antenna. It was invented in 1952 by John Dunlavy whilst he was contracted to the United States Air Force. He wasn't credited because it was classified as "Secret", later changed to "Restricted". In 1958 Dwight Isbell built a log periodic antenna as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was part of a larger team that included Raymond DuHamel, John Dyson and Robert Carrell. Later Paul Mayes developed a variant that improved performance. Before I dig in, I'll also note that this antenna caused all manner of legal issues that are still in force today. The so-called Blonder-Tongue Doctrine states that a patent holder isn't permitted to re-litigate the validity of a patent that has been held invalid previously. It was a result of the University attempting and ultimately failing to protect its patent for the widely copied antenna design. Reading about this is a fascinating discovery in how a single Judge can make a massive impact on law and society. The log periodic antenna is designed in a way that to the uninitiated looks very similar to a Yagi antenna. It's based on the idea that you can design an antenna made up from independent dipoles that are spaced in such a way that they form an antenna where each dipole radiates to take advantage of its neighbours. Generally a log periodic antenna looks like a triangle. Often the elements are on two separate booms, alternating side-to-side, or you'll see a zig-zag structure that causes the antenna signal to alternate side-to-side. One characteristic of an antenna is called bandwidth. It's a measure of how many frequencies it can operate on within the constraints of the antenna. The wider the bandwidth, the more frequencies you can use with the same antenna. A Yagi antenna typically operates within about four percent of the design frequency. If you combine multiple Yagis by adding traps or different length elements, you'll end up with several frequencies, each with a similar range. A log periodic antenna on the other hand is designed to be used across a large range of frequencies. In shortwave broadcasting there are log periodic antennas that operate between 6 and 26 MHz. In more common use today you'll find log periodic antennas used for higher frequencies. It's not unusual to find log periodic antennas that operate between 400 and 4000 MHz. For even more confusion, you can share the boom of a log periodic antenna with a Yagi antenna as is popular in fringe television reception areas. Some other things to note are that for a Yagi most of the elements are passive and only one is generally a driven element, in a log periodic antenna all elements are driven. For a Yagi antenna, more elements

Foundations of Amateur Radio A is for Antenna, the eyes and ears of any amateur station. You'll spend eighty percent of your life attempting to get twenty percent improvement for any antenna you'll ever use. B is for Balun, bringing together the balanced and unbalanced parts of your antenna system. C is for Coax, the versatile conductor that snakes into your station, one roll at a time. D is for Dipole, the standard against which all antennas are measured, simple to make, simple to use and often first in the many antenna experiments you'll embark on in your amateur journey. E is for Electron, source of all things RF, the beginning, middle and end of electromagnetism, the reason you are an amateur. F is for Frequency, the higher you go, the faster it happens. G is for Gain, measured against a baseline, you'll throw increasing amounts of effort at getting more, one decibel at a time. H is for Hertz, Heinrich to his mother, the first person to transmit and receive controlled radio waves in November of 1886 proving that James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism was correct. I is for Ionosphere, the complex and ever changing layers that surround Earth which led radio amateurs to discover HF propagation in 1923. J is for JOTA, the Jamboree On The Air where radio amateurs, guides and scouts come together on the third full weekend of October to share global communications. K is for Kerchunk, the sound caused by the local repeater that brings a smile to the operator and a grimace to the listener, created by pushing the talk button and not saying anything. L is for Logging, the only way you'll ever remember who you spoke to and when and the perfect excuse for bragging to your friends after you managed to collect contacts all over the globe. M is for Modulation, adding information to a radio signal by varying the amplitude, frequency, or phase. N is for Net, a social excuse for getting on air and making noise with your friends. O is for Oscillator, making repeating currents or voltages by non-mechanical means. P is for Prefix, the beginning part of an amateur callsign that identifies your country or region of origin. Q is for QRP, the best way to make just enough noise to make yourself heard, low power is the way to go! R is for Resonance, the point where a circuit responds strongly to a particular frequency and less to others, used every time you tune a radio or an antenna or both. S is for Shack, the space you call home, where you live your radio dream. The size of the corner of the kitchen table, the back-seat of your car or a purpose built structure with never enough space, no matter how much you try. T is for Transceiver, a single box that contains both a transmitter and receiver that share a common circuit. U is for UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, the only time zone that radio amateurs should use for any activity that goes beyond their suburb. V is for VFO, the Variable Frequency Oscillator that provides radio amateurs with frequency agility, the means to listen anywhere, any-time. W is for Waterfall, which displays radio signals across multiple frequencies at the same time. X is for XIT, Transmit Incremental Tuning, changing your transmitter frequency whilst listening on the same frequency, helpful when you're trying to break through a DX pile-up. Y is for Yagi, or Yagi-Uda antenna, the most popular directional antenna invented in 1926 by Shintaro Uda at the Tohoku Imperial University in Japan and popularised to the English speaking world by his boss Hidetsugu Yagi. Z is for Zulu, the last word in the phonetic alphabet that every amateur should know and use. 73 is for best regards. Saying goodbye is hard to do, this says so without fanfare and clears your station from the air. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Getting on air and making noise is a phrase that you've likely heard me repeat often, actually, this will be the 24th time or so. It's an attempt at encouraging you to actually transmit and use the radio spectrum that is available to you. It's a nicer way of saying: Use it or lose it! One of the more frustrating aspects of our hobby is finding other people to interact with. At the beginning of your hobby you have access to all these magic radio frequencies with no idea on how to use them. Often a new amateur will turn on their radio, call CQ a couple of times to see if there's anyone out there, hear nothing and give up. As you get more experience you'll discover that radio frequencies change over time and that some work better at certain times of the day. This is reinforced by others who will talk to you about propagation, the solar cycle and how the ionosphere and its various so-called layers will change and what you can achieve throughout the day, the year and the long term cycle. Armed with all this knowledge you are likely to get to a point where you make noise on a certain band depending on the time of day. For example, experienced amateurs will avoid the 10m band at night because it's a so-called day-time band, in other words, their perception is that you cannot make contact on the 10m band after sunset and for the same reason, it's not suitable for early morning contacts. What if we could test that perception and see if it's true or not? Turns out that we have a perfect dataset to discover what actually happens. If I look at the 10m band WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter data for the past year, a year that had me using a beacon pretty much 24 hours a day, you'd expect that you could see just which times worked and which ones didn't. Turns out that regardless of time of day, my beacon was heard across every hour of the day. Of course the numbers aren't uniform across the day. The peak is at noon local time, the trough is at 5 am local time, 10% of reports are at noon, about 1.5% at 5 am. In other words, the worst time of day for my beacon to be reported is 5 am in the morning and it's not zero. Interestingly the same isn't true for the signal to noise ratio, a measure of just how weak or strong a signal is in comparison to the local noise at the receiver. If you account for differences in transmitter power, meaning that a stronger transmitter is measured in the same way as a weaker one, the 10m band has the best signal to noise ratio at my location at 9 pm local time and the worst at 4 pm local time. Given that I'm only using the 10m band with my beacon I also looked at the local OF78 grid square across all bands. It shows that reports are not directly related to when the average signal to noise is best. It seems to me that people are transmitting when they think it works best, not when it actually works best and I'll mention that the definition of "best" depends on each user. Note that I haven't yet sat down to discover if there are automatic transmitter and receiver pairs that have been reporting 24/7 across a year on the same band to determine if there is more to learn about the relationship between how often something is reported and what the signal report was at the time. I can say that it's likely that your favourite band is more popular when others think it's popular, not when the conditions are better. Consider for example that there are no local reports on the 12m band at 10am, but there are at 9am and 11am, so, was the band magically unusable the whole year at that time, or did people just not use it? The same is true for 160m. No reports at all before 5pm or after 3am, despite the bands around it having contacts throughout the day. I will point out some things I've ignored. For example, what is a useful contact? Is it measured by distance, by quantity, by uniqueness? Is this choice the same for each band? Is it reasonable to compare a whole year, or should it be by some other time period, like month, season or lunar month? What is the signal to noise ratio for a band that's considered closed? I'm mentioning this because each of those will directly affect what it looks like when you create a chart and it's likely to change what works best for you. So, next time you get on air, try a band that shouldn't work according to your knowledge and see what happens. Perhaps you'll get lucky, make a contact and discover something unexpected. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The amateur community is nothing if not entertaining. Look at any discussion about a mode like FT8 and you'll discover people who describe it as the dehumanising end of the hobby. In the same thread you'll find an amateur who's been licensed longer than I have been alive who welcomes it using words like revitalising, more active, and the like. If you're not familiar, FT8 is one of many weak signal digital modes that gained popularity over the past years during the most recent solar minimum when long distance HF propagation was challenging. That example discussion was about the visible end of a mode like FT8, but there's an often overlooked all but invisible aspect of these modes that is much more significant, namely the popularisation of signal processing in software. In many ways amateur radio is more about receiving than transmitting. This might not be obvious, but what's the point of transmitting if you cannot receive? Using software to do the listening makes for an interesting evolution that might be hard to grasp if I start digging into the fundamental algorithms that make this happen, instead let me describe a process that is easier to explain. Imagine that there's a piece of software that knows how to decode digital signals. As the user of that decoding software, or decoder, you send audio into one end and callsigns and grid-squares come out the other end. How it does this isn't important right now. We measure the quality of this decoder by how many times it correctly does this, in other words, how many times a correct callsign and grid-square comes out. The decoder can be improved by changing the way that the decoding process works. If the number of correct callsign and grid-squares that come out increases, the quality of the decoder is improved. Now imagine that the decoder spits out the callsign 7N5EC with the grid-square OF78. This particular combination emerged as a WSPR decode on the 10th of December 2022. It was reported by AA7NM as a 100 Watt signal, 14,882 km away on the 40m band. The signal report was -30 dB. If you know where OF78 is, you'll immediately spot a potential problem, if not, I'll help you out, OF78 is located near Perth in Western Australia. It's unlikely that a transmitted callsign in that part of the world starts with anything other than VK6. Mind you, a weather balloon with an odd callsign could theoretically be overhead in that location, but I've not yet heard of a 100 Watt transmitter on 7 MHz that someone hung from a weather balloon. Another problem is that 7N5EC is a callsign that appears to be Japanese. It starts with 7N which is part of the Japanese callsign block, but the next symbol is the number 5 and at least according to the research I was able to do is not actually a currently valid callsign. The prefix 7N4 is allocated to the Kanto region on Honshu island, the largest island in Japan. 7N5 doesn't seem to be valid as a prefix. Ironically, that callsign will now exist on the Internet as soon as this article is published, but that's a whole other problem. Either way, the chances of the combination of the callsign 7N5EC with the grid-square OF78 is unlikely to be correct. It gets even less likely if you consider that the callsign was reported only once in fifteen years and over 500 million WSPR decodes, I checked. That means that if you updated the software to ignore that particular decode, you'd have improved the decoder by removing an incorrect combination. You could keep doing this by checking callsigns against grid-squares and against allocated callsigns and you'd have made a higher quality decoder. Before you start arguing that this isn't fair, it's exactly the same process as the super check partial list does for people operating in a contest. The idea being that if you only recognise known contesting callsigns, you've got a better chance of making contact. Think of it as a way of filtering out potentially incorrect callsigns. It still leaves the operator having the option to ignore the suggested callsigns and listen to what's actually coming in. I realise that this is not how you would realistically improve a digital signal processing decoder, but it's an example of how changing the software can change the quality of a decoder and that was the point of this example. In reality you'd attempt to discover how this decode happened and what caused it to be wrong. If you want to consider a more signal centric example, consider a decoder that starts with a first attempt at making a decode. With a single decode, it can then remove that known signal from the original audio and start another decoding cycle. You can repeat this as many times as you want until you end up with gibberish. Essentially this is an example of how a modern decoder can improve its performance. This is why signal processing in software is so powerful and important and why FT8 and the rest of the digital firmament are here to stay. I should point out for those wonderin

Foundations of Amateur Radio Sometimes you learn mind boggling things about this hobby, often when you least expect it. Recently I discussed having my 20 mW WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon heard on the other side of the planet, in Denmark, 13,612 km away. That in and of itself is pretty spectacular, but it gets better if you consider just how weak the signal was by the time it got there. In radio communications there is a concept called path loss or path attenuation. Until recently I understood this to mean the things that impede a signal getting from transmitter to receiver. That includes coax and connector losses, refraction across the ionosphere, reflection off the surface of the planet and diffraction around objects. It turns out there is another factor called "Free Space Path Loss" to consider. It's loosely defined as the loss of signal strength between two antennas. The name sort of implies that something happens to the signal in free space, which is odd if you know that in space, radio waves, regardless of frequency, travel without loss and will travel pretty much indefinitely. So what's going on? To get started, think about a dome lawn sprinkler, one of those little round discs that sits on the ground with the hose connected to the side. You turn on the tap and the water sprays in all directions. If you're really close to the sprinkler when the tap is turned on you'll get sopping wet almost immediately, since most of the water will hit you directly. This is particularly fun in the heat of summer on New Years Day in Australia, not so much in the middle of winter on the other side of the globe. If you stand a couple of meters away, you'll still get wet, eventually, but it will take much longer, because most of the water isn't hitting you. If you stand even further away and assuming the water still gets that far, it will take even longer. A small towel and a big towel will both take the same length of time to get wet if they're held at the same distance from the sprinkler, but if you wring them both out, you'll discover that the big towel captured much more water during the same time. In radio communications we can combine these two ideas, the distance and the size of the receiver, to describe free space path loss. The further away from the transmitter you are, the less signal is available to you to capture since much of the signal is not heading in your direction and the bigger your antenna, the more signal you receive. The bigger the antenna, the lower the frequency, which is why you'll discover that free space path loss is dependent on both distance and frequency. To give you an idea of scale, the free space path loss for 28 MHz over 13000 km is about 144 dB. While the name "Free Space Path Loss" implies loss of signal across the path in free space, the loss is not due to distance as such, rather it's caused by how much the signal is spread out in space. Similarly, there isn't more loss because the frequency is increased, it's that less signal is captured by the smaller size or aperture of the antenna required for a higher frequency. So perhaps a better name might be Spherical and Aperture Loss, but then everyone would have to learn how to spell that, so "Free Space Path Loss" it is. I'll point out that this is the minimum theoretical loss, in reality the loss is higher than this, since it also includes all the other parts of the path loss which are things that we can control, like coax and connector loss, and things we can improve by frequency selection, like ionospheric reflection and refraction which depend on solar conditions. The one aspect of path loss that we have no control over is the "Free Space Path Loss", so perhaps that's why we don't talk about it very much. I'll mention that in path loss calculations often antenna gain at the transmitter and receiver are used to reduce any path loss figures. If I have an antenna with 6 dB gain, then that reduces my overall path loss by 6 dB, which is why we spend so much time and effort figuring out what antenna to use when we get on air to make noise. I mentioned that the free space path loss for my beacon between Australia and Denmark was about 144 dB. This means that my 20 milliwatt signal arrived in Denmark as a -131 dBm signal. That might not mean much, but that's the equivalent of about 80 attowatts. If you're not sure how big that is, 1 milliwatt is 1 quadrillion attowatts, a 1 with 15 zeros. Said another way, 1 watt is 1000 milliwatts, 1 milliwatt is 1000 microwatts. 1 microwatt is 1000 nanowatts, 1 nanowatt is 1000 picowatts, 1 picowatt is 1000 femtowatts, 1 femtowatt is 1000 attowatts. It might come as a surprise, but these numbers are not unusual. Don't believe me? When your radio shows an S0 signal on HF, it is defined as -127 dBm, so we deal with tiny numbers like this all the time, we're just not quite aware of it on a daily basis. Remember, my numbers are theoretical only, to give you an idea of scale. In reality everyth

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've ever been in the market for a new radio, and truth be told, who isn't, you'll find yourself faced with a bewildering array of options varying from obvious to obscure and everything in between. At the obvious end of the scale are things like price, bands and transmit power and at the other end are things like Narrow Spaced Dynamic Range, which you'll find explained by Rob NC0B on his sherweng.com website where he's been publishing receiver test data for many decades. One of the more subtle options you'll need to consider are handheld, mobile or base radio. This is harder than you might think, since radios are increasing in functionality every time you wake up and if you look long enough, you'll discover that they're getting smaller at the same rate. Once upon a time you could just look at the size of a radio and define it as belonging in one or other category, but that's no longer a useful distinction. For example, my PlutoSDR is a tiny device, fits in my pocket, but there's no way I'd consider it a handheld, or even a mobile radio. You might think that a bigger box has more stuff inside, costs more and performs better. For example, the Drake R-4C receiver and companion T-4XC transmitter require external power and were once rated by the ARRL as very good. In reality the Drake R-4C performed terribly in a CW contest, incidentally, that was what caused Rob to start testing radios in 1976. That receiver and transmitter manage to cover 80m, 40m, 20m, 15m and 10m and together weigh in at 14.3 kg. They're considered a base radio. The Yaesu FT-817, runs on batteries, weighs in at just over a kilogram and can be carried with a shoulder strap. It comes as a single device and covers many more bands than the Drake transmitter and receiver do, it would be considered a mobile or even portable radio. Obviously it would be hard to jam a Drake into your car or strap it to your belt, but does that mean that you cannot use an FT-817 as the base radio in your shack? In case you're curious, the slightly beefier brother to the FT-817, the mobile FT-857d, is sitting on my desk as my current base radio. Has been for years. So why do manufacturers continue to make this distinction between handheld, mobile and base radio? One look at the nearest radio catalogue will tell you that it's not based on either performance or price, not even close. You can buy a handheld with more functionality for the same price as a mobile radio and that same is true when you compare a mobile radio to a base radio. Radios vary in price from $20 to $20,000. A cynical person would suggest that pricing is based around extracting the most money from your pocket, but a more charitable explanation might be that physical size dictates things like the number of buttons you can fit on a radio, how many connectors can be accessed before the radio flies off the desk from the weight of the coax hanging off the box, how big is the display and other such limitations. I'm not being glib when I use the word charitable, since much of modern transceiver design revolves around software which can pretty much fit in any box. Using external computers, neither buttons nor a display are needed, leaving external connectors, which if we're being really honest could all fit in a box that would fit in your pocket. At this point you might wonder if handheld, mobile or base has any meaning at all. As I said, in most cases it doesn't. There's really only one place left where this matters, and that's when you have access to strictly limited space and power if you need to put the radio in your pocket or cram it into your car. For your home shack, the distinction is unhelpful for most, if not all, amateurs. Don't believe me? The Yaesu FT-710 currently ranks fourth on Rob's Sherwood Engineering Receiver Test Data List. It's a quarter the size of the top radio and it's sold as a "Base/Portable Transceiver". Yaesu calls it "Compact". It might not fit in the dashboard of my car, but it will fit on the folding table we use during field days. That isn't an exception either. The Elecraft KX3 is the smallest radio on the first page of Rob's Receiver Test Data list. It fits in your pocket. Before you start collecting statistics for each radio, I should point out that the more you know about this hobby, the harder this process becomes, so be careful. That said, if you have a massive list of anything to choose from, a new amateur radio, pet food, car, what to have for dinner, whatever, here's a process that will guarantee a result. It works by eliminating one item at a time until you're left with your preference. To start, grab the first two items on your list and pick the best one between the two. Ignore everything else, just those two items. You're going to fret about the definition of "best", but don't worry, since every time you do this, you'll have a different idea. All you're doing is saying, all things being equal, between these two options, which one d

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's an immersive effort to create an article every week, so much so, that I've only just discovered that I passed the 600 article mark some time ago. I'd open up a bottle of something celebratory if I thought it warranted the effort, but I'd rather talk about amateur radio and what I've learnt since becoming licensed in December of 2010. This hobby, this community, the activity of amateur radio keeps surprising me in unexpected and exciting ways. I know that there is a part of the community that thinks of this as a dying hobby, but with every fibre in my being I know this to be wrong. We explore, test, build and learn at every opportunity. Put any two amateurs in contact with each other, either physically or over the air and you'll soon witness an exchange of ideas, of things that bring joy, hints of the next thing and the next. The inspiration for my writing comes from all manner of places. For example, here's an opinion recently shared by someone on social media: "Basic antenna modeling using software should be included in ham radio licensing exam syllabus if it's not currently." [sic] As opinions go it's one of the tamer ones I've come across, but it's not unique in any sense of the word. I've heard it described bemoaning the missing knowledge of new digital modes or the need to upgrade my license, or the idea that the introductory license should come with a fixed expiry date. You might have heard similar ones, phrased along the lines of a missing attribute that new licensees should be required to learn or know about before they can call themselves amateurs. It's also completely unhelpful. Let me explain why. I'll start with an analogy. When was the last time your driver's license expired because you didn't upgrade it due to new road rules, new vehicle types, new car accessories or speed limits? In case you're confused, the answer is: never. Does amateur radio cause death and mayhem in the community? No. Do cars? So, in the scheme of things, even if amateur radio can be used to help save lives, it's not an activity that's generally considered life threatening. You could argue that radio amateurs could cause life threatening interference, and technically they can. So can any user of any piece of radio equipment, CB radio, mobile phone, Wi-Fi, you name it. Even a half asleep electronics student in their first year of high-school could do this. The skill isn't specific to radio amateurs. So, what is this about, the requirement for antenna modelling, or some other missing skill, and why does our community keep getting flooded with such, frankly, nonsense? In my opinion, it's the same phenomenon that laments the loss of Morse code, the fact that we lost the 11m band, that we're playing with FT8 instead of AM, that we prefer integrated circuits to valves. The world is a flowing feast and amateur radio is along for the ride. Stand still and the world moves on. Should amateur radio licensing change? Absolutely! It should move with the times. It should lower the barrier to entry at every opportunity. It should explore the possible, not the requirements of a select group of people who decry the dumbing down of the hobby and want to pre-load every license exam with things that are absolutely irrelevant to the turning on of a radio and making noise. Will amateurs benefit from knowing that antenna modelling software exists? Sure they will. Just like they'll benefit from knowing about valves and Morse code. That doesn't mean that they should be part of the exam process. I want new amateurs, no, all amateurs to be curious, to ask, to discover, to explore and to want to know stuff, not because it's a requirement to get a license, but because it's beneficial to their amateur journey. Every week I come up with a different way to look at our hobby because this hobby is so divers. I've used the phrase a 1000 hobbies in one. So far I've just scratched the surface, some 600 weeks in. We'll see where we're at when I've held my license for another decade or so. So, have at it. What is missing from the current exam and why should it be included? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the many questions that new amateurs ask is, "When should I get on-air, and on what band?" The often-heard reply is just to get on-air and make some noise. As time goes by, the importance of this seems to fade in favour of using HF prediction tools. Some amateurs never venture beyond that point, relying almost exclusively on technology to determine if they should turn on their radio or not. If you search the internet for "current HF conditions", you'll end up with dozens of sites boldly claiming to provide precisely that information, some even using the label "Real-Time". You'll find instructions from countless self-proclaimed "experts" on how to read propagation conditions from their favourite site. There's even widgets that you can install on your website displaying propagation data per amateur band with helpful labels like "Band Closed" or showing conditions as "Poor", "Fair" or "Good". Some of these widgets even include an embedded time-stamp to prove just how "current" the information is. If that's how you decide to activate your amateur station, like I once did, I have some questions. Where is this information coming from, is it accurate, and when was it last updated? To give you an idea of just how complex this question is, consider visiting two popular websites, solarham.net from Canada and spaceweatherlive.com from Belgium. On their home-pages, you'll find all manner of numbers, charts, photos, events, notifications, alerts, and warnings, each related in some way to HF propagation and the condition of the Sun. Sounds great, excellent resources, job done. Well, no. Let's start simple. Location. Leaving aside where the site's owner is or where the servers are, both potential sources of confusion, consider where you are and where the remote station is that you're trying to contact. Now compare that with the propagation data location. Do you know where the measurements came from and if they're relevant to you? What about data currency? For example, if you can see the Sun, you can count the number of sunspots since that data comes from physically looking at the Sun. Mind you, can someone count the number of sunspots at night? It's not a trick question. The Sun isn't overhead for everyone all the time, and the data from any particular observer will be out of date at night. When was the count updated? Is it still actually current, let alone real-time? Obviously, not everyone uses the same data source either. In case you're wondering, why are we counting by eye in the space age? It turns out that, since Galileo more than 400 years ago, it's the most long-term, reliable way to keep data consistent between observers and instruments, both of which often last only one or a few solar cycles, and it's also cheap! What about equipment changes and failures in data gathering? Geomagnetic activity isn't global; it's measured using a device called a flux-gate magnetometer. Measurements from specific instruments scattered around the globe are combined into the planetary, or Kp index. You'll discover that locations used change over time, and when instruments are down, the numbers are estimated, but you won't see that unless you actually find and explore the source data. It's not just solarham.net and spaceweatherlive.com; it's pretty much every single site that shows any form of HF propagation or space weather information. Even sites based in a specific country, like the Australian Space Weather Service, have many instruments scattered around Australia. If you happen to be near an actual instrument, where "near" is anything less than 500 km away, how do you know if that instrument was actually online when a measurement was made? Even if the instrument near you is working, is the data relevant to the receiving station on the other side of the planet? If you look closely at the sites giving out current HF conditions, you'll discover that most of these don't even tell you where the data comes from, let alone if any of it was estimated to come up with their current reported values or recommendations. If you start searching for historical information, this problem gets bigger. You'll find many sites that claim to have data, but are invariably underfunded, are rife with broken links, out-of-date servers, and moved, deleted, and abandoned pages. If you unearth a dataset, you'll discover that everyone uses a different standard to record their measurements. How do you even know if combined measurements are coming from the right column? Think I'm kidding? There are documents with warnings about different formats, calculations, and dates on which these changed. Aggregating this data is challenging, at best. So, is there a better way? Yup. You're not going to like it. "Get on-air and make noise!" I can hear you groaning from here. It's not all bad. You can run your own beacon to see the conditions at your location. It's what started me down the path of installing a WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagati

Foundations of Amateur Radio In 2016, Daniel EA4GPZ, documented how to discover the weakest signal that could be decoded using several weak signal modes, including WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter. This is an interesting question because as you might recall, I've been experimenting with very weak signals coming from my shack. To date, my 20 milliwatts has been heard over 13 thousand kilometres away. When you tune to a weak station you'll often hear both the station or desired signal as well as interference or background noise. The stronger the signal, the less noise you perceive. The weaker the signal, the more noise. You can express the relationship between the power of these two, the signal and the noise, as a ratio. If the power levels are the same, the so-called signal to noise ratio or SNR is 1:1. A higher ratio, like 2:1, indicates that the power of the signal is higher than the noise and a lower ratio, like 1:2 indicates that the signal is lower than the noise. If you express this ratio in decibels, you'll end up with positive numbers where the signal is stronger than the noise and negative numbers where the signal is weaker than the noise and zero when they're the same. If I tell you that the signal report for my WSPR decode from Denmark was -28 dB, it means that the noise was much stronger than the signal. For today I'm going to leave alone just how WSPR can report a negative signal to noise ratio and still successfully decode the signal, even though the signal appears to be buried in the noise. That said, in this experiment, we're trying to learn something else. Using the technique detailed by Daniel, we test using different, known, signal to noise ratios to discover at what point the WSPR decoding process breaks down. This might help me understand if I can reduce my beacon output power even further and still anticipate a good chance of being decoded successfully. To conduct his experiment, Daniel used the then current version of WSJT-X, version 1.7.0-rc1 and I'm using the current version today, 2.6.0-rc5 to repeat those tests. You might ask why I'm not taking Daniel's word for it and just using his findings. The process to decode a WSPR signal is all software and can be improved with better methodologies and algorithms. It's not unreasonable to think that in the years since Daniel's experiments things have changed, hopefully improved. So, how does this work? If you generate and attempt to decode one hundred different files, you can use the number of times that you count your callsign in the decode list as a percentage of success. If all of your files decode properly, the decode percentage is 100%. If only half of them are decoded successfully, it's 50% and so-on. Similarly, if a different callsign, locator or signal power is decoded, you can count those as a percentage of false decodes. This is important because noise coming from the ionosphere can corrupt any signal. I should point out that because we know in advance what the decoded signal should be, since we created the message, we can actually count the ones that don't match what we sent. In the real world it's very hard, if not impossible, to do this, unless each transmitter also starts recording their efforts so data cleaning can be done after the fact. A false decode happens when the software decodes a message and the result is not what was sent. Due to the way that WSPR works, this is not a case of a single character error and as a result the whole message is corrupt, wrong callsign, wrong grid square and wrong power level. Just how prevalent this issue is, has to my knowledge so far not been discussed. Over the past year I've been working with the entire WSPR data set, nearly 5 billion reports, and mapping the data to explore just what's going on behind the scenes. Based on the raw data every single grid square on the planet has been activated. Of course this is not really the case, since there's plenty of parts on Earth where we haven't yet turned on a WSPR beacon. Back to our experiment. Two tools are used, "wsprsim" to generate an audio file and "wsprd" to decode it. Both come with WSJT-X and when you build the application from source, you get them as part of the process. The generator takes several parameters, one of which is the desired signal to noise ratio. If you ask it for a signal to noise ratio of -20 dB, wsprsim will generate the appropriate noise and the desired signal, combine them and build an audio file. You can then use wsprd to decode that file. If you repeat this many times, you end up with some data. How many times? Well, I probably went a little overboard. I generated a set for each SNR reading between 0 and minus 50 dB in 0.01 dB increments and then generated one hundred for each of those. At the point where the process broke down I doubled the resolution further to get a better idea of what was going on. About three quarters of a million tests. It took a while. What did I learn from this? First of all, fal

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever asked yourself a question that turned out to be a rabbit hole so deep you could spend a lifetime exploring and likely never come out the other end? I did. Yesterday. What's a Volt? This came about when I started exploring how to measure the power output of my WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon. According to the specifications the output level is 23 dBm or 200 milliwatts. If you read the fine print, you'll discover that the power output actually varies a little depending on which band you're on, for my specific transmitter it says that the output on the 10m band is 22 dBm, or 158 mW. That comes with a disclaimer, that there can be some variation on individual transmitters of about 1 dB. So, on 10m, my output could vary between 21 and 23 dBm, or between 125 and 200 mW. With my attenuator connected, the output could be between 12 and 20 mW, and that's assuming that my attenuator is exactly 10 dB, it's not. Measuring anything means to compare it against something else. To give you a physical example. If you look at a tape measure, the distance between the marks is determined in the factory. The machine that prints the lines is configured to make the lines just so. In the factory there will be a specific master tool that determines how far apart the lines are in that factory. That tool is called "the standard". The process of lining up the standard with the machine making the lines is called "calibration". If you build a house on your own with just that tape measure, everything should work out fine, but if you have a mate help you and they bring their own tape measure, from a different factory, their lines might not quite match yours and the fun begins. If you don't believe me, as I've said previously, pull out all the tape measures and rulers around your house and see just how much variation there is. In my house, well, my CNC, there's a standard that came with my micrometer kit. It specifies physically how long 25mm is. I also have a 50mm and a 75mm standard. When I compare the 75mm with the 50mm and 25mm together, they're the same within one hundredth of a millimetre. It's likely that it's better than that, but I'm still learning how to hold a micrometer and not have it overheat and stretch while I'm measuring. Yes, temperature changes the size of things. The point is, in my CNC world, my current standard sits in my micrometer box. At some time in the future I might want to improve on that, but for now it's fine. The standard that I have was at some point calibrated against another standard. That standard was in turn calibrated against another standard and so-on. Eventually you end up with an SI unit of 1 meter as defined by the International System of Units. In case you're wondering, it's defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during the time interval of one second. One second is defined in terms of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom. I know right, runs right off the tongue. I can't help myself, that frequency is 9,192,631,770 Hz. Oh, this system is also subject to change. In 2019 four of the seven SI base units were redefined in terms of natural physical constants, rather than relying on a human artefact like the standard kilogram. This is an ongoing process. For example, in 1960, the meter was redefined as a certain number of wavelengths instead of a physical bar in a vault in Paris and there was also not just one bar, there were 30. National Prototype Metre Bar no. 27 made in 1889 was given to the United States and served as the standard for defining all units of lengths in the US between 1893 and 1960 - yes, perhaps surprisingly, the USA is metric, really. One inch used to be defined as "three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end lengthwise" but since 1959 is defined as exactly 2.54 centimetres or 0.0254 meters. Back to power output on my beacon transmitter. Assuming for a moment that I had an actual tool available to measure this, I'd still be comparing my tool against another standard. Let's imagine that I could measure the power output of my beacon with an oscilloscope. When the oscilloscope says 1 Volt per division. How do I know that it really is? If you start reading the calibration steps, you'll discover that they state that you need to connect your scope to a reference, another word for standard, and that's if you're lucky. Some documents just wave their hands in the air and say something like "push the auto calibrate button". The Volt is defined as the electric potential between two points of a conducting wire when an electric current of one Ampere dissipates one Watt of power between those points. The Ampere definition involves counting elementary charges moving in a second. It's in the order of a 10 with 19 zeros. Not to mention that there's also a definition of how much an elementary charge is. You get the point, this is a rabbit hole. So, now let's pr

Foundations of Amateur Radio Propagation, the art of getting a radio signal from one side of the globe to the other, is a funny thing. As you might know, I've been experimenting with WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter and for about a year running a beacon on 10m. Out of the box my beacon uses 200 mW to make itself heard. I couldn't leave well enough alone and I reduced the output power. Currently a 10 dB attenuator is connected to the beacon, reducing output to a notional 20 mW. I say notional, since I haven't actually measured it, yet. With so little power going out to my vertical antenna, a homebrew 40m helical whip, built by Walter VK6BCP (SK), and tuned to 10m with an SG-237, it's interesting to discover what's possible. Last night my signal was heard in Denmark. Picked up by Jorgen OZ7IT, 13,612 km away. That report broke another personal best for me, achieving 680,600 kilometres per Watt. I was stoked! I shared a screen-shot of my report with friends. One friend, Allen VK6XL, asked a very interesting question. "What makes you think it was short path?" Before I go into exploring that question, I need to explain. If I was to fly from Perth to Sydney, the popular way to travel is across the Australian Bight, over Truro, north of Adelaide, clip the northern tip of Victoria, over the Blue Mountains to Sydney. The distance is about 3,284 km. This route is known as the great circle route, more specifically, the short great circle route. It's not the only way to travel. Instead of heading East out of Perth, if I head West, I'd fly out over the Indian Ocean, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas, the Pacific Ocean and finally arrive at Sydney. That journey would also follow a great circle route, the long great circle route. It's about 37,000 km long. You might notice that I wasn't very specific with either the path or distance. There's a reason for that. None of the tools I've found actually provide that information, other than to point out that the entire circumference of the planet is about 40,000 km and that it's not uniform since Earth isn't a perfect sphere. You might be asking yourself at this point why I'm spending so much energy worrying about taking the long way around and how that relates to my 20 mW WSPR beacon. In amateur radio we refer to these two travel directions as the short-path and the long-path. Radio signals travel along the curvature of Earth bouncing between the Ionosphere and the surface. How that works exactly is a whole different topic, but for the moment it's fine to imagine a radio signal skipping like a stone on water. As a stone skips a couple of things happen. If the angle at which it hits the water is just right, it will continue on its journey, get the angle wrong and you hear "plop". Every skip is slightly lower than the previous because the stone is losing a little bit of energy. Every time the stone touches the water it creates a splash that ripples out in a circle from the place where the rock hit. These ripples also get weaker as they increase in diameter. Consider what happens if you skip a rock across concrete or sand instead of water and if you really want to geek out, there's also wind resistance on the rock. A complex equivalent dance affects a radio signal when it propagates between two stations. For success, enough radio energy needs to reach the receiver for it to be decoded. For our signal to make it to the other side of the globe it must bounce between the Ionosphere and Earth's surface. Every bounce gets it closer to the destination. Each time it loses a little bit of energy. This loss happens at the Ionosphere, at the surface and in between through the atmosphere. To give you a sense of scale, my signal report from Jorgen in Denmark was -28 dB. It started here in Perth as 13 dB, so we lost 41 dB along the way. We're talking microwatts here. I'll note that I'm avoiding how this is exactly calculated, mainly because I'm still attempting to understand how a WSPR signal report actually works since it's based on a 2,5 kHz audio signal. As I said, enough energy needs to make it to the receiver for any of this to work. There's an assumption that less distance means less energy loss. It's logical. A shorter distance requires less hops and as each hop represents a specific loss, less hops means less loss. But is that really true? There's nothing stopping my beacon signal from taking a different route. Instead of travelling the short-path, it can just as easily head out in the opposite direction. Theoretically at least, my vertical antenna radiates equally in all directions. The long-path is mostly across water between Perth and Denmark. What if hops across the ocean were different than hops across a landmass? Turns out that they are in several ways. For example, there's less energy loss in a refraction across the ocean, how much less exactly is still being hotly debated. Much of the data is empirical at the moment. It gets better. What if I told you that the re

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the oldest means of electronic messaging is Morse code. Developed by Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse and sent for the first time on the 24th of May 1844, Morse code changed the way we communicate. For nearly a century it was required to become a licensed radio amateur until in 2003, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU left it to the discretion of individual countries to decide if a budding amateur needed to demonstrate their ability to send and receive in Morse. With that decision many thought that the end of Morse code was only a matter of time. They were wrong. Turns out that use and progress of Morse code continues at a surprising rate. Searching for scholarly articles on the subject, you'll discover that it's used, for communication by quadriplegics, for information exchange between IoT or Internet of Things devices, as a way to secure information combining DNA and Morse code, as a method for gesture recognition, as a research tool for psychologists interested in learning methodologies, for training neural nets, for REM sleep research and plenty more. Learning the code is an activity that sparks joy or dread, depending on whom you ask. For me it's been a decade of anticipation with little to show for it. How to learn is a question that prompts as many answers as there are people within earshot and most of those disagree with each other. If you do ask, you'll discover that there are dozens of websites that offer to teach you, podcasts and audio files, bits of paper, buzzers, software and video, images and cheat sheets, the list is endless. You'll also discover two terms, Koch and Farnsworth. Both are intended means of learning. You'll find proponents of both methods wherever you look. You'll also hear from people who learnt the Army way, whatever that means, there's people who were taught not to send before they could properly receive, those who were taught the opposite and everything in between. There's discussion on the topic, heated even, but very little in the way of actual hard data. There's some research. In 1990 the Keller Method from World War 2 was explored. The method involves playing a Morse letter, followed by a gap where the student is expected to write the letter, followed by a voice prompt of the letter. Interesting, were it not for the fact that it looked at nine students and only at their ability to master the alphabet. In 1960, 310 airmen were subjected to 14 tests to determine their ability to learn Morse. No idea what the research outcomes were, since the Journal of Applied Psychology doesn't appear to share their research unless you pay for it. There are reports of actual science behind the Koch method of learning, but I wasn't able to find it, though it's repeated often. It's only with the introduction of computers that actually using this method of learning has become practicable and recently popular. As you might know, I've been attempting to learn Morse code for a while now. I've tried many different things, including Farnsworth, Koch and others. I publish versions of my podcast as Morse code audio only. They're published every week and there are a few people who listen. I also attempted to make stereo audio files with a computer generated voice in one ear and a Morse word in the other, I generated flash cards, I tried learning the code as dits and dahs, but in the end, nothing really worked for me. About a month ago I came across a video on YouTube by Electronic Notes. It contained the Morse alphabet as audio and flashed the letter visually on the screen whilst the audio was playing. There's also a video with numbers and a combination of the two. It gave me the idea for something entirely different to try and in preparing to talk about this, it turns out that there's even research to suggest that I might be on to something. I discovered that in 1994, sixty healthy people were tested to determine if learning Morse code in a rehabilitation setting was best achieved using visual, auditory or a combination of both. The research conclusion was that the combination works best. My idea is a video that shows an individual word whilst Morse code for that word is heard. There's no dits and dahs on the screen, just the word, written in English, and the Morse code for the word. The speed is 25 Words Per Minute, or WPM, and it's played with a side-tone of 600 Hz. Each video is an entire podcast, lasts about 30 minutes, and plays at full speed. I'm already beginning to notice that some words sound like a sound blob in much the same way as when I learnt a new language, so I'm hopeful that this will finally get me on my way. It's early days and the video channel is an experiment, so please comment to share your thoughts on the experience. Who knows, I might have introduced a new way to learn. Now all we need is some research to compare it to other methods, Koch, Keller, Farnsworth and Onno, hi hi. You'll be able to find this article on YouTube too,

Foundations of Amateur Radio Having been able to call myself an amateur for over a decade, it might come as a surprise to you that it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that I thought about attenuators for the first time. They're a curious tool and once you come across them, you'll never be quite the same. Before I dive in you should know that an amplifier is an active tool that makes things bigger and an attenuator is a passive tool that makes things smaller. To look at, attenuators are diminutive to say the least. The ones I have in my kit look like barrel connectors, a male and female connector and seemingly not much else, but looks can be deceiving and I'll mention that shape isn't universal. The purpose of an attenuator is to reduce the power of an RF signal by a known amount, preferably without distortion or any impedance mismatches. When you go out hunting and gathering, your choice of connector is the first obvious selection, but soon after you'll be asked for a frequency range, an impedance, a power level and an attenuation level, so let's take a look. I have some attenuators with N-type and SMA connectors. There's options for every connector under the sun, so consider what you're using with your gear and remember to think about your measuring equipment connectors as well. In my case my shack is pretty much SMA the whole way, but a friend had some broadcast N-type attenuators and I was unable to resist. The next thing is impedance. In my case 50 Ohm, but there's options for other choices like 75 Ohm for TV based attenuators. The purpose of an attenuator is to reduce power. It does so by converting power into heat and more power handling means more heat. Too much heat and the attenuator starts letting out the magic smoke, so consider how much power your RF source is generating. Putting out 5 Watts? Then make sure that you don't connect a 1 Watt attenuator to that radio. Now for the attenuation level. It's described in dB or decibel. At first the numbers look bewildering, but pretty soon you'll be familiar with how it hangs together. A 3 dB attenuator will halve the signal, so a 10 Watt signal will be reduced to 5 Watts and a 200 mW signal will be reduced to 100 mW. If you have a 6 dB attenuator, it will halve again, so 10 Watts becomes 2.5 Watts and 200 mW becomes 50 mW. A 10 dB attenuator is a little more than 9 dB, so you could try something along the lines of a bit more than half again, but you don't need to. 10 dB attenuation is essentially moving the decimal point. A 10 Watt signal with 10 dB attenuation becomes 1 Watt. A 200 mW signal becomes 20 mW. If you have a 20 dB attenuator, it moves the decimal point two places, 10 Watts becomes 0.1 of a Watt, or 100 mW and 200 mW with 20 dB attenuation becomes 2 mW. You can connect two attenuators together and combine their values by adding them together. For example, combining a 10 dB attenuator with a 3 dB attenuator makes for 13 dB attenuation which moves the decimal point and then halves that. All that's fine and dandy, but what's the point? Well, imagine that you want to measure the actual power output of your radio. If you were to pump the minimum power level of my Yaesu FT-857d into a NanoVNA you'd blow it up, but if you added say 20 dB attenuation, that 5 Watt would become 0.05 Watts or 50 mW which is half the power rating of the NanoVNA. If you're not confident that your radio is actually putting out 5 Watts, you could add 30 dB attenuation and have a safe margin at an expected output of 5 mW. I mentioned that attenuators don't all look like an innocent barrel connector. That's because if you have to attenuate something with higher power levels, you'll need a way to dissipate heat, in much the same way as a dummy load has cooling fins, higher power attenuators can come with cooling fins too. On the inside of this contraption is a simple circuit made from three or four resistors which combine to attenuate your signal. If you're inclined to build your own, there are plenty of online calculators to be found that show how to put an attenuator together. One thing I've skipped over is the frequency range. Most of us are having fun with HF, VHF and UHF, generally below 1 GHz, so most attenuators will be fine, but if you are playing at higher frequencies you should take note of the frequency range specified for the attenuator. While on the subject of frequency range. You can easily measure the actual performance of an attenuator using a NanoVNA. Connect Port 1 to Port 2 through your attenuator and using the magnitude trace you can see just how much attenuation it provides. Be sure to set the intended frequency range and calibrate without the attenuator before measuring. Now that I know about attenuation, I cannot imagine a life without, but to be fair, I was in blissful ignorance for more than a decade, so this might not apply to you, yet, but one day perhaps you'll find yourself thinking about adding some attenuation to your tool kit. I'm Onno VK6FLA

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's common knowledge that power, as in output power, makes your signal heard in more places. If you've followed my adventures you'll also know that I'm a firm believer in low power or QRP operation. It all started when I was told that my shiny new amateur license was rubbish because I was only allowed to use 10 Watts. Seemingly the whole community around me shared that opinion and slogans like "life's too short for QRP" are still commonly heard. As a direct result of that sentiment I decided to explore and document just how much I could actually do with my so-called introductory license, the Australian Foundation License. I've now held it for over a decade and I'm still exploring and writing. One of my first acts of rebellion was to lower my radio output power to its minimum setting of 5 Watts and half legal power was sufficient to prove my point. Although I'm still regularly being encouraged to upgrade, my second act of defiance is to keep my Foundation License until I decide that I need more. I'll let you know if it ever happens. One more well known so-called "fact" about our hobby is that if you use low power you'll really only get anywhere on the higher bands, 2m, 70cm and above. There's plenty of reports of amateurs using a low power handheld radio to talk to the International Space Station and my own satellite internet used 1 Watt to get to geostationary orbit. On HF on the other hand, 5 Watts is as low as you really want to go. Making contacts is a struggle and often frustrating, but when you do, bliss! About a year ago I took delivery of a WSPR beacon. It's capable of transmitting on all my accessible HF bands using 200 mW. Given my antenna situation I've configured it to transmit on the 10m band, 24 hours a day, thunderstorms excepted. When making the purchase decision I had no insight into how my beacon would perform. 200 mW is stretching even my love of low power, but I hooked it up and turned it on and waited. It came as quite a surprise that my beacon was heard over 15 thousand kilometres away, not once, not a couple of times, but regularly. When I came up with my November challenge to see if I could improve on that I made an almost throw away comment about reducing power to see if I could still make the distance. A couple of weeks ago I hooked up a 6 dB attenuator to my beacon, reducing the power from 200 down to 50 mW. It came as quite a surprise that my signal made it to the same receiver in the Canary Islands. My kilometre per Watt calculation shot up, quadrupling my previous record. Just imagine, 50 mW making its way over a third of the way around the globe, bouncing between the ionosphere and the planet, just like any other HF signal. At that point I realised I had learnt a few things. You don't need stupid power to make a distant contact on HF either. I started wondering just how little power was needed to get out of the shack. Yesterday I hooked up a 10 dB attenuator and within ten hours my now 20 mW beacon broke my own kilometre per Watt record again and based on the signal to noise numbers from previous contacts, I see no reason for that record to stand for very long. Once that happens I've got plenty more attenuators to play with and I'm not afraid to use them. Now I'm on the hunt for an attenuator that will reduce my main radio output from 5 Watts. I'm told I should aim for double the power rating, but I also have to consider how to connect my antenna coupler which needs 10 Watts to tune, but that's a project for another day When was the last time that you used really low power? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I discussed the concept of a VFO, a Variable Frequency Oscillator. It's an essential building block for our amateur radio community. In describing the idea behind it, while making an error in one of the CB radio frequencies, thanks to Ben VK6NCB for picking that up, I skirted around how a VFO actually works. In reality the VFO is a collective term that describes a whole range of different methods to vary a frequency. Naturally I continued my exploration and discovered a whole range of documentation on the subject. I even started writing about how one common method, a Phase Locked Loop or PLL, works and how a VCO, a Voltage Controlled Oscillator, operates as part of that. I'll come back to those shortly. In doing my reading, since, as is often the case, I use my weekly contribution to the world as a method to learn things. I'll investigate a topic and attempt to describe who came up with it, what it means, how it works and what its place is in the world, the who, where, why and what of it, if you like. I suspect that comes from my very first introduction to broadcast radio where that was one of the very first things I was taught, thirty years or so ago. If you've followed along for the decade I've been at this you'll know that I also intersperse such learning with observations about the things that I'm interested in. This is such an observation, a meta view if you will. I discovered somewhat to my chagrin that the ways that an essential component of our hobby, a system called a Phase Locked Loop, was described in such academic terms, complete with formulas and detailed circuits and even component lists, spread over pages and pages of verbiage, or explained in YouTube videos lasting an hour or more. Of course there were some little gems, ElectronicNotes on YouTube manages to cover the basics in little over six minutes, but that's a rare example. It reminded me of a website that I've been using to fill in the gaps in my understanding of SDR or Software Defined Radio and Digital Signal Processing or DSP. The PySDR.org site is an online textbook written by Dr. Marc Lichtman. He says about his method: "Instead of burying ourselves in equations, an abundance of images and animations are used to help convey the concepts [...]" My weekly efforts have always attempted to do exactly that and I found myself in a place where such a thing didn't appear to exist for the concepts behind the PLL and VCO. My obvious response to that would be to write the missing document and as I said, I have a first draft of it sitting on my computer. There's only one problem. I don't yet "grok" the concepts. If you're unfamiliar with what grokking is, it means to understand intuitively and emphatically. It also means that unless I can describe it in less than a single page of A4 paper I don't understand what I'm saying and you'll get bored waiting for me to make a point. Here's my point. How do you learn concepts? What is it that you do to discover new topics of interest and how do you progress through the various stages between discovery and grokking? For me it's about puzzle pieces. It's always been puzzle pieces. Little nuggets of information, almost trivial on their own, but after a while you get to a point where you have enough of them that you can start joining them together to grasp a more complex concept. Here's a puzzle piece I discovered today. Impedance: The difference between an explosion in air and one under water is impedance. It's little concepts like that which make me get out of bed and discover what's on the horizon next. I'm also learning about double and triple conversion superheterodyne radio which I believe has a one-on-one parallel application in Software Defined Radio and Digital Signal Processing. Once I figure out how to describe it to you, I'll let you know. The point of all this is that learning things is as much about understanding as it is about explaining. Feel free to point me at new and interesting basic concepts. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the many acronyms that define the world of amateur radio is VFO. It stands for Variable Frequency Oscillator. That doesn't explain much if you're not familiar with the purpose of it and just how special this aspect of amateur radio is. Much of the world of radio beyond our hobby, like broadcast television, WiFi and Citizen Band or CB, to name a few, uses radio spectrum in a particular way. On a television you change channels to switch between stations. Similarly, a WiFi network uses specific channels to make your wireless network a reality and the same goes for CB, different channels to make yourself heard. Looking specifically at CB for a moment, if you look at channel 8 for example, depending on which type of equipment you have, your radio might be using 27.055 MHz, or 476.575 MHz, or 476.6 MHz. Each of those frequencies can be described as CB channel 8. The first is on the 27 MHz or 11m band, the second is if you're using a 40 channel radio, which is now depreciated and the third is if you're using an 80 channel radio. If you look at digital broadcast television, channel 8 is on 191.5 MHz. On WiFi, channel 8 is on 2.447 GHz or 5.040 GHz. You get the point, depending on where you are as a user of radio spectrum, channel 8 might mean a whole host of different things and as I've described with CB radio, that might even change over time. Harry Potter needed magic to reach Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at Kings Cross Station to get to school. In a channelised world, getting to an in-between frequency is not possible if you're using licensed equipment, unless you're a radio amateur, then you can use magic to get into the gaps. That magic is called the VFO. You might recall that our radios use many different frequencies internally to be able to filter out specifically what signal you want to hear. Most of those frequencies are fixed, in fact in the vast majority of cases these are actually tuned and calibrated to work in a very specific way. The one exception is the VFO, it's by nature variable. It's likely calibrated, but it's not fixed and that allows our community to tune our equipment to any frequency we desire. The traditional user interface for this is a big knob on the front of your radio, colloquially referred to as the dial, as-in turn the dial to change frequency. This allows us something quite rare in radio land. We can be frequency agile. It means that if there's interference at a specific frequency, we can tweak our VFO and slightly modify where our radio is tuned. You use this almost subconsciously when you're on HF trying to tune to a particular station. In the world of software radio there's likely no knob. You type in a number and the variable frequency oscillator in the radio is tuned to another frequency and the output signal, or transmit signal if you're making noise on-air, changes to another frequency. Digital modes like WSPR, which generally use a very specific frequency also vary that frequency but in a different way. You set your radio to the appropriate so-called dial frequency, let's say 28.1246 MHz on the 10m band and then the software alters the signal by up to 200 Hz to change within the available audio range of your radio, altering between a low of 1400 Hz and a high of 1600 Hz, making the actual WSPR frequency on 10m between 28.1260 and 28.1262 MHz. I'm mentioning the WSPR example because while we're frequency agile in our hobby, we do use channels as well. There's a specific set of frequencies set aside, channels if you like, for WSPR, FT8 and other modes. We do the same on the 2m and 70cm bands where we have rules for where repeaters are allowed to be. It means that we get the best of both worlds. We have the stability and institutional knowledge where repeaters or some modes go, but we also get to play in any spot we want. For example, there's nothing stopping me and a friend setting our radio to some random frequency within our license allocation and outside pre-allocated space and run a WSPR transmitter there. Only the two of us will know about it, well at least at first, but it allows us to experiment away from any other users who might experience interference from our tests and exploration. The VFO is what makes our hobby so very interesting and it's what makes it possible to do weird and wonderful experiments. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio With the ever increasing pace of innovation, well, change, I'll leave alone if it's actual innovation instead of marketing, we see new software released at an almost alarming rate. There is an urge to stay abreast of this process, to update, upgrade and try new solutions as soon as they are presented to you by well meaning friends and colleagues, not to mention online marketing, uh, reviews and other enticements that make you click the button to install something to avert the fear of missing out. If you've done this for a number of years, actually, who am I kidding, a number of weeks, you'll discover that this comes at a cost. One that the corporate world has attempted to address by using terms like Standard Operating Environment, backups, administrator privileges and other such annoying things that prevent users from trying something new and breaking things. At home and in the shack most of that is not a problem. No corporate IT division around to stop you, but soon you'll discover that something you installed caused you grief, encouraged your logging software to stop talking to your radio, prevented you radio from changing frequency, or blocked the latest digital mode from working as intended. I live in that world too, but with the benefit of an IT background I decided nearly a decade and a half ago that enough was enough. I bit the bullet and bought myself a new computer. I vowed to install only one tool on that laptop, a virtualisation environment, also known as a hypervisor. It allows you to run a virtual computer inside a window. Given enough CPU power you can run multiple virtual computers in multiple windows inside your actual physical hardware. This gives you flexibility. You can run a copy of your favourite operating system in a virtual environment, install the latest and greatest software on it and if it breaks, you delete it and start again. In my case I'm running my daily desktop environment where I'm currently writing this as a virtual Linux machine inside my physical computer which is also running several other virtual machines, including some network monitoring tools, a software defined radio development environment, my accounting software and plenty of other things. Each virtual machine is nothing more than a folder on my physical computer and making a full backup is as simple as making a copy of that folder. Better still, if I want to try a new version of something on a machine that I'm already using, I can duplicate the folder, fire up the copy of the virtual machine, install the new software and test it. If it works, great, if not, throw it away and start again. Changing physical computers is also simple. Buy a new computer. Install the hypervisor, copy the machine folders across and start working. From a security perspective, it also means that I can install a random bit of software recommended by a friend without getting worried about it stealing any of my information, given that my private information isn't on the virtual machine on which I'm installing this unknown piece of software. I also use this to compile new bits of code. If I come across a project on GitHub that I'd like to try, I can fire up a brand new machine and install all the prerequisites without running the risk of breaking something that I rely on. It also means that I can test with different operating systems, from macOS, any flavour of Linux, copies of Windows and play with virtual copies of Android or if I'm feeling frisky, BeOS. There are other ways to achieve some of this. For example, you could get yourself a Raspberry Pi and half a dozen MicroSD cards. Install an operating system onto a card, boot the Pi, install your new application and if you like it, use it. If not, wipe the card, start again. You can have a dedicated WSPR beacon card, a contest logging card, whatever you need, all separate, all easy to backup and change as needed. If that's not enough, some virtualisation environments allow you to emulate different microprocessors, so you could run ARM code on an x86 processor, or vice-versa. If you want more, you can investigate containerisation. A tool that allows you to essentially create a mini virtual machine and run a new environment using a single command, so fast that you essentially don't need to wait for it to start-up, allowing you to mix and match environments as needed. At this point you might ask why I'm even talking about this. What does this have to do with amateur radio? Well, it's how I have my test bench set-up. Sure I have a soldering station, multimeters, a NanoVNA, an antenna analyser and all that kind of great stuff, but my radio world is mostly software and in that space all my tooling is pretty much virtual, put together in such a way that I can pick and choose precisely how I want to test something without killing something I rely on. I'm telling you about it because in my experience much of the amateur community still relies on a desktop computer runni

Foundations of Amateur Radio Yesterday I finally discovered the missing piece of information that will allow me to create a project that I've, if not outright spoken about, at least hinted at. In an ideal world by now I'd have built a proof concept and would be telling you that I've published a GitHub repository under my callsign for you to explore. If wishing made it so. Unfortunately, currently sitting at a keyboard for anything longer than ten minutes or so makes it nigh on impossible to stand up, so you'll have to make do with hand waving and gesticulation rather than actual code, but for now, that's all I have. Consider this a design specification if you're so inclined. So, big idea. Imagine that you have a device that can listen to radio frequencies. This device is connected to a network and it shares the data to any number of different listeners which might each do something different with the information. If you were to do this in the way we watch YouTube or listen to streaming audio, each listener would get their own unique copy of the data. If you have ten listeners, you'd have ten streams crossing your network, even if everyone was enjoying the exact same video or audio at the exact same time. Instead I want the data coming from the device to have only one stream on the network and for as many different listeners or clients to access it as required at the same time. Let's get specific here for a moment. I'm talking about using a software defined radio, could be a $25 RTL dongle, could be any SDR, that is tuned to a part of the spectrum, let's say the entire 40m band, and sends that radio information digitally onto the network. This network could be your local network, or it could theoretically be the internet, for now, let's just put it out on our own network. So, you have a copy of the entire 40m band streaming across your network. Great, now what? Well imagine that you want to decode RTTY on 7.040. You fire up your decoder, point it at the network stream and decode RTTY. Then you want to decode a WSPR signal, at 7.0386. You fire up your WSPR decoder, point it at the network stream and decode WSPR. Then you want to decode FT8 on 7.056, same deal, fire up your decoder, point it at the network stream and decode FT8. Now you want to compare two different RTTY decoders. Fire them both up, point them both at the same stream, decode both, simultaneously. Of course you could do this with CW signals, with SSB signals, with any decoder you have lying around, Olivia, Hellschreiber, AM, Packet, whatever. All these decoders could be running independently but together on the same band. You could add a tool that shows a waterfall display of the same data on a web page, or play some of the decoded data to your headphones, or record it to disk, or do spectral analysis, all at the same time. The information that you're processing is on the network once. You don't have to flood your network with multiple copies of the 40m band, the only limit is how much CPU power you can throw at this and to be frank, most computers on the globe today spend much of their time waiting for you to do something, so processing a bit of data like this is not going to tax anything built in the past 20 years or so. The missing ingredient for this was a Linux tool called netcat, or nc. It allows us to distribute the information across the network using a technique called broadcasting. So, RTL dongle, data extracted by a tool called rtl_sdr, distributed across the network using netcat and used by as many clients as you can think of. The proof of concept I'm working on uses Docker to build a bunch of different containers, or clients if you like, that each can do a different task with the same stream. When I've got something to show and tell, you'll find it, predictably, on my GitHub page. Oh, if you want to run the same thing for say the 80m band, you can. Now you have two network streams, one for 40m, one for 80m and as many decoders on your network as you have CPU cycles to play with. If all this sounds like magic, you've seen nothing yet. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When people think about and discuss my chosen hobby, amateur radio, there's often a perception that it's old men sitting behind a radio tapping on a Morse key, making beeping noises surrounded by all manner of imposing equipment, stacked thick and high in a tiny room that soon becomes too stifling to spend much time in. While such scenes might exist, often reinforced by old photos and messy radio shacks, any self respecting amateur will tell you that plenty of time is spent outside the shack dealing with antennas, coax and earthing systems, combined with pouring concrete, building, erecting and climbing towers and a myriad of other physical activity. My experience has shown that my own inertia bending acts often involve things like camping, portable operation in ever changing environments, throwing ropes into trees and recovering those later, erecting verticals, tying down squid-poles and other muscular movements like building temporary rotators lashed to the nearest utility vehicle to take advantage of a multi-band yagi that someone brought along to play with during a field day. The first time I really discovered just how lacking my stamina is, was in early 2014 when the FT5ZM DXpedition team to Amsterdam Island was in town. I had the pleasure of spending a day with a couple of team members showing off the sights of my QTH, Perth in Western Australia. In the middle of the city is Kings Park. To give you a sense of scale, at over 400 hectares, Perth's Kings Park is larger than New York's Central Park and London's Hyde Park. One of the attractions is the dual spiral staircase DNA tower. At 15m height, it's the highest viewing point in Kings Park offering 360 degree views of the park and the city surrounding it. Commissioned in 1966, the tower has 101 steps and has recently been refurbished. It derives its name from the DNA Double Helix molecule, which is how the staircases are arranged. One of my companions on the climb to the top was a sprightly amateur who's been licensed a decade longer than I've been alive. I marvelled when Arnie N6HC essentially ran up the tower when all I was able to achieve was puff my way up in his wake. Since then I've discovered that doing 24 hour contests, camping and other fun stuff now absolutely kicks the stuffing out of me, often requiring that I spend a day in a small dark room recovering with a blanket over my head. While my body shape and my callsign have things in common and my doctor continues to encourage me to lose weight, I can say that my recent visit to hospital, unexpected as it was, reminded me in no uncertain terms that I should look after myself, if only so I can actually participate in the next contest or camp-out. I'm not going to tell you what my fitness plan is, nor am I going to tell you to embark on one of your own, other than to ask, have you considered just how much of this wonderful hobby goes beyond keying a microphone or tapping a keyboard and consider just how safe you really are when you next climb up a ladder, tower or other height to fix an antenna? Speaking of health, I've been absolutely blown away by the incoming messages, offers of help, shared gallbladder emergency and post-operative experiences and more, from people whom I've known for years through to amateurs who took a chance to introduce themselves and wish me well. It wasn't until this week that I really understood that this community is rich in personal lived history, going well beyond the experiences I've had outside the hobby. I'm ever so grateful for your encouragement and intend to keep fighting to get well. It's going to take some time, but I'm looking forward to when I can next camp-out and not regret my life choices. So, get off your sedentary and go do something will ya? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A week ago I unexpectedly had my gallbladder removed. As emergencies go, I was lucky to be in a major metropolitan area with a remarkable hospital, supported by a group of humanity whom I've never much interacted with in my life. The staff at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital were without exception amazing, from the orderlies to the nurses and everyone behind those, I interacted with about fifty people directly during my stay and every single person had a smile to share and an encouraging word to give. As life experiences go it was as uplifting as I've ever had the opportunity to celebrate. Sure it hurt like hell and there were things I'd rather not have to try again, but on the whole it was, if not pleasant, at least memorable. Recovery is going to take a little while and I understand my voice is expected to return to normal in a few weeks having been intubated for most of a day. Half an hour after being discharged from my five days in hospital I was faced with a choice. Produce nothing for my weekly contribution to our hobby and face the risk of an astronomical bill from my hosting provider because the script that I wrote didn't foresee that there might be a time when I was unable to provide content, or produce something that, to be sure, was lacking in every way, but at least know that there wouldn't be a surprise waiting on my bank statement next month. So, my inadequate production saw the light of day. For that I apologise, it should have been silence. During the week I returned to my shack and had a look at my beacon. As you might recall, I've been using Weak Signal Propagation Reports, or WSPR in my shack for a while. According to the logs the very first time was in November of 2017. At the end of last year I took delivery of a ZachTek desktop WSPR transmitter which has been reported on air over 16 thousand times since. I've only been using the 10m band and it's been heard as far away from me in Western Australia as the Canary Islands, the home of Johann EA8/DF4UE and Peter EA8BFK who between them reported my signal nearly 90 times. It's remarkable to note that this is a distance of over 15 thousand kilometres, on the 10m band, using only 200 mW. During the week I made another milestone, a report in the opposite direction, across the Pacific Ocean to mainland USA. While that didn't break any distance records, it was a thrill to see a report from the Maritime Radio Historical Society, logging WSPR signals using KPH. Other things to note about these reports are that its been heard across 81 different grid squares, by 144 different stations from all directions of the compass. During my hospital stay and since, I've come to appreciate setting little goals. Little personal achievements that in and of themselves are not meaningful to anyone but me, and in some cases, my medical support team. It reminded me of a time when I attempted to achieve this in amateur radio, making a contact every day. Looking back over my logs I can tell you that I've not managed to maintain that, though, technically, on average, given that I host a weekly net and there's generally more than seven people who join in, I could claim an average of one QSO per day, but both you and I would know that I was stretching the truth somewhat. It occurred to me that my signal report by KPH could be considered the beginning of my new 10m adventures. Much of my start in this hobby was during the previous solar cycle and the 10m band featured heavily in much of my activities, especially since you can get on that band with the very minimum of antenna, a quarter wave on 10m is a 2.5m whip and that can fit even on my car and it did, for years. When the solar cycle eventually wound its way down, the 10m band was quiet for much of the year with the odd spot to whet your appetite, but rare enough to have little in the way of ongoing contacts. As far as I'm concerned, 10m is back in play and it's my personal special band, so I'm setting myself a little challenge for the month of November and you can join in, open to anyone who wants to play. There's no prize, no scoreboard, no accolades, no nothing, other than the personal satisfaction of achievement. Here's the challenge. How many kilometres per Watt can you achieve during November? To explain, my beacon uses 200 milliwatts, so any distance is multiplied by five to get the km/W number. If you use more than a Watt, you'll need to divide your distance by the number of Watts you use. As I said, this is a personal challenge. I'm not going to adjudicate, there's no rules to break, no one to tell you that you're cheating, it's just between you and your WSPR beacon. For now, my record is 75630 km per Watt. I'm going to take the opportunity to consider what I might do to improve on that. Perhaps if I reduce power I'll still be heard in the Canary Islands, but I'll have more bang for my buck. Time will tell. Feel free to share your own achievement, or keep it to yourself, entirely up t

Foundations of Amateur Radio Forgive my briefness. You'll discover why this space was left intentionally blank next week. It involves a broken capacitor, of sorts. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past while I've been discussing the Amateur's Code and its place in our community. I've shown that it was published in 1927, despite credits to the contrary and it's possible that it existed since 1923. I've discussed the original code, how it evolved and what changes have been made across the decades since. I'd like to take this opportunity to compare the original from 1927 to a revision that I've constructed using the various versions that have been published since. Originally I was going to use the current 2022 version in the ARRL handbook to discuss this, but it's completely different from the one shown on the ARRL website today, which appears to be more recent, that it made little sense to pick one over the other. Back to 1927, or 1923 if you like, written by Paul M. Segal 9EEA, or W9EEA, Director, Rocky Mountain Division and General Counsel of ARRL. The Amateur's Code I - The Amateur is Gentlemanly. He never knowingly uses the air for his own amusement in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. He abides by the pledges given by the A.R.R.L. in his behalf to the public and the Government. II - The Amateur is Loyal. He owes his amateur radio to the American Radio Relay League, and he offers it his unswerving loyalty. III - The Amateur is Progressive. He keeps his station abreast of science. It is built well and efficiently. His operating practice is clean and regular. IV - The Amateur is Friendly. Slow and patient sending when requested, friendly advice and counsel to the beginner, kindly assistance and cooperation for the broadcast listener: these are marks of the amateur spirit. V - The Amateur is Balanced. Radio is his hobby. He never allows it to interfere with any of the duties he owes to his home, his job, his school or his community. VI - The Amateur is Patriotic. His knowledge and his station are always ready for the service of his country and his community. It has a certain "quality" about it. Leaving aside that it's written with a male radio amateur in mind, it represents what the character Dennis Denuto in the 1997 Australian movie "The Castle" refers to as "It's just the vibe of the thing". I present to you an updated version of the code in an attempt at preserving that vibe whilst taking into account that we're not in 1923 any longer: The Radio Amateur is CONSIDERATE and RESPECTFUL...never knowingly behaving in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. The Radio Amateur is LOYAL...offering encouragement and participation to the global amateur community. The Radio Amateur is PROGRESSIVE...keeping abreast of science, striving to build and operate their station above reproach. The Radio Amateur is FRIENDLY...patient; offering friendly advice and counsel to the beginner; kindly assistance, cooperation and consideration for the interests of others. These are the hallmarks of the amateur spirit. The Radio Amateur is BALANCED...radio is a hobby, never allowing it to interfere with any of the duties owed to home, work, school or community. The Radio Amateur is SUPPORTIVE...knowledge, station and skills always ready for service to country and community. Hopefully you've followed along with the evolution of this discussion and find the reasoning for it as compelling as I do. Of course this is just one perspective on what a revised Amateur's Code might look like and I am offering it as a topic of discussion to the entire global amateur radio community. I hope that it provides food for thought, talking points and encouragement to ask questions. I will reiterate my thanks to the WorldRadioHistory.com website where you can find many of the earliest editions of the ARRL handbook. If you have any of the missing editions, or better copies than those available, I'd encourage you to share them to continue to preserve the history of our community. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's been a while since I looked up the word "patriotic". Depending on which dictionary definition you use it could be: "showing love for your country and being proud of it", or it could mean: "having or expressing devotion to and vigorous support of one's country". Synonyms for the word patriotic include "nationalist" and "nationalistic" and it relates to words such as "chauvinist", "jingoist" and "fervent". Jingoist means having or showing excessive favouritism towards one's own country. That said, the original Amateur's Code published in 1927 says that: The Amateur is Patriotic. His knowledge and his station are always ready for the service of his country and his community. The 2022 ARRL handbook says: The Radio Amateur is PATRIOTIC...station and skill always ready for service to country and community. The ARRL website is slightly different: The Radio Amateur is PATRIOTIC...His/[Her] station and skills are always ready for service to country and community. Based on the meaning and connotations of the word "patriotic", I think that the sixth clause of the Amateur's Code is a political statement. It came at the close of World War One and in that context it makes sense. I will also note that the word "patriotic" means different things to different people. For some it's a positive concept, for others it's the opposite and I think as a result it's a problematic concept in the world today. If that's not clear to you, consider the notion of patriotic to a person living in the United States of America versus a person living in Ukraine, or a person living in North Korea, Sudan, China or Japan. Each of these countries have different concepts of the idea of patriotic which might not actually be compatible with each other. Should we as a global community encourage cohesion or encourage incompatibility? A more inclusive word might be "loyal", but we've already covered that. I've offered the following revision of the original loyalty clause to be: The Radio Amateur is LOYAL...offering encouragement and participation to the global amateur community. We could add the word country to that and dispense with the patriotic clause altogether, but I think that detracts from what the sixth clause is attempting to achieve, the sharing of station and skill to country and community. What if we replace the word "patriotic" with "supportive" instead? I also think that the lost word "knowledge" is separate from station and skill and I think it has a place in this clause. The clause would read: The Radio Amateur is SUPPORTIVE...knowledge, station and skills always ready for service to country and community. I'm aware that, given the wide range of meanings for the word "patriotic" across Earth, this is likely to be controversial, but in considering this version, please consider the level of emotion included in your feeling of the word "patriotic" versus the emotion for the word "supportive". It seems to me that reducing the level of emotion in a code of conduct is a positive evolution. What are your thoughts on the matter? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you are absorbed in a hobby like amateur radio it's easy to lose track of the world around you. I freely admit to spending many hours on this hobby and it wasn't until I spent some effort taking stock that I discovered just how much time I spent. The fifth clause of the Amateur's Code attempts to formalise this behaviour and I confess that it's taken me several years to find a more reasonable balance. Let's review the original 1927 published version of this clause. It reads: The Amateur is Balanced. Radio is his hobby. He never allows it to interfere with any of the duties he owes to his home, his job, his school or his community. It's interesting to note that in one of the oldest documents describing our community it refers to our activity as being a hobby. I'm noting this because there have been plenty of treatises written on the notion that amateur radio is a public service and not a hobby. This clearly states that in the opinion of the General Counsel of the ARRL in 1927, Amateur Radio is a hobby and frankly, I'm fine with that. The 2022 ARRL handbook removes the reference to hobby and words it: The Radio Amateur is BALANCED...radio is an avocation, never interfering with duties owed to family, job, school or community. The ARRL website reintroduces the concept of a hobby like this: The Radio Amateur is BALANCED...Radio is a hobby, never interfering with duties owed to family, job, school or community. I'll note that the definition of avocation is "a hobby or minor occupation" and I'm not sure what the clause gains by using a word that I had to look up in the dictionary. Consider for a moment if your first language isn't English, why use "avocation" when "hobby" is the same thing? The original used the phrase: "never allows it to interfere with any of the duties he owes", this puts amateur radio as a hobby at the bottom of the pecking order in the list of things you do. The 2022 version waters this down to "never interfering with duties owed", essentially elevating the hobby above some of those other duties. I don't think that this is an improvement. I'm a fan of amateur radio, but I think that in the scheme of things it needs to take the place of a hobby, not an activity that has the ability to be prioritised over any of your other duties. If it does, where is the line? What is more important and what isn't? Should this be something that we in our code of conduct endorse? What's next, telling amateurs specifically what they should be doing? I think not. One thing that's worth exploring is the concept of "job". A job is your occupation, tow truck driver, radio astronomer, submariner or accountant. The original meaning, going back to the 1550's is "an activity that an individual performs in exchange for a specific fee or payment". What if you don't have a job? What if you're retired, unemployed or have some other lifestyle? What if we replace the word "job" with "work", defined as "a physical or mental activity that is performed in order to accomplish or produce something"? This could make the fifth clause look like this: The Radio Amateur is BALANCED...radio is a hobby, never allowing it to interfere with any of the duties owed to home, work, school or community. It's short and sweet, uses simple language and it covers everything that the original document was attempting to achieve, and as a bonus it no longer requires you to have a job. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The fourth clause of the original Amateur's Code, published in 1927 has a lot to say about the tone of amateur radio. It says: The Amateur is Friendly. Slow and patient sending when requested, friendly advice and counsel to the beginner, kindly assistance and cooperation for the broadcast listener: these are marks of the amateur spirit. The 2022 ARRL handbook tweaks that into: The Radio Amateur is FRIENDLY...slow and patient operating when requested; friendly advice and counsel to the beginner; kindly assistance, cooperation and consideration for the interests of others. These are the hallmarks of the amateur spirit. The ARRL website adds a pronoun and updates some of the language: The Radio Amateur is FRIENDLY...He/[She] operates slowly and patiently when requested; offers friendly advice and counsel to beginners; kind assistance, cooperation and consideration for the interests of others. These are the marks of the amateur spirit. I'm not quite sure what the idea behind this change is. The original referred to "slow and patient sending" in an era when that meant slowing down your Morse Code. I'm not sure what "operating slowly" means, unless it's asking the amateur to speak slowly or to operate their fixed speed FT8 station slowly, hardly the same thing as reducing the speed of your Morse key. There's also a reference to the "broadcast listener", something which we refer to as shortwave listeners today. Essentially, be kind to the people around you and accommodate their limitations when you are asked, which is what the rest of the words have been morphed into. I think that being friendly and patient is a worthy aim and I don't think that it should be requested. The original used the word friendly twice, added kindly and used counsel, advice, assistance and cooperation. All this is collaborative language, encouraging the amateur to participate and being friendly and considerate when they do. I also note the difference between a "mark" and a "hallmark". The word hallmark means a mark stamped on articles of gold, silver, or platinum by the British assay offices, certifying their standard of purity. I think that certifying friendliness to a standard of purity is a worthy objective and I think that using the word "hallmark" instead of "mark" elevates the clause to a standard worth achieving. I think that the 2022 ARRL handbook use of the word "hallmark" is an example of an improvement of the code that should be embraced. With that in mind, removing the superfluous pronouns, given that "The Radio Amateur" encompasses anyone with a license, here's an alternative for the fourth clause of the Amateur's Code. The Radio Amateur is FRIENDLY...patient; offering friendly advice and counsel to the beginner; kindly assistance, cooperation and consideration for the interests of others. These are the hallmarks of the amateur spirit. It's a little longer than I'd like, but I think it leaves less room for ambiguity in the notion of operating slowly and it no longer requires that someone needs to ask for an amateur to be patient. I think that overall, it encourages good behaviour in a world where we can bash out an angry reply at the whim of the nearest keyboard. What do you like about this version and what would you change? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The third clause of the original Amateur's Code reads: The Amateur is Progressive. He keeps his station abreast of science. It is built well and efficiently. His operating practice is clean and regular. The 2022 ARRL handbook is similar: The Radio Amateur is PROGRESSIVE...with knowledge abreast of science, a well-built and efficient station and operation above reproach. The ARRL website adds in some pronouns and removes the science from the clause: The Radio Amateur is PROGRESSIVE...He/[She] keeps his/[her] station up to date. It is well-built and efficient. His/[Her] operating practice is above reproach. I'm not sure what prompted this alteration and frankly, I'm not a fan. Pronouns aside, science is at the heart of what it is that we do and that has been the case since the very first amateur went on air. It's also bewildering to me that knowledge and science has been transformed into keeping your station up to date, which means something else entirely. The original is about learning and education, in my opinion the ARRL website version is about shopping and frankly it's distasteful in a world where we as amateurs are renowned for experimentation and constructing a solution from parts. It raises another question. Who actually made this change and what process exists to actually implement it? Is it the whim of an individual, or is there a committee that was elected to investigate and update the code? If it was an elected body, how does it represent me in Australia and how does it represent any amateur beyond the shores of the United States, or even beyond the membership of the ARRL? Consider the scope of amateur radio as a global activity. The Amateur's Code has spread far and wide in the past century, well beyond its apparent origins as a page in the third edition of the ARRL handbook in 1927. In my opinion this code is not an ARRL owned document, it belongs to all amateurs across Earth and it should be treated as such. As I've said before, it's a living document and it has evolved over time, but that doesn't mean it can be changed on a whim. There should be rigorous discussion in a public forum that informs any such change and at present I see no evidence of that at all. To illustrate its reach further, the IARU has a document called "Ethics and Operating Procedures for the Radio Amateur", with Edition 3 published in 2010. It contains a copy of the code with yet another version of clause three: The Radio Amateur is PROGRESSIVE... He keeps his station up to date. It is well-built and efficient. His operating practice is above reproach. Clearly change is being implemented somewhere and it might well be that this version informed the current version on the ARRL website, 12 years later. I'll also note that there is a copyright statement in that IARU document that contains a whole lot of, in my opinion, unenforceable verbiage, including the requirement that any copy or portion is required to include a copyright notice, which in the case of the included Amateur's Code is murky at best. I also note that it credits Paul Segal in 1928, something which we've already established is wrong, given that the code appears in print in 1927 and has been credited to him as far back as 1923. Back to the clause, I think that keeping science as an integral part of the conversation is essential. I'm going to repeat the original clause as published for reference. The Amateur is Progressive. He keeps his station abreast of science. It is built well and efficiently. His operating practice is clean and regular. In addition to science, there's a statement about how to build and how to operate. It's a little curious to use the word progressive, but it means to happen or develop gradually or in stages. In other words, you don't need to be perfect on day one, but you do need to strive for the objectives as part of an evolutionary process. So, progressive, science, well built and well operated. That seems like a recipe for lifelong learning, in my opinion a lofty goal to strive for. What if we lost the last century pronouns, removed the shopping imperative and kept the tone: The Radio Amateur is PROGRESSIVE...keeping abreast of science, striving to build and operate their station above reproach. Would such a clause inspire you to do better, to build and grow as an amateur, to improve and learn? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The second clause of the original Amateur's Code reads: The Amateur is Loyal. He owes his amateur radio to the American Radio Relay League, and he offers it his unswerving loyalty. The 2022 ARRL handbook presents it with the following words: The Radio Amateur is LOYAL...offers loyalty, encouragement and support to other amateurs, local clubs and the American Radio Relay League, through which Amateur Radio in the United States is represented nationally and internationally. The ARRL website goes the extra mile to make this hard work and states that: The Radio Amateur is LOYAL...He/[She] offers loyalty, encouragement and support to other amateurs, local clubs, the IARU Radio Society in his/[her] country, through which Amateur Radio in his/[her] country is represented nationally and internationally. Pronouns aside, this has got to be one of the more tortured efforts you might subject an entire group of humans to. Written in an attempt to enumerate each and every specific version of the global amateur radio community, it excludes more than it includes and in doing so completely fails the one thing it aims to achieve, a sense of belonging, being part of something bigger than you. So what does loyalty look like? Is providing constructive feedback loyalty? Is giving your time and energy a loyal thing? What about being a member of a club? The dictionary suggests that loyalty is a strong feeling of support or allegiance. Originally the code suggested that this should be directed at the ARRL, even the handbook continues to suggest that today, but is that relevant for me here in Australia? Should I be a loyal member of the ARRL, or should I be a loyal member of the WIA? What if there is a second body in your country? In Australia there is another organisation attempting to reshape the hobby, RASA, the Radio Amateur Society of Australia, should I be loyal to that? Can I be loyal to both, or neither? What happens if I am not comfortable with either organisation, who should I be loyal to? National bodies aside, what about clubs? Am I required to be a club member and be loyal to it? What if I'm a member of more than one club? Should I be more loyal to one than the other? Should I be more loyal to the national body or my local club? What if I'm not a member of any club? What should I be loyal to then? What if loyalty is coupled to an idea instead of a specific body? What might that idea look like? The revised version of the clause already includes concepts such as encouragement and support to other amateurs. What if we just omit any specific bodies and replace it with the idea of the global amateur community in all its many splendored diversity? While we're looking at this, the word encouragement includes the action of giving someone support, confidence or hope, so we're repeating ourselves by using support and there's plenty of other things we could share around. Here's a philosophical question to wrap your mind around. If you have a drivers' license, but you don't drive, are you a driver? Similarly, if you have an amateur license, but you don't do anything with it, are you an amateur? Perhaps the nub of this lies in participation. Taking those thoughts into account, we could rephrase the second clause of the Amateur's Code to: The Radio Amateur is LOYAL...offering encouragement and participation to the global amateur community. If this clause was part of the Amateur's Code, would it help you feel like you belonged, would it travel beyond the borders of your country and would you feel part of something bigger? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The first clause of the original Amateur's Code reads: The Amateur is Gentlemanly. He never knowingly uses the air for his own amusement in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. He abides by the pledges given by the A.R.R.L. in his behalf to the public and the Government. The 2022 ARRL handbook version states it like this: The Radio Amateur is CONSIDERATE...never knowingly operates in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. Today the ARRL website presents it as: The Radio Amateur is CONSIDERATE...He/[She] never knowingly operates in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. It's surprising to see the addition of the He/[She] pronoun when nothing is added by doing so, in fact for some amateurs this actually reduces its relevance, something which I've spoken about before. We could just simply change the words to remove the pronoun entirely, but does that actually cover all of what we want it to mean? Should this consideration be limited to operating, or should we go beyond that? What about conduct in a club setting, or on social media, email or SMS? Some of these activities are conducted as a radio amateur and some are not. If we're limiting ourselves to amateur radio, not an unreasonable place to start given that we're talking about a document called "The Amateur's Code", we should really discuss the nature of amateur radio today. I find myself in a community of amateurs, not a radio in sight, exchanging thoughts, opinions and experience that go beyond the concept of operating. I will note that there are legal definitions in our hobby that describe the notion of operating that do not include QRZ.com, email or Reddit and there is an argument to be made that operating falls strictly within the bounds of a licensed amateur activity. That said, since "no man is an island", first uttered in 1624 by John Donne, neatly illustrates that although we're licensed amateurs, we do more than key our radios alone and even when we do, there are activities that affect others who are not operating as such. When we discuss things with each other, face to face, that's not a licensed activity, even if both of us are amateurs. Neither is sending an email to another amateur, or commenting on a social media post. Standing in a club and teaching is also not a licensed amateur activity and cannot be considered under the idea of "operating". All of what this clause is attempting to say is to be considerate. Don't reduce the pleasure of others by doing things that are unacceptable. It goes to how you are expected to be, to conduct yourself, to behave. To incorporate this idea that what you do with other amateurs goes beyond operating, I think the word "operate" needs to be changed to the word "behave". I'd also like to explore the word "gentlemanly" from the original text. Synonyms for this include civilised, courteous, honourable and polite to name a few. It seems to me that words like that would benefit our interactions within our community, not to mention beyond it. One word that comes to mind is "respectful", something that lies at the heart of how we conduct ourselves towards each other. So, if we drop the pronouns, update the word operates and add in respect, a revised clause one could be: The Radio Amateur is CONSIDERATE and RESPECTFUL...never knowingly behaving in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. Let me hasten to point out that I'm proposing this as a starting point for discussion. This is an activity that should go beyond one individual, it should also go beyond a single organisation. Amateur Radio is a global activity and it would do well for us to consider all of humanity when drafting a code of conduct which is essentially what the Amateur's Code is attempting to achieve. So, how would you approach the first clause, what do you like, what do you think is missing, what would it need for you to consider it words to live by? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The American Radio Relay League or ARRL is one of the oldest amateur associations on Earth. 1926 saw the birth of "the Radio Amateur's Handbook", the first edition of what we now know as "The ARRL Handbook For Radio Communications" featured chapters on what it means to be an amateur, how to build and operate a station, how propagation works and how to experiment. The very first handbook had 5000 copies printed and thanks to the website WorldRadioHistory.com we have access to a signed copy by the author himself, the Communications Manager of the ARRL, Francis Edward Handy (W1BDI). He starts the 228 page book with the following words: This Handbook is written as a guide for member-operators of the League. It is also useful as a source of information to the man who wants to take part in amateur radio activity but who has no idea of how to get started. Written first of all for the beginner, such an amount of useful and up-to-date information has been added that the Handbook in its present form is equally valuable as a compendium of information for the experienced brass-pounder and the beginner alike. The first edition doesn't show a cover price, but the third edition, published a year later shows a charge of $1. The 2022, or 99th edition has nearly six times as many pages, 1280 of them, it costs ten times as much per page and sells for nearly 50 times as much at $49.95. The current handbook features topics such as Radio electronics theory and principles, Circuit design and equipment as well as articles and projects that include 3D printing, portable battery selection, safe antenna and tower work practices and comes in a variety of formats including electronic and box sets. I'm giving this background to give you a sense of how things have evolved in the past century. For example, one thing that the very first edition didn't have was a page called the Amateur's Code. The oldest copy I've found appears in the 1927 or third edition. If you're familiar with the words, you're in for a treat. If not, sit back and imagine it's 1927, or 1923, more on that in a moment. The Amateur's Code I - The Amateur is Gentlemanly. He never knowingly uses the air for his own amusement in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others. He abides by the pledges given by the A.R.R.L. in his behalf to the public and the Government. II - The Amateur is Loyal. He owes his amateur radio to the American Radio Relay League, and he offers it his unswerving loyalty. III - The Amateur is Progressive. He keeps his station abreast of science. It is built well and efficiently. His operating practice is clean and regular. IV - The Amateur is Friendly. Slow and patient sending when requested, friendly advice and counsel to the beginner, kindly assistance and cooperation for the broadcast listener: these are marks of the amateur spirit. V - The Amateur is Balanced. Radio is his hobby. He never allows it to interfere with any of the duties he owes to his home, his job, his school or his community. VI - The Amateur is Patriotic. His knowledge and his station are always ready for the service of his country and his community. This version is credited to Paul M. Segal 9EEA, Director, Rocky Mountain Division ARRL. The code appears on page 9 of the 1927 edition of the handbook. It uses Roman numerals to identify each point, the title is beautifully rendered with the Old English Typeface and it's shown inside a rectangle on a page on its own. Over the next 45 years the text stays the same. There are changes like colons to semi-colons, an additional comma and the evolution from Roman numerals to modern numbers, and then written numbers and finally the removal of the numbers entirely. At one point the title is changed from "Amateur's Code" to "Our Code", but that only lasts for one edition. Speaking of editions, the 1936 edition, the thirteenth in the series, is referred throughout as the 1936 edition, superstition is alive and well. The credit changes over time as well. In 1929 Paul's callsign is changed from 9EEA to W9EEA. In 1943 we see a once-off credit appear. It states that the code was written in 1923 by Lieut.-Commander Paul. M. Segal, General Counsel of ARRL. It's the only credit that shows a different year from any of the other references which all point at 1928 as the original year, which is what the ARRL uses today. Interestingly, we have a copy of the handbook from 1927 that features the code, so it's entirely possible that 1923 is actually correct and it's not hard to imagine that a poorly printed 3 looks like the remains of the number 8. To add to this, there's a 1944 FCC report to the President of the United States of America that contains a reference to "Lieutenant Commander Paul. M. Segal, the radio industry attorney". In addition there's an announcement in the New York Times, dated 25 May 1968 with the headline: "Paul M. Segal Is Dead at 68; Expert in Communications Law" I don't have access to any version of the S

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the most misunderstood settings on your radio is the microphone gain. You'll often hear people talking about adjusting it up or down depending on what they hear and the results are often displeasing to the ear. The very first thing to know is that the microphone gain is likely the single most audible setting on your radio, right after the tuning frequency. It's pretty much the first variable between your voice and your transmitter. Set it too low and you'll hear nothing, set it too high and you'll hear gibberish. I said it's pretty much the first thing, but it's not the very first. That's your voice, unique in all its glory, loud, soft, happy, sad, funny or not, it's the thing that your microphone captures to transmit. Closely coupled to your voice is the distance between your mouth and your mike. The closer you are, the louder, the further, the softer and the more background noise creeps in. As an aside, speaking of noise, there's background noise at play, but there's also the noise that comes from the audio circuitry itself, which can for example change depending on the temperature of your radio. I'm going to refer to both as noise here, even though they're slightly different. So, starting with the ideal model where you always speak in the same way, at the same volume, at the same distance from the microphone, with a constant temperature in your radio, at all times, the next thing is the microphone gain, or gain. Gain is an imperfect attempt at corralling your utterings into electrical signals without causing the audio circuit to distort or drown in noise. Distortion comes as a result of overloading of the audio circuit when the gain is too high, causing clipping, which essentially changes the audio waveform into something that no longer resembles your voice. At the low end of the gain range there is no difference between audio and noise which results in your voice being buried inside a hissing noise. You might wonder why we don't just build transmitters that cannot clip and increase your volume. Well, we do. We use things like AGC, or Automatic Gain Control to attempt to prevent such things from happening, but this isn't perfect. All this results in the microphone gain being a setting that you need to tune to your voice and adjust as things change. Overall, the best outcome is when you set the gain so the AGC just engages when you talk normally. This gain setting also applies to computer generated signals, often fed into your radio via an audio or microphone input. If you set the gain too low, noise is the problem, set it too high and the Automatic Gain Control will distort the signal to the point where it no longer works and causes interference for everyone else including the station that you're trying to contact. On older radios the output power was fixed. This is also true for Software Defined Radios. To reduce output power, you can change the microphone gain down and reduce the power. Change it to halfway and your output power is essentially reduced to half power. This works for a range of settings, but get too low and we're back to noise and audio fighting each other. The opposite isn't true. You cannot increase the microphone gain to increase power. The moment you exceed the audio circuit range your signal is distorted. On an SDR this means that you're exceeding the ability of the Analogue to Digital converter to represent your audio. In digital terms, zero means no sound and all on means 100%. If your audio is so loud as to only be 100% on, that's like sending a tone out the transmitter, resembling anything but your voice. All of what I've talked about is related to SSB signals and to some extent AM. FM is a different animal entirely. For starters, output power on FM is fixed. The next difference is the signal or channel width. Without going into full detail, FM comes in different widths, WFM or Wideband FM, NFM, or Narrowband FM, and between the two, "normal" FM. To make things more fun, not everyone agrees on what each one means at any given time. Also, channel width and channel spacing are not the same thing, but that's for another day. Gain aside for a moment, consider two matched FM radios using the same channel width. Your voice volume is determined by how much of the channel you use. Louder means wider, softer means narrower. Adjust the gain up, the signal gets wider, but the limit of the channel width remains, get too high and it clips at the channel width and distorts. At the other end, changing the gain down, you'll use less of the channel width and eventually the noise and your voice will be at the same level and you won't be heard. Let's look at what happens when you use a normal FM signal to transmit to a narrowband FM receiver. Essentially your signal is too wide and the result is that your voice will be clipped unless you speak really softly or if you've set the gain really low, either way comes with more noise. Similarly, if you transmit a narrow

Foundations of Amateur Radio As a new amateur one of the initial perplexing issues you're confronted with is setting up your first radio to talk to the local repeater. The question is so common that it's almost an invisible rite of passage to a new licensee. While I'm a fan of learning, there is plenty of that to go round and setting up your radio to talk to a repeater shouldn't be a hurdle to getting on air and making noise. Ignoring the whole repeater thing for a moment, let's consider your radio. It doesn't matter if it's a handheld, a base station, a boat anchor or something else. To participate in the whole repeater experience, you need to tune your radio to hear it. Technically, if I told you that you could tune to a local repeater on 146.750 MHz, that would be enough information to get you going, but this depends entirely on a set of standard assumptions that are likely not obvious to you. Let's explore what's going on. Given that frequency, you can set your radio to 146.750 MHz and in most cases, you'll be able to hear the repeater. To actually participate, you would need to do some more work to get your transmitter to be heard. As I said, standards are what makes that possible, but like every human endeavour, caution must be applied. As Andrew Tanenbaum said: "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." With that in mind, let's proceed. Before you start yelling, I'll add caveats at the end. Armed with a repeater frequency, you have enough information to get on air, but it assumes that you know a couple of things. So let's delve into those assumptions. For starters, there is an assumption that you're aware that to operate a repeater you must transmit on a different frequency than what you're listening on. Why that is the case is a whole other discussion which I'll leave for today. There is the assumption that you know that the two frequencies, one for listening, one for transmitting, are separated from each other by a known distance, a so-called offset. You're also assumed to know that this offset is fixed but different for each band. There's more, but let's start here. For your radio to transmit on a different frequency than you listen, you must tell it to. In many cases tuning your radio to a so-called repeater frequency will already do this for you, but not always. You might need to specifically program your radio for repeater operation, or turn on the offset mode, or use two memories, or some other thing specific to your radio. Read The Friendly Manual, I know you know how. The next step is to look at the band you're on. In this case the 2m band. This means that the standard says that the difference between the receive and transmit frequency is 600 kHz. I'm studiously ignoring other bands at this moment because, standards. At this point you know that your radio should be tuned to 146.750 MHz, it should be in repeater mode and the offset should be 600 kHz. That's when the next question arises, should that be plus 600 or minus 600? Guess what, another standard. If the receive frequency is less than 147 MHz, the answer is minus 600 kHz. If it's more than 147 MHz, it's plus 600 kHz. Notice that I didn't specify what happens if it's exactly 147 MHz? That's because nobody knows. Seriously though, the local repeater owner will know, but you can try either and get your answer. Now for the caveats. Let's start with the 147 MHz cross-over exception. This isn't global, for example repeaters in California use several different ranges for such a cross-over point. I also didn't tell you about repeaters on other bands because the offset depends on where you are. In many cases the 70cm repeater offset is 5 MHz, but in Europe it's mostly 7.6 MHz, unless it's 9 MHz. The 10m repeater offsets are often 100 kHz, but sometimes they're 1 MHz, similarly the 6m repeater offset is 1 MHz, except when it's not. The point being that starting with a receive frequency, there's a great number of assumptions, many of which you'll need to discover for your own location. A great resource which I've mentioned before is the brainchild of Garrett KD6KPC, the repeaterbook.com website and app, maintained by a global group of volunteers, which lists many repeaters and their specific settings, frequencies and locations. So, armed with this knowledge, I expect that you can now find a local repeater and make use of it. When in doubt, contact the owner and ask for help, they're a friendly bunch. Remember to say thank you! So, what excuse do you have not to get on air and make noise? Oh, before I forget, if you don't hear anything, or if transmit isn't doing what you expect, check that you've configured CTCSS, another assumption. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The art of amateur radio is a globe spanning activity, held together by radio waves and the promise of a community with a shared uncommon interest. The strength of a community depends entirely on the members of that community. Without the efforts of each individual amateur, our worldwide license to experiment is doomed. You might ask yourself what part you have to play in this? Consider what would happen if a group of amateurs decided to transmit on an unlicensed frequency, or purposefully interfered with other legal users. It's obvious that the regulatory response to such illegal activities would be swift and left unchecked, it would spark the end of our hobby. What prevents that from happening is our common purpose, our common interests, our willingness to address such behaviour, or said in another way, our community standards. It's the thing that keeps us talking, sharing, learning, experimenting and having fun along the way. I've been told many times that I shouldn't expect all amateurs to be friends, but consider for a moment the sheer diversity of our community. For starters we're scattered around the planet. We have different cultural and political sensibilities, we have different religions and expectations. We don't even speak the same language, even if you forget that the Japanese station you just had a QSO with was using phonetics not even close to their native language. Those differences are mostly attributes of geography, but they don't end there. We have differences in our households and family structures, our work life and finances, our play time and our interests. We also differ in age, skin colour, gender and even our sexuality, orientation and gender identity. Even among all those differences, we are still radio amateurs together with our personal preferences for Icom, Yaesu, Kenwood or some other brand, our desire to use QRP or kilowatts, our need to use a Morse key, our voice, or a computer. We choose to use a repeater, or not, choose HF or not, like to chat, or not, build antennas, or not. So it's with all those differences in mind that I'm distressed to report that yet another amateur has been bullied out of our community. An amateur who joyfully participated in this community, who made videos, wrote software, learnt and shared. Like others I know, she was bullied in our community because she was different and it's not the first time I've witnessed this behaviour and it's not the first time I've called out this unacceptable conduct by so-called members of our community. Different, how you ask? Does it really matter, or are you asking to determine if there was a valid reason for making her feel uncomfortable? To be clear, our community is a welcoming environment, filled with hope and joy, but there is a small rotten element in our midst that we need to rip out root and branch, much like we would if it was deliberate HF interference. You might think that given that this abuse exists on reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, QRZ, email, telephone, letterbox, in clubs and on-air, that it's a majority experience. That's not the case. The same individuals harass fellow amateurs across multiple platforms as entertainment causing untold harm to their victims. The Standard You Walk Past Is The Standard You Accept. It's not just up to victims of bullying and harassment in a community to speak out. As members of our community, we amateurs have a responsibility to speak out also. Anyone who doesn't is part of the problem. Our community is so diverse as to never be one single thing. A bully is a bully, no matter which words are used to sugar coat it. I'd like to invite you to consider any bullying you accepted in silence, either personally, as a witness, directly, or indirectly. This community is strong, it's resilient, it's resourceful, it's you and I and it's our duty to stand tall and speak out, loud and proud, about any victimisation. Even if you've never considered that this is happening in your community, look around and notice people leaving the hobby unexpectedly and examine why that might be the case. You might ask what it is that you can do to help. For starters, calling it out at every occurrence is part of communicating to the victim that they're not alone. It tells the community that they are part of the solution. It tells the bully that what they're doing is unacceptable. I host a weekly net where we talk about amateur radio and discuss issues like this as and when they occur. We've done so in the past and will continue to offer a safe space for members of this community. I have and continue to offer my email address, [email protected], for anyone who is struggling with this to discuss any bullying that they are dealing with. I have experienced some of what this amateur has gone through at the hands of this community and I will not stand for it any longer and neither should you. Keeping quiet and changing frequency is not the solution as time after time experienc

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are days that my brain just cannot keep up with all the ideas that I have spinning around and today is one such experience. Before I take you on this wild ride I will mention that I'm only going to focus on the amateur radio specific things going on, but I tend to have a couple of projects on the go at any one time, much like a messy desk piled high with paper, books, gadgets, parts and coffee cups, my mind has this sometimes exhausting tendency to see connections between various projects and often this results in deeper rabbit holes, so with that in mind, I'd like to make an attempt at describing all the amateur things that are going on at this very moment. So, here goes, hang on! It all started with two friends, independently and until now, unbeknownst to each other, playing with a mode called Digital Radio Mondiale, or DRM. It's something I've talked about before. One friend is trying to decode it, the other is trying to generate it. I'm sitting on the side cheering on because I think that there will come a time when I understand enough of my PlutoSDR that I can create any form of any mode and not be limited to the SSB bandwidth that current technologies use and be able to receive and generate say a 20 kHz DRM signal. In order to advance my learning, I started the day wanting to describe a PlutoSDR project. I wanted to spend some enjoyable time playing, making some progress and then telling you about it. I did play, I did have fun, I did make progress, but trying to explain precisely what and how was where I came unstuck. I began describing the difference between analogue and digital radios and how there's a fundamental difference in how a signal comes to exist in both. That quickly turned into a conversation about I/Q signals, a discussion that I've been putting off for a while because I'm still not happy with my own understanding of it, let alone any attempt to explain it to you in a coherent and hopefully fun way. The complexity of explanation was brought home to me during the week when NASA Administrator Bill Nelson used an example to explain an image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The phrase he used was this: "if you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arm's length, that is the part of the universe that you're seeing" That seemed pretty clear to me. I could imagine a grain of sand on my fingertip, extending my arm and grasping the idea that hidden behind it was a small slice of the sky representing how big the image was. For me that explanation was excellent, especially when Bill Nelson went on to say that the things you were seeing were galaxies, each made of a hundred billion stars, each likely with planets in orbit. Only I discovered that the explanation using a grain of sand wasn't universal. I was surprised to learn that for some it got muddled up with the grains of sand in the universe and the relationship between those and the one on your finger. To be clear, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with misunderstanding, but it reminded me in a visceral way that how we explain things matters and there are plenty of times when my own efforts fail to achieve their intended purpose, of making things easier to understand. Given the importance of I/Q signals within the whole conversation on software defined radios, I don't want to do a half baked attempt and fail. I will say this, an I/Q signal is a way of precisely representing a radio signal, but only to stop you thinking about it further. I was talking about how my mind accumulates things. The NanoVNA that's sitting on my desk, gifted to me by a friend, is a fantastic example of the similarity between it, software defined radio and say a TinySA which I came across last week. Let me unpack that a little. A NanoVNA is a piece of testing equipment, as is a TinySA. They test different things. Both have the ability to generate and measure a signal and in that they share the abilities of an amateur radio transceiver that can also generate and receive a signal. That right there is a very deep rabbit hole, so I'm going to purposefully step away and continue the journey of observation, only pausing to mention that my PlutoSDR has all the same capabilities and in that it's not alone. The fundamental difference between these three devices is software. There are a few other things, but on the whole, software. So, I'm carrying around this mush of things that are almost the same, but different, almost understood, but not quite, almost ready to explain, but not yet. In an attempt at going forwards by moving sideways, I went on to investigate other things, prompted by people who send me emails. For example, code plugs and DMR and frankly I felt unclean reading the various explanations. I'm a firm believer in Open Source and this is like asking an Icom owner to explain the benefits of using Yaesu hardware. Another question was around bending antennas, as-in, what happens when you drive down the road

Foundations of Amateur Radio In over a decade of writing a weekly article about all manner of different aspects of our hobby and community, I've never once talked about power connectors for your radio. It's so universal as to be invisible and rarely discussed. So much so, that something you do out of habit, makes another stop dead in their tracks and ask themselves why they never thought of it. Despite how you might feel at the time, there's no such thing as a stupid question. The other day a fellow amateur Dave VK6KV asked about a power connector he'd seen at the local electronics store. That question started a group discussion about powering radios and how best to achieve that. The very first thing to discuss is that the vast majority of amateur radio transceivers expect a nominal voltage of 13.8 Volt DC. That might sound like a strange requirement, but it's the voltage that comes from a fully charged 12 Volt lead acid battery, which is what many radios use as a power reference. The next thing to consider is that a transceiver can draw quite a bit of power when it's transmitting. My Yaesu FT-857D user manual suggests 22 Ampere, but I've never seen that in the decade it's been in my possession. When you purchase a radio, you'll likely discover that it either comes with bare wires, or some random connector that doesn't fit anything else. In many cases I've discovered that people cut off that connector and replace it with whatever standard they've come up with in their shack, but when they take their kit out on a field day, or acquire a new radio, the problem starts all over again. Let me suggest a different approach. The Anderson Power company, founded in 1877 by brothers Albert and Johan Anderson in Boston Massachusetts, make a range of connectors called the Anderson Powerpole and they come in a variety of ratings, sizes, shapes and colours. First introduced as a standard by the ARRL Emergency Communications Course in December of 2000, after previously being adopted by amateur operators in California, the Anderson Powerpole PP15/45 series was selected. The Coordinator for Hawaii State Civil Defense RACES, or Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service, Ron, then AH6RH, now KH6D has a detailed description on his QSL page on how this came about. As a result, the stackable, asymmetric, genderless plugs are in wide use within the amateur community. The plugs are designed to be joined together using various orientations, creating a unique connector to suit your purpose. The Amateur Radio Emergency Service or ARES standard is one such orientation and before you adopt the Anderson Powerpole in your shack, make sure you use their orientation to avoid magic smoke from escaping your equipment. Picking a connector is just step one. When you acquire a new piece of 12 Volt equipment, you can cut off the connector and replace it with the ARES Anderson Powerpole connector orientation. Many amateurs I know then throw away the unusable connector, or shove it into a box for later. Instead, what I do is, terminate the plug that you just cut off in exactly the same way. Essentially, from a visual perspective, you've kept the power cable intact, but inserted a Powerpole join into the lead. As a result you now have a standard Powerpole power lead and you have a new Powerpole adaptor to suit the new connector. For that reason alone, I tend to bring a box of spare Red and Black Powerpole connectors to any field day and use the opportunity to spread the love around. As I said, the individual plugs come in a variety of colours, I have a selection of eleven in my shack, where for me a different colour means a different voltage or purpose. For example, I've adopted green as the colour for antenna radials. One challenge I'd not been able to resolve, until suggested by Ben VK6NCB, was how to avoid plugging a 12 Volt power supply into something that expects say 7.5 Volts. Colour alone isn't sufficiently idiot proof, especially in the dark. Ben suggested that I adjust the orientation of the plugs, preventing connectors of different colours to mate. Looking back, I can't understand why I didn't think of that in the decade I've been using them. I will note that there are other Anderson connectors in use. A popular one is the grey double connector, used in portable solar installations and caravans. I'd recommend that you consider if you really want to plug your radio directly into a solar panel or not and choose your connectors accordingly. Before you ask, to my knowledge the Anderson Power Company doesn't know I exist, nor did I get compensated in any way to say Anderson Powerpole. It's the ARRL Emergency Services standard and I'm happy to advocate for its use everywhere I go. So, whether you're using bare wires, banana plugs, Molex connectors or some other random barrel connectors, consider cutting the lead and inserting Anderson Powerpole connectors. When was the last time that you had to do the 12 Volt connector dance? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Not a weekend goes by without an amateur radio contest or six, each with its own objectives, audience, times, rules, exchanges and scores. When you get bitten by the contesting bug, you'll quickly graduate from using pen and paper to keyboard and screen. That process comes with the inevitable selection of software suitable to both run on your shack computer and log your particular contest since as you'll discover, not all software knows about all contests or runs on every computer. When you eventually do arrive at a working solution, you'll reap the rewards of using technology. Contesting software can help in many different ways. From logging your operating frequency and mode to tracking where other stations are active and it doesn't stop there. Type in a partial callsign and your software can suggest which ones it might be. Log a contact and you'll see if your contact is valid within the rules or not. Software can track your activity level and warn if you're exceeding any contest time limits. It can keep track of multipliers and the impact on your total score and at the end of a contest, contesting software can help with submitting your log. After you've done this for a while, you'll notice that contest rules and scoring change over time. That brings with it the possibility of your software using old and invalid rules for validation, scoring and other contesting requirements. In most cases, software is updated manually by the author to implement the latest rules. This means that authors are required to keep up to date with the rules for all of the contests that their software supports, let alone add new contests. There are a few applications that support the idea of a contest definition which suggests the ability for anyone to define contesting rules to use them within the application. Unfortunately their functionality is strictly limited and they are not sufficient to define every contest rule that is in use today. Sadly, flexible as they might seem, they're neither universal nor compatible with each other. One definition, written by one amateur, for one application, cannot be used anywhere else, never mind trying to determine what the latest version is. I strongly believe that we need a shared open standard that can serve contest organisers, contest software developers and contest participants. Before I elaborate, I will be explicit in pointing out that the intent is to standardise in a way that makes it possible to document all past, current and future contests and in doing so, provide a collaborative way to share contesting rules between organisers, software developers and contesters, not to mention awards committees and amateur associations. So, if such a contest rule standard were to exist, what would it look like? Until now, the approach has been to create a list of keywords and values that deal with particular types of rules, things like band start and stop, zone score, valid prefixes, power level, exchange, etc. The result is a growing but always incomplete list of keywords with no means to define any logic. At the moment, all the contesting applications manage any scoring logic internally, requiring that it's updated when any of the rules change. Not only that, the contest organiser has no insight into the mechanism and no means to validate the process. As a contest organiser, scoring hundreds if not thousands of logs is a whole different challenge. Many contests do this manually, rely on someone else's software, or if the contest is popular enough, write their own code to manage the process. All this effort creates a disconnect between the contester, the organiser and the contest software developers, each using their own definition of the rules of any particular contest. A different approach might be to implement specific rules in a universal programming language like say JavaScript, and use those to manage the scoring and validation logic specific to each contest. For example, you might define a function that returns the starting and ending time for a contest which gives you a mechanism to detect if the contest is happening right now. A contester could use it to determine when the contest starts and ends, but the same definition could be used by the organiser to determine if a submitted log entry is for a valid time. Another might be a function that uses a callsign to determine if it attracts points or not and if it does, how many. Contesting software might use it to change the colour of the screen to indicate an invalid entry, but an organiser might use it to exclude a contact from a log. You could have a function to determine if the exchange is valid, or what the next exchange number is, or if the frequency on which the radio is currently tuned to is allowed for a contest. You could combine some of these simple rules to determine, for example, if the frequency the radio is on is the same or different since the last contact and if that's permitted or not within the

Foundations of Amateur Radio A couple of weeks ago a friend, Ben VK6NCB asked an interesting question in our weekly net. He wanted to know, if money wasn't a concern, what would your ideal shack look like? The answers varied widely from leaving everything as is and using the money to retire, through to purpose built fixed or mobile shacks, with world wide DXCC activation travel and everything in between. My own answer was a little different. I envisaged establishing an RF research laboratory and spending my life exploring and investigating the ins and outs of the fundamentals of our hobby. Building software defined radios and building tools to leverage their capabilities. As far-fetched as money not being a concern might sound, it's something that a group of radio amateurs had to grapple with in 2019 when their group came into some money. The result is a private foundation with the aim to support, promote, and enhance amateur radio digital communications and broader communication. The foundation, Amateur Radio Digital Communications or ARDC uses its resources to provide grants to the amateur community. There's a number of criteria to be eligible to receive an ARDC grant, but you must at least relate to the support and growth of amateur radio, education, research and development. Grants are evaluated on a range of aspirational goals, things like reach, inclusiveness, innovation, social good and others. One of the first questions you might ask is how did these people get the money and why are they giving it away? To answer that we'll need to travel back to 1981 when Hank, KA6M had the foresight to imagine that Internet-style networking was going to be a thing and requested a block of IP addresses for use by radio amateurs. If you're not familiar, an IP address is like a telephone number, but for a computer. Hank was granted a block of 16.7 million addresses. For decades these were informally administered by a group of volunteers working under the name of AMPRnet and later 44Net. In 2011 the group founded ARDC as a California non-profit and officially took ownership of the network space and its management. At this point I'll make a slight detour into IP addresses. I promise it's relevant. For information to travel to a computer on the Internet it needs to have an address. That address, originally specified using a 32-bit number, a so-called IPv4 address, made it possible to uniquely identify around 4 billion computers. With the explosive growth of computing and the Internet, the world started running out of addresses and in 1998, IPv6 was proposed to solve the problem. It uses a 128-bit number and has space to uniquely identify something like 340 trillion computers. In 2018, the ARDC was presented with a unique opportunity to sell some of its increasingly valuable address space, due to IPv4 address scarcity, but soon to be worthless, due to IPv6 adoption. After a year of internal discussion, in the middle of 2019, the decision was finalised and the ARDC sold a quarter of the address block that Hank had been granted back in 1981. On the 18th of July, 2019, Amazon Web Services became the proud new owner of just over 4 million new IP addresses. I should point out that radio amateurs haven't ever used more than half of the original block and IPv6 is going to make this no longer any issue. So, how much did they make from this adventure? Well, each address sold for about $25, making for a lump sum of well over $100 million dollars which the ARDC used to establish its grants program. To round off the story, in 2020, the ARDC changed from a public charity to a private foundation and continues to administer the 44Net and the grants program. Their grants list is impressive and inspirational, so check it out on the ampr.org website. While you're there, you can subscribe to the newsletter and read about some of the amazing work that's flowing from the ARDC as a result of its efforts. At this point you might be getting all excited about applying for a grant and you should, but I'd like to ask a different question. What have you done lately to grow our hobby, to stimulate it, to encourage new people, to innovate, research and learn? What has been your contribution? So, if you had money, what would you do with your amateur adventure? I'm Onno VK6FLAB