Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you connect the antenna ports of two radios together and transmit from one into the other, that would be bad, right? Just how bad would it be and what could you do differently? Before I dig in, you might ask yourself why on Earth this question even arises. Consider having two radios and one antenna. You couldn't use a T-piece to connect two radios to the antenna unless both were receivers. So, after connecting and disconnecting coax for a decade, you might decide to use a two position coaxial switch instead. Set the switch to one port and the first radio is connected to the antenna, flick it to the other port and you've just avoided swapping coax between radios. I'll point out that in most cases a coaxial switch can be used to connect multiple antennas to one radio, or in reverse, connect multiple radios to one antenna. When you do start looking for a switch it would be good to test that at no point it connected any two switching ports together, potentially causing the magic smoke to escape from your radio. A less obvious issue is that a coaxial switch has a property called isolation. It's a measure of what part of a signal leaks between ports and you'll see the isolation or cross-talk of a switch described in decibels or dB. If you recall, a dB is a relative measure. It means that it's something in comparison with something else, in our case, the amount of signal going into one port compared with the amount of signal leaking through to a disconnected port. You'd think that in a perfect switch none of the signal would leak through, but it turns out that under different frequencies a switch responds differently, even one specifically designed for switching radio frequencies. It might be that a 1 kHz signal is completely isolated, but a 1 GHz signal is not, which is why when you look at the specifications of a coax switch, you'll see something like "greater than 70 dB isolation at 200 MHz". It's worth noting that the lower the frequency, the higher the isolation, indicating that in the worst case, at 200 MHz, there's 70 dB isolation, but at lower frequencies it has higher isolation, sometimes much higher. If you were to transmit into this switch with 5 Watts at 200 MHz, the amount of signal that can leak through would be 70 dB less than 5 Watts. You might recall that you can convert Watts to dBm to allow you to do some interesting calculations. As with other dB scales, it's in comparison to something else, in this case a dBm is in reference to 1 milliwatt and 5 Watts is the equivalent of 37 dBm. This means that if you had a switch with 70 dB isolation, you'd start with a 37 dBm transmission, take 70 dB isolation and end up with a -33 dBm signal leaking through. That's the same as 0.0005 milliwatts. In other words your 5 Watt transmission leaks through your coax switch to the tune of 0.0005 milliwatts. Is that enough to damage your radio? Well, that depends on the radio, but let's put some numbers against it. S9 on VHF and UHF was defined in 1981 as -93 dBm assuming a 50 Ohm impedance of your radio. So, our leaking signal, -33 dBm, is 60 dB higher than S9. You'd report it as a 60 over 9 contact, a tad excessive, but not unheard of. So by that metric, you should be fine. Many, but not all, radios specify the maximum radio frequency or RF power that they can handle. For example, according to the documentation, both the NanoVNA and a Icom IC-706 can each handle a 20 dBm or 200 milliwatt signal without doing damage. That means that your -33 dBm signal should't do any damage to those two devices. I'm off to see what the isolation is for cheap 12V relays to see if I can construct a cost effective, modular, remote control antenna switch with lightning detection. What are you building next? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the time that I've been a radio amateur not a day has gone by without learning something new. Today was no different and this time learning took me both by surprise and delight. I realise that being delighted by charts, since that's what we're talking about, might not be something that comes naturally, but I can highly recommend that you use this as an opportunity to explore. So, which specific chart am I referring to? The venerable Smith Chart, something which I've seen from a distance many times in the past decade, but never actually understood, or to be honest, even looked at with anything more than a glance and a shudder. My first exploration started with a book published in 1969 by the person who developed the chart, Phillip Hagar Smith, an electronics engineer. The book, over 250 pages, is dense and frankly my reading of the first part of the book did not fill me with delight, but based on what I discovered afterwards, I might revisit it. The purpose of the Smith chart is to visualise complex mathematical relationships. Instead of filling your worksheet with a litany of calculations, you can draw lines, circles and read the answer straight off the chart. For example, given the impedance of an antenna system, determining the standing wave ratio becomes a case of putting a dot on a chart, drawing a circle through the dot and reading the VSWR straight off the chart. It gets better. If you have a digital Smith chart, like the one shown on a NanoVNA or a RigExpert antenna analyser, you can read the antenna impedance in relation to frequency, use a tuner to change it and see the chart update in real-time in direct response to you changing inductance or capacitance by twiddling the knobs on the tuner. One of the main things that a Smith chart solves is to visualise a chart with infinity on it, twice. In radio a short-circuit is one extreme and an open-circuit is another. Coming up with a way to show both those conditions on the same chart is a stroke of genius. The chart has evolved over time, but in essence it's a circle with an amazing set of arcs drawn throughout. The very centre of the chart has the number 1.0 next to it. That's the point at which the VSWR is 1:1, the reactance is zero and it's called the prime centre. A dummy load should show up as a dot in that spot, regardless of frequency. The Smith chart is normalised. It doesn't matter if you're using a 50 Ohm or a 75 Ohm antenna network system, the middle of the chart is 1.0. Follow the horizontal axis to the right and you'll discover 2.0, that represents twice the resistance. If you're using a 50 Ohm system, 2.0 represents twice that, or 100 Ohm. Go to the left, find 0.5 and that represents half, or 25 Ohm. The far left point on the horizontal axis represents zero Ohm, or a short circuit, the far right represents infinite resistance, or an open circuit. Positive reactance, or inductance is shown above the horizontal line, negative reactance, or capacitance is shown below the line. Going back to the middle of the chart, you'll discover a circle. All along that circle the resistance is the same, that is, on a 50 Ohm system, all of that circle represents 50 Ohm. If you look directly above the prime centre, you'll discover another 1.0 on the edge of the chart. The arc coming from that point represents an inductive reactance of 50 Ohm all along its path. Similarly, at the bottom of the chart you'll see an arc coming from a 1.0, representing the capacitive reactance. Before you pack it in with all this inductive and capacitive reactance, think of it as another attribute of your 50 Ohm antenna system. You don't need to precisely know how it works in order to use it. Remember how I mentioned that you could just read off the VSWR from the chart? Drop a point on the chart, anywhere is fine. You can read off both the resistance and reactance following the two arcs through that point. If you draw a circle through the same point with the centre at the middle of the chart, the VSWR of that system is the number that you can read, where your circle crosses the horizontal axis. Before I go, there are plenty of YouTube videos on the topic, but there are a few that I'd recommend you explore. Among an amazing array of RF educational videos, Rhode and Schwartz made a ten minute presentation called "Understanding the Smith Chart" which walks you through how to read the chart and you don't need the prerequisites to follow along. In Part two of his "Smith Chart Basics" series, Carl Oliver shows how to look up the VSWR in three easy steps and Alan W2AEW has several videos showing the chart in action with several vector network analysers or VNAs and I'd recommend that you look at videos 264 and 314 to get started, but there's plenty more of his handy work to explore. If you take away anything from this, it should be that the Smith Chart isn't scary, there's just lots of stuff there, but spend a few minutes looking at it and you'll discover

Foundations of Amateur Radio It is in my nature to ask questions. It's been hammered into me from an early age and it often brings me new friends, new ideas and new projects. After spending quite some time mulling over my understanding of radio, I came up with this question: "Is it possible to build a single radio transmitter that is capable of emitting a WSPR signal at the same time on all the HF bands?" Before we look at the hardware, let's contemplate for a moment what this transmission might look like. Imagine a WSPR transmission as a normal audio signal. It sounds like a couple of warbling tones for two minutes. Unpacking it, the audio signal is about 6 Hz wide and sits somewhere between 1400 and 1600 Hz. If you were to draw a power chart of this, displaying the frequencies horizontally and power vertically, you'd see a completely flat chart with a little spike, 6 Hz wide, somewhere between 1400 and 1600 Hz. Using an analogue radio, you can play this sound into the microphone or audio port and the radio takes care of transmitting it on the 10m band as a 28 MHz beacon. Tune the radio to 40m and it appears as a 7 MHz transmission. The two takeaways are that the WSPR signal itself doesn't change between bands or transmissions and the radio does the heavy lifting to make your WSPR transmission come out at the right frequency. Your radio is moving the audio frequencies to the correct amateur band. The electronics in your radio achieve this move by mixing the audio and the tuning frequencies together. If you imagine a 28 MHz WSPR signal coming from your transmitter as a power chart, it's essentially silence, except for a little WSPR peak somewhere just off to the right of 28 MHz. From a mathematical perspective, the frequency mixer in your radio is performing a multiplication and best of all, you don't need a radio to do this. You could use software to multiply frequencies instead and end up with something that represented their product. If you were to create a power chart of this equivalent multiplication, you'd see a completely flat chart with a little spike near 28.1261 MHz. Sound familiar? It gets better. You can store the result of this calculation in a file as a 28 MHz WSPR signal and you could do this as many times as you want. You could create a file with a 3.5 MHz WSPR signal, one with a 7 MHz one and so-on. Since we're talking about shuffling numbers only, you could combine all these calculations, and end up with a single file that had several WSPR signals inside it. The chart picture is again mostly silence, just with little WSPR peaks at frequencies suitable for say transmission on the 80, 40, 15 and 10m bands. Now all you need is to find a device that's capable of transmitting it. Turns out that we have such a device. A PlutoSDR, a software defined radio which I've spoken about before. It's capable of transmitting a 56 MHz wide signal, more than ample for what we're doing. We don't need to use the PlutoSDR to calculate the combined signal either, since we can do all that in advance, because as I said, a WSPR signal doesn't change. So essentially, all we'd need to do is generate a file that has all the WSPR signal information at the right frequencies and send it to the PlutoSDR to transmit. There are a couple of hurdles to overcome. When you multiply two frequencies, you end up with two peaks, one at the sum of both frequencies, and one at the difference between them. One you need, the other you don't, so we're going to need to filter this out, something that your analogue radio circuit also does. Another challenge is around sampling rates. The PlutoSDR needs a specific sampling rate and bit depth, so we're going to have to generate our file just so. I'm going to skip past complex numbers and move on to power output, since all the power from the transmitter will be spread across all of the combined WSPR signals we're attempting to transmit, so we're likely going to need amplification. There's also the matter of testing before we actually connect this contraption to an antenna and I've glossed over one minor but essential point, the PlutoSDR doesn't do HF. So, where does this leave us? We can build a proof of concept using 2m and 70cm. Both those bands are native to the PlutoSDR. I'm currently working on generating the actual WSPR signal file to start the transformation process. A friend has some testing gear that could allow us to see what's coming out of the transmitter without polluting the airwaves and of course, at this point this is all still "What-if". I've not actually made this work, but it's keeping me entertained and that's half the fun. It gets even better. The Pluto has an FPGA on board, so theoretically at least, we might be able to generate this actual file inside the Pluto in real-time, which opens up a whole other avenue of exploration, but we'll start with crawling before running. If you have thoughts on this, or any other aspect of the hobby, please get in touch. You can send em

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you finally get to the point of pushing the talk button on your microphone, after passing the test, receiving your license, getting your radio, building an antenna, digesting the manual, identifying a repeater, untangling its offset, programming those frequencies and keying up, you might be surprised to realise that you're lost for words. Something which I've talked about before. Even if you do have something to say, finding a person to say it to will be the next big challenge. Truth be told, the more frequencies you have to choose from, the harder it seems to discover a fellow amateur and with Internet connected repeater networks, your choice appears infinite. So, how do you initiate communication on a repeater? Do you call CQ, ask for a signal check, or just kerplunk the repeater to prove that your signal is getting in? The very first thing to remember is that you have the exact same rights as every other amateur. No amateur is above any other, though hearing some conversations or responses might give you a different impression. Before you embark on a long speech, what you need to remember is that your ability to receive is not usually the same as your ability to transmit. If you're using a low-powered hand held radio that's tuned to a local repeater, you might be comparing your little stubby antenna, inside your home, held at an angle, with that of a high power repeater, with a high-gain antenna bolted to a tower installed on the top of a hill. In other words, you can hear the repeater much better than it can hear you. You'll quickly observe that there are amateurs about who have their radio on all day long and they'll often hear every single transmission that hits the local repeater and even random frequencies. Sometimes this means that you'll have a great friend to talk to, other times it means that you'll have a local troll who in their not so humble opinion determines what is permitted and what's not. So, to get things rolling, you should follow the KISS principle, an aim championed by the lead engineer of the Lockheed Skunk Works in 1960, Kelly Johnson, "Keep it simple stupid.". With keeping things simple, there is a fierce and ongoing debate around the use of the phonetic alphabet on a repeater. With the benefit of experience, having run a weekly radio net for over a decade I'm going to be blunt. When you're identifying yourself to the rest of the community, always use phonetics. Only if you've been acknowledged and you're part of the conversation should you even consider dropping your phonetic callsign. The reason is that your first transmissions will be regularly interrupted by others since they're having a conversation and you'll be butting in. Even if a net controller asks for check-ins, you should use phonetics, since you might not be the only one who keys up at the same time. If you and the controller have known each other for years and they recognise your voice, you could consider dropping the phonetics, but don't expect everyone to know who you are from a single letter getting through. Some people are better at this than others. Whatever you do, don't barge in with a whole story until you've been acknowledged and the microphone has been handed to you. After all, this is a public shared space. The next thing to consider is the audience you're talking to. If the repeater is just local, then the people within range are likely to expect your prefix and know who you are, so just your call might suffice, but if you connect to a network, that's not likely to be true. If you want to actually talk to anyone, you can call CQ, but if you just want to let people know you're there, you can say your callsign followed by the word "listening". If you want to speak with a specific individual on the other hand, you can call them using their phonetic callsign, either with or without the CQ. Also consider they might be on the other side of their shack working hard at attempts to avoid sniffing solder fumes and take a moment to get to the microphone. In other words, what you say on your repeater depends on what result you want and who else is there. Sometimes there will be a mismatch between the two, just saying your callsign might initiate an hour long conversation, and calling CQ might give you the local troll telling you to go away. Don't let that dissuade you. Even with years of practice, sometimes the results are unexpected. Talking on a repeater is like being invited to a party. There are going to be people you know, people you want to know and people you never want to meet again. So, be considerate, listen more than you talk and be deliberate in your intentions and you'll be fine. Thanks to Sandip EI7IJB for the question, "What are the rules for calling CQ on a repeater?" If you have other burning questions, get in touch and ask. I'll try to give you a coherent answer. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was woken by the sound of a thunderclap. It was shockingly loud and came out of the blue. A few moments later, it happened again. I exploded out of bed, rushed to the shack, disconnected the beacon power and switched the antenna coax to "safe". After breathing a sigh of relief, everything went dark and with it came the distinctive sound of the sudden death of the uninterrupted power supply taking with it my workstation. With nothing else left to do, I reported the outage to the power company, went back to bed, pulled the covers over my head, snuggled in and surprisingly, slept pretty well despite the barrage of water hitting my QTH. The next morning the power was back on and I discovered that one of the residual current devices, the one that powered most, if not all, the wall sockets had tripped. I reset it and much to my surprise, most of my QTH came back to life. I say most, because after breakfast I had a moment to switch on my radios and see what, if any, damage there was. I could hear and trigger the local repeater, but HF was strangely dead. I could hear the coax switches turning on and off, but the SWR on the antenna was high and it didn't appear that the antenna coupler was doing anything. It's powered remotely using a device called a Bias-T. You use two of them to transport a power supply voltage along your antenna coax. In my case, I inject 12 Volts in my shack, and extract the 12 Volts at the other end near the antenna where it powers the antenna coupler. Occasionally the antenna coupler needs a reset, so I removed the power, waited a bit and reconnected. Still no response from the coupler, so I disconnected the power and left it for another time. A few days later I had a moment to investigate further, so I went outside to check out the antenna and coupler. Both looked fine. I removed and reinserted the power, heard a click, but wasn't sure since a car came barrelling down the road at the same time, so tried again and heard nothing. At this point I decided that this warranted a full investigation and started putting together a mental list of things I'd need. I wanted to test the coupler when it was isolated, I wanted to do a time-domain-reflectometry, or TDR test, to see if anything had changed. This test uses the RF reflection of a cable to determine its overall length and any faults like a cable break, high or low resistance and any joints. If you have a Nano VNA or an antenna analyser, you can do this test. It did occur to me that I didn't have a baseline to compare with, so that was disappointing, but I added it to the list. First thing to test was to check if the radio had been affected. I turned it on, did the same tests and discovered that the Bias-T was still disconnected, which could explain why I didn't hear a click when I tested a second time. Armed with a level of confidence around power, I tried again to trigger the antenna coupler and got nothing, dread building over the potential loss of a radio in the storm, I set about swapping my HF antenna to another radio. At this point I was reminded of an incident, 37 years ago, as a high school student during a class outing. My wonderful and inspirational physics teacher, Bart Vrijdaghs, took us to the local University where the head of the Physics Department of the University of Leiden gave us a tour of their facilities. He took us into a student lab full of oscilloscopes and tone generators and set-up a demonstration to show us how you could generate Lissajous figures. He was having some trouble making it work and with the impertinence reserved for teenagers I quoted a then popular IBM advertisement from 1985, "Of Je Stopt de Stekker Er In", which loosely translates to asking if he had plugged it in. I can tell you, if looks could kill, I wouldn't be telling this story. Suffice to say, it wasn't. Plugged in, that is. Back to my HF antenna. Yeah. It was already plugged into the other radio, so, unsurprisingly it was unable to send any RF to, or from, the first radio, much like some of the advanced telepathic printers I've had the pleasure of fixing during my help desk days a quarter of a century ago. After all that, I can tell you that HF seems to work as expected. The beacon is back online and I have some work ahead of me to create some baseline TDR plots and perhaps a check-in, check-out board to keep track of what's plugged in where. That and looking for another UPS, since keeping the computer it's connected to up and running, at least long enough to properly shut down, would be good. What other lessons can you take away from lightning hitting nearby? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you obtain your license there's a whole lot of learning to be had before you even get started with your first transmission, but when you get there you'll discover that learning has just begun and the rest of your life will be beset with challenges, quests, discovery and dawning understanding. One of the early and recurring questions is around the best time to be on air. Before I get into the why, the answer is, right now. This interminable question will continue to haunt you throughout your life, and the most pressing answer will be shaped around the missed opportunity. You'll discover tools that assist with predicting propagation, web-sites that explain what the various layers of the ionosphere do and how they affect your ability to use radio to make contact with other amateurs. There's learned discussion around testing and tracking propagation, special modes that help create your own maps for your own station and you'll discover an endless supply of experts who will advise you when you should power up your transceiver and call CQ. Whilst I've only been an amateur for a short time. In the decade to date I've learnt one thing about propagation. Despite all the tools, the discussion, the maps and forecasts, there is no substitute for actually getting on air and making noise. Over the past while I've been watching the propagation from my own shack using a 200 milliwatt beacon and I've discovered that running 24 hours a day, every day, well, almost every day, my signal gets to places far beyond my wildest dreams. I have also discovered trends. That is, the average distance of the signal reports is increasing over time. This isn't a linear thing, not even a recurring thing, much like the ebb and flow of the tides, varying from day to day, a little bit at a time, inexorably making your shoes wet when you least expect it. While to some extent we've tamed the prediction of the tides with complex and interrelated cycles, discovered by using Fourier transforms, we're no-where near achieving this level of sophistication for the ionosphere and its associated propagation. Just like predicting a specific wave is still beyond the capabilities of a tide table, predicting the ability of a radio wave to make it from your antenna to that of another amateur is beyond any tool we have today. Another way to look at predicting the complexity associated with the ionosphere is comparing it to weather forecasting. We have national forecasting bodies, with millions of sensors, super computing cycles that dwarf most other research, a global network of satellite sensors, roughly a quarter of which have some form of earth sensing capability, transmitting terrabytes of data every day and still we cannot determine where on Earth it's going to rain tomorrow. The ionosphere, whilst it's being monitored, is not nearly as well resourced. It's not nearly as visible to the average person as the packing of an umbrella and the political perception of need is nowehere near as urgent as getting the weather right. So, absent accurate forecasting, finding a better way to determine when to get on air is required. That said, I've discovered that regret is the biggest motivator to get on air. The day after a contest when a friend made a contact with an amazing station, or the lunch break where I didn't power the radio on to discover a random opening to a clamouring horde of calls looking to make contact. So, my best advice to you is to get on air whenever you can. You might not make a contact every time, but you'll discover what the bands look like right now and you'll have the chance of hitting the jackpot with a rare contact and truth be told, I think your chances of making a contact are higher than winning the lottery. When you do take that step, you'll start discovering the ebb and flow of the bands, discover the characteristic sound that each band makes and what a band sounds like when it's open and when it's not. You'll hear stations far and wide, discover that while there are trends in propagation, there are no rules. From one moment to the next, you'll discover the thrill of hearing something unexpected. One thing to consider, if you get on air for the sole purpose to make contacts, you're likely going to be disappointed. It's like fishing. Most people don't get up at some crazy hour, sit on a damp jetty, freezing parts of their anatomy off for the sole purpose of catching fish. So, get on air and make some noise, today. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In our hobby we regularly invoke line of sight when we discuss the VHF and higher bands. It's a simple concept to help describe when two transceivers can hear each other. The process evokes an image of a beam of light travelling unobstructed between the antennas at either end. Some might picture a laser, others a flashlight, both are useful to become familiar with some of the concepts. If there's a pole between the two, a laser beam, unless it's particularly powerful, won't go through to the other side. A flashlight beam on the other hand might fit around the pole and still be visible at the destination. That illustrates that objects can get in the way of a signal, reducing strength and sometimes blocking it entirely, but it's not the only effect at play. Imagine a building with a mirror glued to its side. If you shine a laser at an angle at the mirror, you can reflect the light off the mirror and essentially still land on target. This is useful if you want to avoid an obstacle directly between you and your destination. The reflected light travels a different and slightly longer distance than direct light would, but if there's no obstacles, both will arrive at the destination. This is an example of a multipath, where the same signal arrives at its destination using multiple different paths. If you've ever used HF radio, making a contact on the other side of the planet, it should come as no surprise that radio waves travel in more than just straight lines. Depending on frequency, radio waves can be affected by phenomena like ionospheric reflection and refraction, atmospheric ducting and even bounce off water, the ground, mountains, hills and objects like buildings, aircraft and even water droplets, along their path. Each of these cause a radio signal to take multiple paths to arrive at the destination. It gets better. A radio signal that travels along a different path takes a measurable difference in time to get to its destination when compared with another path for the same signal. From a radio signal perspective, this difference in time is also known as a phase shift. Now consider a single radio signal that travels along two paths, just like our laser beam and mirror. If you imagine a radio signal as a sine wave, you can draw the two signals on the same chart. They will be in lock-step with each other, since they're the same radio signal, but they won't be on the same place on the chart. In relation to each other they'll be shifted along the time axis, since one took longer than the other to get to the destination. At the destination, the receiver hears a combination of both those signals. They're added together. That means that what's sent and what's received are not the same thing and why it's a great idea to use phonetics in radio communications. In some cases the two signals help and strengthen each other, they're said to interfere constructively, and sometimes the signals hinder and cancel each other out, or interfere destructively. Said in another way, a radio signal can arrive at a receiver along multiple paths at the same time. What's heard at the receiver is essentially a cacophony, caused by each slightly different path. Since the signals are essentially all the same, some of these signals reinforce each other, where some cancel each other out. This effect isn't absolute, since the different path lengths aren't all exact multiples of the wavelength of the signal, they're all over the place, but there will be groups of paths that help and groups that hinder. This phenomenon was first described by Augustin-Jean Fresnel on the 14th of July, 1816 in relation to light and we now call these groups, Fresnel zones. Fresnel zones are numbered, one, two, three and up. The first or primary Fresnel zone is the first group of radio signals that helps strengthen the signal, the second zone is the first group of signals that hinders. The third zone is the second group of radio signals that helps and so-on. Odd helps, even hinders. I should point out that a Fresnel zone is three dimensional. The primary Fresnel zone essentially has the shape of a Zeppelin stretched between the source and the target. The secondary zone is wrapped around the outside of the primary zone like a second skin, but it's thicker in the middle. In practical terms, what this means in point-to-point radio communications is that your antenna needs to be located in a place where most of the signal arrives. The rule of thumb is that the primary Fresnel zone needs to be at least 60% clear, but ideally 80%. If you're in a situation where a receiver is moving, say in a car, you can imagine that your antenna is moving in and out of direct line of sight to a transmitter, but it's also moving between the various Fresnel zones. If you were to move your antenna from the first Fresnel zone to the second and then the third, the signal would be strong, then weak, then strong again. If your receiver is an FM receiver and it's

Foundations of Amateur Radio The amateur radio community is as varied as humanity across the globe. It represents an endless supply of ideas and experiments that continue to attract people looking for something new and exiting. On the face of it, our hobby is about radio and electronics, about propagation and antennas, about modes and contacts, but if you limit your outlook to those topics you'll miss out on a vast expanse of opportunity that is only just beginning to emerge. Until quite recently, computing in amateur radio was essentially limited to logging and contest scoring. It has evolved to include digital modes like PSK31 and the advent of smaller, faster and cheaper computers in the home has brought the possibility of processing unimaginable amounts of data leading to modes like WSPR and FT8. In the past I've spoken about how amateur radio means different things to different people. Making contact using a digital internet enabled repeater is sacrileges to one and manna from heaven to another. Between those two extremes there is room to move and explore. Similarly where one uses valves, another expects an integrated circuit. One wants low power, the other wants every Watt they can lay their hands on. Contesting versus rag chewing, nets vs contacts, SSB vs. CW, FT8 vs. RTTY. Each of these attracts a different part of the community with different outcomes and expectations. For some it's about antenna building, others going portable, climbing a mountain, or setting up in a park. Those are all traditional amateur activities, but the choice and opportunity don't end there. The longer I play with computers the more I see a convergence in the world, a coming together of technologies and techniques. I've talked about some of this before when in 1994 I produced a competition broadcast promotion for the radio station I was working at, using just a computer in the era of reel-to-reel tape and razor blades. My station manager couldn't quite put his finger on what was different, but with hindsight it represented a landslide change in how radio stations have operated since. Mind you, I'm not saying that I was the first, just the first in that particular radio station. In many ways computing is an abstract effort. When asked, I like to express it as designing something intangible in an imaginary world using an made up language and getting paid real money to make it happen, well, numbers in my bank account at least. Within that context, amateur radio is slowly beginning to reap the rewards that come from the exponential growth in home computing power. While the majority of humanity might use the vast amount of CPU cycles to scroll through cat videos online, that access to processing power allows us to do other things as well. For example, right now I'm playing with the dataset that represents all the WSPR spots since March of 2008. As of now there are around four billion rows of contacts, containing data points like a time-stamp, the transmitter, the receiver, the signal strength, location, direction, and more. As part of that investigation I went looking for documents containing the words "RStudio" and "maidenhead", so I could consider creating a map in my statistical tool that allowed me to represent my dataset. In making that search I discovered a thesis by a mathematician who was using the reverse beacon network in an attempt to predict which station could hear which transmitter at what time. In reading the thesis, which I opened because I was looking for an example on how to convert a maidenhead locator into geo-spacial data types in R, a popular statistics platform, I discovered that the author didn't appear to have much, if any, amateur knowledge or experience, but they approached their task, attempting to predict as a mathematician what we in our community call propagation, based on a public dataset, downloaded straight from the reverse beacon network, created by amateurs like you and I. This interaction between science and the amateur community isn't new. Sometimes it's driven by science, other times it's driven by amateur radio. There's a team exploring the ionospheric prediction models that we've used for decades, popularly referred to as VOACAP or Voice of America Coverage Analysis Program, based on multiple evolutions of empirical models of the ionosphere that were first developed in the 1960's, headed by both a scientist and an amateur, Chris KL3WX. With the advent of WSPR and the associated data collection some experiments have started to compare the reality of propagation as logged by WSPR to the predicted propagation as modelled by VOACAP. One such experiment happened in 2018 where Chris and his team at HAARP, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, set out to make transmissions at specific times and frequencies, using the amateur community logging of WSPR spots to compare their transmissions to the predictions. Interestingly they did not match. Just think about that for a moment. The to

Foundations of Amateur Radio The lure of digital modes and the opportunities they bring are enough to tempt some amateurs to begin a journey into integrating their radio and computer to make a new world come to life. This isn't without pain or challenge, but the outcomes are so enticing that many embark on this adventure every day. As a person who has made this trip it's heart warming to see the joy writ large on the face of an amateur who makes their first FT8 contact on a home brew wire dipole rigged together on a Sunday afternoon to take advantage of the latest opening on the 10m band. On the flip side, it's heart breaking to see an amateur falter at the first hurdle, attempting to make their computer talk to their radio and giving up because it just won't work. At first this attitude bewildered me in a community of experimenters, but over time I've come to understand that sometimes an analogue approach isn't suited to the digital world. There isn't really a place where you can attach your multimeter and see why the serial connection isn't working, nor is there any universal document that can walk you through how to set things up. So, for you, if you're in a place where you've all but given up, let me see if I can find words to encourage you to keep trying. I'll skip the propaganda about going digital and move straight to making it work. This might come as a surprise, but in the digital world, things are built in complex layers of interdependence. Said in another way, using an analogy, to turn on a light you need flick a switch, which depends on power to the switch, which depends on power from the fuse box, which depends on power from the street, which depends on power from the substation and so-on. If you flick the switch and the light stays off, you need to figure out which part of the chain failed. Did it fail at the bulb or at the substation? If the street is dark, do you need to check the fuse box or the bulb? That's not to say that either, or even both, can also be faulty, but there's no point in checking until the street has power. From a fault finding perspective, the number of variables that you have control over, in the case of a light bulb not switching on, is strictly limited. You can control the bulb and the fuse and in most cases that's about it, the rest of the chain is outside your direct control. In attempting to make a computer talk to a radio you can be forgiven in thinking that the level of complexity associated with such a trivial task is just as direct and straightforward. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. It's not your fault. A popular slogan "Plug and Play" made people think that computers were easy to use and control. The truth is a far darker reality. One of the hidden sources of frustration in the digital world is the extreme level of complexity. In our quest to standardise and simplify we have built a fragile Jenga tower of software that can collapse at any point. Most of the time this is completely invisible but that doesn't cause it to be any less real. Computers are simple, but only if you control the environment. And when I say control, I mean take ownership of each change. Updating the operating system? Installing a new application? Adding a new peripheral? Changing location? All these things, innocuous as they might seem, can fundamentally alter the behaviour of your environment. As an example, consider the location of your device. Let's say that you changed the location of your computer, either physically or via a preference. All of a sudden your Wi-Fi network stops working. The one that you used for years. Turns out that changing location changed the Wi-Fi driver to stop using a particular channel, not permitted in your new location. If you're curious, this happened to me last week. The point being that troubleshooting is about controlling change in that fragile environment. So, when you're trying to figure out how to make your serial connection work, you need to stop fiddling with everything all at once and change one thing at a time. Discovering the layers of dependency makes this difficult at times, but not impossible. For example, a working serial connection requires that both ends are physically connected, speaking the same language at the same speed. That depends on the radio being correctly configured, but it also depends on the computer having the right drivers installed. It also depends on the software you're using being configured correctly to talk to the right serial device and the operating system giving your software permission to do so. It depends on the software using the right radio mode and it depends on the radio being switched on. Now, imagine the serial connection "not working". Do you check the radio mode before you check if the radio is turned on? What about the physical connection? When you're troubleshooting, you cannot just look at the error message on the screen and follow that path. You need to ensure that all the underlying things are working f

Foundations of Amateur Radio Antennas and propagation are the two single most discussed topics in our hobby, that and how an FT8 contact isn't real. Not a day goes by without some conversation about what antenna is the best one and by how much? In my opinion it's a futile effort made all the worse by so called experts explaining in undeniable gobbledegook, or sometimes even using science, just how any particular antenna is a compromise. The truth is that most conductive materials radiate to more or lesser degree. Sometimes there is enough of that to make it outside your backyard into the antenna of a fellow hobbyist. To make a point, as is my wont, over the past months I've been conducting an experiment. It's the first in a series all related to antennas and propagation. As has been said, the difference between fiddling and science, is writing it down, so this is me writing it down. I'm using the tools available to me to explore the various attributes of my station and how it affects what's possible. I will observe that this is within the dynamic nature of the environment, so the solar cycle, solar events, thunderstorms and noise are making an impact. No doubt I'll create a visualisation that links some of those extra variables, but for now I'm just noting that these external events affect what I'm doing. You might recall that I took delivery of a WSPR beacon a few months ago. If you're unfamiliar, WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, is a tool that allows a station to transmit a time synchronised signal on a specific frequency, so other stations can look for, and attempt to decode it. Think of it as a timed Morse code signal and you'll have a pretty close understanding of what it does. The beacon I purchased was a 200 milliwatt, ZachTek 80To10 desktop transmitter, built by Harry, SM7PNV. It can operate on all the HF bands I'm licensed for and can run all day, every day. It's time-synchronised using a supplied GPS antenna and powered by a Micro USB cable. It's currently connected to my vertical antenna. That vertical antenna is a homebrew helically wound whip, tuned for the 40m band, clamped to the side of my metal patio roof. It's fed by an SGC-237 antenna coupler which is held by magnets to the roof. A 75 Ohm, RG6 quad shield coax cable, about 20m long, left over from my satellite dish installation days, is connected via several adaptors and coax switches to the beacon. This is not a fancy set-up by any stretch of the imagination, but it's my station and what I use to get on air to make noise and that's the whole point of this exercise. You might recall that one of the reasons I want to learn Morse is so I can hear an NCDXF beacon and know which one I'm hearing on my own station. In many ways, this is a different way to approach the same problem. Said plainly, "How do I determine what propagation is like for me, right now, on my own gear?" There are countless tools available, from the Voice of America VOACAP propagation prediction, through the graphs and charts on clublog.org to the Space Weather Services run by the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia. All of these tools have one thing in common, they don't use your own gear. Unsurprisingly, you're likely to wonder what it is that I can achieve with a mere 200 milliwatt transmitter and a vertical. Turns out, quite a lot. As of right now, my WSPR beacon has been heard multiple times over the past three months in the Canary Islands, over 15 thousand kilometres away. The Watts per Kilometre calculation puts that at over 76 thousand kilometres per Watt, not bad for a little amateur station located in the middle of a residential suburb. Did I mention that this was on the 10m band? I was asked if I would put a pin in my DXCC map, tracking the countries for each of these WSPR reports and my answer to that is "No". This is not a contact, this is a propagation ping. I suppose that I could, if I really wanted to argue the point, which I don't, use a pin if I had a reciprocal report from the other station within a set period of time, but that's not why I'm doing this. The purpose of this exercise is to discover what my station is capable of, what propagation is like, how it changes over time, how uniform my radiation pattern is and how much of the globe can hear my signal. One observation to make is that much of the West Coast of the United States is a similar distance away from me, but so far there are no reports from that continent. As a quick and dirty test, I'm using my Yaesu radio and 5 Watts for the next day to see if this is an edge case, or if there is something else going on. For example, my house has a peak metal roof, to the West of my antenna. Is it possible that it's affecting the radiation pattern, or is there something else going on, like the neighbour's house that sits to the East? For all I know the noise floor in the Canary Islands is significantly better than anywhere in the USA, but only time will tell. I've recently taken delivery of a multi

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the first questions a new amateur asks is "Which radio should I buy?" It's a topic I've discussed at length and the answer "It depends." is unhelpful without doing more research, but after you've done the work, you'll be able to answer it for yourself. A question that is just as important, but not asked nearly enough, frankly, I've not heard it in the decade I've been part of this community, is: "How should I build my shack?" The answer is just as useful, "It depends." So, let's explore what precisely your shack design depends on. Let me start with pointing out that I'm not here to give you answers, you can watch hundreds of YouTube videos, read a gazillion web-pages and get no closer than discover how others have answered this question. It wasn't until recently that I understood that it was a question at all, but airing my frustration at the level of dysfunction of my shack unearthed it and in attempting to answer my own question, I started to explore the landscape. As with choosing a first radio, one of the very first answers you need for yourself about the ideal shack is: "What do you want to use it for?" That in and of itself is not enough. I had an answer for that, I want to operate my weekly net, I want to do casual HF contesting, have a beacon running and have space for experimentation. It wasn't until Ben VK6NCB suggested that I dedicate a single radio to the weekly net and the contesting and use the other for experimentation, that I discovered that this wasn't going to work for me. I want to be able to use both my radios at the same time, in a so-called Single Operator Two Radio setup, or SO2R. This will allow me to extend the boundaries of my comfort zone and in doing so, will give me plenty of new things to learn. So, the question: "What do you want to use your shack for?" is probably the single most important thing you need to discover. If you're like me, the obvious answer is: "Everything!", but reality soon sets in and you might start to create an actual list of things that you want to do. Prompted by Ben's suggestion, I was able to articulate for the very first time something that I didn't want to do. I didn't want to set a radio aside for experimentation. So when you're considering what you want to achieve, also think about what you don't want. For example, I have no interest in using the 6 meter band at this time. Not because it's a bad band, far from it, it's because I'm not permitted to use it with my current license. Same for the 23 cm band. This means that I don't have to find ways of making my shack accommodate those two bands. My current license permits me access to precisely six bands and the station I'm building only needs to access those bands at the moment. That brings me to the next question for the ideal shack design. "How long do you expect the layout to last?" For example, are you going to build a new building for your shack, for the next 50 years, or is it something that's going to last for the weekend? Is your shack going to be moved, or is it something a little more permanent? Are you going to change your needs and should you incorporate some of that into your design, or are you perfectly happy with what you're doing today? You have to remember, this is your shack, not mine, not your friends, yours. It means that it needs to accommodate what you want. The next question, boring as it might be, "How much money are you going to spend?" Building a whole new shack out of a catalogue is perfectly fine, but you might discover that the gear you have today is ample to get your shack started. You might leave space for a different piece of kit, or you might decide that the shack needs changing when a new shiny piece of equipment arrives in a nondescript brown box. Some other things to consider are, "What operating actually looks like?" I've seen shack videos that look like a tour through a radio museum with more radios than I have keys on my keyboard, sometimes all connected, other times, just stored on shelves to look at. Are you going to have more than one radio operating at the same time and if so, how are you planning to control them? How many antennas are connected to this shack and how do you track which antenna is connected to which radio? What are you going to do about power? Does everything run on mains power, or are you going to build a 13.8 Volt supply for all your gear? Where are you planning to put computer screens, what about keyboard, mouse, Morse key and antenna switching controls? In other words, "What do the ergonomics of your shack look like?" Remember, there is no right answer. The answer you come up with is yours and yours alone. Look at things that work for you and take note of things that make you wince when you see it in another shack somewhere. That's not to say that you should be dismissive, rather, use the opportunity to ask the shack owner why they made that choice. Who knows, it might cover something you hadn't considere

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the weekend I learnt to my chagrin that my shack was not ready for the contest I decided to participate in for an hour. Truth be told, it was probably me who wasn't ready, but I'm going to blame my shack, since it can't argue and besides this is my story. It started off with turning on the HF radio. That involved turning off my 10m WSPR beacon which is transmitting its little heart out 24 hours a day into the one vertical antenna it shares with my HF radio. Turning off the beacon was simple enough, reach into the mass of cable and dig out the USB power lead that plugs into the beacon. Then follow the antenna coax to the correct switch. Whoops, that's the GPS coax, the other one, there's the switch, now switching it to the HF radio. Why didn't the sound change, actually, come to think of it, what sound? Hmm, the audio is going into, nothing, actually, it's going into the audio mixer that's turned off. Turn that on. Then audio at last, nope. Hmm, oh wait, the audio needs to go from the HF radio, not the VHF radio that's configured to do some audio spectrum recording. Turn off the Raspberry Pi at the same time, since there's no more audio going into that and who needs more potential noise? Locate the two audio plugs that go into the radio audio adaptor, disconnect the Pi audio, connect the radio audio, now, which one is the microphone? Now I've got it all plugged in, still no audio. Hmm, two of the mixer channels are muted. Turn on one, radio goes into TX, that's not good. Turn it off, radio stops transmitting, sigh of relief. Turn on the other channel, finally hear some squeaky sounds. Ahha, it's coming from the headset. Don the headset, now I've got glorious mono in my brain. Test the microphone, nothing. Hmm, ah the switch on the microphone lead. Now I've got RX and TX going. Yay, victory! Now turn on the computer so I can do some logging. Fire up my trusty, wait, which tool? The one I normally use for casual contesting hasn't seen a new version since the author became a silent key, no idea if the rules for this contest are still current, fire up the next one, that needs a brand new configuration file, but that means reading the manual and I've got more important things to do. Try another one, Yes, that's got the rules ready to go. No idea if the rules are current, but at least there's no configuration file to contend with. At this point I'm two hours into my one hour contesting window and I have to stop. Haven't even tuned the antenna and I'm already out of time. Hmm, this shack is rigged. Wonder who I should blame for that? Some days all good intentions come together. Other days they don't. There's always the next contest. Lessons learnt, my shack needs a serious rethink on how best to set it up so I can operate daily, experiment and accommodate a casual contest. Looks like I'm off to the hardware store for some brackets and my documentation clearly needs updating, actually, truthfully, needs writing. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Identifying the problem is the first step in fixing it and with that I want to talk about emergencies. One of the very first things I was told about our amateur radio community was that we're here for when emergencies happen. Our purpose is to communicate, so in a crisis, we can assist by supplying communication to the situation. I've talked about some of this before. Preparedness in the way of on-air training by contesting, in getting gear ready and even exercises for when this occurs. There are amateur clubs dedicated to putting up repeaters for just such an eventuality. Recently there was a local news item about radio amateurs banding together, sending gear to fellow amateurs who were hit by severe flooding that wiped out their shack and with it their ability to communicate. Another event was a friend who lost a big chunk of his shack when his basement flooded. Across Australia and in other parts of the world in recent times we've been witness to the most devastating fires that destroyed entire towns and communities, taking with it infrastructure, communications, not to mention stock, local flora and fauna and entire wildlife ecosystems, bringing some to extinction levels. The destruction doesn't end there. War and famine, drought, cyclones, hurricanes or typhoons, snow storms, heatwaves and the like. All those situations can to greater or lesser degree benefit from amateur radio communications, either for amateurs affected, or for the community at large. I started considering what would actually be required to be useful in such a situation. Could you be prepared for anything, or are you required to pick and choose? What does "being prepared" actually look like and what steps can you take once it's happening? I asked myself if sending radio gear to amateurs who are affected by floods is the most effective way to actually help, or would it be better to pass the hat around and send the proceeds to their bank account? Should you as an amateur drive into an emergency area and start communicating, or are there better ways to help? There are local amateur radio emergency service groups under various names in different countries, some of which are highly effective, others much less so. One attempt I made was to join the local volunteer state emergency services. For several reasons that didn't work out for me, but it remains a viable option for some. Joining those types of groups gives you a framework, but does it actually answer the underlying question, that of effectiveness? I have a drawer full of emergency service training manuals, each more dense than the next, but very little of it relates to the amateur radio. Many pages are dedicated to search and rescue, staying alert, first aid, keeping alive, hand signals, log books, mapping and the like. I am left wondering why we as a community, with a proud century of activity, having one of the main principles as emergency communication appear to have such a poor track record of actually considering what dealing with an emergency looks like and what your own individual place could be in that situation. We document our radios, antennas, power supplies, contacts, circuit board designs, contesting procedures and all the rest of it, but we don't seem to do the same for emergencies. Why is that? In my opinion, it's time to document emergency amateur radio and if you have already started, get in touch. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The art of amateur radio is many things to many people. For me it's a technological challenge, a learning, a way to broaden my experience, a way to be technically active away from my consultancy. The place that amateur radio takes in your life might be the same, or it might be completely different, as varied as the people I've encountered since I became an amateur. People from all walks of life with different experiences and vastly different stories. Truth be told, in the decade that I've been an amateur, I've spoken to and met people from more diverse backgrounds than in the forty years before that. I make that statement as a person who migrated across the globe twice, travelled through a dozen or so countries, stood on stage in front of thousands of people, taught countless classes and as a radio broadcaster interviewed people from all over the planet. From paraplegic to quadriplegics, from people with terminal diseases to people struggling with their identity, from astronomers to astrologers, from train drivers to truck drivers, from mariners to motorcyclists, from working to retired, from healthy to hospitalised, from local to remote, from energetic to sedentary, from happy to sad, from connected to isolated and everything in between. As a host of a weekly net for new and returning amateurs I've begun to notice that some people are falling away, either sitting on the side because they feel that they have nothing to contribute, or stopping communication altogether. It occurred to me that for some people amateur radio is the only way that they connect to the world around them. It's the only way for them to meet people who are different, who walk a different path, who tell a different story. It's also sometimes the only thing that makes them get out of bed. In a world where we're all busy, dealing with the realities of daily life, trying hard to figure out what our place is in that experience and trying hard not to lose your identity while you're attempting this, it's easy to overlook the amateur you didn't hear from for a week or a month. I know that for several of my new friends, amateur radio kept them alive for longer and made them smile more often and made their life a little easier, even if several of them have become a Silent Key since I counted them as my friend. When one of the main activities of our hobby is communication, it seems appropriate to take a moment to consider what that looks like from the other person's perspective. What might it be like to be acknowledged, to be validated as a human, to see them and their life, to speak with them, even if only briefly, and to take a moment out of our own busy existence and answer that CQ, or respond to a question, or smile with a fellow amateur. There is another aspect to this, one which I've not actually seen in the amateur community. Perhaps I've been too busy to notice, but it appears that the venerable telephone circle, the idea that one person calls the next person on the list, who then calls the next and so-on. If the last person doesn't get a call within a set time, they call the list backwards and discover who is not answering their phone. It's an effective way for people to regularly talk to each other and it's an excellent way to make sure that everyone is OK. In our own community of amateurs we can do the very same thing. Hosting a net is one way, having a daily commuter chat is another, but when you do this, take a moment to consider who didn't check in and see what they're up to. It's fascinating to me that we're a hobby that's primarily made of old men, yet we haven't actually embraced our own ageing process as part of the experience. Sure there is a need to encourage new people into the hobby, but that's not the entire story. We should be so lucky as to speak with our friends on a regular basis, to check-in with each other and to make sure that we're all getting our daily dose of RF. So, ask yourself how the community around you is doing and how you might take a moment to check-in with those not so near, but just as dear to you. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of my favourite activities is contesting. Essentially it's a time-limited activation of your station for the purposes of testing your skill and station against other participants. Contests are controlled by rules as varied as the amateur community itself. That said, there are common terms and concepts and if you're not familiar with them, they can lead to confusion and disappointment when you inadvertently break a rule and see your hard work vanish into thin air. I will note that what I'm discussing here is not universally true, so read the rules for each contest you participate in, something you should already be doing since rules are refined over time and it's rare to keep the same rules between years. A contest starts and stops at a specific time, often expressed in UTC, or Universal Coordinated Time. You should know what your local timezone is in relation to UTC and take into account any variations like Summer and Winter time. Any contacts made outside these times don't count and you cannot log these against the contest. Each contact or QSO is awarded a set number of points. It might be scored based on mode, band, power, time and sometimes distance. To encourage specific types of contacts, some might attract a score of zero. This does not mean that the contact is useless, which I'll get to shortly. Your score is the sum of all the points you make for each contact. I will mention that contest logging software can track this to make your life easier, although it comes at the price of requiring a computer. Sometimes a prohibited contact attracts penalties. Prohibited, as-in, by the rules of that contest. For example, some allow you to contact the same station more than once, others allow this only if you do it on a different band. Speaking of bands. It's not permitted to make contest contacts on the WARC bands. In 1979, the World Administrative Radio Conference allocated the 30m, 17m and 12m bands for amateur use. These are not used for contesting. To avoid a contest, you can use those bands, but truth be told, you should try to use all the bands, even during contests, since it will help you operate your station in adverse conditions, something worth practising. Many contests allocate additional scoring based on state, country, DXCC entity, CQ or ITU zone, prefix, or all of these together. Both the CQ and ITU zones represent regions of the world. The CQ zones are managed by CQ Magazine and the ITU zones are managed by the International Telecommunications Union. A zone is represented by a number. The DXCC is a system that tracks individual countries across the globe. If you make contact with 100 of these places, you've achieved your DX Century and you join the DX Century Club, or DXCC. Consider a contact with me. You'd have a contact with VK6FLAB. It would also be a contact with the VK6 prefix, the VK DXCC entity, CQ zone 29 and ITU zone 58. If that's not enough, it would also be a contact with OC-001, the IOTA or Islands On The Air designation for Australia. This is useful because for some contests these extra features represent points, often significant ones, generally referred to as a "multiplier". To calculate your score, tally up all your contact points, then count all the features, CQ Zones, the ITU Zones, DXCC entities, states, countries, etc. and multiply your score with that count. If you contact 10 callsigns and get one point for each, you have 10 points. If in doing so you contact five contest features, you end up with an overall score of 50 points. Often contests have different categories and rules for transmitter power level, the number of transmitters and the number of operators. Definitions for these vary. High Power might be 400 Watts in Australia, but 1500 Watts in the United States. QRP or very low power might be 10 Watts in one contest, but 5 in another, so check. Some contests have an assisted category where you're permitted to use tools like the DX Cluster where other stations alert you online to their presence on a particular frequency. There is a concept of an overlay, where how long you've held your license, your age, working portable, battery operated, using a wire antenna or mobile, groups you with others doing the same thing. This means that you could be a rookie, youth, portable, battery, wire antenna, single assisted operator, all at the same time. It often pays to consider who else is in a particular group and make your claims accordingly. If you're contesting with more than one person, a Multi station, there are rules for that too. Sometimes this includes the amount of land a contest station is permitted to use. If you're a Multi-Single station, you might be permitted to use one transmitted signal on one band during any 10 minute period. A Multi-Two might be permitted to use two simultaneous transmitted signals, but they must be on two different bands. A Multi-Multi may activate all six contest bands at the same time, but only use one transmitt

Foundations of Amateur Radio After weeks of attempting to get some noise, any noise out of my PlutoSDR I have finally cracked it. Not sure if cracked it refers to my sanity or the outcome, but beeping was heard from the Pluto on my radio, so I'm doing victory laps around the house, all conquering hero type affair, complete with whooping and hand waving. In the end it all came down to serendipity and truth be told, I know it beeps, I've heard it beep, it does so on a predictable frequency, but why it exactly works is still a mystery that has yet to be discovered since the documentation I have isn't sharing and the example code I have contradicts what I'm seeing. For context, a PlutoSDR, or Pluto, is a very capable software defined radio, perfect for experimentation. I've talked about it before in the context of using it as a receiver. My most recent efforts involved coaxing my Pluto out of a corner after it sat there sulking for weeks. Turns out that not only was my USB power lead broken, which caused the blinken lights to stay off. When I finally figured that out, I discovered that one of the two wireless dongles I'd purchased together was Dead On Arrival. After a frustrating morning with the manufacturer who wouldn't take my word for it that swapping out the two identical units would not require installing the driver, something about Windows Device Manager on my Linux computer, I went back to the store who happily swapped out the faulty device on the spot. Mind you, the Pluto still isn't talking to my wireless network, but at least it's not the dongle anymore. I plugged the Pluto into the back of my main workstation and discovered to my surprise that in addition to showing up as a thumb-drive, which I knew about, it also turned up as a network device, which I didn't know about. It's been a while since I powered this up to play, so I updated the firmware which fixed some annoying issues and started to explore. The aim of my quest was to create a proof of concept beep from the command-line on the Pluto. If you're not familiar with this. The Pluto is running a flavour of Linux. You can connect to its command-line and run commands from inside the hardware. This is important because for most radios, of both the analogue and software kind, you generate the information somewhere, like Morse Code, a WSPR signal, your voice, what-ever and then you send that to the radio. On an analogue radio it's likely to go across an audio cable of some sort and if you have a software defined radio, it's likely to travel from your computer across a USB or network cable to the radio to get processed. This is different in that there is no such signal coming across the USB link. The link is used as a network cable to ssh into the radio where you can generate whatever you want. In my case Morse. If you're not familiar with ssh, think of it as a keyboard connection to a remote computer. My script, hacked together as it is, more on that shortly, takes a string, like say "CQ DE VK6FLAB" and processes that character by character. It converts each into the equivalent Morse code dits and dahs and then uses those to turn on a test tone for an appropriate amount of time. So, to send "CQ", the script changes that into -.-. --.- and then turns on the transmitter for three units, off for one, on for one, off for one, on for three, off for one, etc. This is Morse code at its very simplest, the software equivalent of holding down a Morse key for the correct amount of time and then releasing it. I disparagingly called it hacked together, because it's using the in-built busybox command shell that comes with the Pluto. If you're familiar, the actual shell is called ash, or Almquist shell. It's strictly limited in functionality, no arrays, minimal redirection, all very basic. Perfect for what I want to do, but not so much if you want to write software. After working around the lack of arrays, one of the things that caused me the most problems was to discover just how to setup the Pluto to actually do this. I found a couple of examples online that pretended to work, claimed to be doing what they said they were, but nothing was heard on my local analogue radio. At one point I heard clicks, but no beeping. After spending literally hours testing, scanning up and down the radio dial with my Yaesu FT-857d, I stumbled on a tone that stopped when my test script stopped. I started the script again and the tone came back. When it ended, the tone stopped again. I finally had a relationship between a tone on the PlutoSDR and the frequency on my radio. So, with all manner of funky offsets in my code, subject to me understanding the how and what of them, I can now beep to my hearts content. Of course I've shared my efforts on github, cunningly called Pluto Beacon. Have a look and tell me what I did wrong. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I took delivery of a shiny new circuit board populated with components and connectors. Knowing me, you'd assume that I'd been the recipient of some kind of software defined radio gadget and you'd be right. One of the connectors was a micro USB socket, intended to be used to plug the hardware into a computer and to drive the circuit board. The board came to me by way of a friend who saw it online, waxed lyrical about it and for less than $35, who could begrudge this exploration into a new toy? Once it arrived, it sat on my shelf for a few weeks, enticingly packed in an anti-static bag, transparent enough to see the device inside, taunting me to open it up, plug it in and have some fun. Today I opened it up and started researching my new gadget. It didn't come with any user manual, no URL, no model number, but it did have a callsign on it, so I started there. I'll note that I'm not going to repeat that callsign here for a number of reasons, which I'll get to. My exploration discovered a site where this device was being sold. It also unearthed several international amateur radio forums describing what appeared to be this device, including circuit diagrams and specifications. What I found harder to discover was software. It appears that I have a clone of a device that may still be manufactured, or not, I cannot tell. I found some example code on github for the original hardware, but it seemed to require other libraries, but didn't actually specify those anywhere. I opened up an online translation tool and started translating some of the wording on the circuit board in an attempt to discover just what information was written on the board. The wording was clearly from a different culture, a different perspective and while it claims to come from a maker space that appears to promote women, it also contained a militaristic phrase which caused me to pause. In that moment I came to a sudden and abrupt realisation. How do I know what this piece of hardware actually does? How do I know if when I plug it into the first available USB socket on my computer, it won't install anything nefarious, start connecting to the internet and start doing something unexpected? There's enough hardware on the circuit board to do that and even if the labels on the components tell me that they are a specific integrated circuit, how do I know that it actually is that chip? The chips on this circuit appear to have a lot more connectivity than a simple receiver might warrant. One has 40 pins, the other 32. If the label is accurate, the data sheet for one of the chips indicates that it includes an 8-bit micro controller among its various functions. I'll admit that I'm coming from an IT security background at this and you are free to argue that I'm being paranoid, but does that make me wrong? I know that I don't know enough about this particular board or its origins that for now it's going to remain inside its anti-static bag, taunting me with the possibilities of the connectors it offers, but until I know more about the provenance of this gadget, it's going nowhere near any of my computers. If you have suggestions on how to proceed, don't be shy. I did briefly consider plugging it into a Pi, but how would I know if it updated the firmware, forever compromising that Pi? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this board does any of this. My point is around discovering if it does, or not, one way or another. No doubt some might think I'm overly suspicious and there is truth in that, but in my profession it pays to be vigilant. The underlying issue is that of validation. There's anti-virus software available to deal with malicious code, but how do you do such a thing for malicious hardware? Again, I'm not saying that this circuit board is doing anything other than being a USB connected receiver, but how would you know? How would you verify that? And how do we in the amateur community weed out the nefarious tools from the legitimate ones? I'll leave you with one thought. When was the last time you plugged your phone into a free charger on the bus or at the airport? How do you know that your phone wasn't hacked? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the topics I've been talking about lately is the idea that we might be able to measure the performance of your radio in some meaningful way using equipment that can be either obtained by any amateur, or by introducing a process that allows results to be compared, even if they have been generated differently. Recently I came up with a tool that automatically generates a spectrogram of an audio recording. That on its own isn't particularly interesting, but it's step one in the processing of an audio signal. In addition to the spectrogram, I also created a tool that generates a tone frequency sweep, think of it as a tone that changes frequency over time, let's call it a sweep. If you combine the two, you can generate a spectrogram of the sweep to give you a starting point or baseline for comparison. You can build on that by using your radio to transmit that sweep and record the result using a receiver. In my initial experiments, I used an RTLSDR dongle to receive the audio with some success and a boatload of spectacular harmonics, but I wanted to find a better, more accessible way to do this and during the week I realised that my Yaesu FT-857d that's sitting in my shack, is connected to a perfectly functional antenna and with a few settings it could do the job perfectly. One of the biggest issues with my RTLSDR setup was squelch. That is the difference between what is a legitimate transmission and what is noise. Set it too high and you hear nothing, set it too low and you hear everything, including background noise. Since the VHF or 2m noise levels are quite high at my location, or QTH, I normally have the squelch completely closed. This is fine if you're normally using a strong repeater, but if you're attempting to receive a weak hand-held, that's never going to work. As any self-respecting amateur I was dragged down the path of last resort to read my user manual where I discovered that in addition to CTCSS, a way to transmit a tone to open a repeater, there's also a setting called Tone Squelch or on my radio TSQ, which will keep my radio squelch closed, unless it hears the CTCSS tone from another radio. Truth be told, I had to read a different user manual to discover how to actually set the CTCSS tone on my handheld to test, but that's just adding insult to injury. It has been a while since I read any manual, even though I try to get to it once a year or so. I blame it on the lack of field-day camping. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. So, combining all this, the spectrogram generator, the sweep, CTCSS, and adding a Raspberry Pi with some website magic, if you're interested, an AWS S3 bucket, I now have a service that listens on a local frequency, opens the squelch if it hears the correct CTCSS tone, records the incoming signal until it stops, then generates a spectrogram from that audio and uploads it to a web site. None of this is particularly complicated, though I did have some bugs to work through. I've published the code as a branch to my existing frequency-response project on github and I've asked my local community to experiment with what I have on-air before I start doing more far reaching experiments. For example. If I were to tune my radio to a local repeater output frequency, rather than the simplex one I'm currently on, I'd be able to record and generate spectrograms for each transmission coming from that repeater. If that repeater was connected to the internet, using AllStar, IRLP, Echolink, DMR or Brandmeister, or even all of them, the global community could send their audio to my recorder and it could generate a spectrogram on the spot. If using that repeater, you played a sweep into your microphone, or used your digital audio interface to play the sound, you could then compare your signal path against others and against the baseline response. One of the issues with doing this is that much of the audio that travels across the internet is pretty munched, that is, it's compressed, frequencies are cut-off, there's all manner of interesting harmonics and the value of the comparison appears limited at best. Once I have my multi-band HF antenna, which I'm told is still being built, I intend to set this contraption up on HF where we can do point-to-point recordings and we end up having a direct comparison between two stations who transmit into my frequency-response software. I should add some disclaimers here too. At the moment I'm only using FM. The intent is to get this to a point where I can compare any mode, but when I move to HF, I'll likely start with Single Side Band and go on from there. One other annoyance is that any user needs to configure CTCSS to make this work, which is yet another hurdle to overcome, not insurmountable, but I like to keep things simple when you're starting to learn. Also, the harmonics still show, even on an analogue radio, so there's plenty more to discover. In the meantime, what kinds of things can you think of to use this fo

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I've spoken about measuring the frequency response of your radio and what the benefits of doing so might be. Today I've got some progress to report and some initial discoveries. Again, this is preliminary, but then all of this hobby is experimentation, so that should come as no surprise. Let's start with the mechanics of what I'm doing and a "duh" moment I need to confess. The aim of this process is to transmit a known audio signal, receive it, record it and create a spectrogram from it. This allows us to compare the original spectrogram against the received one and show just how the audio path has been affected by getting the audio into the transmitter, the processing by the transmitter, the propagation between the transmitter and receiver, the artefacts introduced in the receiver and any recording device. To begin this process I started off with an audio file of my voice. That wasn't very helpful, since it's a complex signal and comparing my voice before and after is a non-trivial process. At some point I intend to come back to voice before and after comparison, but that's on the shelf for now. The audio that I'm using is a frequency sweep, lasting 5 seconds. That is, there's a tone that changes frequency from DC to 5 kHz. When I looked at the spectrogram of that, it shows as a curve with time against frequency. It occurred to me that I could make two of those sweeps at the same time to measure distortion, so I added a reverse frequency sweep from 5 kHz down to DC. Now I've got two crossing lines showing in my spectrogram. To transmit this audio, I'm using the same tool I use to automatically call CQ during a contest. Every so many seconds I transmit this audio into a dummy load and at this point I should mention that my "duh" moment was that I was attempting to transmit into an antenna and record from a dummy load, rather than transmit into a dummy load and record from an antenna. I still cannot believe that I did that. Moving on. The recording is done using an RTLSDR dongle. In the current initial version I'm using a tool called rtl_fm to tune the dongle to the same frequency as my transmitter. I send the audio from there to the same tool I used to generate the original audio, SoX, that's Sierra, Oscar, X-Ray, and have it detect the silence between each transmission and record each into a new file. If I leave it running, every time I transmit something, SoX will create a new audio file. I'm saying that quite quickly, but getting the squelch and silence detection working in my noisy environment took most of a day and it's specific to my station, today. I'll have to figure out how to make this smarter, but for now I have some data. A spectrogram is generated for each audio file and then we can compare pictures. What was sent, audio wise, and what was received, audio wise. To be clear, I'm not sending images, I'm sending audio and comparing the spectrograms of this audio. I will also note that I'm currently using FM as the mode. I intended to do this with SSB, but the amount of effort to get the squelch right has left me with a future project to achieve that. The code itself is pretty rudimentary, but I've uploaded it to my github page. I've also added the pictures to my project website, which you can find at vk6flab.com. One initial observation, one that I don't yet understand, is that what I sent and what I received don't look the same. My pretty curves in the original audio come back with spectacular harmonics all over the place, very pretty to be sure, but not quite what I was expecting, let's call it an educational challenge. Before I forget, just because I'm using a Yaesu FT-857d, a Raspberry Pi, an RTLSDR dongle, an antenna and a dummy load, doesn't mean that you need to. Essentially, what this does is generate a special audio file, transmit it, receive it, record it and generate a spectrogram. You can play the audio from your own computer if you have digital modes set-up, or from your mobile phone if not. Recording can be something sophisticated with off-air monitoring, or it can be a recorder held in front of your receiver. One final note. You can change settings on both the transmitter and the receiver to see what they do in relation to the audio, so experiment. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I was reading a comment from another amateur about digital modes. Tucked inside that comment was a phrase that could easily have been overlooked, but it reminded me that there is plenty to learn and test in the field of amateur radio. The phrase, "requires actual understanding of audio level paths" was uttered by Chris, VK2CJB and it prompted a brief conversation at the time, but I've been working on it ever since. Where I arrived at is an attempt, incomplete as yet, to design a mechanism to show the impact of various transmitter settings on the received audio in such a way that you can test your own gear and see the result. Before I explain how I'm doing this, let me describe why it's important. Using a radio in concept is pretty simple, if you yell into the microphone, the audio comes out distorted and if you whisper, it might also be distorted, but in a different way, neither is conducive to communication. One way to improve this is a tool called the ALC. Using Automatic Level Control as a guide to what level your audio should be is outlined in every amateur radio manual I've seen, but how much it matters and to what extent is left unsaid. If you apply a filter or any number of other fancy options, what happens to your audio? To get some sense of what I'm describing, listening back to your own voice after it comes across HF SSB is surprisingly distorted in comparison to a local recording. You might argue, what's the harm, as long as the other station can hear my voice, we're good to go. Sure, if voice is all you're using, but what if it's data? In that case, the audio you're transmitting is actually encoded digital information. To decode it, the software needs to deal with frequencies, distortion and levels to name a few. In computer science, "garbage in, garbage out" is the concept that flawed, or nonsense input data produces nonsense output. In our case, if you transmit garbage, the receiver is going to start with garbage and what gets decoded is likely not what you expect. Without going into error correction, essentially, the cleaner the path between the transmitter and the receiver, the higher the chances of success and to be fair, you already know this when you attempt to work a pile-up on a noisy band. "Again, again, just the prefix, again!", sound familiar? To achieve this I started with the idea that you could transmit a tone and if you knew what it was, you could determine the difference between what was sent and what was received. My first step was to generate a single 1 kHz tone, but then I wondered what would happen if you did multiple tones, one after the other. My current version is an audio frequency sweep, running from 0 to 5 kHz in five seconds. It's essentially a computer generated sequence of tones with known characteristics. You transmit this audio file using your radio and then record it off air, either from a local receiver, WebSDR, or the radio belonging to a friend. Using the recording, you can create a spectrogram, a picture, showing the frequencies over time present in the audio. Compare the two and you just learnt what each setting on your radio does precisely to the audio. Of course it's simple for me to say this, but I'm working on using a tool I've spoken about before, csdr, to do the heavy lifting, so you can actually do a meaningful comparison between the various audio files. In the mean time, I've managed to use SoX, the so-called Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs to both generate the audio sweep and draw a preliminary spectrogram. Next up is showing some side-by-side images of various radio settings and their effect on the spectrogram. I'll publish this on my website when I have something to show-and-tell. I also don't yet know if my source audio file is going to be sufficient, but I'll subject that to some testing as well. For example, I'm investigating multiple simultaneous audio sweeps with different frequency ranges. The more complex the spectrogram, the more we might be able to learn from the distortion on receive, but time will tell. If you have some ideas on how to improve this, let me know. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio On the 6th of June, 2004, two Brazilian amateurs Roland, PY4ZBZ and Arnaldo, PY4BL made a historic contact on 40m. The distance was not particularly significant, only 70 km, but the mode was. Using 2.1 kHz bandwidth, so it could fit within an amateur radio SSB transmission, they used software created by Swiss amateur Francesco, HB9TLK to make the very first HamDream exchange. This technological advancement represents the birth of what we now call HamDRM and Digital SSTV and how it came about is an adventure that needs documenting, since what we have is written in a combination of Portuguese, German and English, cobbled together from broken websites, archives, source code, commit comments and lost links. To provide some context, there is a broadcast radio mode called DRM, or Digital Radio Mondiale. At this point I should mention that this has absolutely nothing to do with Digital Rights Management with the catchy acronym of, you guessed it, DRM. As you might expect, this acronym clash is unhelpful, to say the least, when you're trying to find information about this radio mode. Digital Radio Mondiale, or DRM, essentially defines a digital standard for radio broadcast transmissions. It can handle multiple audio streams as well as file exchange and is used by broadcasters across the globe. Mondiale, in case you're curious means worldwide in French, seems my high school language lessons have finally been put to good use, my French teacher in the Netherlands will be thrilled. DRM is more efficient than AM and FM and as an open standard, it's gaining popularity. The first broadcast using this mode took place on the 16th of June 2003, during the World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva. An open source implementation of this mode is called Dream. The source code is available online and is capable of being compiled for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Dream was originally written by Volker Fischer and Alexander Kurpiers. The Dream project started in June of 2001 and today it has many contributors. The DRM standard uses different bandwidths depending on which mode is used. The narrowest DRM mode uses 4.5 kHz, but modes using 100 kHz exist. By comparison, a typical analogue amateur radio uses 2.7 kHz for SSB. Using the source of Dream, Francesco built a modified version, called it HamDream and let it loose on the world. It was used for that very first 70 km contact between Roland and Arnaldo. Several versions of HamDream existed. The first QSO used 2.1 kHz and the last version of HamDream used 2.5 kHz bandwidth. To fit digital audio inside that narrow bandwidth it used different audio compression techniques, called a CODEC, namely LPC10 and SPEEX. According to Francesco, HamDream is the basis for all current amateur radio 2.5 kHz HamDRM programs. He goes on to say that it's outdated and the source and executables were removed from the net. Personally I think that's a shame, since it represents part of the history of our community and I think that putting the source online in a place like GitHub would be beneficial to the hobby. The 2.5 kHz HamDRM mode is implemented in several places. QSSTV, EasyPal and WinDRM to name a few. No doubt it's elsewhere. Of those three, only QSSTV survives. The source code for EasyPal, written by Erik VK4AES, now SK, was lost, apparently when the computer on which it lived was sold by his estate. Ironic really, since EasyPal was written because Erik lost a previous application due to a lightning strike nearby and was forced to write a new application from scratch. WinDRM appears even more elusive. There's a repository on the now archived Google Code site. There are derivatives that appear to use a version of WinDRM, but details are hard to find. An archive I have shows a commit by Francesco, HB9TLK from 2008. I've yet to learn how this relates to the overall picture. In parallel, in 2005, a few enterprising students made a MATLAB implementation of DRM. Called Diorama and written by Andreas Dittrich and Torsten Schorr it forms the basis of a Linux open source HamDRM receiver written by Ties, PA0MBO, chosen because it had a better performance in marginal conditions than Dream did. It's called RXAMADRM. Ties also wrote an open source transmitter, cunningly called TXAMADRM. It was based on the source code of Dream, specifically v1.12b. If at this point your head is exploding, I wouldn't blame you. Let's recap. There's an open broadcast standard called DRM. An open source, cross platform tool called Dream, in active development, implements that standard. A special, now discontinued, version of Dream was created called HamDream. It used less bandwidth than DRM and forms the basis of a standard that we now call HamDRM, which underpins Digital SSTV. HamDream forms the basis of the discontinued products, EasyPal and WinDRM, and lives on in TRXAMADRM and QSSTV, both Linux open source. In amateur radio terms HamDRM is one of the ways we can efficiently exchange digital infor

Foundations of Amateur Radio A couple of days ago, after months of anticipation, an unassuming little box arrived on my doorstep. Inside the box was a nondescript electronic device with two SMA connectors and a USB socket. Other than the branding, there were no markings on the device and it came without any instructions. It did come with a couple of SMA adaptors, which came in handy. A little research later determined which of the two SMA adaptors connected to an antenna and which connected to a radio. The gadget itself is called an upconverter. It's an interesting little device that essentially mixes two frequencies together, creating two new ones, start with say 720 kHz and mix it with 120 MHz and you end up with 120.720 MHz and 119.28 MHz. In other words, if you mix two frequencies together, you end up with both the sum and the difference of those frequencies. If you have a radio that can listen to 120 MHz, but cannot listen to 720 kHz, then using an upconverter, you can, as it were, expand the frequency range of your radio to hear different signals. I purchased the upconverter with the intent of connecting it to my PlutoSDR, since the lowest frequency it can do is 70 MHz. Combine the two and I should be able to listen to all of the amateur HF frequencies at once. Given that my PlutoSDR is currently doing something else, I had a look at using the upconverter with my WSPR beacon monitor that uses an RTL-SDR dongle. Technically it's not required, since my particular dongle can be used to tune to HF frequencies, but as an experiment, it works well enough. So, I connected the antenna to the upconverter, the upconverter to the dongle and the dongle to a Raspberry Pi, a single board computer that runs Linux. Essentially the exact same setup I've been running for years, except that I inserted the upconverter between the dongle and the antenna. That and some power took care of the hardware. The software initially gave me some challenges. After discovering that the tool I'm using, rtlsdr_wsprd, has an option for an upconverter, I was up and running in minutes. So, at the moment, and for the next foreseeable little while, my WSPR monitor is using an upconverter to scan HF. Technically this should increase the sensitivity by a significant amount, since the dongle is better suited to tuning to higher frequencies than it is to lower ones, but only time will tell. I updated my monitoring scripts to take into account if the frequency I was monitoring was out of range, so it currently won't report on anything above 60 MHz, but then that's fine for what I'm working on. I've updated the script on github if you want to have a look. It's nothing fancy, it essentially checks to see if there's a file called upconverter and if so, it calls a slightly different monitoring script. Given that I have existing logging data associated with this monitor, I should be able to discover if there's any significant difference between what I've been monitoring to date and what's coming in now that an upconverter is in the listening chain. Theoretically, I should be able to hear weaker signals, but time will tell. One thing that was interesting whilst I was discovering how this all works and hangs together is that it wasn't immediately obvious how to set it all up in software. I tried several tools to make sense of the data. In the end the combination of gqrx, setting the local oscillator offset to a negative frequency, in my case 120 MHz, got me to the point where I could set the frequency to 720 kHz and hear my local broadcast station, whilst the software actually, secretly behind the scenes, added 120 MHz to that and tuned the radio to 120.720 MHz. Once I got my head around that, things started falling into place. The same is true for rtlsdr_wsprd, adding the upconverter flag with the value of 120MHz, got my monitoring station up and running. This is a pretty user friendly way of getting started with frequency mixers. You might recall my exploration into components apparently made from unobtainium. The intent is to use a variable frequency to achieve a similar thing, but that's a project still on the drawing board, for now, I have a fixed frequency, 120 MHz, which is plenty to get started. If you're curious why I'd want a stable variable frequency, consider for example, what might happen if you transmit from a HF frequency into an upconverter. Perhaps you could use your HF capable WSPR beacon to make a signal on 2m or 70cm. 120 MHz won't cut it, but perhaps you can work out what's needed to get from the 10m WSPR band to the 2m WSPR band, or the 70cm WSPR band. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A little while ago I mentioned in passing that I was considering implementing a parrot repeater to help determine how your radio is performing. Discussion afterwards revealed that not everyone had the same picture in mind, so I thought I'd share with you some of what I'm considering and why. Most of the modern radio landscape revolves around hooking a computer up to some type of radio frequency capable device. Commonly it's the audio and control signals that travel between computer and radio, but there are plenty of examples where raw data makes the journey, like in the case of an RTL-SDR dongle. That journey is increasingly made using USB, the cable, not the sideband, and limits are based around the maximum speed that a Universal Serial Bus has. Essentially the amount of data that you can process is limited by how fast your computer can talk to the radio. For my parrot repeater, I'm imagining a device that can receive RF from any radio and process that signal to determine what the centre frequency is, the deviation, stability, the mode, what ever parameters I end up being able to determine, a whole other discussion on its own. In response, the idea is that the device generates a report and either presents that using text to speech, or as a web-page, or both. Using traditional methods, this would involve a radio, a computer, some software, connections between the radio and the computer, not to mention power for both the computer and the radio, an antenna and perhaps an amplifier. The picture I have in mind is not anything like that. I'm imagining a single device that takes power and does all I've described inside the one device. No external computer, no audio cables, no control cables, no hard drives, not anything, just a PlutoSDR and a power source connected to an antenna or two. You might think that's fanciful. As it happens, we already have some of that today. When I run dump1090 on my PlutoSDR, it presents itself to the world as a website that I can visit to see which aeroplanes are within range, where they are exactly on a map, what messages they're sending and where they're going. All of the processing is done inside the PlutoSDR. All I have to do is give it power and an internet connection. This is possible because the PlutoSDR is essentially a computer with RF. It runs Linux and you can write software for it. Unlike my Yaesu FT-857d, which also has a computer on board, rudimentary to be sure, but a computer none the less, it cannot be altered. I cannot load my own piece of software, launch a web browser and point it at my Yaesu, not without connecting an external computer that in turn needs to be connected to the radio. I might add, that this is is how many repeaters work and how devices that implement AllStar and Echolink manage to make the jump between the Internet and the world of RF. If your eyes are not lighting up right now, let me see if I can put it in different terms. The PlutoSDR has the ability to access signals between 70 MHz and 6 GHz. It can do so in chunks of 56 MHz. Said differently, if you were able to consider all of the amateur HF spectrum, from zero to 54 MHz, you could fit all of it inside one chunk of 56 MHz that the PlutoSDR is capable of. You couldn't send it anywhere, since you're limited to how fast a USB cable is, but you could technically process that inside the PlutoSDR itself. To get the PlutoSDR to see the amateur HF bands you could connect it to a transverter, in much the same way that today many 2m handheld radio owners use a transverter to get to 23cm, except in this case, we're going the other way. In order to actually use this massive amount of information, you're going to need to do some serious signal processing. Accessing 56 MHz of raw data is hard work, even if you don't have to get it across a serial connection. As it happens, the PlutoSDR also comes with an FPGA. As I've mentioned previously, it's like having a programmable circuit board, which can be programmed to do that signal processing for you. It has the capability to massage that massive chunk of data into something more reasonable. For example, you might be able to use it to extract each of the amateur bands individually and represent them as an image that you might show to the world as a waterfall on a web browser. Now to be clear, I'm not saying that any of this exists just yet, or fits within the existing hardware constraints. I'm only starting on this journey. I'll be learning much along the way. No doubt I'll be using existing examples, tweaking them to the point that I understand what they do and how they work. I've already been talking about some of this for years. As you might have discovered, this adventure is long with many different side quests and at the rate I'm going I'm confident that this represents the breadth and depth of what amateur radio means to me. So, if you're wondering why I'm excited, it's because the amateur radio world of opportunity is gettin

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I received an email from a fellow amateur, Elwood WB0OEW. We've been exchanging email for a little while and having been in the hobby since before I learnt to ride a bicycle, he's always got some interesting insight into something I've said and an encouraging word to share. This time he introduced me to a project he built and published a couple of years ago. It's a variable frequency standard, built from parts and, at the time, costing all of about $150, more on that shortly. Compared to the microwave oven sized HP-606A signal generator sitting on my bench in bits, with some diligent layout, this project could fit inside one of the valves that drives that massive hunk of equipment. As an aside, truth be told, I'm a little afraid of the HP. It managed to pop the RCD, a residual current device, or safety switch, in my house and in doing so, took out the UPS that powers my main workstation, so, not unexpectedly, I'm reluctant to repeat the experience. Once I understand precisely what happened, I'll pick up the restoration efforts and based on what I learnt today, it might get me where I want to go faster. Elwood's frequency standard is a very interesting project that delivers a very precise Variable Frequency Oscillator or VFO with an accuracy approaching 1 part per billion. His project uses an Arduino to control a touch sensitive display, read a knob and set and correct the frequency using a GPS as an accurate external time source. It's all very compact, easy to follow and I immediately thought that this would be an excellent project to build with a little twist. I'm thinking that it would be really great to have this device sit on your local network and make it remote controllable. The heart of this frequency standard project is a chip called an Si5351. The Silicon Labs Si5351, to use its full name, was first sold by Mouser in 2010 and has been popular since. You'll find it in all manner of places, including the Linux kernel source tree, the QRPlabs QCX and BITX to name two, the Elecraft KX2, scores of Arduino projects and countless frequency source products and projects used in amateur radio. The Si5351 is a configurable clock generator. Think of it as a programmable crystal that can be configured on the fly, as often as you like. For configuration, it uses an I2C bus, or Inter-Integrated Circuit communications protocol, a special serial bus intended for chip to chip communications, invented by Philips Semiconductors in 1982. That's the same Philips from the light bulbs and audio cassettes, CD, DVD and Blu-ray, also the Philishave. To complete the picture, Philips Semiconductors became NXP in September 2006. Back to our frequency standard project. I wondered if I could cut out the Arduino from the actual correction process, since I didn't need a display or a knob and discovered that the Si5351 comes in several flavours. Elwood's design uses the A-version, but there's also a C-version that has the ability to take in an external clock, like say that from a GPS, and correct within the chip itself. With that information in hand, I figured that I could use a simple Wi-Fi capable system on a chip, something like say an ESP8266, to configure the clock and take care of communications with the outside world. In the process I'd learn how to do a bunch of new things, including my first foray into generating RF, first time writing actual firmware, first time designing circuits and no double many more firsts. Then I hit a snag. It seems that the Si5351 has gone from commonplace to zero in stock. Not just zero in stock in Australia, or the US, no, zero in stock anywhere. There are a few A-version breakout boards, that is, the chip on a circuit board, available from one supplier. There is also a new compatible chip, an MS5351M, available from China, but that's a drop-in for the A-version, not the C-version. So, where it stands is that I can almost taste the design, essentially three chips, an almost trivial circuit board, some SMA connectors, a power source and an external GPS antenna, something that would represent the very first circuit I actually designed, which is a long way from reading the circuit diagram for my Commodore VIC-20 back in the days before I owned a soldering iron. It did bring me face to face with an odd realisation. There are components that we use in day-to-day use, ones that are common, used across many different industries, that come from a single source. I should also mention that this particular manufacturer just got sold to another company, which doesn't help matters. Nobody seems to know how long this shortage might last with forecasts varying wildly, but I'm beginning to wonder how many of these kinds of components exist and how we might reduce our dependence on single supplier hardware. I'm also starting to look at using an FPGA to do all of this in software, but that's going to take some time, of course we could start using valves again. My 1960's e

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I came across a how to video on becoming a radio amateur. It's a recurring kind of publication, the kind that I've contributed to in the past. I wondered what it would take to leave the hobby. First of all, I'd have to let my callsign lapse. That's easy enough, but I paid for five years, so it's going to take a while. When it has finally ceased being mine, have I stopped being an amateur? For one, my qualifications would still be in the regulator's database, likely well beyond my breathing years. I wonder if they implement the right to be forgotten? Another thing I'd have to do is stop knowing about how antennas work in day-to-day situations. I'd have to stop noticing the location of free to air television antennas, mobile phone towers, Wi-Fi antennas throughout the community and even the network in my home. I'd also have to say goodbye to all the friends I've made around the place. There's hundreds of people scattered around the globe who with a single word might lure me back into their world, and with that the risk of being sucked back into the community once again. At a minimum I'd have to stop using computers, or radios, or electronics really. I'd have to stop wanting gadgets and measuring equipment, not to mention having to mothball my soldering irons and give away all my heat shrink. I'd have to give back the space I've eked out in the house and return it to the general living space it once was. I'd also have to sell all my radio gear and antennas. I'd have to rip out the coax, fix up any holes, cancel pending orders for new antennas and donate my books and magazines to the local library. I'd have to stop looking at electronics magazines, cut up my loyalty cards for the local electronics and hardware stores and start an online store to sell all the connectors and adaptors I've amassed over the time I've been part of the community. I'd have to forget the phonetic alphabet that I use almost daily and start using crazy words to spell things over the phone like a normal person does. Experimentation would be a thing of the past and would be frowned upon as a fringe activity, one only suited to madmen and amateurs, and I'd have to stop investing my time in software and projects that might one day be used in amateur radio. One of the hardest things to give away would be my curiosity, the one thing that's innate to my wellness. I'd have to stop asking Why? and How? all the time. I'd have to plead ignorance when someone asks how coax works and what's inside a blob of goop on a random circuit board they found on the side of the road. Then there's the other things like physics and general science. I'd have to disavow all knowledge of these activities. I'd have to stop looking at the stars and stop wondering which radio frequencies were being emitted from all over the night sky. I'd have to become ignorant of emergency services and communication, of event management and club life. I'd have to feign interest in anything that wasn't science or technology and I'd have to keep a straight face and my mouth shut when someone extolled the virtues of an irrational belief system. I would likely have to give up my job as an IT consultant and start on a more manual job. Perhaps I'd take up gardening, though I'm not sure how I'd do in the weather at my age. Even if I achieved all that, and kept it up for the rest of my life, I'd still be an amateur, just one hiding from the hordes of humanity striving to live on this ball of dirt, hurtling through the heavens on a journey through the stars. I'm not sure I could do that. So, for better or worse, as I see it, once an amateur, always an amateur and if you're curious and believe in science and technology, I'm here to say that you're well over halfway towards being an amateur! Welcome to the club! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio After discussing the notion that it's not really possible to determine how your gear is performing without measuring, several people commented that in the good old days an amateur was expected to have sufficient equipment to test performance of their gear. I flippantly pointed out that once upon a time, computers ran on punch cards too. That's not to dismiss the notion of testing, but rather that times have changed. Testing equipment that was suitable in the 1980's is still available around the place, but expect to pay for it. Some of it is still relevant, some less so. Even if you do acquire suitable equipment, how do you know if what you're measuring is real? How do you know if the frequency counter that you have is accurate, how do you know if 1 Volt is 1 Volt, or 1 second is 1 second? As I've said before, measurement is the act of comparing two things. If you think that's ludicrous, consider the rulers and tape measures in your home. They all indicate the same measurement, right? Just for a laugh, pull out all the ones you can find and see what you discover. If you've not done this, you're in for a surprise. I don't want to dissuade you from getting testing equipment, far from it, but don't expect to fork out to get the equipment and call the job done. The point being that spending lots of money on gear isn't the end of the story, it's just the beginning and in my opinion it's not the place you should start. Based on community responses, ninety recommendations in all, so hardly scientific or representative, but still a good feel for the space we're playing in, the single most important piece of equipment you should get after sorting out your radio, antenna, coax, power supply, computer, software and other fun things we fill our shacks with is the Digital Multi Meter. You can spend anywhere from $10 to $500 on one, but it should be high on your list. As with the rulers, your results will vary, so be mindful of that when you go shopping. While the SWR meter and the Watt or Power meter appear regularly, they're not the next highest ranked testing gear. Mind you, most current radios have those built-in to some extent, so perhaps the numbers are somewhat distorted here. The next essential piece of equipment is some form of monitoring. Either active, passive, programmable, automated, manual, what ever. Hardware like the NanoVNA, the TinySA, even using a Software Defined Radio feature high on the list. Most of these devices either generate a signal to test against, or they rely on your radio to do the heavy lifting, depending entirely on what you're testing. An antenna analyser is among these kinds of tools. As an aside, the dummy load, either a high power one, or a more modest one, come recommended by many different people. Together with this list of monitoring equipment comes associated accessories, adaptors, patch leads, attenuators and filters. After that comes equipment such as variable power supplies, Watt meters, grid dip meters, oscilloscopes and frequency counters. I will observe that from the responses I received there was a distinct flavour to the recommendations. On the one hand there was the combination of recommending something like a station monitor, or a signal generator, an oscilloscope and a frequency counter, including things like a Bird 43 RF Watt meter. On the other hand were recommendations for spectrum analysers, NanoVNAs, SDRs and the like. It's not quite across the analogue to digital divide, but it's close. Note at this point that I'm a software guy in the process of restoring an analogue HP 606A Signal Generator from the early 1960's, so I'm not pointing the finger anywhere. There were other tools recommended too, an LCR meter, a tool that allows you to measure Inductance, Capacitance and Resistance, something you can buy in kit form if you want to get started, or similarly, can be purchased for varying amounts of money online. Speaking of money, varying amounts that is, the service monitor was on the wish list for several people. Prices between that of a new radio or a new car with varying amounts of warranty. I will make mention of a bi-directional coupler which was marked as essential by one amateur. It's a tool that allows you to sample a signal in the forward and the reflected path which comes in handy when you're trying to test and build equipment. As mentioned before, your transceiver has some of this equipment built in, or can be set-up to do some of this, so there's no need to go out and spend thousands of dollars to set-up your testing bench on day one, but the day after, I'd add it to my birthday list. No doubt that there's many and varied opinion on this. What is your essential testing equipment? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you spend some time in this hobby you're likely to find equipment with similar performance for vastly different pricing. At one end of the spectrum you might compare a cheap $25 hand-held radio to a $450 one. At the other end, a $1,500 SDR or Software Defined Radio against a $4,500 one. Those examples are for brand name devices, which generally speaking have published specifications, come with regulatory approvals, a wide user base, reviews and a distribution network. If equipment is found to be operating out of specification, a regulator might seek a remedy or ban the sale of the equipment. Those various sources and processes make it possible to compare those devices in a structured way to discover just how deep into your pockets you need to reach in order to acquire a shiny new gadget. If you buy any of these devices in the used market, you have no way to determine just how far from the factory specifications the device you're contemplating has deviated. Is that waterproof radio still waterproof, or did the previous owner open up the case and put it together incorrectly? Was it dropped and did a component get damaged? Did the static electricity from a local thunderstorm leak through the circuit via the antenna, or did the previous owner not use anti-static precautions when they looked inside? If it actually failed, it's easy to know. If it's still working, absent a laboratory, you're essentially on your own. If that's not challenging enough, consider hardware that's released as open source, that is, the original designer released their project, shared the design, a circuit board with component list and specifications. Another person can pick up the documentation and legally build a copy of the hardware. How do you know how the two compare? Aside from considering how well any design might actually match the real world, how do you know if the original design can be improved upon or not? Did the second builder use the same components, substitute with better ones, or economise on parts they thought were too expensive? What happens if the two designers argue with each other about the performance of their respective designs? What if the second design becomes vastly more popular than the original and what if you throw in outright intellectual property theft over the top of all this? Now consider the same physical hardware, from the same factory, but using different software. How do you know what impact the software has on the performance of the equipment? For example, one component seen more and more is a chip called an FPGA, a Field Programmable Gate Array. Think of it as a programmable circuit board where updating the software creates a different circuit. An FPGA might be used to filter radio signals. With just a software update, you can program different filters and change the actual performance of the entire device. How do you know if the new version of the software has improved or worsened performance? What all this lacks is a standard way of describing performance. Not only the kind of standard that's achievable in a laboratory, but one that we can test at home. There's no documentation that I've been able to find that shows how to measure some of this objectively, or even compare your own kit against itself. It would be great if I could measure my gear against a standard and you could too and we could compare our respective equipment against each other. Even using the laboratory standard measurements, for example the Sherwood Engineering Receiver Test Data, which allows you to compare other tested equipment in the same list, is hard, if not impossible to compare at home by the likes of you and I. Not to mention that Rob NC0B has finally retired after 45 years, so having been licensed in 1961 age 14, there is a good chance that updates are going to become a thing of the past when Rob stops volunteering his time. I will mention that this isn't a new thing. Many years ago I spent some time as a broadcaster. One of the very first things I was taught is that you need to set levels to trigger the VU Meter just so. When you make a recording to tape, you're required to generate a 1 kHz tone at a specific level so when it's played back to air, the voice levels will be correct. When I became licensed in 2010 I almost immediately discovered that there isn't even a standard way to test if the signal that my radio is putting into the local repeater is the same as that of other amateurs. You'll notice this because you're forever twiddling the volume on your radio when you speak with others on-air because their voice levels vary widely. One idea I've been toying with is using a parrot repeater that can measure a signal, allowing anyone who uses the same parrot to compare their equipment. How would you approach this increasingly complex problem in such a way that the amateur community can share their results in a way that makes comparison meaningful and useful? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio For some time now I've been discussing the potential of weak signal propagation and its ability to create a live map from the data that your own station transmits. There are several systems in place that show a map of where and when your station was heard in the past little while. Using 200 milliwatts, I've been transmitting a WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon on 10m for the past few weeks. At the moment, the furthest away my beacon has been heard is 13.612 km away. That's an 0.2 Watt signal heard on the other side of the planet, on 10m. As distance goes, it's a third of the way around the globe. I must point out that there's no way of knowing if this signal travelled the short path or the long path. If you've heard those terms, short and long path but were wondering what they mean, here's how it works. If I get on my bike at my QTH in Perth in VK6 and peddle East until I hit Sydney, I'll have crossed Australia, taken about 184 hours and travelled about 3.746 km. That's the short path. If I head West instead and start swimming, visit Cape Town, Buenos Aires and Auckland along the way, I'll have travelled much further, still made it to Sydney, but taken the long path. Radio waves can do the same. Depending on propagation, a signal might take either the shortest route, or go in the opposite direction and take the longest route along the great circle between two stations. I'm mentioning this because WSPR doesn't tell you if it's one or the other and if you're using a vertical, it could be either. Even directional antennas might receive a signal from unexpected directions. Using one of the mapping tools, wspr.live, I extracted all the sightings of my callsign and all the reports that I'd made from my receiver. It shows that my newest transmitter has now been heard by 11 stations across three continents. Those numbers are just the beginning. I wanted to see on the map where these stations were, so, during the week I built a proof of concept world map that I used to visually show the four character Maidenhead grid squares that my station was heard in. I also had a look to see which stations I'd heard over the years and where they were. In all, 771 different stations are in my log, either as a receiver or a transmitter. N4WQH heard me on 40m, 18.832 km away when I was using 5 Watts. My station has heard, or has been heard across 331 different grid squares. There's reports across some remote parts of Australia, Japan, India, South Africa, Europe, the United States, several across the Pacific and even a few in Antarctica. I wondered how many of the world's grid squares have actually been activated and which station was heard the furthest and how much power was used. Those numbers will have to wait for another day. I initially started using wspr.live which has a neat way of allowing you to embed an SQL query as part of the URL to download the output. I was getting some interesting results, so I thought, rather than hammer this lovely resource with my questions, I should download the raw data instead. So I did. Well, I am. Still. It's big. As of today, there's 166 files, taking up 60 GB of compressed data, with over 3.5 billion reports. The first spot in that data goes to N8FQ who heard WB3ANQ on Monday, the 17th of March, 2008 across 911 km on the 30m band transmitting with 28 dBm, or about 630 mW, reporting a signal to noise ratio of 1 dB. Using preliminary data to get started I mapped all the activated squares, each shown as a red box and saw that my entire map was red. At that point I figured that either I've got a bug in my code, or something else is going on. To give some context before I share what I found, a Maidenhead locator consists of a combination of letters and numbers. For four letter grid squares, there's a grand total of 32.400 different combinations, running from AA00 to RR99. They're 2 degrees wide and 1 degree high and their width depends on where on the planet they are. At the equator it's about 222 km wide and 111 km tall, at the North and South pole, it's 0 km wide. If you travel between two squares, you might have to move a meter, or the entire width of a grid square. Among the report, I found stations who had activated more than one square. That's fair enough, you can move your station and start making noise where ever you like. I found stations with activations across more than a thousand different squares. Before I start pointing the finger, I will mention that if you attach a WSPR beacon to an aircraft, or a balloon, you can legitimately activate plenty of squares. When you set-up a WSPR transmitter, you're required to manually enter the locator and mistakes happen. There's plenty of records with invalid Maidenhead locators, typically shown instead is a callsign. Then there are stations that pick desirable locators. This manual entry is also true for the power level and even the callsign, so I'm not outing these stations here, since it's entirely p

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the regular topics of conversation in amateur radio, especially for those new to the community, is where to start? The sheer volume of available options is often overwhelming. If you've never encountered the complexity associated with this amazing hobby the experience can be disheartening and even demoralising. In my early years I was results driven. Getting on air, making noise, logging a contact, adding a country, winning a contest, rinse and repeat, get better, do more. There have been numerous occasions when I came home from one of my adventures disappointed, sometimes bitterly so. That happened for quite some time, until one day I realised that the journey in and of itself is the reward. That might sound disingenuous, so let me illustrate. This week I set-up an automatic beacon in my shack that can be heard by stations around the planet, letting me know just how far my signal can travel at any particular moment, using my own station antenna and local propagation. As projects go, it continues to be an adventure. As you might recall, I like low power operation, truth be told, I love low power. The smaller, the better. Less is more and all that. I recently completed the first leg of a journey to set-up a permanent beacon. For years I'd been dabbling around the edges. On the weekend, whilst I was in my shack, I'd regularly set-up my computer and radio, set it to WSPR beacon and see what stations heard me. I couldn't turn my radio below 5 Watts, so that's what I used. Before you start, yes, I could turn down the volume, but that involves math and I wanted a result, now. It filled a gap using WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, like that. For a while, I improved on things by having a receiver set-up that monitored the bands all day every day and recently I turned it back on, with limited success, more on that shortly. What I really wanted was to see where my signal was going, not what I could hear. I received a few emails suggesting that a ZachTek WSPR Desktop transmitter, built and sold by Harry, SM7PNV, would be just the ticket. It's a little metal box with USB and SMA connectors. One SMA for the supplied GPS antenna, used for location and time, the other for a transmit antenna. USB provides serial for configuration and power if it's operating in stand-alone mode. Yes, you can operate it without needing a computer and if you want it does band-hopping. After configuring it with things like your callsign and bands, you can plug-in the GPS, your antenna and power it via USB and it will run as an automatic 200 milliwatt WSPR beacon. That device in turn prompted a journey to discover a more appropriate antenna, since my current station antenna uses an automatic tuner that won't get triggered by this tiny transmitter. That caused an exploration in how and where to mount any new antenna, with a side-trip into finding a specific anti-seize compound locally. To pick the mounting hardware, I had to get into wind loading, how strong my satellite dish mount might be, how to install and tune a multi-band antenna. The list just keeps growing and that voyage continues. I'm tracking the requirements with a project specific check-list, just to make sure that I don't miss any steps and have a place to document new discoveries when they invariably hit me in the face. So-far, so-good. The WSPR monitor receiver is currently connected to a generic telescopic dipole, mounted indoors, which in the past gave me a much better result than my station vertical, so I should be able to keep both running. Next on the list is to construct a live propagation map for my station, then a way to switch modes on that map, so I can tell if it's worth calling CQ without going blue in the face. I'm also working on a WSPR transmitter for 2m and 70cm, because they are under served in my neck of the woods. The takeaway from all this is that whilst there are many steps, and truth be told, that list is growing as I learn, each step is tiny and doable. The only thing that separates me from someone who doesn't know where to start, is this. I started. You can too. Anywhere. Doesn't matter. Pick anything that tickles your fancy. Start digging. It's a hobby, not a profession. What ever floats your boat, what ever makes you excited, what ever you're interested in, pick it and do something, anything. That's how you get anywhere in Amateur Radio, and Open Source, and life for that matter, just start. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Right now it's 10:45. That piece of information is unhelpful without any context. I could just as easily have told you that it's 2:45 and it would be just as accurate, helpful and meaningless. The point being that without context, you don't know if I'm an insomniac, drinking morning tea, recovering from a late lunch or putting on my PJs. If I'm talking to people in the same room, supplying the time happens within the context of that room, but if the world is our oyster, our room is a little larger and dawn for one person is dusk for another, at the same time. Before we could communicate at the speed of light and travel faster than a bullet, time was a relative thing related to the location of the Sun and considered mainly by mariners and astronomers. Even with the advent of increasingly accurate clocks, for most people, noon was when the Sun was at its highest point and the local clock was set to that. When our world got smaller, because communication and travel got faster, people started noticing that noon in one place wasn't the same as noon in another place. It became a real problem when people travelled hundreds of kilometres by train in a day. Imagine coming up with a train time-table that takes into account each local version of noon. In an attempt to deal with this, railroad managers in the United States established 100 railroad time zones. This malarkey continued until the 18th of November 1883 when four standard time zones were established for the continental United States. Of course, being human and all, that was a local solution. Great Britain had already established its own standards for time for England, Scotland and Wales. In October 1884, the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington DC, adopted a proposal that designated the Prime Meridian for longitude and timekeeping should be the one that passes through the centre of the transit instrument at the Greenwich Observatory in the United Kingdom and established Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT as the world's time standard. Why Greenwich? At the time the United Kingdom had more ships and shipping using Greenwich as their reference than the rest of the world put together and the observatory at Greenwich had produced the highest quality data for a long time. As an aside, on a French map before 1911, 0 degrees was centred over Paris. There are other wrinkles, like the fact that Earth isn't round and as a result the Greenwich Prime Meridian is not quite in the right spot because measurements didn't take into account local variations in gravity. In 1972, Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC replaced GMT as the standard for time in the world. It now references the International Reference Meridian, currently about a 102.5m east of the original Prime Meridian passing through Greenwich. It's on the move with reference to land because tectonic plates shift and where it is today is not where it's going to be tomorrow, so don't go looking for a marker to indicate the IRM. Meanwhile in the rest of the world people needed to come to terms with how to standardise on what to call time zones. The USA establishing four time zones was just for one country. Depending on who's counting, there's over 200 countries and each has its own set of time zones. Which each might include daylight saving, or not. For some, like VK6, daylight saving was voted on several times. Trials were had and time changes during summer were implemented, then reversed, then reversed again, and again, in total, VK6 did this dance six times and we currently don't observe daylight saving, neither does VK4 or VK8. So, not only does 10:45 require location context, it also requires that you know if there's daylight saving happening at that time in that location, which to add insult to injury, doesn't actually happen on the same date each year. It gets better if you consider time in another location. Do they have daylight saving, is it on at the time, do we have daylight saving at that time, how many hours are we apart, when is this actual event and what if we're coordinating efforts between people in multiple locations? Did I mention that summer in Europe is in July and in Australia it's in January? In case you're wondering, tracking all this is a massive job currently under the purview of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. The person coordinating this, whilst wrangling the politics of naming things, including dealing with warring countries who take umbrage at having their time zone named after "the enemy" is computer scientist Paul Eggert, the project lead of the time zone database. War aside, time zones are political. For example, Dublin Time was stamped out by the British as punishment for the Easter Rising. If that wasn't exciting enough, to provide local context, we use abbreviations to indicate which location we're talking about. In VK6 that abbreviation is WST, simple enough, Western Standard Time. What if your abbreviation was CST? Is that Central Sta

Foundations of Amateur Radio On the 12th of December 1961, before I was born, before my parents met, the first amateur radio satellite was launched by Project OSCAR. It was a 10 kilo box, launched as the first private non-government spacecraft. OSCAR 1 was the first piggyback satellite, launched as a secondary payload taking the space of a ballast weight and managed to be heard by over 570 amateurs across 28 countries during the 22 days it was in orbit. It was launched just over four years after Sputnik 1 and was built entirely by amateurs for radio amateurs. In the sixty years since we've come a long way. Today high school students are building and launching CubeSats and several groups have built satellites for less than a $1,000. OSCAR 76, the so-called "$50SAT" cost $250 in parts. It operated in orbit for 20 months. Fees for launching a 10cm cubed satellite are around $60,000 and reducing by the year. If that sounds like a lot of money for the amateur community, consider that the budget for operating VK0EK, the DXpedition to Heard Island in 2016 was $550,000. Operation lasted 21 days. I'm mentioning all this in the context of homebrew. Not the alcoholic version of homebrew, the radio amateur version, where you build stuff for your personal enjoyment and education. For some amateurs that itch is scratched by designing and building a valve based power amplifier, for others it means building a wooden Morse key. For the members of OSCAR it's satellites. For me the itch has always been software. Sitting in my bedroom in the early 1980's, eyeballs glued to the black and white TV that was connected to my very own Commodore VIC-20 was how I got properly bitten by that bug, after having been introduced to the Apple II at my high school. I'm a curios person. Have always been. In my work I generally go after the new and novel and then discover six months down the track that my clients benefit from my weird sideways excursion into something or other. Right now my latest diversion is the FPGA, a Field Programmable Gate Array. Started watching a new series by Digi-Key about how to use them and the experience is exhilarating. One way to simply describe an FPGA is to think of it as a way to create a virtual circuit board that can be reprogrammed in the field. You don't have to go out and design a chip for a specific purpose and deal with errors, upgrades and supply chain issues, instead you use a virtual circuit and reprogram as needed. If you're not sure how powerful this is, you can program an FPGA to behave like a Motorola 65C02 microprocessor, or as a RISC CPU, or well over 200 other open source processor designs, including the 64-bit UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor. I'm mentioning this because while I have a vintage HP606A valve based signal generator that I'm working on restoring to fully working. Homebrew for me involves all that the world has to offer. I don't get excited about solder and my hands and eyes are really not steady enough to manage small circuit designs, but tapping keys on a keyboard, that's something I've been doing for a long time. Another thing I like about this whole upgraded view of homebrew is that we as radio amateurs are already familiar with building blocks. We likely don't design a power supply from scratch, or an amplifier, or the VFO circuit. Why improve something that has stood the test of time? In my virtual world, I too can use those building blocks. In FPGA land I can select any number of implementations of a Fourier Transform and test them all to see which one suits my purpose best. In case you're wondering. My Pluto SDR is looking great as a 2m and 70cm beacon, transmitting on both bands simultaneously. It too has an FPGA on board and I'm not afraid to get my keyboard dirty trying to tease out how to best make use of that. What homebrew adventures have you been up to? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio As you might know, I like to transmit with as little power as possible, known as QRP operation. My own station runs at 5 Watts, since on HF, that's as low as my radio will go. I could go lower by turning down the microphone gain, which interestingly is how some radios actually operate, but for now, 5 Watts seems to be a good starting point and truth be told, even though I've been here for a while, I feel like I'm learning something new every day. One of the largest challenges associated with using low power on HF is propagation on the HF bands which is more fluid than ever. There's plenty of variables. For example, in addition to the day-night cycle, there's Earth's magnetic field, the impact from coronal mass ejections as well as the solar cycle. As that cycle waxes and wanes, or in my case, wanes and waxes, propagation trends are affected on a longer term basis. There's all manner of tools to explore this. The Australian Space Weather Service is one of many such bodies that create ionospheric prediction maps showing frequencies and their propagation through the ionosphere. Then there's the derivative ones that use this data to declare if a band is open or closed, spread widely across the globe with little in the way of context, like time, or location. There are tools like VOACAP which attempt to predict the point-to-point path loss and transceiver coverage dependent on antennas, solar weather and time and date. They also attempt to arrive at a so-called MUF, the Maximum Usable Frequency, defined as the highest frequency at which ionospheric communication is possible for 50% of the days in a month. The LUF, the Lowest Usable Frequency is defined as the frequency at which communication is possible 90% of the days of the month. All these tools have one thing in common. They're predictions and forecasts. They reflect an attempt at quantifying reality. There is a place for this, but my often repeated encouragement of getting on air to make some noise is advice that covers the gap between prediction and reality. I've long been a fan of using Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, or WSPR as a tool to measure actual propagation. What I like most about it is that it can be used on your own station, using your own antenna, at any time. It occurred to me the other day that there must be a relationship between a WSPR signal and a voice signal. Not a mathematical one, but one that makes the difference between establishing a voice contact with another station and calling CQ until you're blue in the face. With that in mind I took a leap and purchased a ZachTek Desktop WSPR transmitter, capable of operating on all the HF bands that my license permits. It was shipped from Sweden this week and it is expected to take more than a month to get to me, likely most of that travelling between Sydney and Perth, but when it does, I'll be able to set up my own in-house 200 milliwatt beacon that will show me just how far my signal goes on the bands that I pick. As an aside, I'm still looking for a similar solution for 2m and 70cm since there are all manner of interesting propagation phenomena associated with those bands as well. I'm still digging into how I can best gather the reception data to visualise it and I'm working on a strategy that can send me an alert when a particular band is open from my station at such a level that I can look to operating a particular mode, like FT8, or SSB, or anything that I might choose. The data is public, thanks to the various WSPR reporting systems around, so others in my grid square, likely beyond that, will also be able to benefit from my beacon. I'm considering generating a propagation map from my own station and publish that, but it's too early to say what's involved in making that happen. Right now I've dived into the rabbit-hole associated with finding a suitable antenna. My current station vertical requires a tuner and I don't think that finding a way to tune my antenna every time the beacon changes band is a good solution. I suspect that I'll also need to come up with a way to have two transmitters share the same antenna, but I'll cross that bridge when I need to. Once the beacon arrives, it's my intention to start with 10m as my beacon band using my current antenna, since 10m is on the verge of being useful for my QRP adventures and I must confess, I'm looking forward to making a voice contact with the other side of the planet with my station for the first time in a long time. What kinds of things can you think of that would benefit from a solution like this? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I exchanged emails with fellow amateur Gary VK2OVA. This was his most recent response. Hello Onno, What have you been up to in amateur radio lately, you ask hahahahahahaha. I hope this gives you a good chuckle. I decided to construct and erect a full wave 80 meter sky loop. Simple antenna, and I have lots of space to do so with an old tennis court on the block surrounded by existing poles and wire mesh. The preparation for me was the key to having an easy path to a successful outcome. First step was to measure out the existing poles for the best fit, measured, then stood back and looked, then measured again, yes all is good, this will work. Made up the ropes and pulleys, rechecked the length and height, yep all good, put the ropes and pulleys in place, ready to attach the insulators. I'm going for four corners with an overall measure of 23 meters long by 17 meters wide. Using a corner feed point. Made up a feed point cockatoo deterrent, 90 mil storm water pipe about 15 inches long, split end to end, then zip tied into itself as it wraps around the insulator and feed point. Cockatoos are in abundance here so I had to come up with something to keep them away from the feed point as that seems to be their favourite chew spot. Purchased a 100 meter long roll of green and yellow earth wire, thinking to myself, easy as, just cut a measured length off the end and have the correct length left on the reel ready to roll out. Oh but wait, a couple of hams talking on air had a similar situation and it worked out that the roll was shorter than quoted on the label. Best practice here is to unroll it and measure it myself, simple task. Now I cannot find my 30 meter tape measure, so I put the task on hold till it turns up. Two weeks later it is no where to be seen, so now I have decided to go with the 8 meter tape measure. After thinking about how to best measure 8 meters at a time I came up with a marvellous plan, I'll put a couple pegs in the ground at 8 meters apart and simply loop the wire back and forth 11 times. After all, this is 88 meters in total and I can simply trim the length to my chosen frequency of 3.620 MHz. I'm feeling very good right about now as I have saved myself a lot of walking and bending. Now, the first error pops its little head. After I've cut the wire to length and attempt to lay it out on the ground inside the poles - designated antenna holders - the copper wire reminds me it has a memory. That memory is very adamant, I'm a circle of loops. So yes I now have a birds nest of yellow and green. Have you ever noticed when something like this has a mind of its own, it is, apparently, right. Took at least an hour to unravel it, then several tent pegs, to get this wire to obey me. So I won that battle. Because I had measured the wire myself I knew it to be accurate, which proved how wrong I was back when I'd completed the original measure, post to post for potential mast poles. So I reset my ropes and pulleys to the new poles and hoisted the whole lot up in the air, then ran inside to view the antenna analyser. Now something is wrong, I cannot get a meter dip anywhere on HF. Oh dear, I've got a break or bad connection. So into trouble shooting mode goes whats left of my brain. Track and retrace. As much as I did I could not identify what was wrong. Only one thing for it I will go back to the beginning and start over. Dropped the wire on the ground, pegged it down so it could not get away again. Still could not find my 30 meter tape measure, so out comes the 8 meter tape. But wait, is that a 6 or an 8 on there. Lets settle this, I'll put on my reading glasses just to be sure. Yep it is a 6 meter tape measure, not 8 so therefor I have only got a 66 meter length of wire, oh gosh! Back to square one, move all the pulleys re-measure everything. To correct the problem I had to add on some wire and solder the 2 pieces together. With my new level of cautious approach I managed to get the length perfect at 3.625 MHz. I still cannot find my 30 meter tape, nor can I find my 8 meter tape, but the good news is I still have a 6 meter tape measure, actually out of six tape measures that I had it's the only one I can find. I've decided I should probably wear my glasses when reading small print, from now on. I've been making wire antennas for years and never had an issue. Having just moved here a couple of years ago I'm in a position where size does not impact my antenna choices, hence the ambitious project which took up way to much time and effort. And, if this is suitable for sharing please do so. Cheers, Gary VK2OVA The only thing remaining is to ask you a question. What have you been up to in Amateur Radio lately? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week a new piece of software was born. It's not going to solve world hunger or address man-made climate change, but it will help some contesters who want to get on air and make noise without actually making noise. From my vk6flab github page you can get yourself a copy of a tiny little bash script with the catchy name of ssbdaemon and use it to launch your very own remote-controlled voice-keyer. After making the announcement I received several emails from excited contesters who wanted to thank me for my efforts and I have to tell you, making something that others find useful is very rewarding. My announcement also sparked some discussion around using voice-keyers including some who consider that this isn't a useful addition to the hobby. More on that in a moment. After the code was written, I had to actually, you know, use it. So I hooked up my radio, launched ssbdaemon and fired up my current contest logger of choice, TLF, and attempted to make noise. Unfortunately I wasn't so lucky as to make it all work on the first try. TLF needs to be in CW mode for ssbdaemon to work and someone, somewhere at some point, decided that when you change band, the mode needs to be set, so despite me setting my radio to either Lower or Upper Side Band, TLF would helpfully change it to CW, which actively prevented me from making noise. Since TLF is Open Source, I was able to download its source-code and after some trial and error, including discussion with the TLF developer community, I added my own little flavour to my copy of TLF to make it always use sideband. My fix isn't useful long-term, but right now it will make it possible for me to operate my voice-keyer. An alternative would have been to turn off rig control. This also sparked discussion on the TLF mailing list about how we might implement this kind of functionality long-term. Those two things, the fact that I could hack my own copy of TLF and discuss long-term updates is why I think that Open Source and Amateur Radio are an obvious match. I released my ssbdaemon script as Open Source too, so I immediately benefited from other people looking at it and giving me feedback. As a direct result my code improved, my tool became more useful and those changes were published for anyone to use, immediately. At this point I should mention that although I'm using TLF, ssbdaemon is a drop-in replacement for cwdaemon and should work anywhere as a direct replacement, so tools like CQRLOG, Xlog and others can use it with no changes to their code. Back to the discussion about the usefulness of this tool in relation to our hobby. I think that a tool like mine does a number of things. It achieves the direct purpose that it was built for, making it possible to create a more universal voice-keyer, but it also does other things. I set out to make TLF do callsign voice-keying, but in solving the problem, I managed to build a tool that was universal to any station using an external Morse-keyer, regardless of whether or not they were using TLF. Several emails commented on the way that I'd come to this solution and observed that this opened opportunities beyond my script, including operating Single Side Band contests remotely. As a direct result of my release there's now a discussion underway in relation to how TLF manages band changes. It's not finished, likely it'll go through several iterations and might not be implemented immediately, but the fact that this discussion is happening comes as a side-effect of my script. This little script, truthfully almost trivial script, is causing change to happen in unexpected places. It did make me wonder if there are little things like this that we can do to bring awareness and activity to other areas, things like man-made climate change and how we might achieve that in tiny unexpected ways. As for running a contest with my new voice-keyer, propagation permitting, keep an ear out and let me know how it goes. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio As you might know, I consider myself a contester. I derive great pleasure from getting on air and making noise during a contest. It gives me a wonderful opportunity to test my station, hone my skills and work on learning something new every time I participate. Due to circumstances I've been away from contesting for a number of years, but recently I was able scratch my itch from my own shack. For 24 glorious hours I was able to make contacts from the comfort of my home, being able to make a cup of tea, eat some dinner, stay warm, catch a nap when the bands were closed and generally have a blast. My set-up worked well. Operating QRP or low power, I used a basic contest logger, since I wasn't expecting to be making many contacts. To automatically call CQ, I recorded my voice and set-up a script that played the audio, waited four seconds, then played it again. Using my audio mixer, I could turn that on and off at will and between that and the headset I was wearing I had loads of fun and even made contacts! During the last three hours of the contest my partner came home. After hearing me attempt to confirm an exchange for a while, it became apparent that making exchanges, calling CQ and generally talking out loud was going to be an issue in our home, since my shack is within hearing range of the entire house. That or I'm going deaf and my voice is getting louder. I do get excited from time to time! For the past several months I've been trying to find a solution and until today I wasn't getting any closer. I didn't think I was asking for too much. I'm looking for a contest logger, that runs on Linux, that has the super check partial database, knows the contest rules and most importantly, has a voice keyer with the ability to actually voice the exchange itself, as-in, not a pre-recorded audio file, but the ability to speak any callsign and any exchange. As an aside, the super check partial database is a list of frequently heard contest callsigns, originally introduced by Ken K1EA, which if used properly, helps you when you're deciphering a callsign on a noisy band. Using it to guess calls and make mistakes can result in significant penalties for some contests. The only tool I've come across that does all this in any way is N1MM. It runs on Windows and I have to tell you, the idea of having to buy a new computer, just to run a supported version of Windows just doesn't do it for me. N1MM also doesn't use Hamlib, so my radio needs to be physically connected to the computer. I won't bore you with my weeks of attempts, but it became farcical. During my months of exploration I looked at and tried plenty of other tools. Many of them aren't intended for contesting, don't have access to the super check partial database, don't do voice-keying, don't run under Linux, require weird bits of extra software, have little or no documentation and a myriad of other issues like having to compile from source with arcane library requirements, the list goes on. One contender that got close was a text only tool called TLF. It got so close that I almost used it for my previous contest. In the end I didn't because it was doing unpredictable things with the display and I had to write my own contest rule file for an unsupported contest which I couldn't test in time to actually use. Today I took another look. TLF doesn't have a voice-keyer on board, but it does have the ability to interface with a Morse-keyer, which is interesting, since it implies that there is a process that translates callsigns and messages typed in with a keyboard into Morse, which might mean that it may be possible to pretend to be a Morse-key and make voice sounds instead. The Morse-keyer software in question is cwdaemon. It accepts text messages from TLF and then converts those into Morse code and then directly controls your radio to generate dits and dahs on-air. I started digging through the source code when I realised that cwdaemon might have a debug mode that shows what it's doing. Turns out, not only does it have a debug option, you can also prevent it from keying your radio. Which means that I should be able to get TLF to generate the messages, cwdaemon to show those messages and me to do something useful, like play audio files as appropriate. If I pull this off, it will mean that I can operate my station as if I'm running CW, but the radio will be transmitting voice, which makes for a beautiful way to save my vocal chords whilst running a contest without bothering anyone else and do this without needing to install Windows, which frankly, in my book is a win. If I succeed, and I think the odds are good, I'll publish my efforts on my github repository for you to use, if you're so inclined. I have to confess, when I started this adventure, I was not at all convinced that I could make this happen and I'd all but thrown in the towel. It still quite unbelievable to me that this kind of thing doesn't appear to exist, but if all goes well, i

Foundations of Amateur Radio For an activity that's seeped in the art of communication, amateur radio is a diverse collection of people, joined by a common interest and kept together using imperfect language describing an intrinsically complex science in the hope that we can learn from each other to get on air and make noise. In this cooperative endeavour, language is important. Let me start with a limerick by Arthur Frackenpohl: There was a young fellow of Perth Who was born on the day of his birth He married, they say On his wife's wedding day And died when he quitted the earth Stay with me. In this day and age, first and foremost, let me give you a short summary, cobbled together from bits and pieces of a new invention, conceived whilst watching the evening sunset in close proximity to the beach. What this cornucopia of tautologies has to do with our hobby might not be obvious, but let me illustrate. Consider the phrase: "a compromise antenna", as-in, "Oh, I'd never use that antenna, it's a compromise antenna." If you've been in this community for any time at all, you'll have heard that phrase and unless someone pointed it out, you might not have realised that it's essentially unhelpful. Why? Because as I've said many times before, all antennas are a compromise, by definition. This is true at several levels. At a fundamental level, an isotropic antenna is a theoretical antenna that radiates equally in all directions - horizontally and vertically with the same intensity. It's infinitely small and operates on all frequencies with infinite bandwidth. It should be obvious, but this antenna cannot physically exist, so every built antenna represents a collection of trade-offs or compromises and no antenna can radiate more total power than an isotropic antenna. Beyond that, within the physical constraints of antenna building there are many more compromises. Now this might not be immediately obvious, so let me elaborate. Consider a 28 MHz, seven element Yagi antenna. With a 12m boom, a 5.3m reflector element, a turning circle of 7.5m and weighing in at 53 kilo. At 20m above the ground it has a gain of 17.5 dBi and handles 1.5 kW. It's physically capable of withstanding 180 km/h winds. It's a lovely piece of kit and if you have the space, it's absolutely something you might want to receive for your birthday and bolt to a mast somewhere near your radio. If all antennas are a compromise, you might ask yourself, how is this beautiful 10m Yagi a compromise? For starters, its total radiated power is less than an isotropic antenna. It works between 28 and 29 MHz, but nowhere else. It radiates signals really well in one direction, but not in any other. It requires lots of open space and as a fixed installation, it must be on a heavy duty rotator clamped to a tall mast. To actually acquire and install requires more funds than I've spent on all my radios to date. Some of what I've mentioned might be acceptable to you, some not. For example, if you're always portable, this antenna makes no sense. You make choices to select an antenna that's best suited to the job and in doing so, you are introducing compromises. Additionally, there are amateurs who would have you believe that a compromise antenna is one with high loss. High loss in comparison to what? If you live in an apartment block, there's no way that you can fit that 10m Yagi inside your bedroom, so you compromise and use a magnetic loop antenna instead. If you're on the top of a mountain, there's no opportunity to erect a structure, so you use a self-supporting vertical. If you're in a car, you cannot erect a horizontal dipole and drive down the highway, so you bolt a whip to your jalopy. All of the choices you make to fit a purpose, an environment, a budget and available material will combine into an antenna that hopefully gets you on air making noise. When someone tells you that an antenna is a compromise antenna, what they're really saying is that you made compromises that they're unwilling to make. That's easy to say if you have infinite space, money, experience and opportunity. In other words, they're just blowing hot air. The whole point of antenna building is to find a particular set of compromises that suits your situation at the time that you're doing it. The intent of this hobby is to learn what the impact of a particular choice is and how it affects the operation of an antenna in a specific situation. Next time you hear the redundant phrase "that's a compromise antenna", ask what compromises they are describing that they don't accept and decide for yourself if they are compatible with what you're attempting to achieve within the resources available to you. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The art of storing information in such a way that it doesn't devolve into random gibberish is an ongoing battle in the evolution of the human race. Egyptians five thousand years ago were perfectly happy storing information using hieroglyphs. They used it for well over three thousand years, but today you'd be hard pressed bumping into anyone on the street who knows one, let alone one thousand characters. Latin fared a little better. It's been in use for over two thousand years, but other than fields like biology, medicine and of course some religions, the best you can hope for is et cetera, mea culpa and my favourite, carpe noctum, that and a few mottos scattered about. Using technology to store information is no better. If you have a 3.5 inch floppy disc tucked away in a drawer, can you still read it today and do you know why it's called a floppy disc? What about a 5.25 inch, or 8 inch floppy. What about tape. Do you still have backups stored on DAT? Even if you could physically read the information, could you still make sense of it? Can you open a VisiCalc spreadsheet file today? That was invented during my lifetime, first released in 1979. The latest release was in 1983. My point being that storing and retrieving information is hard. Amateur Radio is an activity that has been around since the early 1900's, over a century of information. We describe our collective wisdom in books, magazines, audio recordings, websites, podcasts, videos and tweets. One of the more consistent sources of information coming from our activity is logging, specifically QSO or contact logging. There are bookshelves full of paper log files, but since the advent of home computing, logging now is primarily an electronic affair. If you've upgraded the software on your computer, you know the pains associated with maintaining your log across those transitions. If you've changed operating systems, the problem only got worse. Currently there are primarily two standards associated with logging, the ADIF and Cabrillo specifications. Both are published ways of describing how to store information in such a way that various bits of software can read the information and arrive at the same interpretation. As you might expect, things change over time and any standard needs to be able to adopt changes as they occur. How that happens is less than transparent and in an open community like amateur radio, that's a problem. Used primarily for logging contacts, the Amateur Data Interchange Format or ADIF is published on a website, adif.org. There's lively discussion in a mailing list and since its inception in 1996, it's evolved through many versions, incorporating change as it happens. Like the adoption of new digital modes, new country codes and administrative subdivisions. Used for contest logging, Cabrillo is published on the World Wide Radio Operators Foundation, or WWROF web site which assumed administration for the specification in 2014. It documents changes as they occurred, like adding contest names, station types and contest overlays. While there's clearly activity happening, there doesn't appear to be a public forum where this is discussed. Speaking of public. The DXCC, or DX Century Club is a radio award for working countries on a list. ADIF stores those country codes using the DXCC country code number, which is part of the specification published by the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League. The list of DXCC entities is copyrighted by the ARRL, which is fair enough, but you have to actually buy it from the ARRL to get a copy. This is a problem because it means that any future archivist, you included, needs access to a specific version of both the ADIF and the then valid DXCC list, just to read the information in a log file. To put it mildly, in my opinion, that's bonkers. Relying on external information isn't limited to ADIF. Cabrillo relies on external data for the format of the Location field which indicates where the station was operating from. Among others, it refers to the RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain who maintains a list of IOTA, or Islands on the Air, published on a web site that no longer exists. There are other issues. It appears that for the Cabrillo specification there is no incremental version number associated with any changes. Version 3 of Cabrillo was released in 2006. There are 31 changes published to update Version 3, but as far as I can tell, they're all called Version 3, so anyone attempting to read a Version 3 log will not actually know what they're dealing with. To give you a specific example of three changes. In 2016 the 119G band name was changed to 123G, which was changed in 2021 to 122G. All three labels refer to the same band, but until you actually start looking at the file will you have any indication about the version used to generate the file. Let's move on. Contesting. Not the logging or the on-air activity, but how to score a contest. What activity gets points and what

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a member of our community proudly showed off their plaque for first place as a Short Wave Listener or SWL in the Poland SP DX Contest. Together with their dad they listened on 80m using a WebSDR and logged all the contacts they were able to hear. Their participation didn't include transmitters, since neither have got their callsigns, yet. To me this illustrates exactly what it's like to dip your toes into the world of amateur radio and it's a path that many amateurs have taken to become licensed and transmitting. I'm mentioning this because that same short wave listener also won a platinum diploma from the anniversary of Stanislaw Lem's 100th birthday amateur contest. If that name sends tingles of excitement down your spine, you're familiar with his work. If not, you might be interested to know that Stanislaw Lem was a world acclaimed Polish writer of science fiction who died in 2006. This random discovery, in addition to giving me ideas about opportunities for contests and awards, reminded me of other times when in one setting I've been surprised by information relating to another setting. In this case, science fiction. In previous workplaces I've come across software developers, technicians and managers who outside their roles in computing were active as volunteer fire-fighters, paramedics, writers, stage performers, singers, foster parents and more. It occurred to me that we in the amateur radio community spend most, if not all, of our time discussing amateur radio, but that we likely share other interests with our community. I recently discovered other science fiction nerds, a cos-player, there's some volunteer fire-fighters and the like, no doubt there's more. My point being that in addition to finding more common ground between us as a community, we also have the opportunity to share our hobby with other people who share our interests. It's hard to imagine that science fiction fans and fire-fighters for example are unable to relate to amateur radio. Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating that you hit the members of your other communities over the back of the head with amateur radio. Instead, think of it as another way to connect to that group. The thing that strikes me about our amateur community is the diversity that it encompasses. It means that there's likely plenty of other interests that you will find that bind you to other amateurs and it likely means that your other hobbies and interests might share some of your amateur interests. Truth be told, as all consuming as amateur radio is, it's not the only thing that defines you and it's not the only thing of interest to the people around you. What those interests are is up to you. Only one way to find out. Talk with your friends. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you begin your amateur radio journey, one of the first things you learn about that's not directly involved with radios and antennas is the ionosphere and its impact on long distance communications. Immediately after that you are more likely that not to be introduced to the biggest plasma experiment in our backyard, the Sun. With that introduction comes information about solar flares, solar flux, sunspots, geomagnetic storms, coronal mass ejections as well as the solar cycle, the solar index and associated propagation forecasts. Before I dig further, I will point out that I'm mentioning this with the ultimate aim for you to get on air and make noise, so fasten your seat-belt and let's go for a ride. The Sun is big. If it was hollow, it could fit more than a million Earths inside. The Sun accounts for 99.8% of the total mass of our entire solar system. About 73% of the Sun's mass is hydrogen, about 25% is helium and the rest, about 1.69% is made up of all the other heavier elements, both gasses and metals, which add up to around 5628 times the mass of Earth. The Sun rotates. Counter-clockwise. Since it's mostly plasma, it doesn't rotate like Earth does. The equator takes about 24 days, the poles around 35 days and because its rotating on an angle of about 7.25 degrees from Earth's rotation axis, we get to see more of the solar north pole in September and more of the solar south pole in March. Earth orbits the Sun in a year, but it's not a circular orbit. We're closest to the Sun in December and furthest from the Sun in June. It takes about eight minutes and 19 seconds for a photon leaving the Sun to reach Earth, but that same photon can take between 40,000 and 170,000 years to travel from the core where two atoms were heated and compressed to fuse into a new element releasing a photon and heat. It takes this long because the photon keeps bumping into other atoms along the way. While we're at it, consuming about 4 million tons of hydrogen per second, the Sun will take another 5 billion years to consume all the available hydrogen. Whilst we experience the Sun as a source of light on a daily basis, as a radio amateur you know that light is just one tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It should come as no surprise that the Sun is radiating across all frequencies all the time, only some of which is visible to our naked eye. As an aside, it's interesting to note that our eyes are essentially translating light into electricity, or said differently, your eye converts radio spectrum into electricity, something which your radio antenna also does. Back to the Sun. I'm highlighting this level of solar complexity because there's so much talk about the A index, the K index, the SFI, the solar cycle and propagation by experts and amateurs that it's easy to hide behind those numbers and think that a low A between 1 and 6, a low K of 0 or 1 with an SFI above 100 will give you the propagation you're looking for. If you think for a moment that the weather forecaster has a difficult job accurately telling you if you need to postpone your outdoor activation because of rain or snow, then you can begin to understand just how complex the interplay between the Sun and our ionosphere is. And I haven't even mentioned that the ionosphere isn't static either. It's important to remember that the cute little weather icons you see on the TV news are just as much an indicator of expected weather as the A, K and SFI numbers are for the Sun and its impact on radio propagation. They give you an idea of what might happen, but it doesn't mean that on any given day something completely random and isolated happens that just affects your station and the path that a radio signal took from your antenna to that other rare DX station. Just like it would be smart to take an umbrella with you when there's rain forecast, it's also smart to consider the bands you want to operate next time you go on air with a particular solar forecast, but just because it might rain, doesn't mean you're guaranteed to get wet. So, in other words, wait for it, get on air and make some noise! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Since December 2010 I've been licensed as a radio amateur. For some this seems like a long time ago, for others, it's just the beginning. In my time thus far I've attempted to document and describe my journey and in doing so, I've had the unbeatable pleasure of hearing stories from others who were inspired by my efforts to join, or rejoin the hobby. It occurred to me that it's hard to tell when you look at any one amateur if the ink on their licence is still wet, or if the whole certificate is faded and yellowed with time. You also cannot tell by looking if one amateur turns on their gear in the car during the daily commute, or if they go out on expeditions to remote locations twice a year. The callsign a person holds tells you even less, let alone the class of their license. In our community we talk about mentoring and we call such people Elmers, but do we really use this as a way to glue together our hobby as its namesake might suggest? As a result of my profile, there's a steady stream of commentary about what I do and how I do it. As you might expect, there's both good and bad, sometimes describing the same thing from opposite sides in equally heated terms. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that playing the man and not the ball will get you completely ignored. If however you have a specific grievance with any technical aspect of what I'm contributing, by all means let me know, but be prepared to provide references because it might come as a surprise, I do research before I open my mouth. That's not to say that I don't make mistakes, I'm sure I do and have. Before this turns into a self congratulatory oration, I'd like to point out that all the negative feedback I see all around me does nothing to grow our hobby, does nothing to encourage learning, does nothing to reward trial and error and it doesn't contribute to society at large in any way. I'm mentioning this because I also receive emails from amateurs who have left the community, not because of lack of interest, but because of the bullying that they've experienced. I know that there are several local activities that I avoid because it's just not fun to bump into people who are friendly to your face whilst being vicious online. It continues to amaze me that this topic keeps recurring and that it keeps needing to be called out. One thing I can tell you is that ignoring it doesn't work. I've described previously what you should do instead when you're the subject of such petulant behaviour, but it bears repeating. Say it out loud. "Thank you for your comment. I don't believe that it's in the spirit of amateur radio. Please stop." Feel free to use that phrase anytime someone in this hobby makes you feel uncomfortable. One final observation. If you've not personally experienced this behaviour that's great, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen or that it's not endemic. Consider for a moment how you'd feel if you were attacked whilst being active in a hobby you love, for no other reason than that the person attacking you didn't like the wire you were using to construct a dipole or some other equally outrageous reason like your gender, sexual orientation, license class, choice of radio or preferred on-air activity. Say it with me: "Thank you for your comment. I don't believe that it's in the spirit of amateur radio. Please stop." I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Getting on air and making noise is what it's all about, so last week, that's exactly what we did. Randall VK6WR, Jishnu VK6JN and I participated in the Fox Mike Hotel Portable Operations Challenge which is specifically scored to deal with power and mode differences between stations by using a handicap system that they liken to playing golf. Having been the winner of the Sir Donald Bradman Award in the Millmerran Memorial Golf Tournament for making the highest score on the day, this speaks to me in more ways than I can say. In case you're wondering, more hits in golf is bad and I'm not a golfer. Scoring in the Portable Ops Challenge is based around four different attributes, the power you're using, the nature of your station, portable or fixed, the mode used and the number of transmitters in use. To achieve this, you exchange a maidenhead grid square, a combination of letters and numbers that indicates your location on earth, which is then used to determine how many kilometres per Watt are used to make the contact. If you're portable, you get a multiplier benefit in the scoring. Depending on the perceived difficulty of the contact, you score more points. In this case, SSB is harder than CW, which in turn is harder than a digital mode. Finally, the more transmitters you have, the less each contact is worth. Two transmitters, means you score half the points for each. With that in mind, a QRP portable station with a single transmitter calling CQ on SSB is the best way to make points and that is something that I'm always up for. In our adventure, we opted for a slight change, instead using FT4 and FT8, using 40 Watts, portable, on the side of a hill in a local park and during the four hours we were active, we managed six contacts, one over SSB, the rest using digital modes and we all had several goes at getting the best out of our station. Our set-up consisted of a small folding table next to my car with a computer, a radio and a thermos flask with hot tea to ward off the chill in the air. Power was supplied by an 80 AH battery. The radio was an Icom IC-7300 that Randall brought along. The antenna we used was a Terlin Outbacker, multi-tap whip that was attached to my car with a 12m counterpoise run along the gutter. None of us had ever seen such excellent conditions with such a low noise floor in the middle of the city. We were enjoying the last warm sun of the day from Kings Park in Perth, Western Australia. It's a 990 acre park, larger than Central Park in New York, set aside for public use in 1831 and gazetted as a public park in 1872. The park is open 24 hours a day and features a botanic garden with thousands of species of Western Australia's native flora and fauna, overlooks the central business district, the Swan River and the Darling Ranges and best of all, there's no radio noise. It did get chilly towards the end, but I'm pretty sure we all went home with all our fingers and toes intact. Jishnu also brought along his FT-817 and a tiny multi-tap telescopic whip that we strapped to a nearby steel rubbish bin and using that set-up was able to detect and transmit WSPR signals across the globe as part of experimentation with his station. One of the unexpected benefits of not yelling CQ into a microphone ad-nauseam was that we were able to continue our conversation, hearing stories from each other and enjoying hot pizza when dinnertime came around without needing to stuff food into the same place where CQ calls were intended to originate. My car isn't quite ready to go completely portable, but this little outing again proved to me that portable vehicle based operation has a charm all its own and the Fox Mike Hotel Portable Operations Challenge is going to be on my dance card next time it comes around! When was the last time you left your shack and went portable? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past few weeks I've been having my hearing tested. I've had the opportunity to discuss sound in some detail with an audiologist. Today as a result of a collision between a jar of chilli pickles and a tiled floor I've come to the realisation that sound is important in unexpected ways. It will probably not come as a surprise to you that sound has an emotional component. Just think of a particular song, or a voice, or something that you've heard previously. The sound of a jack-hammer, or a bell, a horse or a jet, each completely different, impact on your mood. Some sounds are pleasant, others jarring. Some make you feel happy, others make you anxious or even angry. For some time now I've observed in myself that there are times when I cannot stand sound and other times when I invite it into my life. For example, if there's a HF radio going in the background and I'm attempting to have a conversation with a person in the shack, the sound coming from the radio causes irritation, to the point of needing to turn it off in order to actually hold a conversation. On the other hand, if there's a contest on, I can sit, happy as a clam, listening to HF all day and night, working out what station is calling, and making contact. I'm raising this because it occurs to me that amateur radio is unlike broadcast radio where you're expected to actively monitor what is being transmitted. In my experience as a radio broadcaster you're talking into a microphone and the headphones you're wearing are connected to a radio receiver which is tuned to the station on which you're broadcasting. This gives you immediate live feedback on the state of your audio levels. As an aside, I once witnessed a fellow broadcaster who didn't feel the need to wear headphones. They were blissfully unaware that their voice was being transmitted into silence because the audio fader on their microphone was down. In amateur radio however, we don't often do such things. We transmit blind most if not all of the time. It's rare that we even hear our own voice on-air, let alone hear it in real time. If that's not enough, using sideband, it's easy to modify the sound of a person by changing the frequency slightly, making their voice either higher or lower, just by adjusting the dial. It occurred to me that how your voice is perceived by the other station assists in how that station can hear you and make contact. Using the local repeater is a good but subtle example. If you've listened for a while, you might have observed that there are stations that are easy to understand and others that are not. Sometimes that comes down to individual accents, but in my experience a much larger impact is caused by the actual transmission itself. Is the microphone gain set correctly, is there any filtering in play, is the station on the correct frequency, is the transmitter using the correct mode and other more subtle things like background noise, speaking volume and distance and direction in relation to the microphone. We often talk about less being more and you already know that I'm a big fan of low power or QRP operation. Making contacts is absolutely about using the right antenna, the right mode, the correct band and time of day, but the sound coming from your station is just as important. If you have the ability to use two radios simultaneously, then I'd recommend that you find a way to either use a local repeater, or a cross-band repeater, or even a remote web-based radio, to hear what you actually sound like on-air, live, and experiment with the various settings on your radio in order to test and improve the quality of your voice. Whilst we as radio amateurs don't standardise our signals, though personally I think it would be a great idea, there's plenty of improvement to be had by taking some time out of your next on-air activity to have a long hard listen to yourself. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When I first started in this hobby I found myself surrounded by other amateurs who all seemed to have a spare room in their house, or a spare building near their house, or even a property somewhere, dedicated to amateur radio. There was an endless parade of equipment, antennas, tools, workshops, spare parts and the like. Frankly it was overwhelming. A decade on, I have some perspective to share on that first exposure. For me the hobby was brand new. I didn't have a family history, there were no amateur friends I'd grown up with, no electronics uncle or anything even remotely resembling any of that. What I was exposed to wasn't a new thing, it represented something that had been going on for years, decades and lifetimes even. It quickly became apparent that having a shack was desirable, but in my case, at the time, unobtainable, so instead I did the next best thing I could think of. I built a shack in my car. That was a journey that took several years to make. At the end of it, I removed my radio from the car and moved it onto a spare table in my office. I have spent countless enjoyable and sometimes frustrating hours in my car shack and I learnt that it's almost always temporary. If you're not the exclusive user of the car, then your shack isn't always available and in that case it also needs to be family friendly, as-in, no cables, mounts, brackets and the like that can cause damage to a person, or the equipment. This limits the options you have. At the end of my car journey, I had a spare battery in the back, the radio and tuner were mounted under the floor next to the spare tyre, there was an antenna mount attached to the car, there was braiding throughout the car, connecting all the body panels together and the remote control head was detachable from a suction mount that doubled as a mobile phone holder. Antennas, one for HF, one for VHF were stowed against the roof lining with a strap around the roof hand grab of the rear passenger. An external speaker was mounted below the head rest of the centre rear passenger. What I learnt was that this setup was good for short stints, for mobile operation, for contests on the run and for working DX at lunch time at the beach. Trying to do digital modes, attempting to work a pile-up, or doing several other activities I love were not really feasible and as a result I decided to pull it all out. At this point all that remains in the car are the braiding, the control lead, the speaker, the coax and the antenna mount. I plan to rebuild my car shack in the not too distant future. More on that in a moment. I moved house and found myself in an office that was perfect for multiple reasons. It was separate from the rest of the living space, so I didn't need to put away stuff. It was big enough to house a dedicated radio table and it's got pretty simple access to the outside world for running coax. It gives me a dedicated place to do radio and have stuff set-up permanently. I noticed one thing after having this available. I didn't actually get on-air any more than when I was using my car shack. If anything it's less. I think it's because it's also my office and I already spend plenty of time doing office activities that playing radio isn't all that different. I'm going to keep my set-up, but I'm going to go back to my roots and add a radio back into my car. It's still a family car, so I need to consider the other uses that it's put to, but I think I can make it work. I recently installed an 80 Amp Hour battery with an automatic charging circuit. It was put there to power the dash-cams, but it was scaled with amateur radio in mind. I don't yet know which radio I'm going to put into the car, I really do like my FT-857d, but there are other options available to me, so I'm going to experiment. One fundamental change I'm going to make is that the radio will be installed in such a way that it can be easily unplugged and removed. Not because I want to remove it from the car, but because I want to be able to go even lighter, take the radio onto the beach, or into a park or up a summit. I'll likely bolt the whole lot into a Pelican case and make it a mobile go-unit that happens to live in my car. I don't think I'll add digital functionality at first, but I'm eyeing off the idea of dedicating an old mobile phone, which is essentially a computer, screen, battery and internet connection in one to the task, but I'll let you know how that goes. What I do know, with hindsight, is that less is more. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In our hobby we use kilohertz and megahertz enthusiastically. Sometimes even gigahertz. The other day during a discussion the question arose, what comes after tera, as in terahertz? I couldn't remember, so I had to look it up, peta comes next, then exa, zetta and yotta, derived from the Greek word for eight. That in and of itself was interesting, but it turns out that Greek isn't the only language used in attributing SI metric prefixes, SI being the International System of Units. Of the 20 units, which I'll get to in a moment, there's 12 with Greek origins, five deriving from Latin, two from Danish and one from Spanish. The units are used to describe how many of a thing there are in base-10, so, a thousand of something is kilo, or ten to the power of three, which gives us kilohertz. A gigahertz is ten to the power of nine and so-on. Interestingly, kilo is derived from the Greek word thousand, but mega comes from the Greek for great. Both hecto, as in hectopascals and deca as in decathlon originate in the Greek words for hundred and ten. The prefix pico, as in picofarad comes from the Spanish word peak and femto as in femtowatt comes from the Danish for fifteen, as in ten to the power of minus 15. Apparently a zeptomole of a substance contains 602 particles, even NASA says so, let me know if you can find a source for that. I could devote my entire discussion on these 20 units, adding for example that their naming wasn't all done at the same time, the most recent additions are yotta and yocto, as I said, derived from the Greek for eight, being ten to the power of 24. How's that eight you ask? Well, three times eight is 24. I'm not saying it's intuitive, but there is logic. In looking at all these units, and specifically the smaller ones, milli, micro, nano, pico and the like, it occurred to me, is there a way to go below one Hertz, could you have half a Hertz? Hertz is the number of oscillations per second, a single Hertz being one per second. Half a Hertz would be one oscillation per two seconds. I started wondering what to look for in discovering if anyone has been playing with this. For the life of me, I couldn't think of what to search for and my experience tells me that if you cannot find the answer online, you're asking the wrong question. This morning, with a fresh cup of coffee in my hands, it occurred to me that anyone doing this kind of stuff would be using SI units, so they'd be using decihertz, centihertz, millihertz, microhertz and nanohertz, perhaps even picohertz. So I went searching. Turns out that this actually exists. After wading through endless results with conversion tools and dictionaries, there's plenty of research to find. The unit decihertz is being used in gravitational wave interferometry, specifically, there's a Japanese, space-based gravitational wave observatory in the works with hopes of launching their three space craft if they can find funding. It doesn't end there. There are experimental imaging studies being made on malignant and benign human cancer cells and tissues looking at decihertz all the way down to yoctohertz, that's ten to the minus 24. Inside Apple software development documentation, in addition to mega, giga and terahertz you can find links to milli, micro and nanohertz as predefined units. NANOGrav stands for North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves and it uses the Galaxy to detect them. It was founded in 2007 and is part of a global community of scientists in places like Australia, where the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array is located - yes, that Parkes - made famous from the film "the Dish" and Europe with the European Pulsar Timing Array, combining five separate radio-telescopes, all coming together under the banner of the IPTA or International Pulsar Timing Array. The point of my little exploration is that if you're curious about random things, you can often come across activities and ideas you know nothing about and learn something along the way. Today I learnt that there is such a thing as a sub-Hertz signal, it's being explored all over the globe with scientists in different fields and it's happening without much in the way of public awareness. What did you learn today and which SI prefix didn't I use? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A couple of weeks ago an amateur put out a call on the local email discussion list. The message was simple, it read: "I have a 606A HP Signal Generator with a copy of the Operating and Service Manual. It covers 50 kHz to 65 MHz. Free to a good home :-)" It's not the first time that such a message has done the rounds, but this time my reply was quick enough for it to be first. Overnight I became the new custodian of a Hewlett Packard 606A Signal Generator. A signal generator is a tool that can form a specific carrier across a range of frequencies in much the same way that your amateur radio can. In this case, the HP-606A can cover all the amateur HF bands and everything in between. The signal that's generated is calibrated, that is, it's of a specific power level, very stable, clean and it can be used to calibrate other equipment. To set the scene, the HP-606A was released into the wild in 1959. You might call it vintage at this point. It's the size of a modern microwave oven, so I'll need to set aside some bench space in order to actually use it. According to some it's "the best analogue signal generator ever built". It's been in production for decades, with plenty of information to be found online. Unlike most modern gear, this equipment comes fully documented by the manufacturer, to the point of user manual revisions depending on the serial number and including essentials like circuit diagrams, parts list, spare parts list, calibration instructions and the equipment needed, how to open it up, tests to conduct after repair, how to conduct regular maintenance and how to replace the tubes in it. Yes, I did say tubes, or valves, or glow in the dark electronics. At this point I've not yet switched it on. You might wonder why that's the case. This unit has internal voltages exceeding 500 Volt DC, so some care is required. Inside are at least four electrolytic capacitors. Think of each of them as two pieces of aluminium sandwiched together, separated by a piece of foil and electrolytic paste, all rolled up into a cylinder. When an electrolytic capacitor is built, the process to convert these components into an actual capacitor involves forming it, which means that the manufacturer applies a specific voltage to the pins of the capacitor and in doing so, causes a chemical reaction which makes all manner of funky stuff happen, including unidirectional conductance, something you're looking for in a capacitor. Over time, when not in use, or in my case, in storage, this chemical reaction reverses and the capacitors are back to rolled up aluminium with some foil in between. Powering it up in this state will let the smoke out. It turns out that in many cases you can apply the voltage again and reform the capacitor. Apparently, according to the author of Tu-Be Or Not Tu-Be Modification Manual by H.I. Eisenson, applying the voltage for five minutes plus one minute per month of storage does the trick. In my case, I can leave the capacitors in circuit and apply the voltage externally using a Variac, a Variable AC Transformer, loaned to me by Denis VK6AKR. Doing the math is a little tricky, since we don't really know when the unit was last powered up, but we're told that it was some time in the last decade, so a couple of hours should suffice, but there are some wrinkles in relation to voltage and managing the step to powering up the tubes, so when I've made it happen, I'll let you know. Denis was kind enough to help with opening up the cabinet and having a look-see inside. We noticed that it has previously been expertly repaired with a few replaced components and Denis managed to identify some likely failed tubes, so we're on the scrounge for those. Together we did some initial tests and ran up the unit using low voltage to determine if the various test points were actually showing the proportional voltages that were expected. This isn't like a digital circuit where it either works or not, using a Variac, you can slowly power this up, to a point, and test along the way. This brings us to the provenance of this tool. I got it from Dave VK6AI and from discussion, we think it came from the estate of Don VK6HK, now silent key. I've met Don's widow who happens to be the neighbour of a friend, so at some point when I have it working I might give her a call. I don't know who owned it before Don. I do know that when it was released, in 1959, it was sold for $1540 US Dollars, the equivalent of $14,000 in today's money, or half a car back then. Based on serial numbers, this HP-606A appears to have been manufactured between October 1961 and August 1966, so it's older than I am. In case you have extra information, the serial number is 009-01180 and my email address is [email protected]. If you have spare valves, a 12B4A is high on the list, get in touch. While Denis and I were exploring inside the guts of this function generator, we were at the clubhouse of the local WA VHF Group, surrounded by other amateurs

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I illustrated the diversity of our community by highlighting social media posts made to a single community over a 24 hour period. Each reflecting a different aspect of our community. It occurred to me that although those things are amateur radio, some more obviously than others, there's a whole other side of the community that isn't amateur radio. Look at radio astronomy for example. One of my friends is an astronomer and we've been having loads of fun learning from each other. I'm getting exposed to concepts like Fourier transforms, interferometry, sampling and plenty of the mathematical concepts that underlie my interest in amateur radio. Then there's things like physics. While I've always been interested, long before I met my physics teacher in high-school who helped me kick off a career in computing, I've been playing with light bulbs, batteries, disassembling old hardware like the valve radio that I was given when I was about twelve or so. There's the continued curiosity about audio. I've been making mix-tapes since I was nine, and that has blossomed into an ongoing interest in audio production, some of which is reflected in my weekly podcast and fuelled by my hearing loss. My interests outside amateur radio have always been wide and varied. I've learnt to fly an aeroplane, learnt to navigate a sailboat, learnt to drive a truck, installed satellite dishes in the bush and built a mobile satellite ground station, built software solutions for piggeries and bakeries, provided logistics for remote outback events, built vehicle mounted GPS tracking and mapping solutions and I continue to read articles as they come my way. What amateur radio has given me is a context, a framework if you like to bring together these wide ranging fields and make them hang together. An obvious, though simple example, is learning the phonetic alphabet. In amateur radio it's a given that you'll need to learn that so you can effectively communicate using a poor signal path, but my phonetic learning predates my amateur radio exposure by at least a dozen years. In order to pass my aviation radio certificate, I was required to learn the phonetic alphabet before I was allowed to use the radio. It's only a small example, but it's illustrative on how, for me at least, amateur radio is the glue that binds it all together. It happens at other levels too. I've mentioned in the past that looking at a television antenna on the roof of any house before getting a license was a non-event. Today I can't look without thinking about propagation, how the antenna is aligned and if it's installed back-to-front or not. Once you know a thing, it's hard to un-see, or unlearn the background of it. The same happens when I spot an antenna in the wild, stuck to a lamppost, or bolted to a random roadside cabinet. Previously they would go unremarked, today I wonder what information they're transmitting or receiving, what band they're operating on, who owns the equipment and what interference they might be causing or experiencing in their environment. I have a growing interest in computer controlled manufacturing like 3D printing, laser engraving and CNC and spend some of the available time in the day learning about how that works, how to improve things and I wonder about how the speed of communications between the various components create an RF field of some sort and what that does to other components and circuits. As a final experience, recently I had a medical procedure where there was a notice supplied with the logging hardware that specifically called out amateur radio as a source of electromagnetic radiation and that I was required to refrain during the process due to a potential failure of the equipment. If anything, for the first time in a long time, I felt that there was a visible link between my hobby and the rest of the community, since that notice was given to every single person, not just the radio amateurs. Some links between amateur radio and the rest of the world are visible and some are not. What kinds of interactions between the hobby and society at large have you come across? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio You've heard me say that amateur radio is a thousand hobbies in one. It's not my idea, but it speaks to me in ways that are hard to articulate. Today I found a way that might give you an inkling just how vast this community is. One place where our community gathers is on-air, but it's not the only place. There are clubs, websites, email lists, video channels and other outlets all catering for different amateur radio users and their interests. One such place is the social media site Reddit. In the so-called amateurradio sub with currently over 88 thousand members, there is a lively community discussing many of the different aspects of our hobby. Over the past 24 hours, 23 posts were made in that single community. "Thanks, K-2722 hunters", was a photo about activating Carolina Beach State Park, as part of an activity called Parks on the Air, or POTA. To participate you can either go to a park, set-up your station and make contacts, or you can stay at home and listen out for people who are doing that. "It's not high-high, it's hee-hee", a meme around the sound that the Morse Code generates when you send the letter H followed by the letter I, commonly considered laughter. "Why don't scanners have FM radio?", a discussion around the perceived lack of FM mode on scanners. "Help with TYT MD-380 CPS", a question from an amateur who purchased a new radio and is looking for software to program it. "Portable on the Space Coast. QRP on a speaker wire antenna.", a video of an amateur making an activation in Florida and showing off their set-up. "Could not hit DMR repeater", an amateur sharing that they figured out that they couldn't hit a repeater because they had their radio set to low power and wanted to share that with the community. "Antenna advice part 2", asking about how to set-up antennas for dual use, how to amplify the signal, use rotators and what kind of coax to use. "ISS SSTV Aug 6-7 145.800 MHz FM", linking to a news item announcing slow scan television coming from the International Space station in August. "FT-3DR APRS message question", exploring the specifics on how Automatic Packet Reporting System or APRS messages are sent. Think of it as global distributed SMS via amateur radio. "Is it okay to leave a handheld radio on while it's on its battery charger 24/7?", with answers to the question that's puzzling one owner of a radio. "Extra test question", asking about how to learn for the test and wondering if the techniques needed are different when compared with obtaining the "tech" exam. "Just got my first radio! Now to prep for the test, but first a question about saving time after I pass it...", asking about how to register before the test to speed things along. And that's just over half way there. "Maldol TMH-21 / TMH-71 handhelds - any info?", asking about a new to them radio from around 2007. "2021 Berryville, VA (US) Hamfest - any reddit community members going?", looking for others going to the first hamfest in their region for a long time. "CB Radio is Going FM! Why is the FCC Doing It?", linking to a video that discusses the changes on how CB radio is getting another mode. "What is the 'right' way to learn morse?", the age-old question, one that I'm still am working through. "Sidetone distorted on QCX mini? How do I fix this? It gets better or worse when I move the radio around, but the problem doesn't go away. Anyone else's QCX do this?", with a video showing the issue. "Aluminium roof trim + HF dipole", with a question on what kind of effects might happen as a result of the combination of the two. "Never owned a Radio be for please help lol. I got 2 of these on the way any tips for beginners? [sic]", excited new owner looking for advice. "I finally got my qsl cards printed!", with pictures to show the artistic prowess involved. "Legality of transmitting digital data over FM audio", asking about the specifics on how data may or may not be transmitted in the United States. "It's no pie plate on a kayak, but you gotta work with what you have, right?", showing off a frying pan as a magnetic base. If it works, it's not silly at all. "Very New Here", asking about how to explore radio waves. Those 23 different posts are all about amateur radio, from one single community, on one day. Each post from someone finding their way in the community, discussing something that's important to them, sharing their experience and contributing to that community. Reddit alone has at least a dozen amateur related communities, covering electronics, specific radios, amateur software development and more. The thing about this hobby is that it's different things to different people. For some it's about getting on air and making noise, for others it's learning about whatever comes their way. This hobby is so vast because it touches so many aspects of life, it innovates, leads and contributes in ways that are often invisible and that's why it's so engrossing. What's your latest interest in this

Foundations of Amateur Radio The essential purpose of an amateur radio contest is to get on air and make noise. Each contest has a set of rules on how they intend to achieve this. An integral part of the rules is the idea that you establish a contact, a QSO, with another station and exchange some predefined information. Likely the callsign, a signal report and often something else, a serial number, the age of the operator, a maidenhead locator or the CQ or ITU zone. I'll race past the discussion around sending 5 and 9 as a standard signal report and move right along. To validate your activity, you record this information in a log and after the contest has concluded, you share your log with the contest organiser who collates and processes the submitted logs to determine a winner. As a participant you look for your callsign on the results page and if you're lucky you get some form of trophy, a certificate, a plaque, or more often than not, a PDF. An amateur radio contest is not a particularly high stakes competition. Recently I asked a group of contesters a question: "How do you learn why a QSO was excluded from your score?" I asked because one of the eight contacts I managed during a recent contest was disallowed, leaving me with an unexplained discrepancy between my log and the results. I will note that this entry didn't affect my ranking, I won my category, mainly because I was the only entrant - hah! Depending on whom you ask, this is either a simple or a complex question. The simple explanation states that if the contact isn't in the log of both stations it's not a valid contact. This interpretation was extremely popular in the group I asked. It was not the only answer I received. When I spoke with individual contesters they came up with different answers to my original question. For example, if I log everything right, if I'm using a serial number, the number increments each time and my log shows that, then my log entry should be valid, even if the other station didn't log it correctly. Note that I said log, not copy, as-in, they repeated back what I gave them, but logged it incorrectly. I also wondered what would happen if I was using a club-station callsign and accidentally called CQ with my own callsign and a station logged that callsign instead of the club-station. Should they be penalised because they logged what was actually exchanged? There's more. For example, what happens if the times are not identical? Based on the simple explanation, this would not be a valid contact, so you would not get recognition for this exchange and in some contests an invalid contact will produce a penalty to both stations. Another variation to the simple answer occurs if the contest organiser doesn't receive a log for every station and as a result, some contests set a maximum number of contacts for stations without logs. All this came within the context of attempting to discover how log validation happens, who decides what's valid and what rules are used. During my group conversation, two contest managers shared how they scored their particular contests and showed that they attempted to award the benefit of doubt to each station. One decided after the discussion to change their interpretation to the simple explanation I've already looked at. I wanted to know if there was any standard and other than pointing vaguely in the direction of a few large contests, I didn't actually manage to find any definitive discussion on how this works, if it's universal, which I suspect it isn't, and if it changes over time, which I know it does. The largest annual contest is the CQ World-Wide. In a 2012 blog post the contest committee discusses the time window of a contact and explains that they allow a 15 minute window, so as long as both contacts agree within 15 minutes, the QSO is allowed. That post also pointed out that if the time for one station was out by 45 minutes, none of their contacts would be allowed and anyone who made contact with that station would by implication get a penalty. Clearly there are variations on how this is handled. I asked if there is validation software for logs that checks this and if that software is open source so others can look at how decisions are made and see how these evolve over time. Is there an arbitration that goes beyond the standard phrasing in most contests: "The decision of the contest committee is final." I was told that this wasn't necessary and I should focus on more practice. I beg to differ. I've been contesting for a decade now, I have plenty of winning certificates on my wall. I'd like to improve my skill and I'd like to learn why and how my contacts are disallowed and I'd like others to be able to do the same. Log checking software is written by humans who interpret the rules and write software to conform to those rules. In order to see what rules are in place and to validate that, the source of that software must in my opinion be open and transparent. As a community we sit at the b

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you explore the landscape of amateur radio you'll discover an endless array of innovation. There's websites with photos and descriptions of activities, places discovered and lessons learnt. If you watch the growing collection of YouTube channels you'll discover videos describing what people have been up to, commenting on videos they've seen and you'll start to notice that people all over the community are pinging off each other. Social media does the same. If you read an amateur magazine, or a book, you'll unearth references and counter-references, links and credits, descriptions gleaned and tests made, all of them interlinking and adding to the knowledge base that underpins the amateur radio community and society beyond it. The same is true for on-air activity. Look at contesting for example, you'll hear descriptions from other contesters, sharing their lessons learnt which potentially influence how you do your next contesting activity. The same is true for working DX, operating any digital mode, running an on-air net, running a SOTA activation, anything. The point being that you are influenced by others and everything you do influences somebody somewhere else who in turn influences the next person who might then influence you. On and on the chain grows. This chain of knowledge goes back to the early science in our hobby, the works of James Clerk Maxwell who for the first time brought electricity, magnetism, and light together as different manifestations of the same phenomenon in 1864. The reason we know this is because he published his work and without needing to leave home to see the original, anyone can read it today from the comfort of their living room thanks to the PDF that's on the Royal Society web-site. The point being that Maxwell documented his work and shared it with the world. In our hobby we've gone through the process of making our equipment from unobtainium, requiring that the actual components were constructed before you could actually put them together and use them for their intended purpose. We then went on the scrounge for parts from other equipment, acquiring surplus gear and through a phase where you could buy new components off the shelf and attach them to an etched circuit board. That evolved into being able to design a board, ordering it online, having it built for cents and shipped to our door. Today an increasing component of our hobby evolves around software with its unique property of transience. Unlike physical components, software is intangible. You imagine how something might work, you describe it in an imaginary language, convert it into something that can be run inside a computer, and if you did it right, the outcome gives you the basis for your next experiment. When software reaches a certain level of complexity it becomes impossible to remember. You tweak something over here and something over there changes and unless you can keep all that together inside your brain as a cohesive imaginary model, you quickly run into a brick wall. If you're a software developer you've likely heard of tools like CVS, SVN and git. They are examples of revision control. They're used extensively in software development, but increasingly they're being used to track changes in documents, legislation and places where change is constant. As an aside, if you load the various versions of legal requirements of your license into revision control, you'll quickly discover that your license is slowly evolving over time, for better or worse. From personal experience, I know doing that for the Radiocommunications Licence Conditions in Australia was very interesting indeed. Each of these tools gives you the ability to tweak something, track it and if it doesn't work out, revert to where you started your experiment. It's a little like using a soldering iron and a soldering wick, physical undo for experiments. When I talk about Open Source software, I'm not only talking about the ability to look inside and add functionality, I'm also talking about accessing the history that goes with that. Open Source software generally only works if it comes with a revision history, a trail of discovery outlined right there on your screen showing what worked, why and how it came about. There's often options for showing who made what change, which changes happened at the same time and the ability to extract that particular change. All essential ingredients for experimentation. Closed Source software does all those things, but privately. It too likely uses revision control tools, even the same ones as Open Source, but the discoveries are held in-house, behind closed doors, used by a select few. The software evolves inside the organisation, but there's no insight for or from the outside world. Of course, everyone is entitled to keep their stuff secret, but if you want to make a contribution to society outside the life of your walled garden, the only way forward is to publish and share your wo

Foundations of Amateur Radio For much of the past month I've been attempting to articulate what Open Source Software is, why it's important, how it's relevant to our hobby, how it works, how software is different from hardware and why you should consider if the equipment you buy comes with source code or not. I'm finding it difficult to separate out the issues since they all hang together in a cohesive clump of ideas and concepts. So, let me go sideways to set the scene. There is a movement that asserts the right to repair our own things and to ensure that manuals and diagnostic tools used by manufacturers are made available to the public. For many radio amateurs that might sound quaint and obvious, since for much of the hobby that kind of information was not only available, it was expected and assumed to be available. You can get the circuit diagram and testing procedures, the alignment process and the list of required test equipment for most if not all amateur transceivers today and truth be told, if that testing gear isn't available, we tend to build or scrounge our own. Compare a Yaesu FT-857d and an Icom IC-7300. They're radios from different generations, use different technologies, are made by different manufacturers and come in different packaging. Both radios have user manuals, circuit diagrams and documented testing and alignment processes, but they're not equivalent even if they look the same. The 857 is constructed from discrete components and circuits. There's a microprocessor on-board, the source code is not available and updates are issued by the manufacturer if and when it sees fit. Its function is to control and sequence things, selecting band filters, switching modes, updating the display and control serial communications. While integral to the functioning of the radio, the microprocessor itself is used for command and control only. Inside the 7300 you'll also find discrete components. There are circuits, filters and the like and while individual components have reduced in size there are many of the same kinds of functions inside the radio as you'll find on an 857. The microprocessor inside the 7300 is more advanced than the one inside the 857. The source code is also not available and updates are issued by the manufacturer when it sees fit. If that was all there was to it, I would not have spent a month attempting to capture this. Suffice to say that looks are deceiving. The microprocessor inside the 7300 does the exact same things as the 857 with one minor difference. It now also forms part of the signal input and output chain of the radio itself. Let me say that again. The computer that is the heart of a modern radio is an integral part of the signal processing of the radio. Where in a traditional radio the microprocessor was switching circuits on and off to process the signal, the modern solution is to do all the signal processing using software inside the microprocessor itself. If you want to get technical, an FPGA is doing much of the signal processing, but that too is driven by software. Where previously you had access to the circuit diagram that would show you what was being done to the signal, today you have a magic black box that does stuff completely outside your control. If you want to know how an SSB or FM signal is decoded on the 857, the service manual will helpfully point you at two chips which provide those specific functions. It describes how the signal comes into the chip and how the signal is processed once it leaves the chip and if you need more, you can look online to find the specifications for each chip to see precisely what they do and how they work, complete with equivalent circuits and specifications. On the other hand if you wanted to know the same information for the 7300 you'd be out of luck because if you dig deep enough, following the signal path, eventually you'd end up inside the microprocessor where software is making that happen. There's no description on how this works, what the circuit equivalent characteristics are, there's no way to change how it works, no way to set parameters, no way to see inside and no way to experiment. This is a problem because it means that you've got a solution that's no longer operating in the spirit of amateur radio. It's not open for experimentation, it's not subject to review, there's no way to test, no means to improve, no way to do anything other than what the manufacturer decided was appropriate. For example, if I wanted to modify the FM pass-band width on an 857, I could update the FM demodulation circuit by replacing a couple of components. On a 7300, I could not because there is no circuit. The FM demodulator is described in software that I don't have access to and Icom has decided that the FM pass-band is fixed. If the software was open however, I could add this function and make it available to anyone who would like to experiment. At this point I'd also like to observe that the Icom user manual states that inside t