Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Don't get me started, Let's start this thing, Where do I start, Start me up, I could go on, but I have better things to do today, like starting a podcast. Amateur Radio is a hobby with an enourmous range of activities, interests, skills and experiences. If you're new to this hobby, you might find yourself standing at the edge of a precipous wondering what to do next. Where do I start, who do I ask, what's the first step, what if I fail and a myriad of other doubts and concerns. Would you be surprised to learn that this same dialog happens to every Amateur, all the time? Let's say that I'm an experienced member of the community and there is this new mode called FT8 that keeps polluting my PSK31 transmissions. I decide that it's time to see what it's all about. Or, imagine that you've been invited to come on a hiking trek for the first time with some fellow amateurs to activate a summit. Or, you hear about a new entity that has just been announced. Or, you decide that you need a new radio, a new antenna, a new head-set or a new logging package. Or, like me, you want to try again to learn Morse Code. For every activity you ever engage in, there's that moment of doubt, of concern, of challenge. In fact I suspect that it's exactly that thrill that makes people go ahead and pursue their hobby. That means that as a new amateur you're no different from an old amateur. You have the same level of concern and worry that others also have and you too can overcome those by just deciding to. So, what if you're not yet a new amateur? The first thing to note is that everybody who is an amateur today was at one point or another not yet a new amateur. For some that step happened yesterday, for others it happened over 80 years ago and for some that step lies in the future. At this point it would be helpful if I could point out a few resources, some things to look at, to listen to, or to engage with. If you're already on-air, listening, scan around and hear other activities. If you've managed to find the community on-line, you'll likely find other resources nearby, since we amateurs like to cluster, much like any other community. You'll also find on-line radios to hear HF, websites, discussion groups, mailing lists, interest groups, associations and clubs. If you came across this as a random event, see what brought you here and ask around. If you're stuck, ask a fellow amateur. I can introduce you to one right now. Hi, I'm Onno VK6FLAB and I'm an Amateur Radio Operator, pleased to meet you. Drop me a line and say hello, don't be shy. Just because you're not licensed is no excuse to get started. There are stories everywhere of those who start as shortwave listeners, or CB-ers, or come across the hobby in some other random way, like I did. The fact that you're here, now, means you've already found the community. Welcome. Seriously, Welcome to Amateur Radio. Now all you need to do is take another step, and then after that, another, and before you know it you're in and among other amateurs. There are many steps inside this hobby. Which ones you choose to take and at which speed are entirely up to you. This can be as formal or informal as you like. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are times when you realise that you've always nodded your head when a particular topic came up and after doing that for long enough, you think you know what's going on. Turns out that, no, you didn't, but that the topic itself was interesting enough to learn from. In my case, Three Phase Power. I came upon this topic over the past month while I struggled with power interruptions, blinking lights, weirdness throughout my house. Turns out that it's been happening for a lot longer than I've lived here. After spending some time with the local power company, which I was told was filled with people who didn't care, turns out that they do, but they're busy people. After some back and forth, some logging, some finger pointing and head-scratching, the solution to my woes was to move me from the White Phase to the Blue Phase. I nodded and smiled and everything was well with the world. I know that there are three phases, Red, White and Blue. If you have overhead power in your street you'll likely notice four wires strung from pole to pole. One for each phase and one for neutral. Apparently there's a standard for which is neutral and the order, but there are too many exceptions for me to spell that all out here, so I'll move on. So, what's with these three phases? If you spin a magnet between two coils you have a generator. As the magnet spins, the magnetic field increases through each coil, then peaks, then reduces, and as the next magnetic pole comes along, the magnetic field reverses, increases, peaks, reduces, etc. If that sounds familiar, it's because I've just described a sine-wave. Every revolution of the magnet is a cycle and if you cycle, say 50 times, you get 50 cycles per second, or 50 Hz. For some countries it's not 50 Hz, but 60. Same thing, just faster. That single set of opposing coils and magnet is a single phase. If you add another set of coils, 120 degrees further along, you get the same phenomenon, completely independently from the first set of coils. That's the second phase. Rinse and repeat for the third phase. To get that power to the rest of the suburb, you need to run a single wire for each phase and a common neutral wire, giving you the four wires that you see on a power pole. Theoretically you could run with more phases, but you need to run more copper into the street, so power companies stopped at three. You can think of these as three completely independent circuits, but they all share the same neutral, so there are some subtle interactions, like if the neutral becomes disconnected, bad news happens, especially in a place like Western Australia where ground conductivity is very poor. In a normal home you'll get fed by one of those phases, in my case I changed over from the white phase to the blue phase. This means that each phase has a different set of users in the street. Roughly a third are using each phase. Looking at the actual voltage and current that comes through at high enough resolution and you'll begin to recognise it as an RF spectrum with harmonics, variations, interference and other artefacts that make power show up as a varying feast, rather than the rock-solid expectation of 240V, 50 Hz you see on the sticker. Three Phase Power, now you can nod along like I did and know how it actually works. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's been raining around here for a while now. Not in the order of 40 days and 40 nights, but significant. Mind you, I have lived in a place where it rained every day for 57 days, but I digress. Water, plenty of it and often in all the wrong places. Being a radio amateur you come across water in many aspects of the hobby, sometimes it comes in handy, like lubricating your throat while you're calling CQ, or as a ground plane for an antenna, other times, not so much, like when it enters the shack and causes the black smoke to escape from your pride and joy. As I said, I'm no stranger to rain and in my travels I've encountered plenty of it. I managed to travel around Australia for a couple of years and I took with me a two-way satellite dish with sensitive electronics attached. Living in Australia I planned for dry. This place is dry. Often very much so, but as it turns out, dry doesn't mean without humidity, storms, rain or in one case hail. These experiences told me a little about protecting electronics from the weather. I should add a disclaimer here, I'm not a certified weatherman, nor am I certified in waterproofing, water ingress, or any other guarantee. So, if you do as I say and it breaks, you get to keep both halves. That said, I have some thoughts on the matter and I wouldn't be me if I didn't share them. Water is generally everywhere. It gets into everything and it's one of those silent killers. Electronics and water rarely mix, unless you submerge the electronics in mineral spirits, or if you seal your electronics in circuit board lacquer. Even then, there are few guarantees. The best you can hope for, in my experience, is to plan for failure, hope for success. Finding where water gets in is often the hardest part of keeping it out. Sealing off your electronics from the world in a waterproof anything will trap heat, which in turn will cause condensation, which will ultimately cause rust and destruction of your priceless electronics. Giving your stuff time to acclimatise is a very good idea. For example, if you have a radio stored in your garage and you bring it indoors, leave it there for several hours, if not overnight. Unless you live in Alaska with an in-floor heater to prevent your engine block from freezing, your garage is cold, your home is warm, the combination causes condensation. Alternatively, if your garage is hot, and your home air-conditioned, the reverse is true and condensation will still happen. Water has a habit of finding its way into anything, encouraged by gravity. That means that a length of coax, run into your wall will attract a stream of water along the coax, straight into the connector and into your wall, or between the core and the braid, or into your radio, or some other undesirable place. If you create a low point before the connector, like a drip-loop, a place where water would have to go up before it can do damage, you'll likely solve the issue, but don't discard the effects of wind which can cause water to go uphill. Connectors are magnets for water. Most connections in use in amateur radio have little or no waterproof rating. There are special waterproof connectors about and you may consider using those, but alternatives like self-amalgamating or rubber tape, which you wind tightly around a connection and in doing so, stretches and glues itself together to keep the water out. These tapes are generally not stable in the ultraviolet of the sun, so you may have to wrap that sealed connector in another layer of tape, plumbing or electrical tape is one solution. Based on the experience from national coax installations, the way to do this is with three windings of rubber tape, followed by two of plumbing tape. Think of up as towards the weather and down as away from the weather and make the windings like this: Wind the rubber tape three times around the connector, up, then down, then up again. Seal this from the sun with two windings of plumbing tape, down and then back up towards the weather. For endurance, add a cable-tie to keep the tape in place when the glue eventually fails. This will ensure that water always runs away from the connector. The way to remember this, for a positive result, there are three ups and two downs. If you ever get your coax wet, that is, the end, be prepared to cut off a length to protect your gear. Coax rot is real and is essentially the rusting of the braid, the shield or the core and it spells bad news for your gear. Operating portable is a whole other subject in relation to weather, but the same principles apply. Keep the temperature stable, keep the water out, protect from rain ingress along the coax and you'll likely be able to have a good time and come home without any damage to your gear. There is a persistent idea that rice can help you dry electronics. While it does have some effect, it's slow and by the time it's removed the water, the damage will already have been done. Air drying is much more effective.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I had a conversation with a group of amateurs, ranging in experience from newbie to salty, from purchase to build, from buy to scrounge, in other words, the whole range. One person in the group asked about how to get started with soldering. Their first harmonic had just been granted a license and they wanted to encourage the new amateur to build something, anything. That in turn started a whole conversation about the how, where, why and what of the way of the heated element and its application to a circuit board. In 2012, almost exactly two years after obtaining my amateur license I purchased an electronics kit. The kit was sold by my local electronics store and was intended to become a High Precision LC Meter. The electronics store packages together many of the schematics that are published in Australia's Silicon Chip Magazine and in this instance, it also came with a lovely case, build instructions and a review from someone who had built the kit, John, VK3FJBX. The whole thing cost me $90 at the time and as far as I was concerned, that was a bargain. These days I might have considered it a little high, but the end result was an LC Meter that does what I need and works as described. The process of building the contraption was not complex, in fact, I think the single surprise was the need to purchase a Component Leg Bending Tool, a fancy name for a $2 tapered block of plastic with little indents that you can use to bend the legs of a resistor so they match the holes of the circuit board. As projects go, this one was a success. I bought it, I built it, I put it together, powered it up and the black smoke stayed inside the components and the meter displayed numbers that matched up with what the label on the component I was testing said. That in an of itself is a story of success. I can point at several other kits sitting in a box, still as bags of components, never assembled, lost interest, got distracted, too hard, not viable, missing bits, whatever the excuse, gathering dust until magically one day they'll be needed for when the apocalypse is here, or the garage explodes from too much stuff and I'm forced to donate it to the world. As my life experience increases, my hands are becoming less steady. I now have a magnifying lamp, not enough clamps and less patience for silliness, so, my kit building is at an all-time-low. Mind you, it's not that I've stopped building or experimenting, instead I'm writing software, investigating new and exciting tools, like a random online circuit simulator I came across during the week. I did want to tell you what it's called, but it's down at the moment and I don't know if it was hugged to death by well meaning amateurs who came to visit. Search with your tool of choice for "Electronic Circuit Simulator in the Browser" and you'll be spoilt for choice. In addition to several browser based simulators around, there are also offline applications you can download and run, even tools you can spend actual money on. All told, several options for learning how to build a circuit, how various things work together, including showing simulated oscilloscope traces, so you can see what your latest contraption actually does. The art of building, the skill of soldering, the pursuit of design is hampered by one thing, and one thing only. Your ability to get out and start. So, what are you waiting for? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've been part of the amateur community for a while and have heard me talk on matters of contesting, you'll know that I'm an avid contester and that for me it's better than sliced bread. Of course, I'm me and you're not. If contesting isn't of any particular interest to you, the hobby of amateur radio is big enough for at least 999 other attractions. I talk about them regularly. If you're on the fence, or if you're unsure, or if you are not enamoured with this whole contesting thing, then today I'd like to ask you to consider another aspect of this activity. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you to participate in a contest. As I said, there are many other activities within the hobby. For example, testing propagation is a recurring theme, as is testing your gear, your radio, your skill and doing all manner of other amateur things. For many of those activities having another person to test with is often a way to get a result and if you find yourself on a lonely Saturday looking for a friend to help, I have a suggestion to make. It relates to contesting, specifically those on air. It turns out that there are radio amateurs on air almost all the time. Imagine that. Better still, when there's a contest on, there are even more radio amateurs around, all clamouring about, trying to make contacts, trolling up and down the bands, making an effort to hear new stations, calling CQ, generating signals from all over the place. Here's the thing. There is no rule that says that you have to be participating in the contest, or even log contacts for the contest, but there is no harm in you using the airwaves for your own enjoyment. Turns out that if you get on air during a contest, you can use that for example to do testing of all manner of things. If you've run out of things to test, you can use it to learn things, like how to use the RIT or "Receiver Incremental Tuning", something Yaesu calls the Clarifier, or the IF offset, or the noise-blanker, or the noise-filter, or the A/B VFO, or what ever it is that floats your boat. There are people all around you, getting on-air, making noise and you can join in with the fun. You can learn about the directivity of your station, observe how propagation changes, how the different bands react depending on the time of day, the solar cycle, or magnetic flux. If you have the opportunity, you can monitor the grey-line and observe its effects on what you can hear. You can look at a DX Cluster and see what you can hear, compared to what stations other amateurs are reporting. You can measure signal strengths, the impact of the AGC, test you battery life, your mobility, the layout of your shack and if you feel the urge, you can even log a rare station and add it to your log. No rule anywhere says that you have to participate in a contest, but why let a good opportunity go to waste? If you're an avid contester, you might think that I'm advocating that we fill the air with time wasters, people who shouldn't be there, people who are not worth your attention. I'm here to tell you that just because you're in a contest, doesn't mean that the rest of the world is and just because you want to make an exchange, not everyone else does. If I find myself having a conversation mid-contest with someone with a story to tell, I can participate in the discussion, or I can change the dial and call CQ contest somewhere else. The bands are a shared resource, for those who contest and for those who don't. The interesting thing in all this to me is that there seems to be a perception that you can only fall on one side of the coin. You're either a contester, or you're not and never the twain shall meet. That just makes no sense to me. There's an opportunity to sit on either side of the divide and harness both at the same time. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio It seems that when you categorically state something, like I did recently, you get emails and feedback, almost immediately, pointing out the folly of your assertion. Within the context of setting up your radio, an hour before you go away, I intended to convey: "One thing I can categorically state is that programming your radio manually just before your holiday is really something that you should try and avoid." That's not what I actually said. I missed out on the "just before your holiday" in that sentence. The upshot was that I received lots of feedback, some tips and different suggestions on how to do this and do it well. As I hinted at, you should know how to program your hand held. It's almost an essential life-skill. I generally take a copy of my manual with me, either on actual paper, you know, dead-tree variety, or as electrons as a PDF on my phone or other screen-based gadget. That doesn't mean I like programming my radio. In fact I will be so bold as to assert that I hate manually programming any of my radios. The process is tedious, non-obvious, with a process seemingly written for ENIAC in 1946 when you toggled bits on a panel to program a computer. Yes, that's a slight exaggeration, but not by much. Anyway, given that this is such a chore, I tend to avoid it like the plague and only in case of an emergency, do I break out the user manual and poke through 17 pages of arcane button pushing-fu, to get the job done, without hopefully clearing a memory I had programmed before. One of the emails I received, in fact the first one, was from Andrew KF7CCC. He very kindly pointed out the error of my ways, and I agree with him. One of the points that Andrew and others have made is that a defining characteristic of being a radio amateur is that we're frequency agile. That's not something that most other radio users are familiar with. They have a list of channels to pick from and switch between them. In amateur radio we have access to a VFO, a Variable Frequency Oscillator which allows us to change frequency at will. Of course we should all be able to change frequency as the need arises. Sitting on two different channels, pre-programmed into our radios is like being users, rather than inventors of radio, shock, horror. Andrew also mentions a book he's written. In one of the opening paragraphs he says: "This book shouldn't exist." and goes on to explain why the "Handheld Radio Field Guide" is a book that should be made obsolete by sanity entering into the process of programming a radio. I agree with the sentiment. We really have this insane configuration where each brand does it differently, and often within a brand, each model is different. Andrew makes a series of suggestions in his book and I think it's a great starting point for discussion. As I started with, I received lots of feedback. One suggestion was that radios should have an on-board GPS and should automatically know, based on location, which repeaters are nearby. That in turn will create a debate about where the list of repeaters comes from. Such a system appears to exist. At least one manufacturer, Icom does such a thing, but opinions appear to differ on its effectiveness. Another was that you should program the repeater networks into your radio, so when you head away from your home, you have access to the widest range of options. All this talk of repeaters started a lament by some that repeaters are dead and that they are not being used. Others said the opposite and welcomed new calls regularly. I am an IT geek. I wonder if we could create a ping of sorts where a radio transmits a broadcast request for nearby repeaters and that each in turn sends a response, collected by the radio and neatly added to the list of local repeaters. If it sounds familiar, that's because in computing we do this all the time with all manner of different gadgets like printers on our local network. In fact, your radio could just listen for repeater idents and store them. Given that a repeater identifies itself regularly, that's a way we could create a repeater map locally. What ever your poison, as-in, choice of radio, figuring out what to use it for is part of the adventure. You should know your radio inside and out. Read your user manual once in a while, I know I do, every couple of months or so, and each time I learn something new. "One thing I can categorically state is that programming your radio manually just before your holiday is really something that you should try and avoid." I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A regular question from people who go on holiday is: "Which repeaters should I put into my hand held radio?" If there was infinite amount of memory and time, the answer would be simple - All of them. If it were that simple, I wouldn't be talking about it and you wouldn't be asking the question, so given that it's not that simple, what options do you have for dealing with this question, generally an hour before you pack up your suitcase to leave on that trip to another location. For me, my first effort was to try to find a list of repeaters for the new location. Failing that, I ventured onto the national association and downloaded their list, which I might add, was woefully out of date, but I wasn't to know that when I found it. I then fired up a copy of the cross-platform CHIRP programming software, pushed all the repeater frequencies into my radio and called it a day. I did have the benefit of a radio that was able to group memories into separate so-called banks, which allowed me to be able to select a particular bank for each state, my own state, VK6 was, and I might add, still is, in bank 6. VK5 is in bank 5 and so-on. The advantage of this arrangement is that I can select a bank, set my radio to scan in just that bank and I can hear all the activity that's happening within range of my hand held. Pretty useful when you're on holidays in a new location. If your country doesn't quite break-down into neat little groups like that, or if you cannot break your hand held radio memory into banks, you might have to come up with a different strategy. You could for example, create your own equivalent banks, 100 to 199 is bank 1, 200 to 299 is bank 2, etc. Or if you have 50 states to worry about, you might allocate 101, 201, 301, 401 etc. to state number one and so on. Of course that will start an argument about which state is number one, but I'm sure you can work that out for yourself. Another suggestion is to query the local license database, in Australia the ACMA database, and get a list of currently licensed repeaters. If that's not your style, you could download a mobile phone app, something like Repeaterbook. You can even link your mobile to your radio and have the app set up the frequencies for your location. One suggestion I came across the other day is to do none of this and to just program in all the possible repeater pairs. There's not that many possibilities and setting your radio to scan will unearth any activity on what ever standard pair is being used at the time. This won't get you completely out of the woods, since some repeaters require a CTCSS tone of some description, but several hand held radios have the ability to decode the tone. You could get fancy with pre-programmed tones in different memories, but I'll leave that as an exercise for you to imagine. In the end, finding amateurs in a new location is a lot like finding amateurs in your home town. They're around, you just need to find them. Visiting a local club works at home and it works just as well while you're on holiday, sometimes even more-so, since you'll be a visitor and many clubs like to be on their best behaviour for new comers. One thing I can categorically state is that programming your radio manually is really something that you should try and avoid. Not because it's not possible and not because it's not a skill you should have, but because it's error prone and there's nothing quite as frustrating as programming in the wrong frequency without having the ability to fix it when you're in the field. One tip. CHIRP allows you to create as many different frequency files as you like. There's nothing wrong with making one fit for purpose for this outing and having a different file for your home location, or for a specific contest or DX activity. A final bonus tip. CHIRP generally uses the microphone and headphone sockets for most hand held radios. Setting the volume correctly is a must. If you set the volume too low, CHIRP won't work, since there won't be anything to decode. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio How to get the best Amateur Radio gear? A recurring question for new entrants to our hobby, and truth be told, some experienced ones as well, is: "What's the best hand held to buy?", or the best antenna, or the best base station, the best coax, the best mount, the best software, the best something. There's a principle in Engineering, Good, Fast and Cheap, pick any two. You can have Good and Fast, but it won't be Cheap. You can have Fast and Cheap, but it won't be Good. You can have Good and Cheap, but it won't be Fast. The concept of Quality is balanced between these limits. With that in mind, answering the question in search of the best is already a trade-off. To muddy the waters further, there is an economic principle related to pricing. It goes a little like this. If you sell an amateur radio gadget for $50, there's a group of people who will buy it. There's a group of people who would have paid more for the same thing and a group of people who can't justify $50. If you make the price higher as a manufacturer, say $75, you'll get more money from some people, but the group of people who can't justify the price will get larger, so you'll sell less gadgets. If you make the price $25, you'll sell more gadgets, but you won't capture the income from those who were prepared to pay $50 or $75. So, as a manufacturer, you make three gadgets, one for $25, one for $50 and one for $75. They're all essentially the same, but the market will lap it up. Of course, between $25 and $50, there's a group of people who would have been happy to pay more, etc. etc. Ad-infinitum. That's our amateur radio gadget market place today. The price points might not all be taken up by the same manufacturer, but the market price for say a hand held radio goes from somewhere around $40 to over $1200. You'll find the range completely filled with offers. As an aside, your local telco is doing the same thing, as is your mobile phone manufacturer, your internet service provider and your car manufacturer to name a few. So, now what? We're looking for the best gadget. Since you're going to be the one using it, your definition of best is going to be different to my definition. I care about my hand held being waterproof, but I don't care about having a torch, a compass, a thermometer or a GPS on board. You might want to take it hiking, where I'm more likely to use it on a field-day. This means that asking another amateur, "What's the best?", is a recipe for discussion. Some will be adamant that their selection is superior to that of another amateur, but you should now already know that this is completely subjective. If you go down the scientific route, you might use receiver sensitivity as a metric. If that's all you care about, the choice is easy, list them all by sensitivity and pick the one that's the most sensitive, but the battery life might be abysmal, or it might not use the frequency you care about, or it might have some other extra function you are paying for, but don't care about. We get down to picking from a list. If you're anything like me, and let's face it, we're all amateurs here, you'll get to a point of making a list of the options you have. Selecting the best antenna, the best power supply, the best base station, hand held, mobile, car, service contract, you name it, it always comes to a list. Here's how to pick. Is option A better than B? Yes? Remove B. Is option A better than C? No? Remove A. Is option C better than D? No? Remove D. Is C better than E?, etc, etc. You might be concerned about the ones that you've removed. You already decided that there was a better option than the one you removed, so ignore them, they're just muddying the water. If you want to ask another amateur what they bought and why, that's a whole field of exploration, but if you ask them what's the best gadget, that's just asking for trouble. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A question that occurs more often than you might think is one related to powering your radio. It comes in a few different flavours, like: "I want to install a radio in my car, how do I power it?", or "I want to operate portable, what's the best way to power my radio?" or "What power-supply should I buy?" There are many more versions of this, but they all come down to the same underlying challenge. I spoke about sizing a battery a couple of years ago, but that's not the only consideration. If you look at the power specifications of my Yaesu FT-857d, you'll see 13.8V DC +/- 15%, Negative ground, 1 Amp on Receive and 22 Amp on Transmit. Based on this I purchased two 26 Amp Hour batteries and a 45 Amp variable power supply. My amateur license restricts me to 10 Watt and I tend to operate using 5 Watt. On receive the actual draw, specified in the documentation at 1 Amp doesn't go above 0.5 Amp in typical use. Transmit, specified at 22 Amp doesn't go above 3.6 Amp at 5 Watts and at 10 Watts it's still only 4.5 Amp, so my 45 Amp power supply is slightly overkill, by a factor of 10. By the way, that's an FM carrier on 2m. Different modes and bands have different current draw. I should make mention of the duty-cycle, that is the difference in time spent transmitting and receiving. A 100% duty-cycle means that you're transmitting all the time, 50% means half the time and 25% means that for every minute of transmission, you'll spend three minutes listening. There is more to the duty cycle, in brief, AM, FM and RTTY are 100% duty cycle modes, CW is a 40% mode and SSB has a duty cycle of 20%. So if you're listening half the time on SSB, your duty-cycle is only 10%. At this point you should at least understand that what the manufacturer says on the box and what your radio actually does is entirely dependent on your use case. I have no doubt that there is a way I can operate my radio so it draws 22 Amp. I'm not quite sure how, but I'm sure it's possible. Sizing aside, there are other things you need to consider. If you're in a car, do you wire the contraption directly to your car battery, or to a secondary battery? Should it be connected directly, or via the accessory switch? Should you get a DC to DC power supply, or some other technology? Also, not all cars are 12V, not all cars have their body as earth and the thicker the wire between the battery and the radio, the better. My decision, given that I live in a country where distances are non-trivial, and in a state bigger than Texas, in fact Western Australia is bigger than Alaska, Texas and Minnesota combined, I decided that it would be prudent to make the power supply for my radio completely separate from my car. I have a toolbox in the boot, that's the trunk if your regulator is the FCC, which contains two 26 Amp Hour batteries. I take it out to charge and put it back when I need it. Other solutions include second batteries with disconnect on low charge circuits, manual and automatic ones, direct connect to the main battery and variations on that theme. In shacks I've seen batteries which are constantly charged connected to a radio and dedicated power supplies bordering on being a local sub-station to ensure that enough of the good stuff makes it into the radio and out to the antenna. For portable operation I've seen Lithium in several different flavours, car start boost batteries, mobile phone USB batteries, remote control car batteries, and the like. If you have more than one, bring some red Velcro and use it to mark the flat battery. One of the things you'll really only be able to learn after doing it is finding out what the noise level is that a power supply generates. A battery generally doesn't make noise, but the charger or up-converter might. Inverters are often a great source of HF noise, the cheaper the more noise, so test before you buy. Also, none of what I've said so far considers emergency preparedness, which is a whole other topic for another day. As in any technical situation, in theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice they're not. Be prepared to do some real world tests, see what your friends are doing and see what you can take-away from that. My purchase of a laboratory variable 45 Amp power supply was excessive, but it's likely to outlast me. The two 26 Amp Hour sealed lead acid batteries are very heavy, but I avoid carrying them as much as I can and so far, seven years later, they still last most of the weekend during a contest. There's not a one-stop solution for power, just like there isn't one for picking a radio. How do you power your radio? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a solitude about amateur radio. Sitting in your shack, listening to the bands, trying to locate an elusive station and if you're doing a contest then even that can be something that you do alone. Don't get me wrong, I like my own company as much as the next introvert, but there is much joy to be found in finding a companion. Over the years I've participated in group activities, camping, field-days, contests, activations, antenna building, ham-fests and the like. These activities have been excellent and I highly recommend that you attempt to find a local community where you can connect with other amateurs to find common ground and explore this hobby together. Last week I did a contest with a friend. Each on our own, but doing the same contest at the same time. The contest itself was what can only be described as a fizzer. For my 8 hours or so of operating I managed a grand total of one contact and that wasn't even with my friend. What made the experience one to remember is that I wasn't alone in the activity. I wasn't the only one having the experience. I was able to share my single contact and know that my friend didn't fare much better, that they had been in the same boat and came out just as wet. It's not the first time I've done a contest with a single friend. This time we did it as two stations, each under our own callsign, but previously I've participated in contests where it was just two of us that were working the same callsign, both trying our best to contribute as much as we could. The thrill of doing this is like nothing else I've experienced and I would highly recommend that you try it. My tips for success are that you agree on a common understanding of why you're there. If one of you is wanting to lark about and the other is serious the experience will end in tears. One of the things I've done in the past is to agree on operator rotation. For one contest we set a hard limit of two hours per operator and between us we covered most of the 48 hours of the contest and we managed enough sleep to stay sane. Operating two radios doesn't in my experience work very well if you're both working in the same shack. That's not to say that there is hardware that can fix that, but so-far it's been elusive at best and at least frustrating. My quest for coax-stub filter bliss continues. Motivation is a big deal. Encouraging the other person, making them a coffee at 2am in the morning, listening in and laughing helps and makes the experience one of joy. Learning and observation is a useful spin-off from this. I've done this with people with more, sometimes decades more, experience than I and with those who have less experience. Giving feedback, write it down, don't interrupt the contest unless it's a rule breaker, and talking about it after the fact will make both of you better operators and that's not a bad outcome by any measurement. Back-seat driving isn't OK. If the other person is operating a pile-up, let them operate it, their ears are not yours and your interjection of a callsign you heard is likely to end up in frustration for both. That's not to say that you can't do this together, just talk about it before you start "helping". One of the most rewarding aspects of this whole process is that you get to see another person doing what you're doing and the differences in style between the two of you is often a learning experience for both, not to mention a shared history that will continue well after the contest is finished and forgotten. Over the years I've now managed around half-a-dozen contests with a single other person, sometimes in their shack, in a club shack, on a camp-out, or in a car mobile and I have to say that it's the most fun I've had along the way. For all I know that kind of fun can be had in a contest station that has an operator for every band with equipment coming out of every corner, but I haven't experienced that yet, so I can't comment. Find yourself a contesting buddy to share the highs and lows and before you know it you'll be having more fun than you've had before. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio We as radio amateurs log things. We log our contacts, we log our progress towards an award, we log how many different countries we've contacted, which stations we heard with WSPR, how many kilometres we managed per watt, which stations were in a net, what callsigns received a QSL card, what location we're in when we made a contact. You get the point, we log things, many things and for many different reasons. Here's a log that I started last week. An asset log. You heard me, an asset log, a thing that logs what amateur radio stuff I have, when it came into my life, where it came from, what brand it is, what model, what the serial number is and if I spent money on it, how much money I spent. It shows things that I've loaned to other amateurs and it shows things that are on loan to me. It started with a conversation about a silent key. That's what we call radio amateurs who have died. The idea of a silent key is one that reminds us that everyone is unique, that every manual Morse code transmission has a particular feel and that this is unique to every amateur. Once that particular combination of speed, tone and pacing is no longer heard, they're said to have become a silent key. I've been an amateur for a few years now and in that time I've seen the process that happens once an amateur becomes silent play out over and over again. In my experience it's not pretty. It almost always appears to end in something akin to a feeding frenzy where the person who got in first grabs the best stuff and leaves the rest for the next person. Rinse and repeat until there's nothing of value left. It leaves me with a bad taste in many ways. For one, the family who is left behind might not know or understand that there is a monetary value associated with what's often referred to as "grandpa's gear" and they might just be in need of some extra financial support in their time of mourning. Another aspect, if there is no actual need for money, is that the person who's shack is being dismantled might have an idea on how they would like to see their hard work live on. They might want to donate it to a particular person, an organisation, a club, a school, or some other destination of their choosing. All that can only work if there is a list of stuff. Having a family member construct that list is going to be a tough ask, unless you're fortunate enough to have more than one amateur in your household. Asking another amateur to make the list creates a load of work with at best guesses of age and value. The only person really qualified to make the list about your shack is you. Last week I started the list on a spreadsheet that I'll share with my family. I'll add to it when more stuff arrives and if I feel the need, I can remove stuff that has moved on. I'm not in the position to add new amateur equipment to my shack more than a few times a year, so maintaining this list isn't going to be an onerous task and I could imagine that the list expands to include tracking which equipment went with me on a field-day, which I have to tell you is always a challenge to track. As a bonus, the list can be used in the case of loss or theft and for insurance purposes, so it's not just for when the time comes that we become a silent key. To get started, make a list of what you can see around you and keep adding stuff. If you keep accounting records, they can be used as a source of information too. We log lots of stuff and I think that adding an asset log is something that will add to any amateur shack and it could form the basis of a legacy that you might leave behind. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The topic of how radio evolves and embraces available technology is one that describes the hobby itself. From spark-gap through AM, SSB and FM our community picked up or invented solutions to make communication possible. When the internet came along it too became a tool ripe for picking and in 1997 a connection between a radio and the internet was made with the Internet Radio Linking Project or IRLP when Dave VE7LTD, a student at the University of British Columbia, joined the UBC Amateur Radio Society. Using a radio, some hardware and a computer, you could send audio between radios across the internet. Since then this field has exploded with D-STAR, Echolink, DMR, AllStar, Wires, CODEC2, System Fusion and Brandmeister. At a glance they're all the same thing, radio + internet = joy. Looking closer there are two distinct kinds of internet radio contraptions, those where the radio is digital and those where it's not. IRLP is an example of an analogue radio connecting to hardware that does the encoding into digital and transmission across the internet. At the other end the reverse process, decoding, happens and another analogue radio is used to hear the result. This encoding and decoding is done by a piece of software called a CODEC. If we continue for a moment down the analogue path, Echolink, AllStar and Wires do similar things. In 2002 Echolink made its way onto the scene, similar to IRLP, but it didn't need any specialised hardware, any computer running the Echolink software could be used as both a client and a server, that is, you could use it to listen to Echolink, or you could use it to connect a radio to another Echolink computer. AllStar, which started life in 2008 went a step further by making the linking completely separate. It uses the metaphor of a telephone exchange to connect nodes together, which is not surprising if you know that it's built on top of the open source telephone switching software Asterisk. In 2012 or so, Yaesu introduced Wires which is much like Echolink and AllStar. There are servers with rooms, not unlike chat rooms, where you connect a node to and in turn your radio. Blurring the lines between these technologies happened when you could build a computer that spoke both IRLP and Echolink at the same time. Now you can also add AllStar to that mix. Essentially these systems do similar things. They manage switching differently, handle DTMF differently, use a different audio CODEC and handle authentication in a variety of ways, but essentially they're ways of connecting normal hand-held radios, generally FM, to each other via the internet using intermediary computers called nodes. Before you start sending angry letters, I know, there's more to it, but I've got more to tell. While Dave was busy in Canada inventing IRLP back in the late 1990's, in Japan the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications funded research, administered by the Japan Amateur Radio League into the digitisation of amateur radio. In 2001 that research resulted in what we know today as D-STAR. Two years later, ICOM started developing D-STAR hardware which resulted in actual physical radios less than a year later. Today you can get D-STAR hardware from ICOM, Kenwood and FlexRadio Systems. Unlike the other technologies where the audio was converted at a central place, in D-STAR the audio is encoded in the radio and a digital signal is sent across the airwaves. That in turn means that the software that does the encoding, the CODEC, needs to be inside the radio. Since the information is digital right from the point of transmit, you can send other information, like GPS locations and messages along with the audio. In 2005 DMR started life as a group of companies, now up to around 40, agreeing on some standards for digital audio in much the same way as D-STAR. Mostly in use by commercial users, DMR has the ability to have two users simultaneously on-air using alternate channels by having separate time slots for each channel, alternating between the two of them. They agreed to use the same CODEC to ensure compatibility. Formal interoperability testing has been happening since 2010, but because DMR allows manufacturers to build in extra features many brands cannot actually work together on the same network. For many years D-STAR and DMR-MARC, the DMR Motorola Amateur Radio Club World Wide Network, were the main digital radio systems around in amateur radio. That changed in 2013 when Yaesu introduced System Fusion. It too made digital audio at the radio, but it added a wrinkle by making it possible to have both analogue and digital audio on the same repeater. Depending on how the repeater is configured, analogue and digital radios can coexist and communicate with each other. The Wires system that Yaesu rolled out was upgraded in 2016, renamed to Wires X and now also incorporates digital information to allow the linking of their System Fusion repeaters. In 2014 at the Ham Radio Exhibition in Friedr

Foundations of Amateur Radio Where are all the Amateurs is a question that I am asked regularly by new entrants into our community. The journey most new amateurs go through and the one I followed starts with becoming interested, getting a license, buying a radio, setting it up and then turning on your radio. If you're lucky you are at this point surrounded by other amateurs, hopefully in a club setting, or you have a friend nearby and you're off and running. The reality is likely that even after a successful first on-air adventure, you'll be on your own in your shack asking yourself where everyone went. I've talked in the past about picking the right day, for example, a Wednesday is likely to have less people on air than a Saturday, but that's only part of the story. One of the things that had never occurred to me until a while after I became an amateur is that listening is a really important way to find other amateurs. Let's start with some things that might not have occurred to you. Most amateurs are not in your time-zone. There is amateur radio activity almost all the time, 24/7 on whatever the appropriate band is. Not all bands sound the same. What worked yesterday might not work today. This hobby isn't exact or precise, that is, there are an infinite number of variables which each affect the experience either positively or negatively and even if you used your radio in exactly the same way with the same settings on the same band in the same location at the same time with the same antenna, the landscape around you has changed, the ionosphere is a lot like the ocean, flat and calm one day, storms and waves the next. Those things aside, each of which could be a whole story is still only part of the story of finding other amateurs. There is a tendency for new amateurs to think of frequencies as numbers, as parameters to add to your radio, pick 7.093 MHz, pick 21.250 MHz, or 28.500 MHz, they're just numbers, things that you pick with your radio, set-up your antenna to and listen. That's part of the story, but there is another part. If you think of light and you go from Infra-red through visible light through to Ultraviolet light and beyond, all you're doing is changing a number, from somewhere around 300 GHz through to 3 PHz. It's a long dial in amateur radio terms, but the difference is just a number, right? It should be obvious that the human day-to-day experience of Infra-red and Ultraviolet are completely different. The 28.5 MHz 10m band frequency is on the same spectrum as both Infra-red and Ultraviolet but you don't expect to see these frequencies or use them in the same way. The same is true for amateur radio bands. The 80m band, the 40m band, 15m and 10m are all different. They're in use by radio amateurs, but their experience is also completely different. Some are good for day-time communications, others for night-time, some work regardless of the solar-cycle, others need solar flux. Magnetic activity affects some bands more than others and that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you have a hand-held radio and you're used to listening to a local 2m repeater it's likely that you've set up the squelch on your radio to hide noise and your day-to-day experience is one where there is silence when nobody is talking. You might tune to 15m and look for the same silence, only to learn later on that noise is what you're actually looking for. The sounds that the 10m band makes is different than the 80m band, the 20m band responds differently to changing conditions to the 40m band and every different radio you use has a different feel, so what you're used to with one radio will be different on another. All this to say that the way you find other amateurs is to listen. You'll need to get a feel for this thing, a sense of opportunity. I've compared amateur radio to fly fishing on more than one occasion. Standing up to your arm-pits in a river tossing out a line, finding a bite will be different depending on the day, the temperature, how much you moved around and the appetite of the fish around you at the time. The more you do this, the more you get a sense of opportunity and the better your results. Instantaneous gratification is going to be elusive, get used to it, be patient, be curious and experiment. I'll leave you with this image. I'm currently standing in my wardrobe, surrounded by clothes, shoes, boxes and jumpers in the middle of my home with the door closed, crammed in with my microphone stand, a laptop and a tablet in an attempt to ward off the background noise that comes from a winter storm that is currently overhead unleashing the first rain of the season in spectacular style. Some days I fantasise that my budget could manage a recording studio or even a sound-proof booth. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio With computers becoming more and more ensconced within the confines of our radio shack the variety of information available is increasing regularly. The introduction of a waterfall display has dramatically simplified the process of detecting what the activity level is on a particular band. If you've never seen a waterfall display, it's often a real-time, or nearly real-time display of radio activity. Leaving aside the mechanics of how this comes about, or how much you see, generally it's presented as a picture that changes over time. In reality it's a very compact way of showing a lot of information. You can think of it as a chart, showing the horizontal axis as frequency, the vertical axis as time and the colour as signal strength. So as you look from left to right you'll look at higher and higher frequencies. For example, the left side might be 7 MHz and the right side might be 7.3 MHz. Halfway along is 7.150 MHz. Similarly, now, as in zero seconds ago is at the top of the chart and 1 minute ago is lower. Depending on how fast you've set it to update the whole screen might represent 10 seconds, 10 minutes or 10 hours of information, entirely flexible, entirely configurable, entirely arbitrary. If you think of the colour black as having no signal strength and the colour red being maximum signal strength, then the brighter the colours, the more signal there is. A morse code signal might turn up as a series of dits and dahs running down the screen, with the oldest one being at the bottom and the newest one at the top. An AM signal might show up as a thick line with a bright colour, that's a high signal strength in the middle and lighter colours or low signal strength towards the edges. Every mode has its own visual characteristic and there are even modes that allow you to read information within a waterfall display. One of the other things you'll see in a waterfall display is strange artefacts, things like a diagonal line for example. If you think of what a diagonal line represents as a radio signal, it's something that has a strong signal at a particular time and frequency. A moment later it's changed frequency and a moment later it's done it again. The steepness of the line is dependent on two things, the speed that the frequency changes and the speed that the waterfall is updating. Before waterfall displays, the way you'd experience such a signal would be something that flashes up as a low to high swoop, or a high to low swoop, depending on your listening mode and the direction of the frequency change. So what is that signal? Well, it's likely to be something called an Ionospheric Sounder. It does what you think it does. Ping the ionosphere across multiple frequencies. The station doing this is listening for a return echo to see if the ionosphere is reflective for that particular frequency at that particular moment. The information can be used to create a map of what the ionosphere is doing right now, which in turn is used to figure out what frequency to use to make a contact. I should also mention that there is a signal identification wiki which shows and plays various identified and unidentified radio signals, hours of fun for the family. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other week I participated in a contest. This particular contest was on the 80m band, around 3.5 MHz. The contest itself, while worthy of a mention, the Harry Angel Memorial Sprint, runs for 106 minutes and commemorates every year of Harry's life, at the time, the oldest radio amateur in Australia. I made two contacts. Count 'm and weep. Two. So, you could do the thing that I might have done in a previous contest, smiled, thought, "Wow, that's not very many contacts." and got on with life. You're free to do that, but I wouldn't be talking about this today if I shared your view. In fact I'm sure that in my activities as a radio amateur I've managed to learn, and in some ways unlearn some things along the way. In a previous contest I might have operated a club station, made contacts a plenty, added to the overall club score, added new countries and multipliers, had some good natured ribbing to go along with it and walked away with nothing to show for it on my own log. The truth is that for many of my on-air contest activities I made contacts for other callsigns, those of fellow amateurs, clubs, special events, you name it, I made contacts. Don't get me wrong, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, nor was it a waste of time. I learnt loads from those experiences, but my own callsign log rarely, if ever, got an outing in such activities. So, this contest was for me. For my callsign, using my radio, my antenna, my location, my patience and my skills. I did the contest because I wanted to, for me. As you know, I'm a fan of operating QRP, that is, low power, so this contest I used 5 Watts, a Yaesu FT857d, a multi-tap vertical antenna, screwed onto a mount on the back of my car, parked next to a river with water to the East of me, so I could benefit from any gain that water nearby might offer me. As an aside, I'll talk more about water and gain at some other time, because it appears that not is all as my handed-down in hush-hush terms from mentor to me, would have me believe. I don't yet know enough to point at anything, but there's more than apparently meets the eye. Watch this space. Anyway, two contacts. Not even that far from me, about 230km South and 20km North East. Both with SSB. I heard about 20 stations, some up to 3,500km away, but they were dealing with S7 noise where I had none. That's right, no noise, S0, in the middle of the city. In addition to a heart stopping moment when the lights came on in the car park where I had set-up, my biggest fear being noisy lights, which turned out to be unfounded, my other take-aways were that I really should bring spare batteries for my LED lamp, and that I called it an LCD lamp last week. Not sure what I was thinking. I logged using pen and paper, in doing so I was upholding a fine tradition of radio amateurs everywhere, pen and paper is by far the most popular method of logging and with two contacts made, that's not surprising. I'm still on the lookout for sensible logging on a phone, but so-far that's eluded me. Perhaps I should write one and sell it, become rich and famous, retire, become loved in the community, kiss babies ... who am I kidding? Seriously though. What would the ideal phone based logging app look like to you? As for the baby-kissing famous one, let me know when you meet them, I'll stay away. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've talked about leaving your shack and setting up your station in a different location. I have my car configured as a mobile shack of sorts, that is, it's got a radio, an antenna mount and wiring to manage the location of the speaker, the head-unit and the microphone. This weekend I'm planning to do a contest and it's been a while since I operated my radio from my car. I've been advocating that you should do some preparation before actually going and doing your thing, so during the week at lunch time I had a look around on the map and picked a spot that I'd like to operate the contest from this weekend. I drove to the location and pretended to set-up my station, actually, I did set it up. Tuned to the actual frequency, configured my tuner, found out that the tuning range for my antenna isn't ideal for 80m, not that this was a surprise. I'm using a so-called multi-tap antenna and the tuning range is somewhat dependent on factors such as the little metal spike that sits on top and where on my car it's mounted. In these situations I've heard other amateurs make statements that it's obvious because it's a compromise antenna. You won't actually hear me say that, since all antennas are a compromise, but then you already knew that. More surprising was the configuration of where I put the head-unit in my car. In the past I've used a modified mobile phone suction mount but sun and age have conspired into making that unsuitable, so I learned that I'd have to figure something out before my contest. Another surprise was that the microphone lead, which connects to a so-called separation cable, think Ethernet cable with RJ45 and joiners which connects back to the radio, had a little broken Ethernet doohicky (it's called the locking latch), which means that while you can push the connector in place, it doesn't stay. I also remembered that this contest was going to be in the dark, so I went looking for my LCD headlamp and it wasn't where I left it. So, now, several days later, after making my to-fix list, I actually managed to cobble together a few spare minutes and address most of my issues. The only one remaining is where to find the Allen Key for an 80m vertical antenna that I'm also bringing, just in case. The point of all this is that normally if you'd asked me if I was ready for my contest this weekend my immediate answer would have been: "Sure". I'm glad I followed the advise I have learned from the many mistakes I've made in the past by actually checking and because I actually went on-site I also managed to check out the local HF environment which means that come contest time I won't have a surprise that could have been managed by better preparation. No doubt there will be more to learn, but that's for after the contest. Perhaps next week. What do you do in preparation for an outing? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the past I've talked about the Standing Wave Ratio, the SWR, and how it describes some of the characteristics of your antenna system. I say system because it's not just the antenna, it's the connection between your radio and the antenna as well. The coax or feed line, their length and how you've connected your antenna, all feature in the performance of the entire kit and caboodle. As an aside, that's why measuring an antenna with an SWR meter at the bottom of the antenna, while you're bolting it to the top of your mast is likely to give you a different result when compared with the measurement performed at the radio. During the week I was asked about how cutting an antenna changes the SWR. The question included a quote from the ARRL Single-Band Dipoles page which states: "If you see that the SWR is getting lower as you move lower in frequency, your antenna is too long. Trim a couple of inches from each end and try again." The person asking the question, Phil, wanted to know why he was seeing a different behaviour. I've seen the same myself and until I had the benefit of an antenna analyser it also made little sense to me. The reason it makes little sense becomes clear once you realise what assumptions you're working under. When you look for antennas online, or when you buy one, often it comes with a lovely SWR graph. You'll see frequencies on the horizontal axis and SWR on the vertical axis. You'll likely see a lovely mostly horizontal line with a dip downwards at the frequency where you want to use this antenna. The assumption you will almost automatically make, I know I did, for years, was that outside the graph the line continues on its merry way in both directions. That means that you're assuming that the SWR comes down in one place and the rest of the time it's high. If wishing made it so. With the benefit of an antenna analyser you can graph the whole HF spectrum, and depending on the hardware, you might even be able to see VHF and UHF or higher. One thing you'll immediately see is that the SWR is all over the place. It's up, and down, crazy lines, across the whole spectrum. You'll find enormous highs and some very interesting lows along the way. It's one reason why I can use an antenna intended for the 10m band on the 2m band. When you're making an antenna, like a single-band dipole, you might find yourself in a position where your antenna SWR is going up and down like a yo-yo around the frequency where you're wanting to be. The higher the frequency, the more likely that your trimming ends you in a different dip or a different high, outside the one that you're actually looking for. One other comment. The ARRL quote which is talking about HF dipoles states that you should remove a couple of inches from each end. Let's take that literally, two inches from each end, that's 4 inches in total. Let's call it 10cm between friends. If you're trimming a dipole for 160m, you'll change the frequency by just over 1 kHz, but if you're doing this on 6m, then the same trimming will change the frequency by nearly 1 MHz and if you use that HF recommendation for 2m, the change is almost 6 MHz, so, trimming a couple of inches as the ARRL suggests will work for some dipoles on some frequencies, but might get you completely crazy results for other frequencies. Now you know, the SWR isn't high across everything except where you care, it's all over the place and sometimes that helps, and sometimes it doesn't. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week during F-troop something very interesting happened. If you're not familiar with F-troop, it's a weekly net for new and returning amateurs and every Saturday we welcome callers to the one hour net to discuss anything and everything amateur radio. It's been going for about seven or so years, about as long as I have been making this weekly contribution to the hobby. Normally there's a host, often it's me, but not always, handing the microphone to the next person who then in turn hands the microphone back and the host passes it on to the next caller. This is helpful for new amateurs who then only need to remember two callsigns, their own and that of the host. It's a safe place where people can ask questions and hopefully find an answer, make a mistake, say the wrong callsign, have their roger-beep turned on, be off frequency, all the typical things you do when you're learning or when you've dusted off an old radio after having been away from the hobby for a while. Last week we had a surprise visitor, a special event station, VI4GAMES, operated by Reg VK2MNM who in the midst of the Commonwealth Games was having little success on HF and decided to join in on our net. After saying hello and calling in other stations I started handing the microphone to each caller, encouraging them to make contact with VI4GAMES so they could each claim a contact, end up in the log and get a QSO card for their trouble. Sitting on the side was hard, but at the same time it was extremely rewarding. I witnessed stations calling a special event station for the first time in their life, dealing with strange callsigns, interruptions, distortions and delays, misheard phonetics, incorrect procedures, you name it, I heard it all. There were some who just made the contact and moved on, handing the microphone back to the host and others who started a whole discussion about their life, their station and their joy in making the contact. There were stations just saying their callsign without phonetics, or saying it once, or fast, stomping on the other station, all the things that happen in real life when you're trying to make a contact using HF and SSB. Just to re-iterate, this was on 2m FM, connected via IRLP, Echolink and Allstar to repeaters across the globe, with callers in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. It was eye-opening for me. In the past I've attempted to make contest examples, to make DX contact simulations and tried to get people to change frequency and check back in. As serendipity would have it, this was by far the most learning I've ever seen in the 7 years of this net and I'd encourage anyone to try this at home. Some of the direct take-away tips from this are that using phonetics on 2m FM is not stupid and sometimes it's even required. Repeating your callsign to a new station is not a waste of airtime, since you have no insight whatsoever as to the state of their receiver. You don't know if they have a poor antenna, or if they're connected via the internet, if the link is not optimal or the volume not set correctly. Waiting until the carrier drops on the repeater is a must for many repeaters and keying and talking at the same time is a recipe for being misunderstood. Key your microphone, wait a heartbeat and then start talking. Leaving gaps between overs allows other players onto the field and you should see that as an opportunity, not a burden. I'm sure there were other things that were learned on that random Saturday and who knew that you could learn that much from 2m FM, special event stations and some patience. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you read it on the Internet, it must be true, but what happens if you read it and there are 700 different answers? In my day job I search countless times a day for answers to problems. Based on my experience I can look at a list of responses to a question and tell myself what the skill-set is of the poster, "they don't know what they're talking about", "they're guessing", "they've got no clue", "they tried it", "ah, this one knows what they're talking about". As an aside, a company once advocated that we should use social media as a way to provide support to customers, but based on my experience, seeing the correct answer in a series of posts being voted down into oblivion and seeing the wrong answer being promoted is a fantastic example of why that won't work, ever. Infinite monkeys with typewriters might eventually write Shakespeare, but it will take an infinite amount of time and before they succeed there will be a whole lot of rubbish. When I started researching magnetic loop antennas several years ago I went through the same process, search for answers online. I found lots of different stories, opinions, measurements, contradictory statements and formulas. I spent some weeks reading everything I could on the subject and after a while a picture started emerging that started to explain to me how a magnetic loop antenna works. I'm no expert, my foray into this died when two ADSL modem transformers died within seconds of me hitting the PTT on my radio and I sort of lost interest. I have a magnetic loop antenna standing behind me, on loan from a friend and I use it to scan the bands. It's compact, easy to tune and one day I'll make more than a single contact on it. All this to say that I've been investigating coax stub filters. If you're not familiar with the notion, you can cut a piece of coax cable to a specific length and connect it with a t-piece to your antenna feed line. If you do that, depending on the length of the coax you cut, you get interesting effects. These effects include filtering, or notching out frequencies, passing other frequencies and all in all affecting what your radio is able to receive and transmit. If you've never set up your radio with some friends nearby for a field day, a contest or a camp-out, you might be surprised to learn that even across the space of a field or a caravan park you'll be able to hear the other station, even if they're not on the same band. You might hear their actual voice, or more likely, you'll hear all manner of overload sounds that essentially show up as noise blocking out the station you're really trying to hear and work. Of course, the reverse is also true. When you're transmitting, your friend is hearing the same horrible gunk coming out of your radio. One of the ways that you can manage this is to set up filters, either notch filters which reduce the strength of undesired transmissions or pass filters which only allow certain frequencies to get to your radio. Combining these will make your life much easier. Coax stub filters are a tried and true method to achieve this and the Internet is full of expert opinion on how to exactly do this. With infinite budget and time, you can try them all out and with your trusty network analyser you can find the combination that works just for you, but in the real world you have a limited amount of coax, money and your lottery winning didn't cover that network analyser. I started this process in earnest two or so weeks ago and frankly I'm no closer now than I was then. I'm still in the reading articles stages. I think I'd like to create two sets of band pass filters and connect each set to a radio. If I'm on 10m, I set my radio to use a 10m band pass and set the other radio to use a pass filter for their band. I figure between the two of them I have something that resembles what I'm looking for. If wishing made it so. To make matters more interesting, I have two rolls of Quad Shield RG6 coax left over from my days climbing roofs and installing satellite dishes for broadband Internet in the bush. If you're familiar with that you already know that this is 75 Ohm coax. Of course none of the documentation I've been reading even talks about using 75 Ohm coax. I like it because it's strong, low loss and I have loads of it. I've been reading everything I can get my hands on. Friends have been sending me emails with copies of copies of copies of a hand-scribbled notes written by a guy 30 years ago with the magic combination. I have several of these, all different. This morning I came across some electrical circuits that purport to do the same thing with a handful of components. One thing I do know, if the Internet has a thousand answers on how to do something, no-one really knows, or one of them does and is buried among the not-yet completed copies of the works of Shakespeare written by monkeys. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week a friend reminded me that the process of determining what's happening within a shack comes with experience. In my day job my whole skill-set can be summed up with one word: "debugging", in all its many and varied guises, fixing code, hardware, business processes, skill-sets, what ever it may be. The process is pretty much, figure out what's going wrong, find out what shouldn't be happening and attempt to join the mismatch together with anything from gaffer-tape to good old fashioned hard yakka. Back on topic, the question my friend asked was about their WSPR receiver which had stopped making spots. If you're not familiar, WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter is a way of listening at specific times on specific frequencies for a signal and when received and decoded, publishing the spotted signal on a website. Their first thought was the antenna, that's where the signal comes from, so if that's not working, the rest fails. Pretty good first guess at figuring out what might be wrong. There is an adage somewhere, not sure of the exact wording, but it goes a little like this: if you don't know where to start, start somewhere, anywhere, and go on from there. Based on that the question became: How can I simply test my antenna and should I buy an SWR meter? If you're not familiar with how WSPR actually works, it's a radio receiver connected to a computer running software that decodes the signal and reports it across the Internet to a website that logs reports from around the globe. That sentence hides a level of complexity that boggles the mind if you start digging, but I'll give you a hint, it's not needed in this case. In my own experience with WSPR, my computer would crash regularly and get slower and slower. It turns out that I'd configured it to store a copy of each signal, as an audio file, so the computer drive was chock-a-block full of audio files. End result was crashing. I've also had issues with the WSPR site being unavailable and in Australia we're currently in the middle of rolling out our brand new not so shiny National Broadband Network which in turn causes Internet outages all over the place. While the antenna was a great place to start eliminating issues, there were several other candidates that could also cause issues, none of which required much in the way of effort to eliminate. As a bonus the antenna was also used for a weekly net and a quick scan with a spectrum analyser revealed that it was working just fine. A day later I got a follow-up email, turns out that the station they were listening for, an automatic WSPR beacon nearby had changed frequencies and that meant that it wasn't being received. One plus One equals Three. So, the lesson in all this is that two minds are better than one and that you can both be wrong at the same time. One thing I really love about amateur radio is that the problem domain is huge. You can think of amateur radio as two stations talking to each other, or you can imagine a place where there is so much variability that exploration in and of itself is the activity. Now that I've moved, I should fire up my WSPR receiver and see what gives. Which reminds me, what WSPR spots have you seen and if you're allowed to transmit WSPR with your license, how far have you been heard? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 6 - Joy of discovery - read about microphone technique, the dead band, propagation maps, melting coax, amateur radio satellites, strange antennas, self-training, SOTA adventures and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever considered the infrastructure that exists to make it possible to tune to 7.090 MHz, call CQ and make contact with anyone on the planet? In a world where we as radio amateurs share spectrum with radio and television broadcasters, mobile phones, wireless networks, satellites, GPS, drones, wireless headphones, radar, boating, aviation, citizen band, garage door openers, fitness trackers and any other wireless gadget imaginable, not to mention radio astronomy, microwave ovens, meteorological aids, inter and intra car communication, autonomous cars, trains and more. The world clamours for spectrum and in among those allocations we find the amateur bands. There are 24 million odd people in Australia, a few normal people, but mostly odd and about 14000 radio amateur license holders, that's about 0.06% of the population. It's extraordinary that in the last 100 years of radio spectrum allocation we have access to the bands we have. It's easy to forget that in the rarefied air of amateur radio where we have access to an astonishing amount of spectrum how unique we really are. Not only do we have a situation where we have access to bands, this is mostly global access. There are exceptions and while bands don't exactly line up, for example 7.090 MHz in Australia and the UK is an SSB calling frequency, but in the United States this is a CW, RTTY and data frequency, still amateur radio, but not the same mode. How this allocation exists is a combination of being the first mover, that is, radio amateurs came along and used it before anyone else had any use for the spectrum and the existence of the International Amateur Radio Union, the IARU. The IARU is a topic in and of itself, but in essence it's an organisation that exists and has done since 1925 due to radio amateurs combining their efforts. The IARU consists of over 160 member countries which are represented by their peak body, in Australia the WIA, the UK has the RSGB and the US has the ARRL. So, if you're a member of one of those organisations, you in turn are represented at the IARU where volunteers represent you and me on the world stage. The IARU has organised the world into three regions that correspond with the International Telecommunications Union, Region 1 is Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Russia, Region 2 is the Americas, Region 3 is the rest, Asia and the Pacific, that includes India and China. At some level discussion about the IARU, the role it plays and the processes it has and services it offers is a dry and boring administrative slog. It's not sexy, it's not thrilling, but every once in a while I think it would be a great idea to consider what the world might look like without the IARU and what our hobby might look like had this organisation not existed. There are some public activities that the IARU engages in, the Beacon Project, the HF World Championships and the Worked All Continents award. There's the Monitoring System and other activities such as the Amateur Radio Direction Finding or ARDF championships. The public relations face aside, much of the activity of the IARU is invisible, going to meetings, making proposals, keeping abreast of new technology and threats to radio spectrum, participating in working and study groups and the administration of all this volunteer effort. Next time you call CQ and a station on the other side of the planet answers, consider some of the invisible forces at work that make it possible. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I spent some time discussing the losses associated with connectors between your radio and your antenna. The traditional wisdom, and I use the word "wisdom" ironically, says that each connector introduces loss into the feed line. There is an understanding that the more connectors you have the worse it is and the more loss you have. Jim W6LG did the test, connected up 30 odd connectors and measured. His measurements were done on 14 MHz and on 50 MHz, using 50 microvolts and 1 kilowatt. No discernible difference. Of course after I mentioned this out loud the questions started. Why didn't he test this at a usable frequency, something like 145 MHz, or in the GHz band? Then there were those who said that this wasn't a real test and that it should be tested with coax in between the connectors. I discussed this all at some length and one idea we had was that perhaps the intersection between the coax and the connector was the problem, that each transition between coax and connector and back was introducing the loss. I wondered if there was a way to test this. Turns out that somebody already did. Back in July 2015 Jim K9YC decided that this needed to be tested. That's right, another Jim. He set up a test with a dozen 100 foot lengths of low loss coax, that's just over 365m of coax. This included two dozen PL259 connectors and 11 barrel connectors. He tested using a calibrated HP generator/voltmeter rig. The total loss was and I quote: "one dB or so less than the loss specified for the cable by the manufacturer". So, the run with connectors was actually better than a single run of coax. In case you're wondering, he tested this up to 500 MHz. Jim K9YC points out that there is a grain of truth in the loss when using junk connectors which can introduce excessive loss and can overheat because the centre conductor is too small. I should mention that this might now debunk the connectors and loss issue, at least up to 500 MHz, but there is something to be said about reducing the number of failure points along the way. Having 35 connections instead of two is an added risk of water ingress, loose connections, short circuits in the connector and potential for other unexpected things like an intermittent connection. In the broader scheme of things, on a field day, or a temporary antenna set up, there's clearly nothing wrong with using some connectors to join together some coax. It also means that my investment into coax terminated SO239 connectors was based on poor information, though it does mean that I don't need to carry nearly as many barrel connectors around. Perhaps it's time to, as Jim puts it, put this "old wives' tale" to bed. In the same document Jim discusses many other questions in relation to coax and stub filters in your HF station. I came across the document while I was looking for information about coax stub filters, since I just participated in another contest where two stations in the same location were interfering with each other and I want to be prepared for next time. There's a lot to discuss in relation to coax stub filters, but in essence you create a quarter wave and half wave lengths of coax that are resonant at a range of different frequencies and the combination of these will either pass or block the band you care about. Given that I have a roll of Quad Shield RG6 lying around, I thought I'd try my hand at making a set of these for my next outing. No doubt I'll share my adventures with you as I explore and dig through the pile of information. Coax and connectors, stubs and filters, it's all in a days experimentation in this amazing hobby we call amateur radio. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 5 - Getting on air - read about the perfect SWR, how to become a better operator, what batteries to use, the difference between a propagation forecast and reality, the phonetic alphabet, antenna compromises, Q-codes and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A question that comes up regularly is one about loss, specifically loss in the coax and connectors between your radio and your antenna. The general wisdom is that better coax gives you better results and more connectors is bad. Anything with double joiners, or such like is really bad. So, essentially we've been taught that we should have the shortest coax possible with as few connectors as possible. Pretty fair and reasonable, right? During the week I was introduced to a video made by Jim W6LG. Jim has a YouTube channel going back a couple of years with about a 100 videos. One video is loosely called Jim measures the loss in coax connectors and 100 foot of RG8X. In case you're wondering, 100 foot is 30m and 48cm of coax. I know this because the United States of America despite appearances to the contrary is actually metric, they defined the inch as being 2.54cm back in February of 1964. Other than driving on the wrong side of the road, they're not too strange and they talk on the air, a lot, so there's that. Back to Jim. He rummaged through his bits box, the one you have, the one that every amateur has, and if you don't then you clearly need to spend some time being with an Elmer and learning the ropes. Jim pulled out 30 odd connectors, SO239 and PL259 by the looks of things and daisy chained them all together. Jim has been around the block a few times and he has connectors going back to World War 2, so he really did find the bottom of his box to make his video. Anyway, he rigged up a testing tool to compare a single connector to 30 connectors. Measuring the difference, showing pretty graphs, lines and scales, the whole bit. He even compared 20m to 6m and tested both extensively and even re-did the tests with a kilowatt. Then as icing on the cake, you know the one, with a cherry on top, whipped cream on the side, he did the same test with the 30 odd meters of RG8X coax. I could leave you hanging here and let you go and find Jim's video, but that wouldn't be fair if you're currently in the middle of your commute to work like several people I know, so I'll share the outcome, but if you get the chance, the 5 minutes of your life that you'll spend with Jim are worth every second. So, what was the outcome of Jim's test you ask? Surprisingly, there was no discernible difference between one connector and 30 connectors in-line, not at 14 MHz, not at 50 MHz, not at 50 microvolts and not at 1 kilowatt, about 223 and a half million microvolts. Using RG8X coax, which sits about halfway between RG58 and RG213 in terms off loss, there was however 22% loss at 14 MHz and 40% at 50 MHz. Does make me wonder if it's the coax manufacturers who have been telling us to buy more coax rather than join two bits of coax together with a connector. Might have to do that test myself. Better go and start digging through my bits box. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The ultimate radio shack is a nirvana that most amateurs I've met strive for all their life. One of the many views I've heard on the topic keeps speaking to me, one of minimalism, less is more, what is the absolute minimum that you can use and still call yourself an amateur? As you know, I've recently moved and my shack was packed up into some boxes and is now slowly being unearthed. At the moment there are two antennas, a radio and a power supply. Keen observers will note that this is the same as it was last week. I've left well enough alone because of two reasons, one being that I'm trying to catch up on lost work during the move and the time where my internet connection was less than optimal, the other reason being that I've been attempting to work out what I actually want from my shack. Unlike my previous QTH, my current location affords me more flexibility, much more, as in four to six times more space to call my own. That's not to say that I was previously living in a shoebox and now I'm in a mansion, just that the distribution of space this time around is working out very well. So, I could go crazy, install computers, screens, multiple radios, a work bench, a soldering station, a weather monitoring station, a contest computer and the likes, or I could spend some time enjoying the breathing space around me and contemplate what I should do with this new found freedom. Initially I pictured setting up a dedicated DX cluster screen, a propagation screen, write some scripts to show the current maps using something like a raspberry pi, set up a dedicated space for doing contests and figure out how to mount several HF antennas, but the more I think about this, the more I wonder if this is what I really want. I've said many times that I adore contesting, it's a pull, a challenge, a bridge I have to cross, a mountain to climb, whatever the metaphor you see, but is that all there is about amateur radio that I enjoy? I know that I'm working on several bits of software, another DX project, some research and other activities, all related to amateur radio, but not specifically contesting. The thing I'd like to attempt to avoid, perhaps foolishly, given my less than latent hoarding tendencies, is the clutter that I see in other shacks. They're perfectly homely places, comfortable, full of interesting things, but I'm wondering what a minimalist shack might be instead, think of it as a "tiny houses" equivalent of getting rid of clutter in my life. What minimalist successes and failures can you share that helped you along the way? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 4 - Just get started - follow my journey through the amateur radio community, how to use QSL cards, mobile antennas on HF, licensing requirements, policing the airwaves, the super check partial list, packing up coax, lightning protection and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is some truth in simplicity. I've mentioned in the past that "suck it and see" is a perfectly valid solution to figuring out if something is going to work or not. I've moved into my new home, my new QTH. The roof is colour bond, that's basically a corrugated iron roof, painted in some random colour. I think it's grey, but don't quote me on that, could be green. Inside is a mezzanine floor, essentially carving out a space within the roof area. It's going to be my office and radio shack, so after setting up technology, I had a spare 15 minutes and came across a box that had my radio bits inside it. After setting up power I went and combed through some more crates to locate a magnetic mount and the vertical I use on 2m and 70cm in my car. The roof beam is held up by a steel post which forms part of the railing that surrounds the mezzanine floor. All conventional wisdom tells me that this is a poor place for an antenna. So, undeterred with little else in the way of simple options, I stuck my magnetic mount to the steel post with my vertical attached. Of course this doesn't mean that I have my vertical actually mounted vertically, in fact it's not, it's horizontal. So, there's one of two steel posts that holds up the steel roof, a magnetic mount stuck to the side of the post with a vertical, running horizontally. It keyed up the local repeater the first time. Made some contacts, spoke to three local amateurs to confirm that they could in fact hear me, swapped sides on the post, from parallel to the roof line to 90 degrees off the side with some improvement. Now as I said, on paper this shouldn't work. The roof beam runs north-south, the repeater is off to the east of the pitched roof, so the signal isn't making its way off the ends, it's going through the roof, or I've managed to use the roof post as an antenna, or the roof, or both, or the signal is bouncing down, over a metal fence, who knows. The point is, it works when anyone you'd have asked about this would have rightly told you that it won't. When I asked recently what the ideal shack should look like, one person who travelled a lot pointed out that just enough shack is a good place to start. Right now, I'm a power supply, radio and a horizontally mounted vertical into the minimal shack. I was asked if I'd tested HF yet. Seriously, the radio is 15 minutes out of the box. But in a word, yes. I put on a 10m vertical, also mounted horizontally, same magnetic mount and I can hear the local beacon on 10m, 12m and 15m, a vast improvement on my previous HF experiences at home. Overall the noise on the bands seems less than it was in my old house - this could be because of shielding of the roof, or it could just be less actual noise, or because my antenna is mounted horizontally. Previously I had S9 noise, now it peaks at S5, but on average it's around S2-3. This is not a proper test by any stretch of my imagination and while initial indicators are better, this is by no means a definitive test of the HF band. For my next trick I'll be taking a closer look at the railing that surrounds my office, It's made from stainless steel stranded wire, the stuff you find on a boat, with seven strands to choose from, in three separate orientations, so plenty of room for experimentation and more if I dare to use the strands on the staircase, seriously, I won't be. One thing I will do before I start keying up for the next HF contact is do some electro magnetic radiation research to learn if I'm in the danger zone, or if my family might be exposed to unsafe levels of RF radiation. Normally this isn't an issue with 5 watts when the antenna is on a roof, but now I have it indoors I'll spend some time making sure. I still have a magnetic loop on loan from a friend, packed away in a box that I'll unearth in the next couple of days to see what it has to say about the new RF environment. As I said this is just the beginning and I've not yet been calling CQ or checking out the local HF nets. What crazy set-ups do you admit to, that actually worked, even though they shouldn't have? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio From time-to-time people move and their shack tends to move with them. For me that move is happening right now, I'm moving all of 900m up the road, a long story in itself, but perhaps best told over a camp fire far from civilisation. As I started the process of working out what needed to be done I realised that I made a few rookie errors. The first one, one that I've made before, but at the time my excuse was that I knew nothing about amateur radio - some say I still don't - this time I was busy focussing on above ground power, pole-top transformers and high-speed internet. I forgot to check mobile phone coverage, forgot to bring a radio and forgot to listen on HF. I will no doubt find out what the state of these things is when I actually move, in a few days from now, but my rationalisation was essentially, "I'm not able to operate from home as it is, so it won't get any worse and if I'm lucky, it might get better." Frankly I didn't have the heart to tell my long-suffering partner that there was yet another condition, you know among the "must have actual proper internet, not the promise of one next year", "must have space for my office" and "a place that can be locked up in the garage". I skipped the "must be amateur radio friendly" tick box for familial peace, and as I said, it cannot get worse and it might get better. Looking around my office now, it occurs to me that I'm going to have to remove the coax that runs through the window, which involves either cutting the coax, or de-soldering the connector. I suspect that it will become the most expedient of the two, given that de-soldering involves having to find my soldering iron among the half-packed-up house, cutting looks like it. I'll tell myself that it's good because I'll find out if my coax is waterlogged, but between you and me, it's because I'm impatient to get moving. The remaining part of this is the thing that's on the other end of the coax, the metal shiny thing on the roof, known to most of the amateur community as a 10m vertical, a metal rod, resonant on the 10m band, about 2m long, clamped to the gable of my pergola, will have to come down. Of course at that point I'll be off the air. No counting how long that will last, but I'm hopeful that a quick-and-dirty magnetic mount will get me up and running shortly after the move. Of course in an ideal world I'd already have measured out the future radio-shack, have a room away from the house, insulated, away from the fence-line, lots of backyard with a choice selection of high trees, no noisy neighbours, council regulations that encourage radio amateurs and a coffee machine, a bed and while I'm at it, air conditioning. Who am I kidding? I'll likely be able to put my radio somewhere in a corner on my desk, much like it is right now and if I'm lucky, I'll be able to be on-air without disturbing the family. This all in stark contrast with a friend of mine who asked the community a simple question. Where would you put your radio shack if you needed fast internet and nearby medical services, anywhere in the state. The answers were many and varied, from ludicrous to amazing, from off the cuff to well researched, just waiting for the win on the weekend lottery to be able to pay for it. Our shack is an integral part of our hobby and while I see some amateurs go out of their way to find and position their ideal shack, I see many more just making do with what they have. No doubt there is a balance to be found. I'm curious to hear what criteria do you have for your shack? What things are essential and what would be nice to have. If money wasn't a problem, what would your ideal shack look like and where would it be? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 3 - Share the fun - follow the third year of my journey, how to make contacts on HF, how to go on-air QRP, propagation planning, how to deal with trolls, online resources and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I was asked: "What do you know now that you would have liked to have known when you started in amateur radio?" The hobby of amateur radio is one filled with generosity. Extreme forms of it. People go out of their way to help, to explain, to loan equipment, to help out, to repair stuff and to participate. In the past I've spoken about the negative aspects of this hobby as well. Belligerence, the warlike aggressively hostile nature of individuals and groups in amateur radio is like nothing I've ever encountered elsewhere, and it needs to be acknowledged. In many ways amateur radio is about extremes, generosity against belligerence, very polarising, confusing and challenging. That said, amateur radio is a hobby like no other. It sits in a field of exploration, of discovery, of invention, challenge and experimentation. Amateur radio navigates between scientific and empirical learning. It's regulated to encourage research and at the same time encourages new entrants into the field with a weekend course. The range between learner and professional embodies the amateur radio community. One of the things that caught me by surprise about amateur radio is that nothing is set in stone. You would think with a field based around physics that would not be the case, but given the vast range of variables at play, often "suck it and see" is a perfectly valid way of finding out if something works. I'd hazard a guess that the most frustrating part of asking a question as a new amateur is the answer: "Try it and find out." In 1920 H.L. Mencken said: "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong". With that in mind be sceptical if an amateur gives you the definitive answer on how to do something. Often the number of variables is infinite and your situation is subtly different from theirs. In that context, the answer "Try it and find out." is perfectly valid, frustrating as it is. I started in this hobby just over seven years ago and since then I've continued to collect what I think of as puzzle pieces, bits of information that I carry around. For example, a dit is the letter e because it's the most common letter in the English language. Voltage equals current times resistance. You need a carrier to measure the standing wave ratio. Remember to bring the head unit connecting cable when you go into the field. There are thousands of bits of information like that floating in my head. When two collide, I gain some knowledge. The most recent example of that was my explanation on how you could use the offset within a side-band signal to determine if a radio was on the correct frequency. It took a while for me to understand it enough to explain it and when I could, I did. For example, right now I'm working through the various types of decibel. You might have thought of a decibel as a particular unit, but actually there is more than one. The deeper you dig, the more crazy it gets. For example, the definition of a decibel in relation to sound appears to exist within an ISO standard, but you can't get that standard unless you buy it. Seriously, a physical standard that you have to buy in order to know what it is. Another example is the definition of the Ampere, which involves infinite length wire and the force between them. The mind goes cross-eyed thinking about how to calibrate an ammeter. So, to answer the question: "What do you know now that you would have liked to have known when you started in amateur radio?" It's complicated. It's challenging and it's like nothing else. Find your own way, talk to people, ask questions and be prepared to be amazed and annoyed at the same time. One final comment, amateur radio has its share of "Mostly Harmless" crocodiles, all mouth and no ears, but the overall apt description that comes to mind to describe this fascinating community is "generous and welcoming". I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The act of telling someone about something is promoting it, not in a marketing sense, just an awareness sense. The act of not telling someone is keeping a secret. Radio amateurs, and I have no doubt, people who are not, like to plan things. They set-up contests, on-air activities, organise swap-meets, build websites, write articles, invent things, build stuff, and all manner of other amazing activities. Some amateurs talk about what they've been up to, but most just sit quietly, hoping that their brilliance will be discovered by someone. Of course that rarely happens. Let's imagine a contest. It's an activity that you'd ideally want other amateurs to participate in, talking to yourself, on your own is like being a broadcaster and I can tell you, that's a tough gig. A contest is about making contacts between different participating people. So, your contest, it's going to have rules, a planned outcome, say more QRP activity on 40m, and it's going to run at a particular time. I've lost count of the times where that's the sum-total of effort put into organising a contest. Of course the contest flops, since no-one knew about it, and often that's the end of it. So, what can you do to actually get a head start in making this contest work? For starters, you should figure out who the audience for this contest is. If you set it up on 160m and aim for beginners you'll have a problem, since they're not allowed on that band. So, the audience is based on the rules of the contest and of course one influences the other. Once you've got a defined audience, and no, all the amateurs on the planet is not a valid audience, since by that metric you could also say all the taxi-drivers in New York city, and while that is a defined group, it's unlikely that you'll find much in the way of participation in your amateur radio contest. That's not to say that there isn't a New York cabbie who isn't also an amateur - hi - but their amateur status is not the same as their taxi-driver status, so pick an actual defined audience. The more defined, the better. Let's say for a moment that your audience is amateurs who've been in the hobby less than a year who live within 1000 km of you. Now your task is to figure out how you're going to talk to them, what you're going to say and how you're going to encourage them to be part of this wonderful contest. You could target the local amateur schools, and ask them to send out an email on your behalf to promote your contest, or you could approach the local radio clubs and ask them to promote your thing to their new members. You could seek out local radio nets that cater for new amateurs, you could write articles for the local radio magazine, or you could post comments on your favourite social media outlet. None of these things are particularly difficult, onerous or complex, but not doing them means that your contest is doomed before it starts. So, now you have an audience and some outlets for communication. What do you say? I've seen contest promotions that list the frequencies and link to the rules. That's it. Not very inspiring. I've seen promotions that state that they're aimed at a particular audience, but the rules indicate that you'll need to have a particular license in order to participate because the bands or modes exclude the audience. All these messages achieve is the opposite of promotion. People know to avoid this contest, rather than feel inspiration to participate. So what should your message be? First of all, it should be written one-on-one. You're listening to me right now. The fact that there are other people also listening is not relevant to you. Every communication is like this. Everyone experiences communication as a message to themselves, to their needs, emotions, desires, motivation, just me and you, talking. Of course there are messages intended for a stage, but this is not one of them. We're not in Wembley stadium and I'm not on stage encouraging everyone to wave their hands in the air right now. So, write your message to a single person. The better you can imagine that person, the better the message works. The information in the message needs to be heard, so you need to find a way to relate to the person listening, it needs to resonate in some way. You need to be able to elicit a "Noooo", or a "Yes!" from the person listening. There's a contest that encourages you to set up a Jolly Roger and speak like a pirate on air, simply to find something that makes it stand out and be memorable. Your message needs to do that, stand-out and be memorable. The first place to look is inside yourself. What would make you want to do this contest, what would motivate you, how would you benefit from this contest, what would you gain? So, find an audience, figure out how to talk to them, determine what you want to say and then do it. Of course, this doesn't just apply to a contest, it applies to courses, to radio clubs, to swap-meets, to technical talks, anything you

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 2 - Find the spark - follow the second year of my journey through the hobby of amateur radio, what's the point of Morse code, making contacts during lunch, Magnetic Loop Antennas, keeping your shack tidy, the identity of your callsign and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've ever been on the hunt for an antenna, and let's face it, in amateur radio that's pretty likely, you'll get information about the gain of an antenna. Often someone will tell you that this one has 12 dB gain, versus that one which only has 9 dB. As an aside, I've seen a few videos where people are comparing sound levels and mention that without the fan, there is only 3 dB less noise. What they don't realise is that 3 dB means HALF the noise. The same is true with an antenna. That 9 dB antenna has half the gain of a 12 dB antenna. In the past I've talked about gain. It's always in comparison to something else. If I say "that antenna has 12 dB gain", I'm actually saying: "that antenna has 12 dB gain when compared with an isotropic source". To jog your memory, an isotropic source is a theoretical source of electromagnetic radiation. It cannot actually exist. It radiates uniformly in all directions. Now when we talk about gain, we're saying that our new funky antenna radiates better in some or other direction than an isotropic source. As a consequence of this, it also means that it radiates worse in other directions. So antenna gain is a trade-off between radiating everywhere like an isotropic source, and only radiating in one direction like a laser beam. As an aside, a laser beam could be seen as an antenna for light. It radiates much better in one direction than in any other, and given that light is also an electromagnetic radiation, we're still playing in the same area of physics. If you've ever shone a torch light onto a wall, you'll have noticed that the light isn't uniform. There are brighter and darker areas. It's the equivalent of differences in gain. Some bits of the light are amplified more than other bits. If you compare it to something like a candle, not exactly an isotropic source, but remarkably close, you'll notice that the light is uniform. A torch doesn't shine from the rear, the energy from the light that's missing from the rear comes out the front and that's gain. Radio antennas do the same thing. In order to compare antennas with each other we've devised several tools, the most common is a polar plot. It's a circle that is divided into 360 degrees, and inside the circle are concentric circles with gain numbers attached to them. Often, but not always, the outside circle has 0 dB as a value and you'll see -10 dB, -20 dB and so-on as you get closer to the middle. Weaker signal is drawn away from the outer edge, stronger towards the edge. No signal in the middle. As you walk around your torch, you could record the strength of the light. Where it's strongest you'd make a mark on the edge of the chart. Where it's weakest you'd mark towards the centre of the chart. If you were to take your torch and take a slice through the middle of your battery, through the reflector, through the globe, through the lens and out to the wall, you'd end up with what a polar chart is displaying. Of course you can slice through your torch in any direction and make a chart, but traditionally, you'd slice it horizontally and vertically, or azimuth and elevation - and if you can't remember which one is which, an elevator goes up. A torch is generally symmetric, so both charts should be the same, unless your reflector is a weird shape at which point the two charts will likely be different. Antenna charts work the same way. The polar graph is showing the signal strength as you walk around the antenna - twice - once for the horizontal slice and once for the vertical one. As I said, the outer edge of the chart is set at 0 dB. This is because you need to compare full signal to less signal. If you are comparing multiple antennas and they all have the same 0 point, you can draw them over the top of each other and see their differences. This allows you to compare wildly different antennas with vastly different amounts of gain. I must also point out that you can get more signal strength in two ways, more gain from the antenna, but also, more power into the antenna. This means that your choice of antenna is dependent on what gain you want and how much you're prepared to pay for it. I could light up an omni-directional antenna with 300 kilowatts, or I could use a very high gain antenna and use 5 Watts. It all depends on your purpose. Final comment. Beam-width of an antenna, the main direction of radiation, is often based on where the signal strength is half, so 3 dB less than the maximum gain. That location will determine the angle, remember the chart is expressed in 360 degrees, so you'll be able to see the beam-width on the same chart. Polar charts, lots of hidden meaning inside a pretty picture. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the past little while you've heard me talk about WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter and I've told you about signals I've heard across the planet. The longest distance at the time was a HF report, 18656 km from Perth to Pennsylvania, very nice indeed. I switched to monitoring 6m, 2m and 70cm about a month or so ago. My reports had been pretty minimal, from my QTH to the suburb next-door and then two suburbs away. Proof that a station is working, but hardly anything to celebrate or even mention. The other day I came across a report a little further away, Perth to Adelaide, 2142 km away. Not world record beating, or even earth shattering, but proof that 6m propagation does have its moments now and then. Then a surprise contact, Perth to The Rock, not the one in the middle, or the one with the wave, the one on the Olympic Highway between Wagga Wagga and Albury, 2899 km away with 20 Watts on 6m. My reports aren't particularly far or amazing. You might recall Wally VK6YS who made a contact on 6m between Perth and Israel. He'd been at it for a little while, longer than I've been an amateur, but not quite as long as I've been the apple in the eye of my mother. 38 years it took for Wally to make that contact. So why am I making any mention of my little achievement? Simple really, my station and Wally's station are nothing alike. He had a large beam on 6m located on a property with few noise sources and his patience paid off. My station consists of a 10m antenna, that is, it's not 10m tall, it's resonant on 10m, and happens to also manage 2m. I've not actually checked to see what 6m on this antenna looks like, perhaps a project for another day, but it sits there, clamped to a metal pergola at the peak of a corrugated iron roof and connected via 20m or so of RG58 coax, cheap RG58 coax, connected to my radio that I use to host F-troop most weeks. I have to restart my WSPR node monitoring software several times a week since the Windows XP notepad computer it's running on crashes regularly. I have to remember to open the squelch when I finish F-troop and connect the WSPR node back up and I have to make sure that there's enough empty disk-space to make sure that I can actually log stuff. This isn't a sob-sob story, woe is me, my station isn't a massive station. It's more about that you can achieve these kinds of things with small and minimal resources. One of my friends is doing really well with a USB TV dongle decoding WSPR on a Raspberry Pi, others are using thousands of dollars of gear and everything in between. The point is that you too can get started without massive expense. A simple radio, something to run WSPR, which can be a Raspberry Pi, an antenna of sorts and you're on the way to check out what propagation is like around your QTH in your neck of the woods. Amateur radio doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to be extensive, it doesn't even have to be elaborate, it can just be enough. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. In Volume 1 - Join the hobby - follow my initial journey through the community, what to buy when you start, how to participate in the community, things to practice, what the first steps look like once you have a license, playing in radio contests, encouragement and sharing. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a feeling of anticipation in the air, the year has started, there are so many different ideas bubbling through my mind that I feel like an excited puppy dog wagging its tail. I've been playing with a wonderful piece of software called GNU Radio, more on that in a moment. So, I have for a while been dissatisfied with the offerings of SDR software. There is lots of development going on, lots of new toys being invented and many different hives of activity in this area. It's not unlike the progression from reel-to-reel based radio broadcasting via VHS tape, to computers with audio files. There are lots of solutions solving specific problems, but there are also a group of solutions looking for a problem and only time will sift out which one is worth the effort. In amateur radio we deal with valves, resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors, integrated circuits, crystals, connectors, solder and many, many different physical things. I'm a computer guy, have been since I was in primary school. I grok computers, more-so than any aspect of anything else. Amateur radio was intended as an escape from this world, but initially to my dismay, but now to my delight, computers are making serious inroads into the hobby. Not just as peripherals that take care of logging, messaging, propagation forecasting and the like, but as integral parts of the radio. I looked at GNU Radio several years ago and wasn't able to understand what it did and how it worked. I didn't have enough in the way of radio skills or vocabulary to get started, but in learning about my hobby I now have a much better understanding. GNU Radio is a tool, a piece of open source software, that allows you to build circuits inside a computer that process information. Not unlike how filters, amplifiers and oscillators do this inside a physical radio. If you want to change the behaviour of a radio, you need to alter a circuit by changing components, or re-design the circuit entirely and re-build it. Hours of planning, soldering, testing and the like, just on a hunch or an idea. It's how we've been doing development for centuries. GNU Radio allows you to tweak a radio on the spot, in real-time, and see what it does. The feedback loop is immediate. You build up a sequence of blocks, an oscillator, a filter, a combiner, splitter, decoder, spectrogram, waterfall, whatever and if you need it do do something else, you either swap out one of the blocks, or change one or more parameters, better still, replace a fixed parameter with a slider so you can change it while it's running to see what happens. For example, displaying a Lissajous figure in the real world involves two signal generators, cables, an oscilloscope, power, gain settings, timing, several hundred, if not thousand dollars worth of gear. In GNU Radio it involves two signal source blocks and an oscilloscope block, joined together. All there, three blocks, two lines and it's working. Making an FM receiver in GNU Radio involves a source of radio frequency information, say a $20 RTL-TV dongle and an FM decoder block. You can display it on a waterfall with a third block, or listen to it with an audio block. To make matters even more interesting, you can build your own blocks, transmit if your radio is capable and test all of this without ever needing to go to the local electronics store or heat up a soldering iron. I have no doubt that this changes amateur radio for me and I'm fairly sure it will do the same for you. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. Six years in the making, after much prodding from fellow amateurs, the edited transcripts of this podcast are now available as a series of eBook volumes. Covering our amazing hobby with short discussions about hundreds of different topics. In Volume 6 - Joy of discovery - read about microphone technique, the dead band, propagation maps, melting coax, amateur radio satellites, strange antennas, self-training, SOTA adventures and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. Amateur radio is a thousand hobbies rolled into one. I hope you find your way. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A week or so ago I watched a movie that was simultaneously the funniest and saddest movie I'd seen in a while. "Pecking Order". It follows members of the Christchurch Poultry, Bantam and Pigeon Club in the lead up to the New Zealand National Championships, as they battle history and each other in a quest for glory and for the love of their birds. Think "Best in Show" with Chickens. While watching, all I could see was squabbling radio amateurs. We're having a similar situation in the Wireless Institute of Australia. There is evidence of gross financial mismanagement, claims and counter claims, Directors with an axe to grind, lawsuits and feathers in the mail. I understand that the Radio Society of Great Britain went through similar disruption several years ago. The ARRL is also going through upheaval right now. Rules, conduct unbecoming, expulsions and gag-orders abound. All these experiences deal with how a board conducts itself, how individual members react and how the main membership just wants to get on with things. Today I read an article in CQ Magazine, titled "We Have Met the Enemy ... and He Is Us". It leads me to wonder, what is it about being on a board that causes you to become entitled? What is it about being a radio amateur that makes you feel entitled to belittle and ignore those around you? What is it about our community that is toxic and detrimental to its survival? No doubt as I become older and perhaps wiser I'll get personal insight into these attributes when some young turk comes along and puts me firmly in my place, but for now, I'm the young turk, and you can keep your quinquagenarian jokes to yourself. I've heard it said that if an organisation is eating itself, let it die. There is something to be said for that sentiment. It causes new structures to be formed, new processes to be created, new ideas to propagate and new people to participate. The thing is, doing this also kills off history, it kills off a knowledge base, it destroys lives, it makes for loss of productivity, loss of investment and it is just plain bad for business. When I was growing up I was told of an organisation that would split its territory in half and form two new organisations once it hit 20 or so employees. Each new organisation would carry on, splitting in half as it grew. The idea was that if you had more people than that inside a company it became unwieldy. I don't know what's become of that organisation, what it's called, or even if it even still exists. I'm using it as an example of new thinking, a new way of trying to build an organisation, a new approach. What kinds of new approaches could we come up with for our representative bodies in amateur radio? For that matter, what new approaches could we imagine for ourselves and our community? There is a very powerful quote by Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, organised citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. Six years in the making, after much prodding from fellow amateurs, the edited transcripts of this podcast are now available as a series of eBook volumes. Covering our amazing hobby with short discussions about hundreds of different topics. In Volume 5 - Getting on air - read about the perfect SWR, how to become a better operator, what batteries to use, the difference between a propagation forecast and reality, the phonetic alphabet, antenna compromises, Q-codes and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. Amateur radio is a thousand hobbies rolled into one. I hope you find your way. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio What is amateur radio? What's not part of the hobby and what is? The more you dig into this, the deeper the rabbit hole goes. I'll start with an analogy to set the scene. In aviation, Sir George Cayley was the first person to investigate heavier-than-air flying vehicles. He invented the aeroplane in 1799. The first full-sized glider, built in 1849 carried the first person in history to fly, the ten-year-old son of one of his servants. Since then the Wright brothers made their flight at Kitty Hawk. We saw the invention of commercial aviation, the turbo prop, the jet engine, the space-shuttle, helicopters, drones, rockets, hot-air balloons, the Hindenburg, the Goodyear blimps, hang-gliders, gyro-copters and many, many other contraptions. Each of those are considered aviation and the person controlling the device is considered a pilot. In amateur radio we talk on the radio. We also create repeaters and talk on them. We link them together using what ever technology is available. We make it possible to connect to such networks using software such as Echolink, AllStar Link, IRLP and other internet based systems. We create digital networks with DMR, use WSPR to exchange information, make contacts using CODEC2, have contests using CW and Morse code. We build software defined radios where we use computers to decode and encode radio signals, test back scatter using all manner of signal processing, use packet radio, RTTY, Hellschreiber and bounce signals off the moon and nearby meteors or an overflying aircraft. We make auto-tuners with a Raspberry-Pi or an SWR meter with an Ardiuno. We build valve based amplifiers and program mp3 voice-keyers, GPS lock radios, map propagation using the internet and have a rag chew on the local 2m repeater. We investigate 13cm propagation, do experiments with amateur television and we set up radio stations on top of mountains, in light houses and on remote islands. All of this is amateur radio, and frankly I've only just scratched the surface. There are heated discussions about if a linked repeater using the internet to create the link is real amateur radio or not, whether using your mobile phone as a node on the Echolink network is real amateur radio or not, if using a computer to create contacts on a digital mode such as JT65 is real radio or not. Each of these questions highlights a misconception about our hobby. There are no boundaries in amateur radio. We're a bunch of inventors, mavericks, people who attempt the unthinkable, try the impossible and make progress. There are people who are passengers on planes, and there are people who fly them. There are people using technology and there are people who invent it. We have a unique perspective as a community. We have the ability to imagine something that doesn't yet exist. Why would you spend any energy on whether that thing is real amateur radio or not? Amateur radio is a myriad of things, some of them related to antennas and radio spectrum, some not. This hobby is what you make of it, so go forth and invent something, try something, get on air and make some noise! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. Six years in the making, after much prodding from fellow amateurs, the edited transcripts of this podcast are now available as a series of eBook volumes. Covering our amazing hobby with short discussions about hundreds of different topics. In Volume 4 - Just get started - follow my journey through the amateur radio community, how to use QSL cards, mobile antennas on HF, licensing requirements, policing the airwaves, the super check partial list, packing up coax, lightning protection and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. Amateur radio is a thousand hobbies rolled into one. I hope you find your way. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a saying in my family, which I'll translate into English for you, "No Onno, it's not slippery." This came about when I was ten or so and cycling with my grandmother. It was the middle of winter, it was cold, there was the promise of snow in the air, but nothing had actually fallen. On the little plants, twigs is probably a more accurate term, dotted alongside the cycle path you could see little signs of frost. I was cycling on my shiny new bike and my grandmother was following behind. We came up to a corner on the cycle path and from behind my grandmother called out that I should be careful going around the corner because it was slippery. Being the indestructible ten year old, I called back: "No grandma, it's not slippery." at which point I fell flat on my face. A few years ago I went on a camping trip with my local club to participate in a contest. One member had a tray-top ute and the idea that we could use that as the base of operation. We planned on putting up a 10m Yagi at the top of a pole. Before we started the process I was asked to test the antenna. I plugged it into my radio, keyed up the PTT and noted that the SWR was as expected, good to go. We then set about attaching the antenna to a telescopic mast. The mast is one of those awkward contraptions. Each segment is about 2.5m tall and standing on a ladder on the back of the ute is just enough height to get to the top of the segment, so you can push up the next and clamp it down. The segments are made of mild steel, so you need to be careful to keep the whole thing straight, guy-wires everywhere, people scattered all around holding on for dear life and needing a spanner to clamp down on the next segment because the locking pins had long vanished or ceased working. About 2 or so hours later we finally had this contraption in the air. Using the Armstrong rotator - a rope that you pull the Yagi around with - we could point the antenna and life was good. We had taped down the coax as we went, put in strain relief, got the whole thing just right. Plugged it in and whoa. What happened? The SWR was through the roof. No match on any band, all over the shop. Head scratching and animated discussion followed. After a little while one of my friends asked me if I'd tested the antenna. I confirmed that I had. They'd even seen me do it. More head scratching, more animated discussion. I was again asked if I'd really tested the antenna. I confirmed that I had. They asked me how I tested the antenna. I showed them. I plugged in my radio, keyed the mike and showed them the SWR meter. All good. What's the problem? At that point I was taught about having to actually put a signal out over SSB to test. If I'd used a mode like FM, or PSK on my radio, all would have been revealed. But no sound, means no power, means no standing wave ratio, since there's nothing to bounce. I am reminded regularly of this event whenever I meet my friends, not as snappy as "No Onno, it's not slippery", but memorable none-the-less. During the week I went to disconnect my radio. It had been sitting there for a fortnight monitoring WSPR signals on 6m, 2m and 70cm. If you recall, I set it up a couple of months ago to monitor the HF bands. I've not yet done the final analysis on that, but I figured I should see if I could monitor the VHF and UHF bands. I attempted to set my radio up with two antennas, but WSJT-X doesn't seem to like doing both HF and VHF monitoring in the same band plan. It complains with an alert that you have VHF mode turned on when you're monitoring HF and stays quiet when you're monitoring VHF, so in the end I turned off HF monitoring and started listening to 6m, 2m and 70cm. After two weeks of nothing, I turned it off, no reports, no point. A couple of amateurs contacted me and asked me if I was still monitoring, so I turned it on again. About a week later, I had to turn it all off overnight with a thunderstorm, but the next morning I turned it all on again and left it running. I got a few more emails from amateurs asking if I was hearing their signals. I even set-up a plan to do some testing this weekend, since we confirmed that I was listening to the correct frequency, but still not able to hear local 6m transmissions. As I said, during the week I went to disconnect my radio. I turned off the computer, turned off the power supply and went to disconnect the antenna. At that point I discovered that I'd been monitoring WSPR for the past fortnight or so without an antenna connected. For icing on the cake, this morning I discovered that the squelch was set for my FM use on the local repeater, so unless the WSPR signal was coming in loud and proud, even with an antenna connected, I would not have managed to hear it. All giggling aside, clearly doing something and failing, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes quietly to yourself, is the way to learn. I wonder what little adventures your life shared with you and what lessons you learned along th

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. Six years in the making, after much prodding from fellow amateurs, the edited transcripts of this podcast are now available as a series of eBook volumes. Covering our amazing hobby with short discussions about hundreds of different topics. In Volume 3 - Share the fun - follow the third year of my journey, how to make contacts on HF, how to go on-air QRP, propagation planning, how to deal with trolls, online resources and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. Amateur radio is a thousand hobbies rolled into one. I hope you find your way. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The social aspects of our hobby are a never ending feast of variety. Since the requirement for becoming an amateur is that you're interested, the assortment of people who arrive at our doorstep can be described as a motley crew. I once stood in a room with radio amateurs and if I recall correctly, between us we had a surgeon, a naval officer, a sailor, a truck driver, a hiking enthusiast, a computer professional, young and old. Some were retired, others hadn't started their careers, there were wealthy people and people on welfare. Some with university degrees, others without. I participate in a weekly lunch, called PRAWNHEADS, been going for 25 or so years. The name is an acronym for the Perth Radio And Wireless Noodle House Eating And Discussion Society. We have a lunch with people from all over the place, visitors from overseas, random interstate drop-ins, new and very experienced amateurs, all mixing it together for an hour or so. If you're ever in Perth on a Wednesday for lunch at noon, you should look it up. Most of my life I've been a computer geek. Some of the time I was a broadcaster on national radio, an ultra-light pilot and I'm sure there were other phases I've skipped over, being a sea-scout comes to mind for example. In those pursuits I found myself surrounded by different people, but the range of interests and backgrounds was never as wide as those that seem to be attracted to our hobby of amateur radio. I'm raising this because it pays to think about this every now and again. People with different backgrounds have different experiences, different expectations, they communicate differently, have different vocabularies, want and expect different things and while the pull of amateur radio brings them into the room, the interaction with other humans is what keeps them there. I spend varying amounts of time online in various discussion groups related to amateur radio and a vast range of communication styles is right there in front of you. Some people are brief, to the point of being perceived as abrupt, others never seem to get to the point and in-between them are the peacemakers who attempt to explain what is going on. It has been pointed out to me that I have a particular communication style that sometimes causes people to misunderstand my intent. For example, I regularly send single word emails with the word "Done", or "Huh?" From my perspective, this is perfectly clear. You write an email for me to do something and I write back "Done" when I'm finished or "Huh?" when your request makes no sense to me. We are a hobby of communication, supposedly. My experience is that we're pretty good with coax, soldering iron, antennas and making a camp site, but our communication skills let us down. We're geared up for talking to people like ourselves, but when we're confronted with people from different backgrounds, often the pitchforks, feathers and tar come out. People take offence, even when none was given, feuds start, people ostracise each other and friendships end. I get that not all humans get on with one another, but given the same interests, amateur radio, given that we're about communication, you'd think that we'd spend a little extra effort with this. Don't get me wrong, disagreements happen all over the place, amateur radio is no different, but looking at the eclectic bunch that we are, it does appear that we have more than our fair share of bullies, discrimination, acrimony and dissent, not to mention the self-appointed police men, the armchair lawyers and those subject matter "experts". I recently pointed out to a new member of our community that amateurs are in the words of Douglas Adams "Mostly Harmless". At this time of the year I think it's a good idea to spend a few moments to consider if something you said or did, could be learned from and improved. I'm sure I'll fail spectacularly on regular occasion, but I do know that I'm never intending to do harm and perhaps that might be a good motto for our hobby. Do No Harm. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. Six years in the making, after much prodding from fellow amateurs, the edited transcripts of this podcast are now available as a series of eBook volumes. Covering our amazing hobby with short discussions about hundreds of different topics. In Volume 2 - Find the spark - follow the second year of my journey through the hobby of amateur radio, what's the point of Morse code, making contacts during lunch, Magnetic Loop Antennas, keeping your shack tidy, the identity of your callsign and more. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. Amateur radio is a thousand hobbies rolled into one. I hope you find your way. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A little while ago I spent some time discussing how to test if your radio was on frequency. It generated lots of comment and email with various suggestions on other ways to do this test, but it also caused one listener to ask the question, what's this Upper Side Band and Lower Side Band thing you're talking about? In the past I've discussed the history of these two, but I've gone back to check and it doesn't appear that I've ever actually explained what exactly Upper Side Band and Lower Side Band might be and how they work and more to the point, why they're important. Let's start where you find these modes. In amateur radio, some bands use Upper Side Band and some use Lower. From a usage perspective it's pretty straightforward, but not obvious. Essentially everyone uses Upper Side Band all the time, except radio amateurs below 10 MHz. There is one exception in that, the 60m band - 5 MHz - uses Upper Side Band. The mechanics aside, what is the point, how does it work and why does it matter? If you've ever seen an AM broadcast via a waterfall display or on a spectrum analyser you'll have seen a symmetrical picture with a big spike in the middle. The spike in the middle is the carrier and the two sides are duplicate copies of each other. If you were to do some math, you'd discover that the spike accounts for 50% of the energy that's embedded within the AM signal and you'll realise that doubling the other halves takes care of the other 50% of the energy. If you eliminate both the spike and one half, you end up consuming 25% of the original AM signal - in terms of energy. That essentially means that you can now spend all of that available energy in your transmission and in effect get a signal that's four times stronger than the original AM signal. A better way to say that is, Single Side Band is four times as efficient as an AM signal. Now if you took the right half of the signal, you'd end up with an Upper Side Band signal, and if you took the left half of the signal, you'd end up with a Lower Side Band signal. The signals are identical, but they're reversed. From a technical perspective, the Upper Side Band signal represents your audio from left to right. Low, or base frequencies on the left and high or treble frequencies on the right. A Lower Side Band signal reverses that, which is why a voice sounds unintelligible if you get Upper Side Band and Lower Side Band mixed up. The alignment of the radio to a specific frequency works because you can map the audio frequency directly to the tuning frequency. That might not be immediately obvious, but let's imagine an Upper Side Band signal at 10 MHz. At exactly 10 MHz, the audio frequency of 0 Hz is represented, at 10.001 MHz the audio of 1 kHz is represented and at 10.002 MHz, the audio of 2 kHz is represented. If your radio is off frequency by say 50 Hz, then the sound you'll hear will be off by 50 Hz across all of those. So 10.001 MHz won't sound like 1 kHz, it will sound like 950 Hz and 2 kHz will sound like 1950 Hz. On the other side, if you flip to Lower Side Band, 1 kHz will sound like 1050 Hz and 2 kHz will sound like 2050 Hz. Upper and Lower Side Band, nifty solution, better signals, less bandwidth use and all in all a great way to play with radio. Remember, everyone uses Upper Side Band all the time, except for radio amateurs below 10 MHz but not on 5 MHz. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio is now available as an eBook. Six years in the making, after much prodding from fellow amateurs, the edited transcripts of this podcast are now available as a series of eBook volumes. Covering our amazing hobby with short discussions about hundreds of different topics. In Volume 1 - Join the hobby - follow my initial journey through the community, what to buy when you start, how to participate in the community, things to practice, what the first steps look like once you have a license, playing in radio contests, encouragement and sharing. Search for my callsign - VK6FLAB - on your local Amazon store to have a Look inside. Amateur radio is a thousand hobbies rolled into one. I hope you find your way. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio This morning I spoke with two amateurs on-air. Not that surprising, since I was hosting a weekly net called F-troop for new and returning amateurs. Both amateurs came on-air for the first time in our net, one licensed sixty years ago, the other six days ago. It didn't strike me until long after the net had finished that these two amateurs have a completely different experience in this shared community. One started in a world where megacycles were common, the other knows them as megahertz, one purchased their radio in parts, the other purchased it online, one heard Donald Duck sounds and needed to read about a new mode called Single Side Band, the other is going to be reading about digital modes and how they work, one was dealing with analogue television interference, the other is dealing with plasma screens. Both these operators share many things. They are both licensed radio amateurs, both have the opportunity to participate in contests, attain their DXCC, pull out a soldering iron, participate in social activities and become members of their local radio club. If during their first year as an amateur both of them read Amateur Radio magazine, the members' periodical published by the Wireless Institute of Australia, they'd both find the rules and the results of the Rememberence Day contest, field days, letters to the editor, instructions on how to build antennas, including detailed instructions on building a 2m Yagi, information from the QSL manager, DX activity reports, the new Australian call book and information about the local news broadcast which continues to go to air on Sunday morning at 9:30am local time. In the intervening sixty years amateur radio has changed a lot, but it's also stayed the same. A radio from 1957 will still be able to communicate with a radio from 2017. Imagine that for a moment. Electronics during those sixty years saw countless dramatic changes. For example, Fairchild Semiconducter one of the pioneers in the manufacturing of transistors and integrated circuits was founded in 1957. Imagine that, the introduction and obsolesence of transistors within those sixty years. The first integrated circuit build by Jack Kilby in 1958 was a phase shift oscillator, consisting of one transistor and a handfull of capacitors and resistors. Today an integrated circuit contains 25 million transistors per square millimeter with some chips being up to 600 square millimeter in size, that's 15 billion transistors. The mind boggles what has happened in those sixty years, but the most satisfying part of all this is that both these amateurs can come on-air, join a net and participate in the hobby today. If that's not the representation of an amazing hobby, then I don't know what is. Thank you to Sandy VK6FBHW and Brian VK6DAD. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm here to tell you that I'm in the process of writing a book, actually seven of them, and to be precise, there's more of editing than writing, since I'm putting together all of my podcast efforts over the past seven years. Nice how that works out, seven years, seven books. Most of the effort is in proof-reading my work. Do I spell radio amateur with capital letters, or not, do I use my word-processor to replace all occurrences of radio amateur without capital letters and what happens when I refer to them as radio amateurs instead? You get the drift, lots of minutia, consistency and every now and then a little edit to make a sentence make sense to a reader. As an aside, if I don't get distracted by life I'm planning to publish in the next week. The unexpected joy I'm getting from this experience is to read about my adventures and to remember some of the adventures that you have told me about, things I've been working on, events that you and I attended, contests, victories and frustration. One thing I've noticed, something that you're likely to observe once in a while by accident, is the immense variety of activities that encompass this wonderful hobby. There are build projects, activations, social outings, research activities, laughter, joy, disgruntlement, dissatisfaction and triumphs. I've said many times that this hobby of ours is 1000 hobbies in one and reading back, I suspect that 1000 is underselling the experience. Going back also shows that learning Morse code has been on the books for a long time and clearly I'm stumbling on some roadblocks there. My DXCC adventures continue to grow one contact at a time, my mobile setup is working well compared to other methods of activating my station and new adventures appear just around the corner waiting to be discovered. I'm in the middle of my next adventure. Adding crystal filters to my radio, installing a temperature compensated crystal oscillator, finding out about the drift and frequency accuracy, all these are part of a much larger project. The next step is finding a suitable antenna. I'm still on the fence between building and buying. It's a joint decision with a fellow F-call, and we're working through this adventure together to see where it might lead. Our skill-set is completely different, with different perspectives on the same thing, different tools we bring to bear on the challenge we've set ourselves and that in and of itself is a fun experience to have. We've spent some time together talking about the landscape we're stepping into and I think it's safe to say that we can both learn a lifetime of knowledge from the other person, if our life outside amateur radio doesn't intrude - hi hi. The point of this observation is that I've noticed over the years that there are amateurs who leave the hobby, never to return. Some would say: "Good riddance!", but I think that given the infinite breadth of this hobby and community, each of those people leaving makes for a poorer experience for them, and also for us. I'll be the first to admit that I have disagreements with fellow amateurs, sometimes very strong disagreements. I know that this is true among other amateurs as well. This is not particularly unusual in a technical pursuit like our hobby, I see it in my professional life in computing as well. The thing that should set us up for a better experience is that we're all about communication in this hobby, but there are times when I wonder if we just pay lip-service to that notion, rather than attempt to be tolerant, inclusive and welcoming. Perhaps it would be wise to add another thing that should be left out of the ham shack, together with talk about religion and politics, perhaps we should leave judgement at the door as well. I think it would be a good idea to learn how to do that, perhaps bite our tongues a little more, take a breath, ask the other what they're thinking, rather than rant back and forth between two individuals who can't stand the sound of the other person's voice. I note that I took a little detour there, but I think it's important to note that this hobby isn't all cookies and cream, that there is discussion, argument and dissent. I think that we are in a unique position to do something about it. As for my adventures, they always seem to just be beginning. There's always something new to discover, something new to build, to do, to experience. I've said it before and I'll say it again: "Amateur radio, what a hobby. Tell your friends." I'm Onno VK6FLAB