Starting in the wonderful hobby of Amateur or HAM Radio can be daunting and challenging but can be very rewarding. Every week I look at a different aspect of the hobby, how you might fit in and get the very best from the 1000 hobbies that Amateur Radio represents. Note that this podcast started in 2011 as "What use is an F-call?".
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Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I heard a thunderclap and as is my Pavlovian response, immediately ran to my shack to disconnect the antennas from their respective transmitter and transceiver. I added a diary entry to my phone to note that I'd disabled my WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon, which generally runs 24/7. A few hours later I remembered that my beacon was off and I returned to put it all back in working order. That's not always been the case. From time-to-time I've managed to turn off the beacon and forgotten to re-enable it, once for months. Same with my ma
Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I was shown a photograph of a chalkboard standing on the sidewalk with one of those "Thought of the Day" quotes on it. Credit aside, since I've been unable to confirm it, despite multiple reverse image searches and attempts at author attribution, the sentiment stuck with me and the more I think about it, the more it resonates and this being radio, that works on so many levels. We proudly refer to our community as "amateur radio", hold it up as a badge of honour and tell everyone we know about it. Curiously, when you look in the dictionary, you see a
Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past weeks, actually, probably months, the push to talk button on the radio I use for my weekly discussion net has been acting up. In the middle of an over it would sometimes cut-out for no particular reason. Being mindful and pushing harder didn't seem to make a blind bit of difference and no amount of fiddling with the cable helped either. Today I finally combined the act of remembering that this was a problem, with the availability of a spare moment, a passing level of personal health and no local distractions and as a bonus, you, or more accurately, my
Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I explored the nature of amateur radio emergency response. I received a few replies providing an insight into the on the ground reality and it encouraged me to dig into this a little more. I'll start with some context. Early in my amateur adventures I became aware of the Wireless Institute of Australia's efforts in encouraging people to become familiar with emergency procedures. It introduced a course titled "Introduction to Public Safety Training for Radio Amateurs", specifically to achieve a Certificate II in Public Safety. I dutifully downloaded the mat
Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've talked about one of the often lauded cornerstones of the amateur radio community, namely Emergency Response, and to be frank, I questioned then, as I do now, the reality of this, at the very least, perceived, foundational aspect of our global hobby. Before you get out the caps lock key, let me assure you that I'm aware of sporadic examples of heroic efforts made by members of our community to save lives that are held up as examples of amateur radio emergency responses. What I'm questioning is related to our collective effectiveness. We have global a
Foundations of Amateur Radio When the Sun burps, something that it does regularly, the mainstream media starts talking about aurorae and optionally the end of the civilised world, not always as clinically as that. What's not talked about, let alone explained, is the nature of the solar burp. You've likely heard the terms Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME, Solar Flare and perhaps Solar Wind, Solar and Geomagnetic Storm, and Solar Flux, but what do these terms actually mean and how do they relate? Let's start with some basic numbers. Our Sun is 150 million kilometres away from Earth. As seen from Ea
Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the more, let's call it challenging, skills to learn in amateur radio is the pace of the process. For many new amateurs I meet, face-to-face, on-air or online, the excitement to get started, to get on-air, to make a contact, to do something, anything, is contagious. It's absolutely delightful to hear the reports of victory and triumph in the face of adversity, and truth be told, it's worth celebrating, more than we often do in this community. So, let's start there, if you've made it on-air, congratulations, well-done, very nice! If you feel so inclined, perh
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a friend of mine mentioned in passing that they'd hooked their Home Assistant dashboard to an RTL-SDR dongle to listen to the various ISM bands. If that sounds like gibberish, let me elaborate. "Home Assistant" is a tool that, among other things, allows you to control devices throughout your house, think lights, vacuum cleaner, air conditioning, and power sockets. It turns out that there are various plug-ins that allow you to connect it to a tool called "rtl_433", more on that in a moment. ISM, or Industrial Scientific and Medical, is a global collect
Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the years I've had the opportunity to operate my station with other amateurs in close proximity. From a community perspective, this is loads of fun; from a radio perspective it's been frustrating to put it mildly. For example if you're operating on say 40m and your friends are playing on 20m or 15m, if you're not careful, you'll all end up hating each other at the end of the weekend due to the harmonic nature of the amateur bands. Imagine my surprise when Keith W6KME mentioned in passing that together with the other members of the Conejo Valley Amateur Radio C
Foundations of Amateur Radio It's a curious thing, this hobby of ours, in that the more you want out of it, the more challenging it becomes. For example, you might start your journey with a VHF or UHF handheld radio, sometimes referred to as a Walkie-Talkie or a Handy, and you start listening to the local repeater, or you try to make contact with a friend. Then you discover that it doesn't always work, so you learn about interference, terrain and antenna gain. You start looking for higher elevation or a better antenna and you discover that now you hear more, but you still can't talk to your fr
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was asked a question on social media. Having answered this question several times before, I admittedly .. initially .. groaned, then provided the bare bones of a response. A little while later, I recalled that I had provided a detailed response to this same question, as it turns out, five years earlier on a different social media platform, so I added another response that included the link to that answer. It all still felt very incomplete and inadequate and I couldn't leave it alone. Which leads me to the anxiety generating question and my response
Foundations of Amateur Radio When was the last time you told a story? The hobby of amateur radio represents as diverse and disparate a group of humanity as I've come across in my life. While that might mark me as living a sheltered existence, I have been around the globe and experienced some of what life celebration looks like. One thing I never tire of is hearing stories from the people I meet, each unique and worthy of my time and consideration. Over the years, in the context of broadcast radio and subsequently producing amateur radio news for over seven years, I've had the opportunity to in
Foundations of Amateur Radio The thing I think I love most about the hobby of amateur radio is the challenges it represents, not in terms of life or emotional ones, though I will admit that there's some of those .. in no small part due to the variety and complexity associated with being human and a member of the community, more in terms of figuring out how stuff works and then how much stuff there is. I was first licensed in 2010 and since then I've attempted to document the experience of being an amateur and discovering just what that might mean. This week has been interesting, if not quite a
Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've talked about a piece of software called SoapyAudio. It's part of the toolkit called SoapySDR which in turn is part of a whole ecosystem called the Pothos framework, coordinated by Pothosware, founded by Josh Blum. I'm mentioning this for two reasons, first to give credit to Josh and the many contributions he has made to the Software Defined Radio ecosystem and second, to indicate that there's several moving parts here. SoapyAudio is a module that connects an audio device, like a microphone or a speaker, more on that in a moment, to a tool called Soa
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I witnessed a fellow amateur attempting to guilt another into using LoTW with comments about how their QSO partner would appreciate confirmation via the service, even if they didn't care for it. Before I continue, if you're unfamiliar, when two amateurs make a contact, or a QSO, with each other, then there's generally a log entry at both ends to record the event. Some amateurs, myself included, save up these contacts and count how many continents, countries, states and other entities are recorded in the log. Several amateur radio organisations allow y
Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I discovered that the antenna that I had connected to my WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon was not a 40m antenna, instead, it turns out to be a 15m antenna. The how and why of that mix-up isn't particularly helpful, so instead I set out to remedy the situation. Step one was simple, go into the garage and pull out the antennas and check if I had forgotten about an 80m antenna. As it happens, I'd forgotten about a 17 megacycles antenna. At the moment I couldn't tell you if it was intended for Maritime or Amateur use, but it doesn't really matte
Foundations of Amateur Radio About a year ago I set upon a new adventure, to determine if the dummy load I own, traditionally seen as a device that doesn't emit any RF, to determine if it was in fact imbued with the ability to absorb RF, rather than share it around like an antenna might. At this point you might be shaking your head, but this wasn't embarked upon lightly. I had spent several years experimenting with lower and lower power levels and came to learn that even 10 mW can make it to the other side of the planet, 13,945 km away. In other words, extremely low power can, under the right
Foundations of Amateur Radio Several years ago, I forget exactly when, I was gifted a device called a "Wio Terminal". It's a micro-controller in a box with a screen, buttons, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a boat load of sensors, ports and more. It's intended for experimentation and truth be told, exactly the right gift for a geek like me. It even has rubber feet to stop it from sliding off the desk, well, slow it down at least! The thing is, it remained sealed in its box until this week, when I finally gathered enough unrelated information, something I often refer to as "puzzle pieces", to understand w
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I went for a walk around the block for the first time in a while. It's something I did for a time and then for several reasons, mostly to do with health, didn't. For me it's the mental equivalent of having a shower with the added benefit of not having to dry my hair, in other words, it's a place I go to with the intent of generating shower thoughts. During my walk, away from the forces pulling me in all manner of directions, none of which have anything to do with amateur radio, away from my keyboard, away from my screen, away from technology challenge
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I came across a post on mastodon.radio by Keith W6KME announcing the resumption of the Micro Field Day, spelled using the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet, Mu. This was news to me, since I didn't know they'd stopped, let alone existed at all. Being the curious type, I stopped to investigate and discovered an initiative that could, and in my not so humble opinion, should, be replicated all over the planet. Essentially an informal monthly gathering of amateurs with their portable set-up, ranging from hand-held radios through lightweight backpack gear s
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day fellow amateur Randall VK6WR raised an interesting question. Using his HP 8920A RF Communications Test Set, which you might recall from our adventures in measuring radio harmonic power in 2023, that report is on my Github repository, but I digress, Randall wondered if the signal strength he was seeing on several radios were the same and discovered that in fact they were not. It made Randall ask who set the standard and following on from that, what does this look like in the real world? In 2014, episode 149 of the series "What use is an f-call?", I pub
Foundations of Amateur Radio The thing I love most about this amazing hobby of amateur radio is the sheer size of the community and the depth of knowledge that comes with it. Case in point, the other day I mentioned the spark gap transmitter at Grimeton in Sweden. A few hours after releasing my comments into the void I received a message from Paul SA7CND who lives, wait for it, 153 km from the transmitter. He's been on-site while it was running, transmitting on 17.2 kHz. Paul pointed out that the Grimeton transmitter is not a spark gap transmitter at all. It's actually an Alexanderson alternat
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was playing around with RDS, or Radio Data System, it's a digital signal that's often embedded in a commercial broadcast FM transmission. Among other things it contains information about the station, its content, frequencies and potentially other useful information, such as traffic alerts. If you recall I've been working on 50 things to do with a Software Defined Radio and decoding RDS is one of those things. The decoding effort aside, I imagined a screen where you could see the RDS information, in real-time, as it was being transmitted by all the l
Foundations of Amateur Radio While spending some quality time discovering what I don't know about GNU Radio, I explored the notion of attempting to at least understand a little more about how an FM signal works. Depending on your background, the letters FM mean different things. In amateur radio it's a way to encode information, generally audio, using something called frequency modulation. Outside the hobby, the letters point at commercial broadcast radio. While the two are related, they're not the same thing. In amateur radio use, FM is a single channel of mono-audio, however, in commercial b
Foundations of Amateur Radio How do you make a hole? That's a pretty straightforward kind of question, and by the time this sentence is finished, there's going to be at least as many answers as people who considered it. I didn't supply any parameters to this hole, so answers could include shovels, collapsing space, fire, a drill, or any number of other interesting approaches. If I narrowed it down to, say, a hole in wood, there'd still be plenty of options. Specifying the type of wood, the diameter and other parameters would further narrow down the selection of methods. What if I asked you: "H
