Foundations of Amateur Radio

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...

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...

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...

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 an...

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, e...

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...

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 ecosys...

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 th...

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 f...

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...

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,...

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. Durin...

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...

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...

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 tra...

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 Softwa...

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...

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...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Still excited from my minor victory in discovering a missing puzzle piece associated with the project I'm working on, I spent the past week introducing my head, if not literally, at least figuratively, to the surface of my desk in a traditional head-desk troubleshooting move that you might be familiar with. I suppose it's an improvement on the "Bear with a Toothache" a...

Foundations of Amateur Radio A little while ago I discussed a lovely article by programmer, artist, and game designer "blinry" called "Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio". This week it occurred to me that I could use their article as a framework to further explore my Bald Yak project. If you're unfamiliar, the Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distribu...

Foundations of Amateur Radio How to go about documenting your setup? Possibly the single most important thing that separates science from "fiddling around" is documentation. Figuring out how to document things is often non-trivial and me telling you that "unless you wrote it down, it didn't happen" only goes so far. If documentation isn't your thing, what about "I broke something and I don't know...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Just under a year ago I started an experiment. I set-up a beacon for WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, transmitting at 200 mW into a dummy load using eight bands between 80m and 10m. I also set-up an RTL-SDR dongle, connected to an external 20m HF antenna and made it monitor 18 amateur bands between 630m and 23cm. I left this running 24/7 for most of the year,...

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a fellow amateur revealed that they qualified for membership of the QWCA, the Quarter Century Wireless Association .. twice over .. there may have been some innocent whistling involved. During the ensuing discussion it emerged that it all started with a crystal radio set built together with dad, which triggered a whole lot of memories and made me consider...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Building a shack makes a number of assumptions about your situation and to make it abundantly clear, it's not the only way to enjoy the hobby of amateur radio. Visiting clubs locally and remotely, being a member of a club, visiting other amateurs, setting up your station in a suitcase or a backpack, on a bicycle, in a car, on a bus, or in a boat are some of the many ot...

Foundations of Amateur Radio On your amateur radio journey, you'll likely discover that many transceivers run on 13.8 volt DC, give or take. For example my FT-857d requires 13.8 volt plus or minus 15 percent, with a negative ground, and a current draw of 22 ampere, more on that later. In other words, the power supply needs to be between about 11.7 and 15.9 volts, the same voltage that runs most ve...