Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio There's a quote from a television show that speaks greatly to me. "If they're shooting at you - you know you're doing something right!" I've been producing this weekly recording since May of 2011. It started life as "What use is an F-call?" and the first episode was recorded in response to an Amateur who bemoaned their transmitter power restrictions associated with the...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past six years or so I've single mindedly been producing a weekly segment about Amateur Radio. Over time this has evolved into a podcast which gets about half a million hits a year. Naturally I receive emails and I do my best to respond in a timely fashion. One of the other things I do is announce a new edition of the podcast on several different sites where l...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I was told that Amateur Radio as a hobby is dead. This isn't news. It's often repeated and the story goes like this. The hobby is full of old dying men who when they finally shuffle off this mortal coil, or as we like to say "become a silent key", will take their hobby with them. There is anecdotal evidence to back this up. An organisation that tasked itself w...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur Radio as a hobby is one of those activities that covers a wide range of pursuits. A fellow Amateur once referred to it at 1000 hobbies in one. I like that as a description, but it really doesn't cover how wide and extensive this hobby really is. You've heard me talk about radios and on-air activity, about contesting, about out door activities, about electronics...

Foundations of Amateur Radio In my travels along the highways and byways of the Internet I came across several references to MARS in relation to Amateur Radio. Being the curious soul that I am, my interest was sparked. I must warn you, today there is a lot to cover. First up before I tell you anything, let me start by pointing out that what I'm talking about has different levels of application dep...

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you have the need to switch something on and off, a likely first candidate is to get a switch from the local hardware store. The principle is pretty straightforward. You put the switch into the power supply lead and by pushing it on, the two halves of the switch make contact with each other, completing a circuit, and the thing you're switching turns on. It's a lot l...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I look at an antenna and marvel at what it implies. A simple piece of conducting material made into some particular shape and size that harnesses the radio spectrum. I find it fascinating that this can and does exist and my fascination translates into a thing of beauty. I recall being on a camping trip and being introduced by a fri...

Foundations of Amateur Radio About ten minutes ago I was blissfully unaware of the existence of James K2MIJ. It's unclear if this bliss will ever be returned because it's obvious to me that James and I share several things, a sense of humour among them. Mind you, I've not yet actually spoken to James, other than me saying "Hello" right now, but his QRZ page is a thing of wonder. Last week I was ta...

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I received a funny picture from a fellow amateur. This particular image was one titled "Multitap Antenna" and it featured a Four Wheel Drive vehicle with a bull-bar and a spring base mounted antenna. The antenna was made from pipe and at suitable intervals the pipe had a t-piece with a tap. Nothing too peculiar, right? Well, other than that the taps wer...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I was going to talk to you about Grid Dip Oscillators. Some research later I realised that I don't yet understand the topic enough to explain it to myself, let alone explain it to you. I then set my sights on a simpler thing, an SWR Meter. Pretty standard fare in a radio shack. You plug it in and off you go, nothing to it. So I then set about learning how this ac...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week I went on an adventure and came home with an experience. I've been wanting to go out and play radio for a while. Work has been spectacularly unhelpful in making time available to achieve this, not to mention the 17 million other things vying for my undivided attention. Last week the planets aligned and my outing came to pass. I'd set my sights on doing a SOTA...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I want to talk about Politics. I can hear you groan from here, so hold your horses, stow your tar and feathers and put your pitchfork back in the barn. Amateur Radio is a hobby. It's to do with electronics and physics and the ionosphere and other cool stuff. Some people call Amateur Radio a thousand hobbies in one and that's a pretty good description. Underlying...

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I celebrated my sixth birthday, no not that one, the one that reminds me when I first became licensed as a Radio Amateur. It caused me to reflect on what I've done with my license and what I've learned and where I'm heading. A recurring theme in my Amateur life is one of upgrading. Not a month goes by when someone makes a comment about my license status....

Foundations of Amateur Radio Let me start completely off-topic today with a thank you for emails and other expressions of concern regarding the demise of the bearing last week from my messy desk. I did not loose my marbles, other than the ball bearings in the disposed item and my sanity is as intact as it ever was. I was also asked for photos of the messy desk and as a concession to that I'll use...

Foundations of Amateur Radio In my time as a member of the radio community I've been in around 30 different shacks and a similar amount of camp-out style activations. I've operated at least a hundred different radio set-ups with different operating styles, logging systems and power sources. I wouldn't say that I was particularly experienced, but I've seen enough to make some observations. My first...

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are moments in your life when you say to yourself, duh, why didn't I think of this earlier? I had one of those last week. As you might recall, I have a hard time using HF communications from my home. There is lots of noise around and I've been going out mobile and portable to make contacts. As satisfying as that is, nothing beats sitting at home in your comfy cha...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Ingenuity is the name of the game in Amateur Radio, building, inventing, solving and helping are all part and parcel of this hobby. We like to lay claim to being the source of all that is good in the world, all that was invented came from Amateur Radio first, right? Seriously though, sometimes we pick up a technology along the way from other places. If you've ever pick...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week over dinner I was chatting with a friend about Amateur Radio in a discussion about things that take your fancy. I was attempting to explain what it specifically was about this hobby that keeps me coming back. I talked about invention, about exploration, about fishing and catching that elusive station, but looking back over that discussion it occurred to me th...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Being on air and getting on air are part of the journey that you undertake when becoming a Radio Amateur, but what happens before all that, what do you need to get your foot in the door as it were? If you're listening to this via a radio, you're already on the journey, but if you've downloaded this as a podcast, you're not far behind and your journey towards becoming a...

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the recurring topics in on-air discussion is that of antennas and if we were to graph the topics of conversations, antennas would be the clear winner in any line-up. As a beginning Amateur this phenomenon bamboozled me for a very long time. Why are these people talking about antennas all the time and what's there to know that you can't say in 30 seconds? From th...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever been on air and in the middle of a wonderful discussion that all of a sudden and often unexpectedly erupts into a heated argument about nothing? One of those conversations that came to mind was about what the term DX means. I'd been taught that DX means outside the country and if you're calling CQ DX, I was taught that this means that you're looking for a...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I talked about making a propagation map in your mind by listening to the various NCDXF beacons across the globe on various HF bands. You're not limited to listening to a beacon to learn what propagation is like. If I tell you that listening to a band gives you an indication on what's going on, you're likely to respond with: "Duh". But what if I suggest that in...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Technology is a moving feast. New ideas spring new inventions which in turn change our lives. Amateur Radio is at the forefront of such inventions. Radio Amateurs have been until recently the only soldering iron brigade around. We've been building things for over a hundred years and we continue as a community to think of new ideas and ways to make them happen. For exam...

Foundations of Amateur Radio The world is your oyster, but sometimes you need to find a way to test what is going on with your station and determine what is working and what isn't. Often I turn my radio on to scanning mode and I set it to scan the Northern California DX Foundation beacons. These beacons, perhaps better known as the NCDXF beacons can be heard across five different HF frequencies, o...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I made a comment about melting your coax and that this was a bad thing. Today I'm going to talk about some of how this comes about and what kinds of parameters we're dealing with. Let's start with coax itself. The operating temperature of coax is somewhere around 80 to 90 Degrees Celsius, or 176 to 194 Fahrenheit. Soldering is at 230 Celsius, or 446 Fahrenheit...