Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today's Amateur Radio is less like the valve or transistor based radio and more like a computer. So much so that most radios today have a mechanism to connect the radio to a computer. This mechanism is called a Computer Aided Tuning interface, or CAT interface. It's a mechanism that's used to allow two way control information to be shared between the radio and a comput...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about operating procedures. Before groan and tune out, stay with me for a moment, this is important for all amateurs, even you. We as amateurs have a range of bands allocated to us. These bands cover a whole chunk of spectrum that we in many cases share with other users. They might either share the same band with us, or the other way around, we...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about repeaters. These invisible services that sit on a particular frequency and do magic things to your signal. First of all, the best way to think of a repeater is to think of it as two radios. One is the receiver, the other the transmitter. The way it works is that the receiver hears your signal and sends that audio to the transmitter which s...

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is an interesting phenomenon that I've begun to notice and now that I've seen it, it's hard to un-see. Think of it as the equivalent of the little dot in the top right corner of the screen that signifies the end of the reel to a movie projectionist. Once you've seen it, you can't miss it ever again. If you haven't, sorry, you will and now you'll carry that with y...

Foundations of Amateur Radio The single largest topic of conversation in Amateur Radio is about Antennas. The discussion often starts with one amateur telling another amateur about some or other amazing antenna, followed by a heated discussion about the merits or pitfalls of that same antenna and why they would never ever consider using it and why it's a waste of money, or some other rationale. Le...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about dipoles. You know the tried and true antenna, the go-to design for getting on air, the simple first antenna you ever make, the one you learn from, you know the one. It's the mainstay of every amateur, of any field-day, of all things Amateur Radio. It's a simple thing. Using metric, rather than imperial measurements, but the point stands, y...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I want to raise the topic of batteries. Specifically, sizing the battery. You can do as I did naively, look at the manual, see that the current consumption of your radio is 22 Amp, decide that this means that you need to get a 26 Ah battery to use your radio for 1 hour. Being the portable type, I got two, 52 Ah in total. Some time has passed since I made that pur...

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a recurring topic in Amateur Radio circles, called "permissions", or "rights", or some other word indicating "entitlement". It's a conversation that has been happening since the dawn of radio experimentation and will continue until well after our Sun has burped it's final sun-spot. In Australia, there are three classes of License, in increasing level of respon...

Foundations of Amateur Radio The history of the evolution of amateur licensing is a nebulous affair, told and re-told, moulded, changed and interpreted by the story tellers along the way. There is an on-going debate about how the restructure of the licensing regime in Australia, in 2005, has affected our hobby. In 2005, after a 10 month review period, three classes of license were established, a n...

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are skills that come from thinking and there are skills that come from doing. There is place for both in Amateur Radio. There is nothing in the world that is like the experience of working a pile-up, unless the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange counts, but I've not personally been there and it doesn't look as intimate as a radio shack. Working stations...

Foundations of Amateur Radio This is episode 236 or so of my weekly contribution to this hobby. As you may have heard me say over the past few weeks, this is now available as a podcast which you can subscribe to. It's available at http://podcasts.itmaze.com.au and you can also search for my callsign, VK6FLAB on iTunes and find it there. I'm mentioning this because each podcast also contains a tran...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've discussed different aspects of contesting in relation to Amateur Radio. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, contesting is an activity where you test your station and skill against other amateurs. Unlike other contests where you're all in the same physical location, say a stadium, or an online playing field, amateur radio contesting is most commonly d...

Foundations of Amateur Radio In every new technology there is an ah-ha moment, the single one insight that defines for you personally what this technology is all about. No doubt this happened when Amateurs first used valves, when they started using transistors and so on. For me that moment happened during the week. You've heard me talk about the absurd noise floor, that is, the incredible amount o...

Foundations of Amateur Radio On a regular basis I receive emails from fellow amateurs and shortwave listeners who provide feedback and ideas about this weekly segment of Amateur Radio. It's a joy to read how they feel that my little contribution encourages them to continue in the hobby, or come back to the hobby, or to build something, or to do something, to participate, to experiment. Yesterday I...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I started doing some research on Baluns. It was prompted by a message from a fellow amateur who asked about how they work and what they do and what the difference was between a 1:1, a 1:4 and a 1:9 balun. While doing that, I thought I'd look up what the definition was of a balun. It says right here on Google - so it must be true - that it's a type of electrical t...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today we have a world where radios are more and more like appliances. We can buy them at a store, ship them to our location, open the box, plug in the radio to an antenna and start operating. I said, "like" an appliance, because a transceiver is not like a toaster in all aspects and it's those little gaps between the toaster as an appliance and a transceiver as an appl...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Yesterday during dinner I heard an interesting story. Apparently there was a farmer who had a chicken coop that he kept warm at night by using a 240 Volt light bulb hooked up to the chicken wire surrounding his chickens. The farmer's property was in the vicinity of a local AM broadcast transmitter. They only found him because the people in the shadow of the chicken coo...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Whenever I go out to play radio, which is whenever I actually want to operate, I try new things. For example I've experimented with different clocks, to keep track of what time I made a contact, I've experimented with different ways of logging, with different locations, different antennas, with different bands, times of day, methods of calling CQ, methods of making a c...

Foundations of Amateur Radio There are times when you'll find yourself being encouraged to participate in a contest. You might receive an email, a Facebook encouragement, or even hear an item on the local news about a contest. Where do you start if that's what you're interested in? Well, first things first. You need to find out when this contest is exactly. The reason this is important is because...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I was looking around my shack and noticed that I have lots of different amateur radio tools that go beyond the simple bits and pieces that I started with, namely a radio, battery, power supply, coax and antenna. While I have no illusion that my gear is complete, or even representative of all of the stuff that you might need or come across, I think that it's worth...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I had the pleasure of talking to a group of freshly minted Amateurs. It's a semi-regular occurrence where I visit a local club that offers training to obtain an Amateur License. I should mention that you'll find clubs like this all over the place and there are often opportunities to do remote examinations if you're too far from an assessor. This however isn't abo...

Foundations of Amateur Radio A recurring topic of conversation is propagation. There is learned discussion about sun-spots, A and K indices, forecasts, ionospheric probing, not to mention half-baked guess work from less scientific perspectives. It's been my experience that all these tools are wonderful, but none of them beat turning on your radio and having a listen, or better still putting out a...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm operating portable, in fact I'm operating portable every day. Though I'd have to confess, some days more than others. I have to do this by necessity. There is lots of RF noise at home, so I'm forced to physically move away from the interference and set up elsewhere. You can do this as simply or as complex as you like. I've done it with a bag that contained my...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I was asked about finding the best antenna calculator. It's a tool that helps you determine what the length of an antenna should be for a particular frequency. Picture a dipole antenna, two wires, end to end, strung out horizontally, joined in the middle by a feed point. A dipole is most effective if its total length is half of the wavelength of the frequency...

Foundations of Amateur Radio In your travels around the sun it's likely you've heard the phrase: "Use it or lose it." Within the ranks of our hobby, that refers to making noise on air and using the bands we've been allocated. It's easy to sit in your shack - in what ever form that might take - turn on your radio and scan up and down the bands to see what's going on. If something interesting catche...