Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio At a recent local HAMfest we set-up a table to measure second and third harmonic emissions from any handheld radio that came our way. The process was fun and we learnt lots and in due course we plan to publish a report on our findings. When we received a handheld, we would disconnect the antenna, and replace it with a short length of coax and connect it to a spectrum a...

Foundations of Amateur Radio There's nothing quite as satisfying as the click of a well designed piece of equipment. It's something that tickles the brain and done well it makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. If time was on my side and I wasn't going somewhere else with this, I'd now regale you with research on the phenomenon, I'd explore the community of people building mechanical k...

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you walk into your radio shack and switch on a light, the result is instantaneous, one moment it's dark, the next it's not. What if I told you that as immediate as it appears, there is actually a small delay between you closing the circuit and the light coming on. Likely the distance between your switch and your light is less than say 10 meters, so the delay is like...

Foundations of Amateur Radio The first official telegram to pass between two continents was a letter of congratulations from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom to President of the United States James Buchanan on 16 August 1858. The text is captured in the collection of the US Library of Congress. It's a low resolution image of a photo of a wood engraving. Based on me counting the characters, the...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Morse code is a way for people to send information across long distances. The code we use today, made from dit and dah elements is nothing like the code demonstrated and attributed to Samuel Morse in 1837. Over years and with assistance from Professor of Chemistry Leonard Gail and Physicist Joseph Henry, then Professor of Literature, Samuel Morse, and mechanically mind...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Thanks to several high profile races we already know that sending Morse is faster than SMS. Recently I started digging into the underpinnings of Morse code to answer the question, "Can you send Morse faster than binary encoded ASCII?" Both ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and Morse are techniques to encode information for electronic transmi...

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've ever looked at Morse Code, you might be forgiven if you conclude that it appears to be a less than ideal way of getting information from point A to point B. The idea is simple, based on a set of rules, you translate characters, one at a time, into a series of dits and dahs, each spaced apart according to the separation between each element, each character and...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever made an international contact using amateur radio and used that towards tracking an award like for example the DXCC? If you're not familiar, it's an award for amateurs who make contact with at least 100 "distinct geographic and political entities". In 1935 the American Radio Relay League, or ARRL published an article by Clinton B. DeSoto, W1CBD, titled: "...

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the earlier days of my career I worked in a computing centre at a university surrounded by people with different interests and experiences in computing. There were programmers, hardware engineers, technicians, sales people, administrators, educators, support staff, statisticians and even a librarian. There wasn't a lot of socialising or foosball, but every now and t...

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other weekend there was an amateur radio contest on. Not surprising if you realise that's true for most weekends. For a change, I knew about this contest before it started, because I missed out a year ago, so I did the smart thing to add it to my diary with an alert a month out. In this particular contest there's points to be made by being a so-called roving statio...

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week, prompted by a protest on popular social media site Reddit, I rediscovered that there are other places to spend time. It sounds absurd now, but until then much of my social interaction with the world was via a single online presence. This didn't happen overnight. Over the years more and more of my time was spent on Reddit engaging with other humans arou...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Our hobby has been around for over a century. The Wireless Institute of Australia, or WIA, is the oldest amateur association on the globe, having just marked 113 years since formation. The American Radio Relay League, or ARRL, is four years younger, founded in 1914. I'm mentioning these two associations because they documented their journey through many of the years si...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'd like to start with saying thank you to the Wireless Institute of Australia for awarding me the Brenda Edmonds Education Award "in recognition of outstanding service in the education of the Amateur Radio Community and advancement of licensees." It's an unexpected honour and a thrill that leads me to a question about how we recognise the people around us. Over...

Foundations of Amateur Radio As you might know I'm in the process of building a cross-platform, open source, contest logger. Right now that project is at the stage where there is a proof of concept that you can use and install as a progressive web app on any web browser. It's intended as a starting point for discussion. Note that this is a long way from the stage where you might want to actually u...

Foundations of Amateur Radio A curious thing happens when you become part of the amateur community, you start to talk like an amateur. This phenomenon isn't specific to being a radio amateur, it happens whenever you join any community. Lead by example, one word at a time, you start to inherit a vocabulary that represents that community. Amateur radio, rife with acronyms and so-called Q-Codes, a st...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently the Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre issued an alert for a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME expected to impact Earth within 24 to 36 hours. This was presented within the context of seeing the resulting Aurora, but as a user of the HF radio spectrum, I'm subscribed to their email list, not for the pretty pictures, though I would be delighted to actually...

Foundations of Amateur Radio On Thursday the 20th of April, 2023 at 04:17:56 UTC the world was subjected to a rare event, a hybrid solar eclipse. In Perth I experienced a partial eclipse and people lucky enough to be directly in line, places like Ningaloo Reef, Exmouth and Barrow Island, experienced a total eclipse. Timor-Leste had the experience of the peak total eclipse. At the time I went into...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the years I've used the phrase, which I shamelessly stole, that amateur radio is a thousand hobbies in one. I've discussed countless different activities and adventures that all fall under the banner of amateur radio, in one way or another. Since becoming a licensed radio amateur I've had the opportunity to speak with many different amateurs and hear their views o...

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the more perplexing things is the nature of radio regulation. If you're a licensed radio amateur, you'll be familiar with this idea, but if you're not it's bewildering and apparently absurd. To explain, let me start with a light bulb that your neighbour put on their back porch. It's bright. It's pointing at your house. Like the apparent radiation from a gazillio...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Several years ago I participated in a local contest. Over a 24 hour period I activated my mobile station in about 30 different locations. On my car, my vertical antenna screwed into a boot-lip mount connected to an antenna tuner or ATU, and my radio. I used rope to guy the antenna, threaded through the rear windows and held tight by closing the car boot. Setting up con...

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you start in this hobby one of the most frustrating aspects is that of selecting the right antenna. If you've been around for a while, you'll discover that this continues to be the case, even when you've been licensed longer than I've been alive. In the past I've discussed at length why that is the case, but to recap, consider a dipole antenna. In essence it's two...

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a fascination with space that arguably started long before the first time that human spaceflight was proposed by Scottish astronomer William Leitch in 1861. Names like Sputnik, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Columbia speak to millions of people and organisations like NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to name a few, continue to feed that obsession. In amateur radio we...

Foundations of Amateur Radio So, I have a confession to make. I'm a contester. I'm not ashamed of this. While I'm in a confessing mood, I'll also mention that I've not participated in many contests in the past few years. This is not for the want of desire, but for the lack of motivation to fix things in my shack that are fundamentally broken. On the weekend I participated in a local contest. I too...

Foundations of Amateur Radio We describe the relationship between the power of a wanted signal and unwanted noise as the signal to noise ratio or SNR. It's often expressed in decibels or dB which makes it possible to represent really big and really small numbers side-by-side, rather than using lots of leading and trailing zeros. For example one million is the same as 60 on a dB scale and one milli...

Foundations of Amateur Radio Our community is full of TLAs, or three letter acronyms. Some of them more useful than others. For example, I can tell you thank you for the QSO, I'm going QRT, QSY to my QTH. Or, thanks for the chat, I'll just shut up and take my bat and ball and go home. Acronyms arise every day and it came as no surprise to spot a new one in the wild the other day, SHF. It was in a...