Foundations of Amateur Radio
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?".
Episodes
The radio telescope at Dwingeloo in the Netherlands recently promoted an Open Day where visitors were treated to tours and live demonstrations. One video caught my eye, a 2.4m dish on a remote controlled azimuth and elevation mount that scanned the entire sky every fifteen minutes and afterwards created a map of the captured radio signals.
Having carried a dish that size around Australia for a couple ...
I recently expressed the notion of using a PlutoSDR as a replacement for an oscilloscope, a spectrum analyser, and perhaps even a vector network analyser. I can add signal generator to that list and you get the notion that this one device might replace a bunch of tools in your shack.
So .. I set out to come up with a minimum viable product to see what I might discover.
There are days when you get out...
Launched into your amateur radio adventure you're faced with figuring out what you need to fly. If you have a web browser, you can start listening to a massive array of online radio sources .. today.
Beyond that, a handheld radio is often the first purchase for a new amateur, more often than not followed by the acquisition of a more advanced radio and associated paraphernalia, antenna, coax, power sup...
Previously I've talked about using radio spectrum monitoring to detect lightning to potentially protect your equipment. This triggered an email from Nick VA3NNW, who pointed out that AM demodulation of "one point twenty-one jiggawatts", is really a red-herring, and indeed it is. Nick went on to point at another approach, which nudged things along.
So, let's start with the herring, not sure about red, ...
In the middle of the night when insomnia rears its head, there are occasions when an idea sprouts that is still with me the next day. I imagined a spinning globe that shows ionospheric propagation and allows you to navigate around the world and experiment. Think the ionospheric equivalent of windy.com in 3D.
To get to that point, I started off with the Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre. I wa...
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to participate in two completely different community events, one aimed at an amateur radio audience, the other at the general public.
Every year, several of the amateur radio clubs in my area hold their individual swap meet, where the aim of the event is to bring amateurs together and to use it as a social fund raising event.
Some jokingly refer to it as a junk ...
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...
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 proud...
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 tha...
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 introduce...
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 commu...
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,...
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 celeb...
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...
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 har...
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 interfe...
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 l...
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...
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 ...
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