Foundations of Amateur Radio

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What's in a plan? Jan 12, 2020

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Foundations of Amateur Radio

As radio amateurs we learn which frequencies we're allowed to transmit on, where stuff lives and who has priority when there's a signal on the frequency you're operating on and when you need to contact your regulator if you hear an illegal station on the air.

Some of that information arrives in your brain by way of the education process that eventually becomes your license after a test. Depending on which country your license is valid, determines which region of the International Amateur Radio Union your activities fall.

Here in Australia, I'm part of the IARU Region 3, together with the rest of the Asia - Pacific region. In the Americas you're part of Region 2 and Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Northern Asia fall into Region 1. As amateur population sizes go, Region 2 and 3 each cover about 40% of all radio amateurs. Region 1 is about 20%.

Each of these IARU regions has a specific band-plan that is updated regularly as member countries adapt and negotiate different frequencies for different users. The band-edges might not change that often, but bands come and go, segments are added and removed as needs change. For example, here in Australia or VK, the 6m band has been changing because analogue TV has been changing.

Information about band-plans is not easy to come by. For example if I look at IARU Region 2, their documentation is pretty sparse. I've never managed to actually load their website and by the looks of it, neither has the Internet Archive. Given that Region 2 is all of the Americas and represents pretty much two fifths of all amateurs on planet Earth, that's a big hole.

There is some availability in Region 1 and 3, but those too leave to be desired. There does not appear to be any formal method of archiving or naming and the transient nature of the Internet all but guarantees that historic information like this is being lost at a high rate.

Even with those limitations in mind, there is plenty of information to be found. Let's look at Australia, for no other reason than that I was able to pull some of the historic information out of the bit-bucket.

You might be surprised to learn that there is much more change under the hood that far exceeds the band edges and segment changes. The Wireless Institute of Australia publishes the Australian Amateur Band Plan. Using the Internet Archive I was able to count that between November 2007 and November 2019 there were at least 25 different versions of that band plan published, for example in 2008 alone there were at least five different versions.

I managed to download 11 of those band plans which show the introduction of the 2200 meter band, the 630 meter band, changes to mode frequencies, DX frequencies, the allocation of emergency frequencies, changes to FM bandwidth from 6 kHz to 8 kHz on bands below 10m, the formalisation of WSPR frequencies, JT65, FT8 and JT9.

Now I must point out that the information I'm presenting here is incomplete. There are many more changes, just in VK alone. I'm relying on the Internet Archive which only sampled the WIA website 162 times between March 2008 and January 2020. Within those pages there were only 11 copies of the actual band plan and I've only compared three of them, August 2009, March 2015 and October 2019, and of those only a few changes that stood out.

And this is for Australia alone. This is on the HF bands. I've not even looked at the veritable feast of changes associated with the VHF and UHF bands, let alone the cm, mm and higher bands.

Even with this massive disclaimer, my point should be pretty clear. A band-plan is a living document. It changes regularly. Likely much more often than you realise.

I'll leave you with one burning question.

When was the last time you got yourself a copy of the band-plan? Seriously, when was it?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Where do you start? Jan 05, 2020

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Foundations of Amateur Radio

So, you've got yourself a license, or it's coming but you're waiting for the regulator to get the administration done and for your payment to go through. The excitement is building, you're itching to get started and you've told your family and friends what your new callsign is.

Then the day arrives. Your callsign is allocated, it's paid for and you're allowed to call yourself a licensed radio amateur, a member of the community, a part of history, the next thing in radio.

Now what?

Where do you start on this adventure of a thousand hobbies in one?

The truth is that you already did. Look behind you. You have a license, a callsign and you've found the community, well, at least some of it. How do I know that you found the community? Amateur Radio is a secret, known only to those who bounce into it. That bounce is where you found the community.

Like any community you'll find people you like and people you don't. People who share your interest and people who are doing things that make your head explode.

That said, is there any sage advice that I can share with you on your journey?

I do, but, you're not going to like it. In fact until you've been an amateur for a little while you're possibly even going to hate my advice. I know, hate is a strong word. If it's not all black and white for you, you're going to think I'm chickening out in giving you advice.

Wanna hear it?

Start somewhere, anywhere.

Let me say that again.

Start somewhere, anywhere.

One of the most fundamental aspects of this hobby is that it's driven by your personal exploration, your journey, your imagination and your adventure. It's entirely up to you to decide what you like and what you don't.

I know that there are those who think that advice should come in the form of buying a radio, erecting an antenna and getting on-air. For many that's a journey worth doing. For others that's the beginning of the end of the hobby for them. If you're unsure which of the thousands of activities you'd like to do, since you don't know what they are, I'll tell you a secret.

Neither do we.

Seriously. There are so many things to do in this hobby that not a day goes by that I find a new thing to do and look at. A new toy to play with, or a new adventure to embark on. This morning I realised that the antenna design and build I've been working on represents roughly 600 million different variations. If I did those manually, taking a generous 10 minutes per set-up, I'll be here for nearly 35 years, 8 hours a day, trying another set-up. Clearly my hobby now includes automating antenna modelling.

My point is that there are so many different aspects of life, the universe, and everything that intersect in some way with the hobby of amateur radio that there's bound to be several that you can think of right off the top of your head. You might immediately be dismissing them as foolish, but if we all did that, nothing would ever happen.

If you're looking for ideas, that's a whole different thing. Of course the nearest search engine is a possibility, but I do have to confess, it's a dogs breakfast. Another is to visit your local club and see what others are up to. You could watch YouTube videos or listen to podcasts or read articles. All these are options to get suggestions.

Ultimately, the whole point of this hobby is that you embark on your own adventure, start on your own journey, down your own yellow brick road. If you think what you're proposing intersects with amateur radio, you're right!

That's not to say that there's no benefit to be had from engaging with others, far from it, just that you are the chief architect of your destiny. You're in charge.

So get to it. Go do something, anything. While you're at it, document the adventure. One day you'll be glad you did.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

What does Amateur Radio mean to you? Dec 29, 2019

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Foundations of Amateur Radio

Over the years I've been asked what the hobby of amateur radio is all about. My response has evolved over time, but it started with the lure of simple point-to-point communications. The antidote against such an example is that a mobile phone does that and more. Of course if you're already in the hobby you know that there is a massive difference between the two, but if you're an onlooker that is not nearly as obvious.

There are other problems with an answer like that. It doesn't cover the spirit of the hobby, the intent, the reach, or any of the other aspects of our pursuits that keep us all coming back for more.

I was asked recently to provide a credit to a fellow amateur for providing inspiration for an episode. Since then I've reflected long and hard about the nature of inspiration and what causes me to contribute and participate.

The reality is that my inspiration comes from all manner of nooks and crannies, from articles I read, videos I watch, discussions I have, activities I participate in, builds I make and emails I exchange. Not to mention friendships, random comments, shower thoughts and flights of fancy.

My understanding of our community of this hobby continues to evolve as I participate and contribute.

I think that underlying all of this is the expansion of my mind, my interests, my exposure to new things is what makes amateur radio such a massively interesting activity.

When I started I had no inkling that between learning how to solder and what a Fourier transform is lies this immense field of individual and community activity. What other hobby has the ability to link astronomy, moon, camping, community, planning, building, drilling, sound, language, antennas, internet, computing, valves, maths, propagation, mapping, transport, emergencies, physics, competition, camaraderie, satellite, soil, ionosphere, sun, batteries, old, new, invention and exploration?

In addition to the technical aspects there's the whole library of human interaction, teaching, learning, giving and receiving, socialising, friendship, discussion and debate to scratch the surface.

In amateur terms I'm still a babe in the woods and the more I learn the more I realise that this is likely to continue for the rest of my life.

For me, amateur radio is the binding force between interests. It's about wonder, curiosity and inspiration. It's about trying and failing, about testing and learning, about thinking and doing.

The magic for me is that you can do this at any level. As a 10-year old with a freshly minted license, or as a 90-year old with a twinkle in your eye. You can approach this as a scientist, or as an educator, as a submariner, or an accountant, as a truck-driver or a boiler maker, from young to old and anywhere at all, amateur radio is just plain interesting.

As for giving credit. I'd like to credit you for your contribution, for your participation and for your excitement.

Keep up the wonder and continue to make this community your own. In the end amateur radio means different things to different people.

What does amateur radio mean to you?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Lamenting the decline of the hobby. Dec 22, 2019

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Foundations of Amateur Radio

During the week I received an email from a fellow amateur who described that they were feeling deeply disturbed by the decline of the core knowledge underlying the education and certification of today's new amateurs. This is a topic I've covered previously and some of what I'm about to say will touch on things I've said before.

I come from a long background in information technology. My first introduction was around the Motorola 6502 processor in the early 1980's. At that time a computer with 5 kilobytes of memory was a big deal. I learnt to harness every byte and nurture every bit. I learnt machine-code, BASIC, Pascal and Modula-2, which went on to form the basis of my current profession.

The reason I raise this is because there are many parallels in the evolution of amateur radio and the evolution of information technology.

For many years I lamented the dumbing down of the skill-set associated with newly fledged computer graduates. In a nut-shell, hand-coded would always beat Java. I held that view for a long time, until it occurred to me that in the big picture it didn't matter.

Let me elaborate before you start jumping up and down.

In computing, every two or so years, everything doubles, speed, memory, bandwidth, etc. The price pretty-much stays the same.

This means that the inefficiencies introduced by "high-level" languages like Java result in very little in the way of performance loss, but in return the actual process of writing new software accelerates. This means that you end up with more functionality, quicker, at the cost of less efficient code. That's a pretty reasonable trade-off.

If that example doesn't speak to you, it's the difference between rolling out turf from the back of a truck to construct a new golf course and teeing off in days, compared to spending a week planting grass, from seed, nurturing it and waiting at least two months until you might consider playing a round.

Does a golfer care if was rolled turf or planted seed?

A similar thing is happening in our hobby. The advent of Software Defined Radio creates a new category of experimentation. The component count is reduced by several orders of magnitude, in return for functionality built by way of software and maths.

Of course that means that the new amateur of today has no idea in the operation of a valve and only limited understanding of a transistor, but in return they can create new modes such as WSPR, JT65, CODEC2 and the massive evolution of other digital experiments, and they can do that with tools unheard of 5 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.

I am an example of an amateur who knows of the existence of a valve and I have a rudimentary understanding of how it works. I am seriously considering building my own Software Defined Radio, from scratch.

I understand that this might not be something that comes easy and may even be seen as detrimental to the hobby, but I dare say that the introduction of the valve to a spark-gap operator caused the same experience, let alone the introduction of the transistor, the integrated circuit or the explosion of cheap single on chip systems that can be had for cents in the dollar.

The essentials still remain. For example, right now I'm working on an antenna. It involves sourcing nuts that seem to be made from unobtainium, even though they are completely standard in our community and have been for longer than I've been alive.

The self-learning of our hobby, the exploration, the investigation, the curiosity will endure. What we're going to be playing with tomorrow is not going to be anything like what we were doing yesterday, and I'm OK with that.

That our hobby is changing is unmistakable. That's true for every human endeavour ever. I don't agree that there is a decline, nor do I think we've lost more than we've gained. I think the future of our hobby, our community and our pursuits is strong and bright.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

How did you get here? Dec 15, 2019

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Foundations of Amateur Radio

During the week I celebrated my ninth birthday. You might think that I'm quite eloquent for a nine year old and you'd be right if it was related to how I came to be born. My ninth birthday as an amateur appeared in my diary unexpectedly on a Monday and I took the liberty of telling a few people.

On one forum it started a wonderful series of comments from amateurs and would be amateurs about their experience coming to our community. I've shared mine before, so instead I'd like to share some of the stories that truly show just how diverse our amateur friends really are.

Floyd KK3Q says: My Dad was into CB radio (back when it wasn't so bad) and I was his antenna guy. He had black lung so I was the one who took down and put up his antennas for him. In the process I learned a lot (ask me later about a "smoke poles" and "buried 12V batteries") Well, Dad and I got into the illegal SSB frequencies and one night we visited one of the locals who happened to be using a Kenwood 520 on 11 meters. One look at that rig and I was in love. I never heard of ham radio and when I asked about it the owner said the radio was a "ham" radio and you needed a license to run one. Which she didn't have by the way. So I says, "Maybe I'll get myself a ham license and a rig like the Kenwood." She laughed at me, "You're just a stupid truck mechanic, you'll never get a ham license."

I never run from a challenge, skipped over Novice and got my Tech, wanted on 20 meters so under incentive licensing I had to upgrade to General which meant 13WPM CW and me partially deaf. Next I wanted SSTV but you had to be Advanced class so I upgraded. Finally I lusted after a short call sign so I upgraded to Extra back when 20WPM CW was still required. Been a nice run, learned a LOT from a lot of elmers.

Floyd has been a ham for 42 years.

Bill WK2KX has been a ham for 33 years. Will be 34 this January. Licensed at age 11. He goes on to say:

My dad and I did it together, but most of my family are licensed as well. My grandfather started it. His main claim to fame is that he served as general Eisenhower's radio man during ww2 for about a month. Now I have both my parents, a bunch of cousins, aunts, uncles, etc who are all licensed - enough that I've considered creating a "worked all (our last name)s" award, haha.

Tyrell KD7TKJ turned 18 as an amateur in September.

My stepdad wasn't a ham, but one of the kids he grew up with was... And my stepdad told me a story at a young age about how he and this neighborhood kid would go to the auto wreckers to pick up scraps to build radios out of, and then use said radios to talk to Australia... The details of said story really were never complete, and I've never met anyone since that claimed to have built a radio from car parts... But it was enough to get me to (get my mom to) get the ARRL Now You're Talking book and get licensed. I've been addicted to this more than any money making Enterprise ever since.

One amateur writes: I got my license 48 years ago. In high school, every day I'd pass a door with no window, just a sign "W2CXN". When I got the courage to knock, I was met with a person I knew liked his job. So happy to help. I remember thinking, how cool is that?

Peter KD2TCQ has been an amateur for 4 days and got interested because of packet radio as well as the ability to do on HF (which he needs to upgrade to do via phone but he's studying for that)

Ron K7UV says: I'm at 62 years and was licensed at age of 12. My dad and I built two receivers together and I wanted to do more than listen... the rest is history. Yup, I go way back before transistors and computers and remember cycles, mmF, aerials and condensers.

My original Hammarland receiver had around 13 tubes, the transmitter had 6 tubes plus the 2 meter converter had 4 tubes and my SCR522 had at least 7 tubes. It kept my bedroom quite warm in the winter and sweltering in the summer when there was no air conditioner, just fans.

The weird thing... I miss those days, maybe it's just my nostalgia kicking in. But radio and my interactions with my father were essentially what led me to radio.

Matt KD2MGM says: I suppose We're only 3. My brother and I put CB radios in our trucks in the summer of 16' but we quickly realized living out in the country that there weren't really any people on the air waves and that 4 watts wasn't enough to talk over the hills to each-other. These days we are not super active but still hop on the air once in a while.

You can find all these stories and many more on the amateurradio sub on Reddit.

For me, reminiscing over how you came to be part of this amazing community brings us all together. Our stories are not that different, we're all cut from the same cloth. Curiosity killed the cat, but it just makes amateur radio stronger.

How long have you been an amateur and what got you in the door?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The SDR earthquake will change our hobby forever Dec 08, 2019

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Foundations of Amateur Radio

In the early 1990's when I was a broadcaster I would come into the studio and prepare my show. That involved hours of preparation, but on the technology side it involved vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape on open spools, looped tape on cart, running edits and razorblades. If you're not familiar, a running edit is where you're playing the tape at normal speed and you hit record at just the right moment to replace the content. Of course that also requires that the thing you're recording is synchronised. Imagine yourself with four hands and three ears and you'll have a good idea. Razor blade edits required that you mark the tape where the audio started, chop the tape at that point and stick it to another piece of tape. The joy of having sticky tape, razorblades and audio tape strewn around the room and hoping that the tape didn't let go when you transferred the audio to a broadcast tape.

If you wanted to play a song at the right time, you had to start it by putting the needle on the record, spinning the platter until you heard the song, then stopping the platter, winding back half or three quarter turn from where the audio started, depending on the speed and torque of the turntable, and then when you hit play, you'd have about half a second until the music started.

At the beginning of the 1990's that was how it was done.

Then compact disc came in and we could cue up a song and hit the go button and get almost instant sound. You could change tracks at the turn of a dial. Vinyl records were phased out pretty quick.

In 1993 I switched radio station and instead of reel-to-reel we used DAT, or Digital Audio Tape. It had the advantage that there was no discernible loss of audio quality as you copied material, but there was no editing, since the bits on the tape needed to be aligned and you just couldn't do that with most of the available gear. The start-up delay was horrendous too, several seconds if I recall. A lifetime of dead air if you got it wrong.

You might be wondering why I'm going down memory lane like this?

The reason is that something changed, fundamentally, almost overnight.

In 1995 Microsoft launched Windows 95. It was in August and as the local computer show I organised a competition to give away a copy of Windows 95. I edited my competition stinger, a 15 second and a 30 second promotional audio segment, entirely on my computer. Using SoundEdit 16 on my Macintosh computer I could overly tracks, add voice-overs, move sound tracks around, add dozens of tracks, change the left and right channel independently, amplify or delete specific beats, all things that were completely impossible using the gear in a radio station at the time.

When I brought my stinger into the station managers office on my laptop computer, the earth shifted. Overnight everything changed. At that point radio stations around the globe started the race towards entirely being run from hard-disk. The digital revolution hit broadcast audio.

That's almost a quarter century ago, but that change cannot be overstated.

I think that in amateur radio we're looking at the same kind of change with the same level of impact.

Today you can go online and buy a NanoVNA for less than a hundred dollars. This device, a touch-screen driven tool, allows you to measure electrical circuits. For example, you might connect an antenna and measure the impedance of that antenna. If you connect a reference antenna to the second port, you can even measure radiation patterns.

Think about that for a moment.

You can measure a radiation pattern. That means that there is something that radiates.

Does that sound familiar?

Perhaps like a transmitter?

So this NanoVNA is essentially a transmitter and receiver in one box, currently runs up to 900 MHz, but the next version is already in the works and it's slated to manage 3.5 GHz, for the same amount of money.

So, a 3.5 GHz transceiver for less than a hundred bucks.

If you look at the internals of a NanoVNA, you'll notice that it's got much of the same bits as a software defined radio, because it is a software defined radio. Thanks to modern integration, at a component level it has significantly less complexity than the early 1980's microcomputers I grew up with like the Commodore Vic 20.

Yes, I know, it's not quite a radio. There's different filtering, different software, no audio input, or output for that matter, no Morse key, it doesn't do FT8 or some other fancy mode, but guess what, it's all software. The parts of this device aren't complicated, they're cheap, simple to program and I don't think it's going to take long before we see a new explosion of software defined transceivers that are begging to be used by radio amateurs around the globe.

We live in exciting times would be the understatement of the year.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Morse Code and You Dec 01, 2019

Show notes

Foundations of Amateur Radio

With the growing availability of new ways of communicating across the globe, from digital voice such as CODEC2, through weak signal modes like WSPR, JT65, MSK144 and FT4 to name a few, with Internet linked radio such as Brandmeister and DMR and the newly granted access to all Australian amateurs to all those modes, it's easy to overlook the one mode that started this adventure.

Morse Code.

It's no longer required to obtain your amateur license, so if that was putting you off from getting your license, you can breathe easy and get right to it.

Among all the shiny new modes Morse Code continues to hold its own and for good reason. It's simple, reliable, has an amazing signal to noise ratio and if you're driving in your car and you're stuck without a Morse Key, you can always just whistle into your radio.

If you've been following my journey through the hobby you'll know that I've been attempting to learn Morse Code. For a while now. It's been a challenge, more so since I spend less and less time in a car and more and more time behind my keyboard appeasing my clients. That's not to say that I've forgotten, just that what I've tried so far has eluded success.

A little while ago I received an email from a friend, Shaun VK6BEK who let me know that there was a discussion happening on a mailing list he was a member of and in that discussion I cracked a mention. Being the shy and retiring type I had to have a look for myself. To read the message I had to join, which is fine, since Charles NK8O has been bugging me to do that for years, well perhaps not bugging, perhaps keying me - hi hi. Turns out that the Straight Key Century Club, the SKCC, was having a recurring discussion about the topic of Head Copy or Head Reading.

To give you a sense of what that is, consider what I'm saying to you right now. It doesn't matter if you're reading this in an eBook on your Kindle, reading it on an email or online, listening to it on your local repeater, or via your favourite podcast player, for each of those the same process is happening.

You are not absorbing individual letters or sounds, but getting the meaning from the entire structure of a sentence. For uncommon words you might need to calibrate your brain, but for the most part you're just bobbing along understanding what I'm saying.

In essence you're doing the equivalent of Head Copy.

In Morse Code the same can be achieved. Ultimately it's a language, a tonal one, but a language none the less. Hearing the individual dits and dahs, followed by letters, words and sentences, eventually you'll get to a point where it all just flows.

I speak a few different languages, a curse or a blessing depending on your point of view. It means that I've become exposed to how language is built up. Initially when you hear a new language your brain is trying hard to figure out where the individual sounds belong, which sound belongs to which word, how a word begins and ends, how you make a plural, all the things you take for granted after you've learnt a language.

In Morse that is no different.

Within that context of discussing Head Copy, Gwen NG3P mentioned that she used the text edition of this podcast to convert into a Morse Code MP3 file so she could learn to hear Morse and bring them with her on her mobile phone.

Gwen and I had similar aims. In the past I'd done the same with a book, Huckleberry Finn if I recall, as well as random letters and also the ARRL Morse practice downloads, but nothing seemed to work for me.

For Gwen my podcast was an obvious source, so much so that I completely missed it, since they are short and on the topic of amateur radio. The language in use is likely going to be things that you'll hear on air and there's a smattering of callsigns, so all good.

Long story short, I spent last week converting all 454 episodes of the podcast to Morse Code for your Head Copy practice enjoyment. They're encoded at 25 WPM, or Words Per Minute and the tone is 600 Hz. I even put them online and made it possible for you to add them to your podcast player.

Best part?

I now get to hear Morse Code at a pace that I'm looking for, on a topic that's relevant and I have been receiving plenty of emails from others who are just as excited as I am.

You can find these episodes on the podcast homepage at http://vk6flab.com. Let me know how you go.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

What's in a Whisper? Nov 24, 2019

Show notes

Foundations of Amateur Radio

A while ago I set up a WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter at home. Before I go into the details, WSPR is an amateur radio protocol that allows stations to transmit their callsign, location and power level and for receivers around the globe to decode those and upload the results to a central database. It's a great way to see what you can hear and what propagation is like.

A couple of months ago the regulator changed the Australian License Conditions Determination, the rules of engagement around amateur radio and now all licensed amateurs in Australia can even set-up a transmitter although I haven't yet. Receiving is plenty of fun and anyone can do that.

Initially I used a piece of Windows software to track the contacts but to me it was like ordering a courier with an 18-wheeler to pick up a postage stamp. I looked around an found a piece of software that runs nicely on a single board Raspberry Pi computer. The software is called rtlsdr_wsprd, it's a mouthful, but it works nicely on a Pi with an RTL SDR dongle. The dongle I have is capable of using all HF frequencies up to 1766 MHz, so I can technically hear the 23 cm band, though I haven't actually heard any stations there.

I created a list of all the published WSPR frequencies and I listen to a frequency for fifteen minutes, pick another frequency at random and do it again, all day, every day. My log for this installation goes back about eight months and I get about a hundred contacts every month or so.

You might think that's a lot of contacts, but really it's not. The antenna is indoors, it's under a metal roof and while it's on the second floor, it's far from ideal, but it works surprisingly well.

What have I learned from this experience?

I've heard 36 different stations, across 11 countries and 23 grid squares, the furthest was G0CCL, a club station in Cambridge in the United Kingdom which was transmitting on 20m with 5 Watts. I heard it 14750 km away.

There are plenty of other things that I can extract from this. The most popular band is 20m, it accounts for nearly 70% of the contacts I heard. Surprisingly, I am also hearing contacts on 80m, as well as on every other amateur band that my receiver can hear. The 6m band is pretty popular too, nearly 13% of the stations I heard.

For my receiver, between 4am and 6am in the morning was the best time to hear something, together they account for just under 20% of the contacts. Locally the worst time is 8am in the morning.

From the data I've collected, April and May were the most active, accounting for nearly 70% of the contacts.

I must point out that the log is not continuous, there's gaps when the logging station wasn't switched on and when I was switching antennas and locations, so using the statistics I've given you here for your own station are probably not going to work quite the same.

The WSPR mode isn't perfect. It will happily decode rubbish and report on that, so I've manually filtered out the bogus information, like for example a grid square XI97LK, or callsign 3KE/21XWK, where neither the location or the prefix are real.

I can tell you that I was surprised that my station can hear 80m on the little telescopic rabbit-ear antenna supplied with my dongle. That same antenna is also fine at hearing 6m, so I'm pretty happy with that.

One thing that this little experiment reveals for me is that a cheap dongle is a perfectly fine way to start playing with a limited budget. It offers the opportunity to explore the RF spectrum using modern tools and techniques. Much of what I describe is absolutely possible with a traditional radio. Originally I had my station set-up like that. It consisted of my Yaesu FT-857d, a 12 V power supply, a CAT cable, an audio interface and a computer.

In stark contrast, my current set-up consists of two things. A Raspberry Pi with an RTL SDR dongle plugged in.

While this set-up cannot transmit, neither could I at the time. Since then there have been advances in both. There are all-band WSPR transmitters for a similar cost to a Pi and a dongle. Power it up, configure it and you're good to go. I'm eyeing off that as a future project, since it's perfect to use to see what bands are open for your station at any given moment.

If you've never had a go, you should. I've documented how my monitor station works and you can find it on the projects page on my website at vk6flab.com.

WSPR is a really nice way to get into many different aspects of our hobby and the barrier to entry is your imagination.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Putting a radio in a car. Nov 17, 2019

Show notes

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Putting a radio in a car.

As you might recall, most of my radio activity is done away from my shack. I tend to operate portable, camping, sitting on a jetty or using a picnic table while a BBQ is going nearby.

For me operating with my car as a mobile base made more sense than trying to cram an antenna in a home with little or no garden.

Putting a radio in a car can be as simple as bringing a hand-held and hanging it from the rear-view mirror, or it can involve a mobile phone mount that allows you to clamp it in place.

Pretty soon you'll want to have an antenna on the outside of the car, so then you start figuring out how to make it go through the car without needing to drill holes and sparking the ire of the other users of the car.

Not long after that you'll want to charge it, then the microphone will become inconvenient, changing frequency, using it for more than talking on the local repeater.

Eventually you might well get to the point that a hand-held is no longer appropriate.

Without telling you which radio to buy, since there are many different ones to choose from, with different specifications, different pricing, different functions and different sizes, there are plenty of roadblocks to radio bliss in the car.

The very first one is: Where to put the radio?

If your radio has a detachable front, that is, the buttons and display can be separated from the main body, you'll have more options, but if that's not possible, you'll likely need to find somewhere near and preferably visible to where you'll be using it.

There are transceivers that fit into a standard car radio opening which might come in handy if your car comes with all manner of bezels and curves. You might find a spot in the centre console, or overhead.

If you can put the transceiver in one spot and the head in another, then you can put the radio in any little hidey hole, for example, under the passenger seat, or in the luggage compartment, in the glove box, or behind the drivers seat.

When you are looking for a spot, consider how you're going to get electricity to it and how you're going to connect the antenna. You'll likely need to connect the power supply wire directly to the battery, which might determine how the power gets into the cabin of the car.

If you can drill holes in your car, you'll have extra options, but consider that you'll need to protect the wire that goes through those holes and you'll also need to protect the steel, given that once you drilled that hole, it's no longer protected by paint from rusting.

The same is true for the antenna. Can you use an existing path, or do you need to make a new one? If you put the radio in the luggage compartment, can the antenna lead exit that and what happens if it rains?

In my set up I have an all band radio, it does HF, VHF and UHF, but I didn't want to have multiple antennas on the car. The radio has multiple sockets, so I used a coax switch that's connected to an antenna mount on the rear of the car and ran two lines back to the radio, so I can switch between HF and VHF. Of course I need to swap out the antenna, but I'm not switching whilst I'm driving, so that's no problem.

Other things to consider are what noise comes from the car. I don't mean the zoom-zoom noise, I mean the noise from things like the alternator. How will you deal with that? What about grounding? How will you make the ground plane of the antenna? Can you use braid to connect the various panels of the vehicle to each other?

If your mount is temporary, like for example a magnetic mount, how will you protect the paint work? Can you clamp something across an edge, or will you need to drill a hole?

If you're at all unsure, then try some set-ups. Run a temporary power supply through a door, figure out where stuff goes. Look at what your friends have done, test it by going out, park somewhere and try to use it for real.

It can be daunting to set-up a car, but it is very rewarding and it's a great way to get used to the many aspects that are involved once you dive into this hobby.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Where is North? Nov 10, 2019

Show notes

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The other day we were aligning an antenna for a contest. It had slipped on the rotator pole during a recent storm and when the rotator was set to zero it was pointing somewhere south east. Not ideal if you want to point your antenna at a particular station.

The topic of the direction of north came up. There was vague hand-pointing, some mobile phone compass magic performed and north was arrived at. I asked if that compass took into account magnetic declination which in turn was met with blank stares.

So, what is magnetic declination and where is north?

It's likely that in school your first physics lesson was around magnetism. Playing with magnets is an easy way to start the conversation around science. One thing you learn in school is that opposite magnets attract. A north pole to a south pole and so on. A compass is a simple magnet with a north and a south pole. So, the north pole of the compass is attracted to the south magnetic pole of the Earth.

This means that the Earth's north magnetic pole is currently at the bottom of the Earth. Also, while we're on the subject, the magnetic field lines that leave a magnet are defined as being the north pole of that magnet. So on top of the planet the magnetic field lines enter the Earth and at the bottom of the planet they leave the Earth.

That definition of north and south was the first to be used and it was pretty successful in getting sailing ships all around the globe. Since then the definition has changed into defining the poles as the points around which the Earth rotates on its axis. The north pole is the one on your left as you face the rising Sun.

So, the north pole that you and I talk about in day-to-day conversation refers to an imaginary point where the Earth rotates around you and you stay still - ignoring for a moment that the Earth is hurtling around the Sun and the Sun is moving around in the Solar System and the Solar System is moving in the Milky Way Galaxy and its moving inside the Universe, turtles all the way down.

In case you're wondering how fast you're moving while you're standing still, it's in the order of 360 km per second in relation to the cosmic background radiation. By the time you've finished this you'll have moved about a hundred thousand kilometres from where you started.

The subtle difference between the definition of north being related to the magnetic pole and the rotation axis means that there's a difference where your compass points and where north is. You probably already knew this.

You might not know that the amount of distance between both the magnetic poles and the rotation poles changes over time. The magnetic poles of the Earth are constantly moving. That's pretty straight forward, but there's more. The Earth's magnetic field isn't pretty. It's not all straight lines and unicorns. It's messy, very messy. And the mess is moving. Normally there's a new map published every five years, but sometimes that's not enough to account for the movement. For example, early in 2019 a new map was published out of sequence to account for changes that were larger than expected.

Why the map you ask? Because field lines are not straight. You'll find all manner of weird shapes and swirls. This means that where ever you are on Earth, your compass is pointing in a different direction, because it's not pointing at the magnetic pole, it's aligned with the magnetic field line which could be as much as 20 degrees off, in either direction, so 40 degrees error could make you completely miss Australia as you're sailing around the planet.

If this is beginning to sound a little familiar, you might consider our Sun. Every sunspot is a magnetic pole. They come in pairs, a magnetic north pole where the magnetic field leaves the Sun and a magnetic south pole where it enters the Sun. If you've come across the impact of the Sun on radio communications and the ionosphere, you'll already know that the Sun is a turbulent place. Sunspots come and go, they move around, there's cycles within cycles, solar minima, maxima, pole reversals, lots of stuff that makes this a variable feast.

The Earth is doing this too. Not as fast, not as hard, not as big as the Sun, but measurable and a rich source of research for Geophysicists and Geologists, since we can even figure out that the magnetic field on Earth reverses itself, has done many times, just like the Sun.

So, next time you get the question, where's north, check out the magnetic declination map for your location, you might be surprised where your compass is pointing, it's almost certainly not north.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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