Foundations of Amateur Radio

Today I have a confession to make. Looking back it's clear that once your brain goes down a certain path, it's easier to follow the path than to find an alternative one. When I was growing up, above my bed, bolted to the wall were two brackets. On top of those brackets, secured with double-sided tape was a radio-cassette player. If you're unfamiliar with what an audio cassette is, don't worry, this is about the radio side of things and is from the days when Digital Music was not in wide use like it is today.

I used this radio to listen to local stations, both on the AM and FM broadcast band, and I managed to even get to the beginning of the FM broadcast band where the police radio happened to be at the time in the country I was living.

As years went by, that radio-cassette player was replaced with a radio tuner, then a combined amplifier tuner and I re-programmed it as I moved around the globe with new local stations filling up the quick select button memories.

Over the last year or so it occurred to me that my latest device had been sitting inside a box in the garage for the better part of a decade and that the gap was filled by the radio in my car. I would drive somewhere and turn on the radio and listen to something interesting, or something boring, depending on what the airwaves brought to my antenna at the time.

I started wanting to listen to the end of interviews, or rock along to some other happy tune when I got home, but I found the transition to be painful. I experimented with streaming radio, spent hours looking for software and currently the best I can do on that front is to have an App on my phone that streams a local radio station.

You're likely by now doing one of two things. We'll get to the second one in a moment. The first one is probably going to be along the lines of "Yeah, so, what exactly has this got to do with Amateur Radio again?"

If you're not thinking that, you might be thinking something that only occurred to me last week. "Why don't you use your Amateur Radio and tune that to a local broadcast station?"

Indeed, why not?

I'd never considered that even though my Yaesu FT-857d can tune from 100 KHz through to 470 MHz, covering most of the Amateur Bands, I'd never considered that it would also allow me to listen to a local broadcast station.

It's not that I haven't actually tuned to those stations, or listened to the local Air Traffic Control frequencies, or the local Non Directional Beacons when they still existed, it's that those activities were in the context of Amateur Radio, along the lines of propagation, or interesting signals, not background music, or listening to an interview or a talk-back station.

I've not yet gone to the trouble of pre-programming those stations, since my Amateur Radio is sensitive enough to pick up stations that my car cannot hear, but the list of frequencies that I'm tuning to during the day, using AM and FM is growing. Shame I can't get FM stereo from my Yaesu radio, perhaps that's something I should play with at some point.

So, my second point is, "Duh, my Amateur Radio is also a radio, that you can listen to other broadcast stations with."

Of course, it's a pretty pricey transistor radio, or short-wave radio, if you think of it like that, but if you've got it sitting next to you right now, it's simpler than making streaming radio work.

I started this with paths travelled and I'll finish with that. When something like this happens, stop for a moment, celebrate the insight, share it with others and who knows what other things will bubble up.

When was the last time your brain surprised you and what do you listen to that's not Amateur Radio? Who knows, I might become a short-wave listener yet!

I'm Onno VK6FLAB