Foundations of Amateur Radio

A regular lament is the lack of things to do in our hobby. I know, it's foreign to me, but there are plenty of amateurs who express frustration at the lack of activity, no contacts, nothing new, no challenges.

For my poison, I started the process of contacting 100 different countries using 5 Watts. I've been at it for a number of years and truth be told, since my latest domestic move, over two years ago now, my efforts have been put on hold. Not because I didn't want to, but because I was getting annoyed with having to leave my home and wanting desperately to have a functional shack at home. As you might know, that's a project that's still in hand and thanks to some magnificent assistance from various places, I'm still making progress.

That said, your perspective might be dulled by the notion that this pretty much concludes the on-air activity possibilities that exist. Within my own license class, until recently, I was permitted to use voice modes like SSB, AM and FM and I was permitted to use hand-keyed Morse. I have access to 10 Watts and am currently allowed to use six different amateur bands, namely 80m, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm. So together with the four modes, I'd be able to make 24 different contacts to 100 different countries, that's 2400 different combinations.

Of course there are more than 100 countries, that is, DXCC entities. The 2018 list has 340 of them, so that's over 8-thousand different options for getting on air and making noise.

Last year all that changed. The local regulator in Australia, the ACMA decreed that all amateurs in Australia were permitted to use all modes.

It's taken a little while for that to sink in. Specifically what it means for me.

A quick search reveals that there are at least 60 different digital modes, think RTTY, Olivia, PSK31, etc. In addition to those, there's a plethora of other modes like IRLP, AllStar Link, EchoLink, CODEC2 and Brandmeister.

So conservatively I'm going to estimate that I now have got access to over a hundred different modes, across six bands with 340 countries, that's over 200-thousand different options for making a contact.

Of course it's unlikely that I'll make a contact between say Belize V3A and Perth VK6 on 2m using Olivia, but even if we limit our calculation to HF, we still have at least 136-thousand opportunities for adding something interesting to your logbook.

I've been hunting for a canonical list of all the various amateur modes and the tools needed to make and receive them. No doubt that will take me some time. I'll be documenting it on the projects page on vk6flab.com if you want to follow along. Speaking of which, you'll also find past episodes of this podcast there.

I suppose I should start by converting my current efforts into some pretty pictures that show what I've been up to so far, but that's a mapping exercise that I'll have to add to my to-do list, since I'm guessing it involves learning how to use some fun mapping tools.

If 136-thousand opportunities isn't enough, you can also add grid-squares, large and small, different prefectures in Japan, provinces in the Netherlands, CQ zones across the world or ITU areas, prefixes and operating modes.

Clearly there's plenty to do and see.

I wonder if there's an award for all modes all bands all countries and I wonder what happens if someone invents a new mode?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB