Foundations of Amateur Radio

When you begin your journey as a radio amateur you're introduced to the concept of a mode.

A mode is a catch-all phrase that describes a way of encoding information into radio signals.

Even if you're not familiar with amateur radio, you've come across modes, although you might not have known at the time.

When you tune to the AM band, you're picking a set of frequencies, but also a mode, the AM mode. When you tune to the FM band, you do a similar thing, set of frequencies, different mode, FM. The same is true when you turn on your satellite TV receiver, you're likely using a mode called DVB-S. For digital TV, the mode is likely DVB-T and for digital radio it's something like DAB or DAB+.

Even when you use your mobile phone it too is using a mode, be it CDMA, GSM, LTE and plenty of others.

Each of these modes is shared within the community so that equipment can exchange information. Initially many of these modes were built around voice communication, but increasingly, even the basic mobile phone modes, are built around data. Today, even if you're talking on your phone, the actual information being exchanged using radio is of a digital nature.

Most of these modes are pretty static. That's not to say that they don't evolve, but the speed at which that happens is pretty sedate.

In contrast, a mode like Wi-Fi has seen the explosion of different versions. During the first 20 years there were about 19 different versions of Wi-Fi. You'll recognise them as 802.11a, b, g, j, y, n, p, ad, ac and plenty more.

I mention Wi-Fi to illustrate just how frustrating changing a mode is for the end-user. You buy a gadget, but it's not compatible with the particular Wi-Fi mode that the rest of your gear is using.

It's pretty much the only end-user facing mode that changes so often as to make it hard to keep up. As bad as that might be, there is coordination happening with standards bodies involved making it possible to purchase the latest Wi-Fi equipment from a multitude of manufacturers.

In amateur radio there are amateur specific modes, like RTTY, PSK31, even CW is a mode. And just like with Wi-Fi, they evolve. There's RTTY-45, RTTY-50 and RTTY-75 Wide and Narrow, when you might have thought that there was only one RTTY. The FLDIGI software supports 18 different Olivia modes out of the box which haven't changed for a decade or so.

The speed of the evolution of Olivia is slow. The speed of the evolution of RTTY is slower still, CW is not moving at all. At the other end new amateur modes are being developed daily.

The JT modes for example are by comparison evolving at breakneck speed, to the point where they aren't even available in the latest versions of the software, for example FSK441, introduced in 2001 vanished at some point, superseded by a different mode, MSK144. It's hard to say exactly when this happened, I searched through 15 different releases and couldn't come up with anything more definitive than the first mention of MSK144 in v1.7.0, apparently released in 2015.

My point is that in amateur radio terms there are modes that are not changing at all and modes that are changing so fast that research is being published after the mode has been depreciated. Mike, WB2FKO published his research "Meteor scatter communication with very short pings" comparing the two modes FSK441 and MSK144 in September 2020, it makes for interesting reading.

There are parallels between the introduction of computing and the process of archiving. The early 1980's saw a proliferation of hardware, software, books and processes that exploded into the community. With that came a phenomenon that lasted at least a decade, if not longer, where archives of these items don't exist because nobody thought to keep them. Floppy discs thrown out, books shredded, magazines discarded, knowledge lost.

It didn't just happen in the 1980's. Much of the information that landed man on the moon is lost. We cannot today build a Saturn V rocket with all the support systems needed to land on the moon from scratch, even if we wanted to. We have lost manufacturing processes, the ability to decode magnetic tapes and lost the people who did the work through retirement and death, not to mention company collapses and mergers.

Today we're in the middle of a golden age of radio modes. Each new mode with more features and performance. In reality this means that your radio that came with CW, AM, FM and SSB will continue to work, but if it came with a specialised mode like FSK441, you're likely to run out of friends to communicate with when the mode is depreciated in favour of something new.

In my opinion, Open Source software and hardware is vitally important in this fast moving field and if we're not careful we will repeat history and lose the knowledge and skill won through perseverance and determination due to lack of documentation or depreciation by a supplier.

When did you last document what you did? What will happen to that when you too become a silent key?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB