Foundations of Amateur Radio

When you start the process of getting your hobby off the ground, either for the first time, or after a hiatus, you might be left with the impression that the only way to "do amateur radio" is to have a shack, a place where you can set-up your gear, and connected to that gear using coax, one or more antennas. While that's a common scenario, it's not the only one at your disposal. We are after all in the game of communication and over the past few decades options have exploded.

Starting closest to the traditional radio, coax and antenna, is to consider indoor antennas. There's many to choose from. You can install one in the same room as your shack, or, you can build your antennas in the roof space, either way, invisible from the outside can sometimes be a requirement. Stealth is a topic all its own, and no doubt we'll get to that another time.

A word of caution. If you do have an indoor antenna and associated coax, consider your transmitter power levels, since it's likely that given the close proximity, you'll exceed emissions safety standards, or you'll cause harm to other electronic equipment in the building. QRP or low power is a good way to go if this is something you're considering.

If we step away from a traditional radio, coax, antenna configuration, you can build your shack in other ways too.

For example, you can use a local repeater which you might trigger from a local handheld radio. Often dismissed as being for local communications only, there are thousands of repeaters across the globe offering a variety of bands, frequencies and modes. Often you can access a local repeater that can be connected to a remote one using a bewildering array of technologies, some using the internet, some using traditional RF. You'll find repeaters on 10m, 6m, 2m, 70cm and 23cm.

There's nothing stopping you making your own repeater. You don't even need to go through the effort of making it completely standalone, for example, my Yaesu FT-857d has a detachable face-plate or head, connected to the main body by a short cable. There are plenty of other radios with a similar configuration.

Presumably designed for the installation in a vehicle, where the head needs to be near the driver and there's unlikely to be space for the body, you can run a longer cable from the head to the body and install it somewhere more convenient. In my case it was bolted underneath the removable floor into the boot next to the spare tyre.

There's several solutions that replace the connecting cable with an internet connection.

Now, that internet connection can be across the room, from inside your shack to your garage, or between your shack and a remote hill where you have permission to put up a bit of gear. In fact, the same type of setup can be used to connect to shared radios, and companies like Elecraft, Flex Radio and ICOM make specific remote heads that can operate remote radio equipment, marketed as RF decks, without needing to install and maintain computers at either end, but more often than not, this equipment is brand or model specific.

Which raises another option.

You can connect to remote equipment across the internet using your computer, which means that your shack might be a computer, a laptop, or a mobile phone and your gear might be in a different country.

Many radio clubs have discovered that their often extensive radio shack is virtually unused during the week, and have installed remote equipment to allow you as a member to connect, sometimes as part of your membership, sometimes with an extra fee, since there are costs associated with setting this up and keeping it running.

At some point you're going to discuss this with other amateurs and you're potentially going to hear someone tell you that this is not "real radio".

Considering over a century of radio evolution, from spark-gap through valves, transistors, integrated circuits and software defined radio, where exactly is the "real radio" line drawn?

Is using WSPR, RTTY, FT8, Hellschreiber, Olivia, SSTV, PSK31, Domino, MFSK and thousands of other digital modes "real radio"? If the answer to that is an emphatic "yes", then ask yourself, how do you actually use those modes?

The answer looks suspiciously like a computer running digital mode software, either connected to a physical radio in the same room, or connected to one across the internet.

In other words, with the proliferation of communication alternatives, amateur radio is evolving. No doubt it will evolve further.

So, today, a perfectly viable, and some might say, modern, amateur radio shack might not actually have any traditional RF based radio gear, though perhaps a hand-held might be something to consider when you next treat yourself, not because without it you're not a real amateur, but because it opens your world to other means of communication, something which I think is perhaps even more important than building the perfect shack.

In other words, you are not required to have a shack to be a radio amateur, it's just that it brings with it another dimension of engagement and activity. Speaking from personal experience, I miss my functional shack, but it's evolving, so there's that.

Next time I'll take a look at antennas, stealthy or otherwise.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

One of the potentially trickier aspects of putting together your shack is connecting the radio to the antenna. On the face of it, the challenge is limited to making sure that you have mating connectors on both ends, but when you actually start implementing this you'll run into several other considerations.

The very first one as I said is the connector. Every amateur I've ever spoken to goes through the same process. You pick a connector, typically the one that your radio comes with, then you adapt the connector on your coaxial cable to suit, then you'll get an SWR meter, a dummy load, some testing gear, a coax switch or two, perhaps another radio, or an amplifier and along the way you'll discover that you now have a growing collection of connectors to choose from, and that's just the connectors inside the shack.

After considering connectors, you'll start to contemplate the coax itself. You'll likely weigh price against signal loss, but there are other aspects to the selection of the right coax for the job.

For example, how do you get the coax actually into the shack?

One of the main challenges associated with solving that problem is surprisingly something that rarely affects our hobby, other than any human factors associated with the phenomenon of "weather".

Getting coax into a shack generally involves passing through a weather proof barrier of some sort. In doing so, you're likely to create a place where the weather can make its way into places it's not supposed to.

Water can and will travel along your coax. Hopefully on the outside of it, but if you're unlucky, on the inside too, likely destroying it along the way. At first glance you'll think that water only travels down with gravity and in an ideal world you'd be right, but as it happens, water will happily do other things like get blown by the wind, or condensate in temperature gradients, like those found near a hole you just created in your lovely weather proof barrier.

If your shack has existing openings, they're generally the easiest to appropriate, things like gaps in the eves, existing vent holes, between roof tiles or sheet iron, plenty of existing places where you can get from inside to outside a shack. Note that this is also the case if your shack is a trestle table tucked away in an office, like mine.

Before I continue, I'm about to raise some potential safety issues, but I'm not an occupational health and safety professional, so, do your own due diligence.

If you do need to go into your roof space, height aside, consider it a dangerous place. Make sure that there's someone to check on you and consider alternatives to climbing up there. Wearing a face mask and full body clothing is a very good idea. Often you'll find exposed wires, deteriorating or toxic insulation and other nasty things, conductivity of steel roof frames and pipes are also a hazard, so be extremely reluctant to venture there. Avoidance is preferable.

Working at heights 101: Don't .. that said, there may be no alternative.

You can lift corrugated iron sheets by undoing the roofing screws. If you do, make absolutely sure that you don't make a string of water inlet points when you put it all back together. In lifting a sheet, you can access the roof space and run your coax. Sometimes the gap between the corrugation and the rafters is sufficient to push the coax through, but if you live in a hot climate, make sure that it doesn't touch the sheeting, since coax is likely to distort, if not outright melt, if it's in direct contact with the iron sheet while the sun is belting down on it. Consider the temperature rating of your coax.

Similarly, terracotta roof tiles tend to have enough space to allow coax to enter the roof space. Be very careful, since they're often fragile and potentially irreplaceable. Look for openings like existing roof fittings, things like chimneys, vent pipes, roof ridges, etc. for simpler points of entry.

If you need to make a hole in your roof and seal it, there's special rubber grommets for this purpose. You cut a little opening in the grommet, too tight for the coax, then force it through. Seal to the roof with UV-stable silicone and you're good to go. Check them every so many years, they deteriorate. Speaking of silicone, if there's an existing hole that you're using, don't just seal it up, it might be there for a reason.

Windows often have vent holes or gaps that will fit some types of coax and there's inserts you can use to open a sliding window that will accommodate coax, but consider the security of that window before you commit. There's also special flat coax for running through a window frame or under a door, but check before you buy that they're suitable for the job.

Ladder line is also an option, it's much thinner, can travel longer distances, but its performance can be affected by corrugated iron and other conductors.

Rarely if ever does the initial acquisition of coaxial cable involve details like "bending radius", the smallest turn you can make with the coax without destroying its characteristics, since bending causes the insulation, the core and the shield to distort to some degree and with it, affect the RF passing through.

Whichever path your coax takes, consider that you can cut it short, but not long. If you really must know how long the coax is, use some string to run along the proposed path, but beware, the string has a bending radius that approaches zero, coax does not. Most coax will specify a bending radius for fixed and repeated bending. The fixed one is for a one time only bend and 65 mm is typical. Thinner coax tends to have a smaller bending radius, but that might affect the signal loss, or the budget, or both, so take that into account.

Cutting and joining also introduces points of failure, places of moisture ingress, thick spots that cannot be pulled through existing holes, and plenty of other hidden fun and games, in other words, don't be stingy, get it right, it might cost a few bob extra, but you'll have a happier time of it.

If you need to run your coax inside a wall, the tool you're looking for is called a "Cavity King", not of the embalming variety, though relevant if you happen to do something foolish like drill a hole through an existing power wire in your building, so don't start drilling holes where it suits without checking first. If you do, make sure that you drill on an angle facing upwards from the outside and find a place where the coax itself doesn't get wet on the way in.

Speaking of holes. Terminate the coax after you installed it, not before. You can use electrical tape to attach a rope to pull the coax along its route without damaging the coax. Before you close up the roof and pack everything away attach the connectors to the coax and properly test it. If it fails your tests, it's easier to run it again with everything in place than it is to start from scratch, ask me how I know.

In my shack, I have a run of RG-214 that goes to my VHF/UHF vertical, I also have a run of quad shield RG-6 that goes to my HF antenna. If you're familiar with coax indicators, you'll know that RG-6 is actually 75 Ohm, not 50 Ohm. Given that it's made from aluminium, not copper, it's also an absolute turd to solder. What it does have going for it is that it's absurdly cheap, since its used in satellite dish installations across the planet. It also very handily can be terminated with F-type compression connectors, which in the 25 years I've used them, I've yet to see fail.

The F-type connector can accommodate a handy BNC adaptor, bringing us back into the realm of amateur radio.

My coax goes under the corrugated iron of my roof through the plasterboard of my office wall, hidden away in a cupboard, snakes under the cupboard door, along the wall to the termination coax switch that is in turn connected to my radio, more on that another time.

The two coax runs are tied together, to ensure that they don't coil weirdly, don't pose a trip hazard and it's connected to various fixed points along its path.

None of it is permanent, other than the hole in the plasterboard, inside a cupboard, behind a faceplate. So, after removing the coax, a blanking plate brings everything back to invisible if that's ever required.

What happens outside is a whole different story and what it attaches to, yet another. The point is that from the place of picking the right connector, you likely discovered that routing coax is potentially a bigger challenge than you might have considered at first.

There are other options.

What issues affect the ingress of coax at your shack?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

When you start on the journey of putting together a shack, in whatever form that eventually takes, you'll need to figure out how much space is required. Of course, no matter what you choose, it's never enough, but you have to start somewhere. Ultimately a shack is a work in progress.

As an aside, I'm using the word "shack", but that is really an amateur concept, so we're not necessarily talking about a plot of land with a wooden lean-to cobbled together from bits of wood collected from your beachcomber days. Not that it can't be that, but it doesn't have to be.

As I've said, my "shack" is a wooden trestle table, I know shacks that are a dedicated room in a house, a converted garage, a garden shed, a warehouse office, a radio station, an out building, several scout halls, demountables, a converted passenger bus and plenty more. In this context, in referring to "shack", I mean, "the place where my radio lives when I get on-air to make noise", but "shack" runs off the tongue a little easier.

Budget aside, in order to attempt to quantify your space requirements, you need to figure out what you're going to do with it.

This perhaps sounds a little ludicrous, since the answer is "amateur radio" .. duh .. obviously.

Okay, so, here's some questions. Does amateur radio for you mean any of the following: operating the local repeater, HF radio, solo or with visitors, listening to multiple stations, operating multiple bands simultaneously, computers, Morse code, contesting, soldering, building, experimentation and plenty more.

While we're at it, if you're into soldering, is that with valves, discrete components, or integrated circuits, and what levels of existing bits and pieces do you have? I'm asking because the racks of jars, component trays and drawers I've seen over the past fifteen years often rival the actual shack for size.

In other words, when you're thinking about .. what .. you want to do, be specific.

For me, amateur radio is more about computers and less about soldering irons, that's not to say that I don't own a soldering iron, just that its use is incidental, rather than fundamental, computers, keyboards and monitors on the other hand, for me, are part and parcel of my amateur radio experience.

Truth be told, if I could, I'd try to eliminate all the analogue radios from my shack and replace them with a single box capable of wide band operation across the amateur bands that I could control with a computer. I realise that this is not a universal picture of what amateur radio means, but it's what it means for me because it represents the ultimate level of flexibility.

That said, I love my FT-857d. I have several other radios that I loan out from time-to-time to new amateurs while they find their feet. I love to experiment with those as well, so my shack needs space for temporary set-ups.

While I enjoy chewing the fat over a cup of coffee, I rarely get on-air and make noise with anyone else. That's not because I don't appreciate it, but because I've yet to discover an effective way of filtering interference, a topic for another day.

Even if you're not a computer nerd like me, there's a high probability that a shack today includes a computer of some description, for record keeping, propagation forecasts, logging, and digital modes. So it's a good idea to imagine yourself actually doing your planned activities and speculating what kinds of things you'll need. Like, where do you put your cup of coffee, your keyboard and your Morse key?

While we're discussing putting things down. Think about the ability to actually use these things, not just where they live. It's no fun balancing a keyboard and trying to reach over the top to change the operating frequency, or having to strain your neck to look at the logging screen when you've made that elusive contact, so think about the ergonomics of what you're planning.

Right now I have a wire shelving unit sitting on my desk. It's 80 cm tall, 90 cm wide and 30 cm deep. The two shelves are adjustable in height. Currently one is at the highest point, the other has enough space to fit a base-station radio underneath it, about 13 cm from the lowest point. It's not ideal, since it means that the keyboard is in front of it.

During the previous iteration, of which there have been several, my monitors were in front of this and the keyboard was an external one connected to a laptop to the right of the screen, allowing me to have two screens to display information. The idea was that I'd use the computer to control the transceivers using a protocol called CAT. This never happened, so operating was awkward to say the least and as a result, hardly used. Instead the FT-857d sat on top of the bottom shelf, using a sound card to operate on digital modes. A slightly better operating angle, were it not for the monitor that hid it from view. As I said, not ideal.

I'm mentioning all this to give you a picture of at least one other shack but in my experience, nothing beats going out to see what others have gotten up to. Of course, you can visit shacks online with the proliferation of photographs proud amateurs have shared, but there's a difference between looking at a photo and walking around someone's physical shack, so keep that in mind.

Other space considerations are rarely, if ever, talked about. What space is there left for you to make changes to your shack? You might think that your shack won't change once you've built it. Here's a change, disconnecting the antenna in case of a thunderstorm, here's another, plugging in a CAT cable, setting up an external speaker, or even buying a new radio, you name it, the shack is never done.

So, think about the idea of being able to walk behind the radio. If you think that's silly, put the shack on wheels. You'll thank me later.

While you're walking behind your equipment, consider coax routing, a topic of its own, but being mindful of the need to actually get the coax from where it enters to your gear and how it relates to any electricity routing required to actually power your gear.

One other consideration in relation to space is your chair. How much space does it need? Can you adjust it, is it on casters, or a wooden dining chair?

Again, this can all be as simple as a dining table, or it can be something more substantial. In my experience, a happier outcome is achieved if you spend some quality time thinking about some of the questions I've proposed.

As you might have guessed, there's plenty more to explore.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Recently it occurred to me that I haven't been using HF in my shack for much longer than I'd care to admit. Over the years I've spoken about my shack and how it's set-up, more on that shortly. I effectively went off-air when I decommissioned the computer that was running tools like "fldigi" and "WSJT-X". Mainly because it was too slow, for example, taking a good minute to launch a copy of Firefox.

After that I repurposed my HF antenna for use with my ultra low power WSPR beacon experiments and essentially ceased being a functional HF station.

There's other forces at work, which I'll get to, but before I do, in discussion with a fellow amateur we discovered that my desire to get back on-air on HF is essentially the same journey that a new amateur might make and the idea was hatched to document the process and share it with you.

In the past you've heard me say that the answer to most questions associated with amateur radio is: "it depends".

As a new, or returning amateur, this might not be very helpful if you don't know what it depends on, so, I'm going to attempt to describe the process of determining how to get to the answers required to make a station.

Now, before I start I'd like to talk about money. I'm raising this upfront because your access to a budget determines many of the choices that are open to you. You could interpret that to mean that you need money and while that helps, it's not universally true, in fact I'd go so far as to say that you could get on-air and make noise using nothing more than a mobile phone and an internet connection, which truth be told is pretty much the minimum requirement to enjoy my thoughts, so perhaps that's the base requirement.

That said, even if you don't have access to that, there's other options that we'll no doubt explore together, so keep that in mind.

I think that the very first thing to consider is what you think of when you hear the term "amateur radio". I've said it before and I'll say it again. Amateur Radio is a great many things to different people. For some it means a hand-held radio and chatting with mates on the local repeater, for others it means a full blown HF contest station with multiple antennas and radios, with integrated logging in a dedicated building. For others it means logging into a remote WebSDR and listening to the bands, decoding interesting signals, and license permitting, transmitting remotely across the internet.

In other words, the "amateur radio" experience is unique to you. What you get from it is dependent on you and nobody else. As an aside, that's also true for licensing.

If you have a "beginners" license, like my Foundation license, then it's entirely up to you to decide if and when you add extra privileges. "Foundations of Amateur Radio", well, its predecessor, "What use is an F-call?" emerged specifically in response to amateurs around me who continued to, let's be kind and call it "encourage" me to "upgrade" to a "real" license. Fifteen years on, I'm still a Foundation "beginner" and thus far I have yet to run out of things to do or talk about, so keep that in mind.

I think that covers the disclaimers, no doubt more will occur to me as we continue on this journey.

For the first decade or so of having a license, most of my activity was done in my car, a mobile shack of sorts. I didn't have access to a space where I could set-up a radio without running the risk of someone tripping over coax, or a landlord complaining within an hour of me erecting a temporary vertical. In other words, my mobile shack was born from necessity. It was helpful in exploring the limitless variation of operating positions, as-in locations and their impact on propagation, antenna performance, local interference, and plenty of other lessons.

So, even if you don't have a permanent space to operate, there's plenty of amateur radio to go round.

When I finally moved to a place where I had space, I started the process of putting together my shack. Initially it was pretty much integrated with my home-office. This sort of worked, but both the office and the shack suffered from this combination, so my first observation is that, in my experience, setting aside a dedicated space for a shack is a good idea.

Now, right now, as I am telling you that, to the bottom right of my computer screen is the head of my Yaesu FT-857d, connected to a "RemoteRig", a pair of devices that replace the serial cable between the head and the radio with a network connection.

The RemoteRig is connected to a WiFi router, which runs a dedicated wireless connection across the room to the WiFi router that's connected to the radio, sitting on what's left of my shack. It's how I run the weekly F-troop net. It's sitting there because I need to be able to access my computer to make log entries and track who's next in the round-robin discussion, and as I said, I've decommissioned my shack computer.

Which brings me to the second point.

Setting up a shack doesn't happen in isolation. You're likely to have existing infrastructure of some sort. It might be a fixed location for power points, it might be a previously drilled hole for incoming coax, it might be a bolted bench, whatever it is, it's something that you need to take into account.

It's also something that you need to consider in terms of feasibility. Just because something is the way it is today, doesn't mean that it has to stay the same for the next decade. I've previously discussed the evolution of my shack, based on a 35 year old wooden IKEA trestle table, all of 1.2 square meters, complete with holes from taking it around Australia for several years in the back of a van. It's currently got a wire mesh shelving unit on top and a pegboard strapped to the back. The legs are adorned with power boards and as I said, the head of my radio is on the other side of the room.

This all to say that building a shack doesn't happen in isolation. The local environment will determine what's possible and what's not. I'm not here to tell you what to do, I'm here to help you figure out what a shack looks like in your environment.

Note that I've not talked in any way about what equipment to get, what, if any, antenna to install or what else is required. These are all part of the "it depends" and I'll talk about that soon.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Let's start with an observation, I'm a geek, have been all my life. Since my early teenage years that evolved as a predilection for computing. As you might already know, I became a radio amateur to essentially get away from computing. The reality turned out to be something else entirely.

I discovered that the time of combining radio and computing had already begun when I joined the community. Like the evolution from spark-gap, through valves, transistors and integrated circuits, radio has come to encompass software, least of which through SDR, or Software Defined Radio.

Why least?

Over the years I've attempted to explain some of my fascination and wonder with software, but one aspect I've been unable to convey succinctly is the scope of software. I'm not talking about the fact that you find software inside your microwave oven, your car, your bathroom scales, but that hints at what underlies the phenomenon.

If you're not familiar with spreadsheets, imagine a blank piece of paper with a grid drawn on it. Inside each square, or cell, you can put anything you want, a number, a label, a picture, a web address, a formula, a colour, borders, you name it. Your imagination is pretty much the only limiting factor.

Now, here's where it gets fun.

Once you have filled in the first cell, the next one follows. What this means is that once you've made the first decision, the next one becomes a little easier. Every time you make a decision, the number of options you have open to you become less and less, or to use another word, constrained.

So what, you ask?

Well, unlike a sheet of paper with a grid, a spreadsheet allows you to add rows and columns, at any point in your document. Doing that reduces the constraints, you have more options open to you. You can also add sheets, or even start a completely separate document.

In other words, you have a playground open to you that is infinitely flexible.

Writing software is like that, with bells on.

Now, I'm not going to tell you to start learning how to write software, though truth be told, there's lots of things to like, and admittedly, frustration, that comes with doing so.

Let's talk about that frustration.

Once you make the first decision, the next one is more constrained. So, if you start with a blank sheet, you have infinite possibilities. Writing software is exactly like that. Here's the frustration. What's the first thing you should decide, because once you do, your options become reduced.

So .. Bald Yak, if you're unfamiliar, the Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio.

That little phrase hides a lot of complexity, but it already contains some constraints. GNU Radio is one, distributed is another and so-on.

Let me share with you what my semi-blank piece of paper looks like.

I've been quietly working on an idea to use my Pluto SDR to listen to amateur radio repeaters. Not just one, all of them, across 2m and 70cm. I came up with this idea as a real-life project that I'd like to implement with whatever Bald Yak is, or becomes. It has all the bits I care about right now, multiple frequencies, something that goes well and truly beyond what my Yaesu FT-857d can do, it taxes my skill set, it gives me something to make tangible and it hopefully moves the needle on the Bald Yak project.

So, here's some variables to consider.

The Pluto SDR has a computer on-board. There are reports that people have run GNU Radio programs on the Pluto itself. This is attractive since the amount of data involved with monitoring 2m and 70cm simultaneously is likely to exceed that of the USB port on the device.

However, what I don't know is how much actual computing resources doing this will take to achieve and if a Pluto could actually do this.

To give you an example. Imagine a massive fire-hose of data coming into my software and then processing that. Between memory and CPU constraints, I can't just decode the stream for each repeater, likely duplicating a whole bunch of calculations.

While that consideration is on the table, decoding a dozen narrowband FM streams implies a dozen copies of the FM decoder software. Ideally this would be one actual piece of software, used a dozen times, rather than a dozen separate copies that will individually be maintained if something changes. For example, once I've built this, I might realise that I need to implement FM de-emphasis, a technique implemented in FM broadcasting to, among other reasons, manage artefacts associated with transmitting a signal over FM, perhaps a topic for another day.

When you write software you do not want to have copies of the same software in multiple places. To use a spreadsheet equivalent, it's like putting a Tax rate in multiple places across your document, rather than storing it in a cell and referring to it in other formulas. That way, you can change it once and all the calculations will automatically be correct. Same deal with writing software, especially if that software is intended to be used for more than a once off.

While that's going on, let me introduce another variable. I have a Pluto SDR, but the whole point of Bald Yak is that I cannot assume that you have one. It's one of the reasons I chose GNU Radio as the basis of this project.

While it's unreasonable to expect that a traditional amateur radio transceiver can decode more than one repeater, the same system could potentially be used to decode multiple Morse code signals, something that should be more than possible, essentially replacing the FM decoder with a Morse decoder.

Which brings up an example of another variable.

How wide do you make the channels? How do you define them? How do you make it possible to modify these without having to update the software, so an end-user can modify something on their screen and see the result?

At this point you might notice a couple of things.

I have not got any answers, I also don't have all the questions. It's unlikely I'll ever have all the questions, let alone answers, since the nature of this software thing is flexibility.

Now, to bring this in full circle, when I say that SDR, or Software Defined Radio isn't just the box that you connect to an antenna, it's the possibilities that this brings, the sheer volume of options that this opens you up to.

Now it's your turn. What questions does this bring for you? What sense of wonder can you bring to the table and what opportunities does this expose you to?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The first step in solving any problem is recognising that there is one. In my case the name of that problem is "logging". Specifically the storage and collection of my amateur radio contact logs.

Just to be clear, the actual process of logging is fraught .. what do you log, as in, which pieces of information are germane to the purpose of logging, do you log your own callsign, or do you only collect that once per session, do you log in UTC, or in local time, if you're logging in local time, do you record where you're logging, do you record what power level, which antenna, what radio, the battery voltage, you get the idea.

Then there's .. when do you log? Do you log each and every session on-air, weekly nets, chat sessions on the local repeater, do you log the time when you establish the contact, once you've deciphered their callsign, or once the contact ends, and if you never wear a watch, how do you know what time it is?

What do you log with? Is it using pen and paper, pencil and paper, on a sheet of A4, or A5, in a binder, in a scrapbook, in an exercise book, in a journal, a diary, on ruled, grid or on plain paper, or do you log with a computer and if you do that, using which of the seven gazillion logging packages that are available to you?

I'm not talking about any of those things, though I suppose you could argue that I'm addressing one of the gazillion options, but stick with me.

I have, sitting on my desk, fourteen different logbooks. That's not unreasonable, almost one for each year that I've been licensed. Except that these books are not in any way consistent, they're essentially bound pieces of scrap paper with log entries scribbled in the available space, sometimes I've reversed a spiral notebook, just so I can avoid the spiral with my writing hand, sometimes it's oriented in landscape, other times in portrait. Some are smaller than A5, others are foolscap and intended for accounting purposes.

Next to that pile are too many empty logbooks, intended for future use. Why so many, you ask? Well it goes like this. You go to the office supply store to look for a suitable logbook. You buy it and try it. You use it for a bit and decide that you either love or hate it. If you hate it, you go back to the store to try and find another one. If you love it, your problem becomes finding an identical logbook. In a fit of inspiration, I loved the grid layout of my tiny spiral notebooks, and decided that this was the one for me, but they're no longer available, so instead I bought twenty A4 7mm grid exercise books with a soft cover, which I hate, and that was after trying to get a third Account Book Journal with a hard cover. There's also several A5 spiral bound books, but they're too chunky for portable operation and their spiral is annoying for logging.

There's also various empty ring binders and paper ready for logging in the garage. Who knew that there are apparently multiple disconnected universes where so-called universal loose-leaf hole punched paper doesn't fit ring binders with more than two rings, I suppose that's like different implementations of the same version of ADIF, but I'll admit that I'm bitter and have digressed well off topic. I will say this, stationery and I clearly have an unhealed relationship.

That's not the half of it.

My computer has at least 208 ADIF and Cabrillo files on it. I say "at least", since that's the ones I found when looking for ADI, ADIF and CAB files. Removing identical files, nets me 171 text files which I'm pretty sure are all log files, 50-thousand lines, but that's with some having a one line per contact and others having a dozen, depending on which software wrote the file.

It's going to take a moment, since those 208 files are scattered among 74 different directories. Then there's the files that "wsjt-x" and "fldigi" create, but right now I'm not sure what the extensions for those are, I think one is called "all.txt", and looking inside, it helpfully does not have a year in the logged data, so that's fun. My computer also has logs in "cqrlog", "xlog" and "VKCL", probably others.

Then there's the logs I have online. The log for F-troop is a single spreadsheet, it has nearly 10,000 entries. I know that there's other files online and likely in other places like the various clubs I've operated at .. fortunately or not, most of those were done with the club callsign, so I'm calling those out of scope, at least for now.

Then there's the entries in LoTW, Clublog, eQSL, probably QRZ and likely more.

It all started out so innocently. I made my first contact in 2011 and forgot to log it. Since then I've been extolling the virtues of making sure that everyone around me logs their first contact.

Meanwhile I've been pulling my hair out trying to make sense of the fragmented disaster that is represented by logging in amateur radio. I'll take responsibility for my own mess, but I have to point the finger at my predecessors who still cannot agree on what to log, how to log and how to store or convert it, despite a century of logging.

It's not for the want of trying. It's that the nature of logging in this hobby is less than consistent, to say the least. Each contest wants their log in some special format, logging tools pick their own format that's incompatible with that of another tool, if you're lucky that incompatibility is obvious, but more likely than not it's subtle.

Among all those sources of log entries that I've mentioned are undoubtedly going to be duplicate contacts. There's going to be incorrect transcriptions, inaccurate record keeping, wrong times, missing years and all the other things that come to mind when you describe a data entry problem.

Fortunately I have some experience with data entry.

It was the transcribing of a recent POTA, or Parks On The Air, log that triggered an insight for me. Faced with the reality of entering contacts into something electronic, based on a bound notebook with log entries scribbled all over it, basically a pretty piece of scrap paper, I needed to solve a specific problem. Namely, the fact that I was entering this data for another amateur, who would be uploading it into the relevant POTA system. I had no idea what the field requirements were, didn't know where they'd be uploaded to, nor what format they needed, so I improvised, figuring that getting both the logged and inferred data into some table would be a good start, so I used a spreadsheet.

After completing the task, I had my epiphany.

What if I logged ALL my contacts in a spreadsheet?

I can sort it by whichever column I want, I can have as many columns as I need, a squillion rows if I make that many contacts, I can convert it to whatever format the next contest manager desires and I can back it up like any other spreadsheet. Better still, it's software agnostic. If I suddenly discover the next best logging tool since toasted sliced bread with creamed honey, I can convert my sheet into something that's required. Better yet, I can extract the data from that tool and put it back into the spreadsheet after discovering the author has a propensity of making random changes that are incompatible with my worldview.

So, spreadsheet.

Oh, yeah, I won't be using Excel, it has a, let's call it, nasty habit of converting anything that remotely resembles a date into one, even when you don't want it to. Clippy lives on .. apparently.

I'll likely photograph each page and to keep track of which logs I've entered, I'll put a coloured dot on a page when I've entered it into my spreadsheet. Once a logbook is entered, I'll mark it in some way too. Then I'll have to massage the existing electronic data. I can't wait.

How have you solved your contact logging problem?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The other day I was stuck in traffic behind a vehicle proudly proclaiming that it was "electric". I'd seen the model before, just never connected it with being available as an EV. I wondered how many other cars on the road turned out to have added an "electric" option to their line-up and how that evolution had just quietly, inexorably occurred.

It started me thinking about the nature of the driving experience and what it would be like for someone who has never seen a petrol, or other fossil fuel burning vehicle, and what driver education might do to incorporate that.

In my teens I first sat on a hotted up moped belonging to a friend, I was old enough to be legal, whilst he wasn't, so I got to ride his bike to school with him on the back, win-win for both. Later on, I learned to drive a car with a manual gearbox and as interest took me, I learned to drive a double clutch gearbox and got my heavy rigid truck license. I also learned to fly a plane, but that's besides the point.

Stuck in rush-hour traffic, such as it is in Perth, it made me think about amateur radio licensing and education.

Specifically, how do we incorporate change? When I was first licensed, my education included consideration for analogue television interference, including pictures of different screen patterns, their causes and remedies.

Three years after I got licensed, almost to the day, the last analogue television transmitter in Australia was switched off on 10 December 2013, 57 years after the first transmissions started.

While I retain little, if any, of the now, let's call it, esoteric information associated with that, it made me consider a wider picture in relation to the process of amateur radio education.

New amateurs today are unlikely to be asked about analogue television interference, let alone be subjected to questions in their exam. Fair enough, information changes, evolves, becomes superseded or expires, and as a side-effect, I have some brain cells dedicated to analogue television, PAL, 625 lines total, 576 visible, horizontal and vertical synchronisation, white noise, you get the idea. As an aside, 78 on a turntable indicates a speed reserved for shellac records until the 1950s, seeing that we're dropping arcane knowledge. Oh, means NOP on a 6502, in case you're wondering.

Although I don't have a specific list of what is currently being taught .. more on that in a moment .. I daresay that newly minted amateurs have a curriculum that has evolved with technology and legal requirements over the past 15 years.

A tangible example is the fact that the Foundation Class in Australia is now permitted to use digital modes, something that changed after I was licensed, when on 21 September 2019, the regulator amended the Amateur License Conditions Determination, known locally as the LCD, with immediate effect.

The point being that over time things change and education changes with it.

This is all as expected.

Here's my question.

What about the rest of the community? What happens to someone who has been licensed for a decade, a generation, or more?

Are they expected to gain these skills by osmosis or self-education?

Should this process be dictated by the regulator, or should this be a community effort to bring everyone into the same decade?

Should we revise how we educate our amateurs and make the education skill-set technology agnostic, should we be less prescriptive with the license, or should it achieve something else?

One example in this space is an initiative called the Ham Challenge, which you can discover at hamchallenge.org. In case it sounds vaguely familiar, I've talked about this before. It's a list of 52 activities that you can take on to broaden your horizons and explore different aspects of our hobby. In its first year, I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

Is this the kind of self-training that we might encourage, or is there another way to achieve this? Is this something that occurs elsewhere in society and if so, how has that been addressed? I know for example in ICT there are endless certification courses, which I have to confess are in my professional opinion absolutely counterproductive, serving only to entrench vendor lock-in, not something that I think benefits the amateur community.

I mentioned curriculum a moment ago. Another approach is to attend a licensing course and participate as part of your own self-education. Of course this will require cooperation from the educators, and we'd need to come up with some idea of how this might be useful. Is this something that benefits from attendance every five years, every decade, more, less? As a bonus side-effect, it will introduce new amateurs to old ones, and vice versa, perhaps facilitating a new resurgence of Elmering, or mentorship, that previously has been the hallmark of our community.

Over the decade and a half or so that I've been licensed and writing weekly articles about the hobby and our community, I've made a conscious effort to keep up to date, to learn new skills, to share what I've learnt, to actively explore what I need to learn more about and to share that journey with you.

I realise that this is not a universal experience. For some their amateur license sits in a drawer gathering dust together with their first aid certificate and their first runner-up prize for something that for a minute and a half caught their attention years ago.

For most of us the reality lies somewhere in between. For many, the amateur experience is one of playing on air and getting delight from the doing and participating.

There are those who go out and become teachers, those who sit on boards, those who run clubs and those who get on the local repeater once a week. It takes all of us to make this community and my thoughts are not intended to stop that enjoyment and experience.

I'm trying to discover how we build a resilient community, one that is sustainable in a world of continuous and rapid change.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Recently I spent some quality time digging into the origins of a word in common use. In doing so, I contacted the Postal Museum in the United Kingdom and received a lovely reply that included a photo of a document in their archive.

The document, a Post Office Circular from Friday, December 30, 1904, number 1641, introduces a new service offered by the Post Office.

Let me read to you what it says, and I quote:

"Telegrams to and from Ships by Wireless Telegraphy.

"(To be noted at Telegraph Offices only.)

"With the present Circular is enclosed a list showing the wireless telegraph stations in the United Kingdom worked on the Marconi Company's system, and the hours up to which telegrams can be received at those stations for transmission by wireless telegraphy to certain ships fitted with Marconi apparatus. By another notice in this Circular, Postmasters and others concerned are requested to enter the names of the stations in the Code Book with the necessary particulars. Ships will be issued for insertion in the Post Office Guide.

"On and from the 1st January, 1905, Telegrams may be accepted from the public on the following conditions:-

"Subject to the Inland Regulations with regard to counting, the charge, which must be prepaid in the usual way by means of stamps, will be at the rate of 6 1/2d. [six-and-a-half pence] a word, with a minimum of 6s. 6d. [six-and-a-half shillings] per telegram.

"The name of the wireless station will in each case pass as one word in the address.

"The word 'Radio,' which is not charged for, should be telegraphed in the Service Instructions."

When I read that, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The introduction of a Wireless Telegram service, under the service heading of "Radio", with a photo of the actual document that introduced it into the world.

I also learned that there's a dozen pennies in a shilling and over the years before decimalisation in 1971, the composition of coins changed, which made converting this into today's money interesting. As an aside, the Royal Society has a wonderful article: "The science of money: Isaac Newton's mastering of the Mint"

Back to radio, this is 1904 bleeding edge technology and it's priced accordingly. The starting price for a radio telegram on new years day 1905: six bob and six; or three florin and sixpence; or a crown, a bob and a tanner; is worth just over 34 Great British Pounds today, that's just on 45 US Dollars, or nearly 69 Australian Dollars. That's the minimum price.

The price per word, sixpence and halfpenny [sixpence hayp-ny] is just over 2 Great British Pounds today, nearly 4 US Dollars or almost 6 Australian Dollars.

Compare that to the price of SMS, which started at about 21 cents here in Australia, today it's about 3 cents per message of 160 characters.

This seems like a lucrative business to be in, but I digress, again.

From my current, and ongoing research, it appears that until this point, the early 1900's, the word "radio" was always accompanied by another word, for example in this context, "radio telegraphy", another combination of the day is "radio active", as well as "radio tellurium", which today we know as polonium.

Moving on, the response I received from the Postal Museum included other gems, including a reference to the "1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act", from the 15th of August, 1904, where I found something fascinating, from Section 2 paragraph 1:

"Where the applicant for a licence proves to the satisfaction of the Postmaster-General that the sole object of obtaining the license is to enable him to conduct experiments in wireless telegraphy, a license for that purpose shall be granted, subject to such special terms, conditions and restrictions as the Postmaster-General may think proper, but shall not be subject to any rent or royalty."

I think that's the birth of amateur radio licensing in the United Kingdom, right there.

As an aside, because I cannot help myself, the definition for the expression "wireless telegraphy", is pretty interesting too, reminding me of a quote, variations going back to at least 1866, incorrectly attributed to Einstein that goes something like this:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, and they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

Seems that the drafters of the "1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act" had the same thing in mind when they wrote:

"The expression 'wireless telegraphy' means any system of communication by telegraph as defined in the Telegraph Acts, 1863 to 1904, without the aid of any wire connecting the points from and at which the messages or other communications are sent and received"

Now, as I said, I'm still working on this, because the word "radio" as a concept had to have been conceived before the Post Office Circular was written, printed and published. It might transpire that this was the brainchild of a single individual, or it might be that this was a term whose time had arrived, or this might not be the first occurrence of the word "radio" as a concept.

Today we think nothing of it when we use it to turn on the radio, listen to, or talk on the radio, radio for help, break radio silence, and plenty of other uses of this now ubiquitous word.

Thanks again to the Postal Museum for finding and photographing the Post Office Circular for the 30th of December 1904, which at this stage appears to be the first occurrence of the word "radio" on its own, and for referring me to the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy act which appears to be the birth of "amateur radio" in the United Kingdom.

You can find both documents on my project site at vk6flab.com.

I should also mention the brave individuals who took the time to share with me how to refer to Old British Money, any mistakes are all mine.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

If you use a word often enough it starts to lose its meaning. The other day, during breakfast, well, coffee, whilst playing one of our start-the-day with a smile word games, the word "RADIO" turned up. I grinned and pointed out that this was my favourite word, to which my partner mentioned that in Italian, it's referred to as "La Radio", which made us both wonder where it actually came from, did the Italian language import the word, or export it, given that Guglielmo Marconi was Italian?

A quick search advised us that it came from Latin, radius, meaning "spoke of a wheel", "beam of light" or "ray".

Fully enlightened we finished our coffee and got on with our day .. except I couldn't stop thinking about this.

Having recently spent some quality time looking into the history of the RF Circulator, I figured searching the patent records might be a solid way to get some handle on where this word "radio" came from.

Initially Google Patent search unearths the oldest as being from 1996, not very helpful. Adding 1900 as the end date filter turns up a radio cabinet patent with a filing date of 1833, except that it was published and granted in 1931, which is confirmed by the patent itself.

This level of corruption in the data affects at least a dozen patents, but I daresay that there's plenty more like that.

1857 turns up a patent with the word "broadcasting", in the context of "broadcasting guano", so, nothing much has changed in nearly 170 years, but I digress.

Adding quotes to the search term unearths a patent from 1861, apparently iron roads, locomotives, large slopes and small radio curves relates to the other meaning of the word radius, in Spanish.

1863 gives us ruffle stitching, "made upon the radio", but the patent is so corrupt that it's pretty much unreadable.

1871 unearths an electromagnetic engine, but the text has so much gibberish that I suspect that the word "radio" is a happy accident.

1873 shows us a "Wireless signalling system", bingo, the patent shows us transmitter and receiver circuits, antennas, messages and frequencies and a whole bunch of relevant radio information, except that the date on the patent itself is 1919.

And you wonder why people argue about who invented what when?

I'll spare you the gas apparatus, petrol lamps with cigar cutter, running gear for vehicles and bounce to 1897, "Method of and apparatus for converting x-rays into light for photographic purposes", the first occurrence of "radio", in the form of "radiograph", complete with pictures of the bones of a hand drawn meticulously from presumably an x-ray.

I confess I'm not convinced.

Using the United States Patent and Trademark Office search for the word radio gives you 54,688 pages with 2.7 million records, ordered in reverse chronological order with no way to skip to the last page.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation finds the same Spanish iron paths patents, but unearths "A Differential Arrangement for Radio Controlled Race Cars" from 1900, but inside we discover it's really from 1979.

Seems this level of corruption is endemic in the patent field, wonder who's benefiting from this misinformation?

Meanwhile, still looking, I discovered the Oxford English Dictionary, which claims that the earliest known use of the word "radio" is in the 1900's, but the earliest evidence is from 1907 in a writing by "L. De Forest", but you are granted the privilege of paying them to actually see that evidence .. really?

On 18 July 1907, Lee de Forest, made the first ship-to-shore transmissions by radiotelephone, which adds some credence to the claim, but I have to tell you, I'm not particularly convinced.

Taking a different approach, starting at Guglielmo Marconi, his first efforts in 1894 showed the wireless activation of a bell on the other side of the room. Six months later he managed to cross 3 kilometres realising that this could become capable of longer distances. The Italian Ministry of Post and Telegraphs didn't respond to his application for funding, so in 1896, at the age of 21, moving to Great Britain, he arrived in Dover where the customs officer opened his case to find various apparatus, which were destroyed because they could be a bomb.

Lodging a patent "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor", was the first patent for a communication system on radio waves. It was granted a year later.

One problem.

It doesn't have the word "radio" in it, instead it talks about "a Hertz radiator", so close.

So, we've narrowed it down to somewhere between 1896 and 1907, that's an 11 year window.

Some observations.

De Forest founded a company called "the Radio Telephone And Telegraph Company". It's unclear exactly when this happened, it collapsed in 1909 and was founded after disagreement with management of his previous company, apparently on 28 November 1906.

A quick aside, apparently in 1881, Alexander Graham Bell used the word radiophone for the first time, which he used to refer to a system that used light to transmit wirelessly, he also referred to it as a photophone.

You could argue that because light and radio are the same thing, this is the first legitimate use of the word "radio" in the context of communication, but I'm not buying it.

I'll leave you with the discovery that on 30 December 1904, the British Post Office published a "Post Office Circular" with the instructions to use the word "Radio" in the service instructions, think of it as the metadata associated with a telegram. This information has been repeated often without evidence.

If you're keen, the Postal Museum is located in Phoenix Place, London. I've contacted them to see if that particular Circular is in their possession.

Amazingly the "Post Office Circulars" have been digitised between 1666 and 1899. So close, but no cigar, that said, I looked for the elusive Volume 7 of the set to see if there were any straggling references to "radio", but couldn't confirm this.

The Postal Museum Catalogue returns plenty of early references to radio, but it's hard to tell what's real and what's written after the fact. Anyone know of any research grants that will allow me to dig into this on-site, feel free to get in touch, oh, a bed would be good too .. I think this might take a while.

At the moment, the best I have is an uncorroborated "30 December 1904" for the origin of the word "Radio", in English, in other words, it was imported into Italian. No sign of Marconi, Bell, or De Forest.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Recently I explored the use of a radio device aptly described by a fellow Aussie Electronics Engineer, "ozeng", as "Absolute witchcraft." .. I'm talking about an "RF circulator", one of which is sitting quietly on my desk, roughly 60 mm square, 30 mm thick, weighing in at just under half a kilogram, unexpectedly with a 200 year history.

Let the spelunking commence ..

The moment you start reading the "Circulator" Wikipedia page, you'll see this sentence: "Microwave circulators rely on the anisotropic and non-reciprocal properties of magnetised microwave ferrite material.", with a helpful reference to "Modern Ferrites, Volume 2: Emerging Technologies and Applications", a 416 page reference that promises to dig into the nitty-gritty, showing 55 hits for the word "circulator".

Anisotropic you ask? It's the property that describes velvet, rub it one way, it's smooth, rub it the other way and the hair stands up on the back of your neck. Wood is another example, easier to split along the grain than across it.

While we're at it, reciprocity in physics is the principle that you can swap the input and output of a linear system and get the same result.

If you know me at all, it should come as no surprise that I went looking for an inventor. There's over twelve-thousand patents referring to a "circulator", including more than a handful relating to Nuclear reactors. In 1960, a prolific Jessie L Butler came up with patent US3255450A, "Multiple beam antenna system employing multiple directional couplers in the leadin", which states: "This circulator has the characteristic that energy into one port will leave another port to the exclusion of a third."

If you recall, that's the exact phenomenon I used to describe the "RF circulator" on my desk.

So, job done, we have our inventor. Not so fast. The patent goes on to say: "Circulators of this type are discussed in an article 'The Elements of Nonreciprocal Microwave Devices' by C.Lester Hogan in Volume 44, October 1956, issue of Proceedings of the IRE, pages 1345 to 1368." The IRE is the Institute of Radio Engineers.

I found a copy of that tome, thank you worldradiohistory.com, which includes the following sentence: "Until a few years ago, all known linear passive electrical networks obeyed the theorem of reciprocity. Today several different types of passive nonreciprocal microwave networks are in practical use".

A footnote refers to an article by Lord Rayleigh, "On the magnetic rotation of light and the second law of thermodynamics" and includes images of an optical one-way transmission system from 1901.

In that 1901 article, Lord Rayleigh in turn refers to a paper published sixteen years earlier in which he observed that light polarisation can be made to violate the general optical law of reciprocity, using a system that consists of two so-called Nicol prisms, a crystal that can convert ordinary light into plane polarised light, invented by William Nicol in 1828. Using two prisms, arranged at a 45 degree angle, you can make light go through it in one way, but not the other.

Lord Rayleigh, also known as John William Strutt, in a very sparse footnote, states: "That magnetic rotation may interfere with the law of reciprocity had already been suggested by Helmholtz."

Further digging gets me to an 1856 publication of the "Handbuch der physiologischen Optik", or the handbook of the study of how the eye and brain work together, where Helmholtz says that, translated from German, "according to Faraday's discovery, magnetism affects the position of the plane of polarization."

This gets us to 1845, where Michael Faraday experimentally discovered that light and electromagnetism are related. His notebook has the following sentence, paragraph 7718 written on the 30th of September 1845: "Still, I have at last succeeded in illuminating a magnetic curve or line of force and in magnetising a ray of light."

Today we call that the "Faraday effect"

The best part?

You can read Michael Faraday's diary, right now, and see the whole thing.

So, who then invented the RF circulator?

From Mastodon to Circulators, to Modern Ferrites, to Nonreciprocal Microwave Devices, to Multiple beam antennas, to Magnetic Rotation, to Optical Reciprocity, to Nicol prisms, to the Faraday effect, this is the perfect example of standing on the shoulders of giants, and the result sits as a little box on my desk.

Just so you don't feel left out, your mobile phone likely has one of these devices on board.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB