Foundations of Amateur Radio

In the past little while you've heard me talk about WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter and I've told you about signals I've heard across the planet. The longest distance at the time was a HF report, 18656 km from Perth to Pennsylvania, very nice indeed.

I switched to monitoring 6m, 2m and 70cm about a month or so ago.

My reports had been pretty minimal, from my QTH to the suburb next-door and then two suburbs away. Proof that a station is working, but hardly anything to celebrate or even mention.

The other day I came across a report a little further away, Perth to Adelaide, 2142 km away. Not world record beating, or even earth shattering, but proof that 6m propagation does have its moments now and then.

Then a surprise contact, Perth to The Rock, not the one in the middle, or the one with the wave, the one on the Olympic Highway between Wagga Wagga and Albury, 2899 km away with 20 Watts on 6m.

My reports aren't particularly far or amazing. You might recall Wally VK6YS who made a contact on 6m between Perth and Israel. He'd been at it for a little while, longer than I've been an amateur, but not quite as long as I've been the apple in the eye of my mother. 38 years it took for Wally to make that contact.

So why am I making any mention of my little achievement?

Simple really, my station and Wally's station are nothing alike. He had a large beam on 6m located on a property with few noise sources and his patience paid off.

My station consists of a 10m antenna, that is, it's not 10m tall, it's resonant on 10m, and happens to also manage 2m. I've not actually checked to see what 6m on this antenna looks like, perhaps a project for another day, but it sits there, clamped to a metal pergola at the peak of a corrugated iron roof and connected via 20m or so of RG58 coax, cheap RG58 coax, connected to my radio that I use to host F-troop most weeks.

I have to restart my WSPR node monitoring software several times a week since the Windows XP notepad computer it's running on crashes regularly. I have to remember to open the squelch when I finish F-troop and connect the WSPR node back up and I have to make sure that there's enough empty disk-space to make sure that I can actually log stuff.

This isn't a sob-sob story, woe is me, my station isn't a massive station. It's more about that you can achieve these kinds of things with small and minimal resources.

One of my friends is doing really well with a USB TV dongle decoding WSPR on a Raspberry Pi, others are using thousands of dollars of gear and everything in between.

The point is that you too can get started without massive expense. A simple radio, something to run WSPR, which can be a Raspberry Pi, an antenna of sorts and you're on the way to check out what propagation is like around your QTH in your neck of the woods.

Amateur radio doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to be extensive, it doesn't even have to be elaborate, it can just be enough.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB