Foundations of Amateur Radio

The world is your oyster, but sometimes you need to find a way to test what is going on with your station and determine what is working and what isn't.

Often I turn my radio on to scanning mode and I set it to scan the Northern California DX Foundation beacons. These beacons, perhaps better known as the NCDXF beacons can be heard across five different HF frequencies, on 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m. These beacons repeat in a cycle that lasts three minutes, covering 18 different transmitters located in countries scattered around the globe.

Beacons exist in New York City at the United Nations, in two other locations across the US, in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Israel, Finland, Madeira, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela.

Each beacon rotates through each frequency and then waits three minutes to transmit on the same frequency again. Each transmission contains the station callsign, sent in 22 words per minute Morse code, followed by four one-second beeps.

The callsign and the first beep is sent using 100 watts, the next one uses 10 watts, the third beep is sent with 1 watt and the final one uses 100 milliwatts.

What this does is give you a pretty accurate map of what you can hear on what frequency at this time with your station.

Another way to think of this is as a propagation map that actually uses your station as the receiver. If you can't hear 'm, you can't work 'm.

If your radio doesn't scan across frequencies very well, there's nothing wrong with listening on one frequency for 3 minutes, switching to the next and so on; 15 minutes later you'll know what propagation is like around your station.

You can find full details about this whole beacon system on ncdxf.org and I should mention that there are many other beacons around that provide signals for you to listen to.

As an aside, this system is precisely what prompted me to start the process of learning Morse Code. I'm still at it and you should not take my slow progress as anything other than me being distracted by the other things that are happening in my life.

If you need something more active and participatory to get a sense of the operation of your station, you should have a listen to the 7130 DX net. It happens every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:30am UTC on 7.130 MHz +/- QRM.

Next time I'll talk about how that works and what you might gain from having a go.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB.