Foundations of Amateur Radio

Recently my local power company notified me of a planned network outage, that's code for, we're turning off the power and your choice is to deal with it. If you've been paying attention, you'll note that this is not the first time this has happened in recent times.

On this occasion I want to make a difference and actually use the day wisely. Coincidentally, the 750th instalment of F-troop is coming up and traditionally we try to find an excuse to get outside and set-up a station in a local park somewhere. If you recall, I recently went outside and came across a new park, one with picnic tables, gazebos, toilets and all the mod cons required for a party.

Combine these unrelated events and you end up with testing the idea of running F-troop, a weekly net for new and returning amateurs, from this park, which also neatly turns that into a POTA or Parks On The Air activity, which raises several logistical questions.

The first one being, what is the radio noise like in this park, followed shortly by the question, can I hit my local 2m repeater, any 2m repeater, or the local 10m repeater? If the answer to those questions is unsatisfactory, I might be required to rethink my plans.

Combining those questions with a power outage at home seems like the perfect excuse to go out into the bright day to get on air and make some noise.

One challenge. Having removed my radio from my car several years ago to accommodate the replacement of the transmission, I never did replace it and never used my radio in the car again, which truth be told is not a situation I ever imagined when I first installed it many years ago.

This leads me to creating a list, which should come as no surprise, a list with what I need to bring as a minimum requirement to test the questions I need answers to. I will confess that the "making a radio packing list" skill-set has atrophied in recent times, so I started small.

I'll need a radio, and a suitable antenna, in my case, at least two, one for 2m and one for 10m. Then there's the question of power, at which point I discovered that my trusty portable sealed lead acid batteries have finally died, not bad after 15 years, well, 12 years of regular use. Likely they would have continued to be of service if I'd used them in the past three years, mainly hampered by the death of my 12 volt battery charger.

If you feel like I'm going off track, you'd be right. That was the exact experience I had when I started building my list. I added a digital multimeter, an antenna analyser, an antenna tuner and coax, then realised that I needed to check if the coax adaptors were the right ones and so it continued.

The upshot is a preliminary list with 15 items on it, in various stages of fully populated, for example, I know I have a 2m and 70cm antenna in the garage, but I haven't touched it in years, so I need to go find it, and the battery in my digital multimeter needs checking, you get the idea.

It's a good thing I started this caper well over a week before the planned outage, so at least I have half a fighting chance to get it to the point of usefulness before my screen turns black due to the threatened lack of electricity.

It occurred to me whilst I was in the middle of this extended list creation process, that I was essentially replicating what I might have experienced the very first time I went outside with my station in 2011. In coming to that realisation, the stress levels that were building steadily at that point, pretty much dissipated with the understanding that I'd already done this and survived the experience. In other words, there was nothing worth stressing about.

So, this leaves me with a question for you. What does this process look like for you, how do you prepare to get on-air and make noise, what steps do you take and what do you avoid, are there things you might share with a new amateur and if so, how will you do that?

I contemplated sharing the list in a public place, but realised that the power of the list isn't the items on it, but in the process of making it, so, no list, but the notion that you too can do this, and if it transpires that you forgot something, there's always the next adventure.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB