Foundations of Amateur Radio

I'm looking at components. Not looking for, looking at. I have them sitting on the bench in front of me. A collection of six variable capacitors and six inductors. There's also a germanium diode, a breadboard, some connecting wires and two connectors.

I don't quite need that many capacitors or inductors and truth be told a breadboard is overkill, but I found myself getting into the spirit of things and for the tiny investment it seems like the thing to get whilst you're dipping your toe into the art of electronic circuit prototyping.

I am noticing something odd whilst I'm looking at these components, a familiar feeling in some ways, butterflies in my stomach. It's the exact same feeling as when I sit at the radio, getting ready to speak into the microphone just as I am starting a weekly radio net, something that I've now done about 480 times, not to mention the times when I did around 1600 interviews or broadcast live to the world, butterflies.

I'm mentioning this because in many ways this is a momentous event, not for the world, not for humanity, not even for the hobby, but for me. It's the first time I'm building a circuit completely from scratch, no pre-made circuit board, no pre-selected components, no building instructions, just me, some resonance formulas and the hope that I've understood what they represent and that the components I selected will do what my calculations say they should.

To make this even less exciting, there's no external power, nothing that's going to go boom or let magic smoke escape, nothing that will break if I get it wrong, but still.

The other day I received an email from Phil, WF3W. We have been exchanging email for a couple of years now. He's a member of the Mt Airy VHF Radio Club in Pennsylvania in the United States.

His email outlined an interesting question. What do new amateurs get excited about in this era of the ubiquitous world wide web? As a hobby we're attracting new members every day. Many of those are coming to the community by way of social media, rather than using things that are more traditionally considered radio like HF DX, making long distance contact using HF radio, rather than exchanging pithy emails or instant messages via the interconnectedness of the globe encompassing behemoth of the Internet.

The answer came easily to me, since last week we had a new amateur, Dave VK6DM who made his very first long distance HF contact between Australia and the United States. His level of excitement was contagious and that's something that I've found happens regularly.

Someone talks about magnetic loop antennas and the next thing six amateurs are building them. One person starts playing with satellites and before you know it YAGIs are being built and people are describing their adventures.

The same is true with my crystal radio. I've talked about it a couple of times and people are digging out their old kits and telling stories about how they grew up with their dad making a crystal radio.

That's what is exciting the new amateurs. The internet is just an excuse to find each other, just like F-troop is an excuse for people to turn on their communications tool of choice at midnight UTC on a Saturday morning to talk about amateur radio for an hour.

My excitement comes from trying new things and just like keying a microphone for the first time, there's this almost visceral experience of anticipation associated with starting.

I'm still working out how I want to build my new toy and how to go about testing to see if it actually works and what to look for if it doesn't. I'm trying hard to resist tooling up with crazy tools like signal generators and oscilloscopes, instead opting to use things I already have, like LC meters and my ears.

I can't wait until I can share how it goes.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB