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Foundations of Amateur Radio

Starting in the wonderful hobby of Amateur or HAM Radio can be daunting and challenging but can be very rewarding. Every week I look at a different aspect of the hobby, how you might fit in and get the very best from the 1000 hobbies that Amateur Radio represents. Note that this podcast started in 2011 as "What use is an F-call?".

education how to

All Episodes

7:12

Acronym not found ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/03/11

Foundations of Amateur Radio Our community is full of TLAs, or three letter acronyms. Some of them more useful than others. For example, I can tell you thank you for the QSO, I'm going QRT, QSY to my QTH. Or, thanks for the chat, I'll just shut up and take my bat and ball and go home. Acronyms arise every day and it came as no surprise to spot a new one in the wild the other day, SHF. It was in a serious forum, discussing antennas if I recall, so I didn't blink and looked it up. Super High

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5:41

Antenna Testing Day ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/03/04

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week I went outside. I know, it was a shock to me too. The purpose of this adventure was to test an antenna that has been sitting in my garage for nearly a year. Together with a friend we researched our options and at the end of the process the Hustler 6BTV was the answer to our question. Before the commercial interest police come out of the woodwork, I'll point out that I'm not providing a review, good or bad, of this antenna, it was the antenna I purchased and

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6:19

Are all spiky antennas the same?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/02/25

Foundations of Amateur Radio The world is filled with antennas. You'll find them on towers, buildings, cars and on your next door neighbour's roof. They come in an astonishing variety, to the point where you might start thinking that antennas are a fashion accessory that vary with the season and if you start digging through the history books you'll come across designs that dial that variety up to eleven. Possibly the most visible antenna today is the television antenna and when you start noticing

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4:30

Some Amateur Radio ABCs ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/02/18

Foundations of Amateur Radio A is for Antenna, the eyes and ears of any amateur station. You'll spend eighty percent of your life attempting to get twenty percent improvement for any antenna you'll ever use. B is for Balun, bringing together the balanced and unbalanced parts of your antenna system. C is for Coax, the versatile conductor that snakes into your station, one roll at a time. D is for Dipole, the standard against which all antennas are measured, simple to make, simple to use and often

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5:02

Do you really know when the best time is to go on air?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/02/11

Foundations of Amateur Radio Getting on air and making noise is a phrase that you've likely heard me repeat often, actually, this will be the 24th time or so. It's an attempt at encouraging you to actually transmit and use the radio spectrum that is available to you. It's a nicer way of saying: Use it or lose it! One of the more frustrating aspects of our hobby is finding other people to interact with. At the beginning of your hobby you have access to all these magic radio frequencies with no idea

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5:54

The evolution of software in radio ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/02/04

Foundations of Amateur Radio The amateur community is nothing if not entertaining. Look at any discussion about a mode like FT8 and you'll discover people who describe it as the dehumanising end of the hobby. In the same thread you'll find an amateur who's been licensed longer than I have been alive who welcomes it using words like revitalising, more active, and the like. If you're not familiar, FT8 is one of many weak signal digital modes that gained popularity over the past years during the most

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5:31

Path loss and very small numbers ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/01/28

Foundations of Amateur Radio Sometimes you learn mind boggling things about this hobby, often when you least expect it. Recently I discussed having my 20 mW WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon heard on the other side of the planet, in Denmark, 13,612 km away. That in and of itself is pretty spectacular, but it gets better if you consider just how weak the signal was by the time it got there. In radio communications there is a concept called path loss or path attenuation. Until recently

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5:48

What is the difference between handheld, mobile and a...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/01/21

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've ever been in the market for a new radio, and truth be told, who isn't, you'll find yourself faced with a bewildering array of options varying from obvious to obscure and everything in between. At the obvious end of the scale are things like price, bands and transmit power and at the other end are things like Narrow Spaced Dynamic Range, which you'll find explained by Rob NC0B on his sherweng.com website where he's been publishing receiver test data for many

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4:04

What should we be learning?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/01/14

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's an immersive effort to create an article every week, so much so, that I've only just discovered that I passed the 600 article mark some time ago. I'd open up a bottle of something celebratory if I thought it warranted the effort, but I'd rather talk about amateur radio and what I've learnt since becoming licensed in December of 2010. This hobby, this community, the activity of amateur radio keeps surprising me in unexpected and exciting ways. I know that there is

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6:05

Where does propagation data come from?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2023/01/07

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the many questions that new amateurs ask is, "When should I get on-air, and on what band?" The often-heard reply is just to get on-air and make some noise. As time goes by, the importance of this seems to fade in favour of using HF prediction tools. Some amateurs never venture beyond that point, relying almost exclusively on technology to determine if they should turn on their radio or not. If you search the internet for "current HF conditions", you'll end up

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7:34

What's the weakest signal that WSPR can decode?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/12/31

Foundations of Amateur Radio In 2016, Daniel EA4GPZ, documented how to discover the weakest signal that could be decoded using several weak signal modes, including WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter. This is an interesting question because as you might recall, I've been experimenting with very weak signals coming from my shack. To date, my 20 milliwatts has been heard over 13 thousand kilometres away. When you tune to a weak station you'll often hear both the station or desired signal as

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6:59

One Volt ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/12/24

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever asked yourself a question that turned out to be a rabbit hole so deep you could spend a lifetime exploring and likely never come out the other end? I did. Yesterday. What's a Volt? This came about when I started exploring how to measure the power output of my WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon. According to the specifications the output level is 23 dBm or 200 milliwatts. If you read the fine print, you'll discover that the power output

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7:30

Which way did it go?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/12/17

Foundations of Amateur Radio Propagation, the art of getting a radio signal from one side of the globe to the other, is a funny thing. As you might know, I've been experimenting with WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter and for about a year running a beacon on 10m. Out of the box my beacon uses 200 mW to make itself heard. I couldn't leave well enough alone and I reduced the output power. Currently a 10 dB attenuator is connected to the beacon, reducing output to a notional 20 mW. I say

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5:27

Morse is dead ... long live Morse!

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/12/10

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the oldest means of electronic messaging is Morse code. Developed by Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse and sent for the first time on the 24th of May 1844, Morse code changed the way we communicate. For nearly a century it was required to become a licensed radio amateur until in 2003, the International Telecommunications Union or ITU left it to the discretion of individual countries to decide if a budding amateur needed to demonstrate their ability to send and

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5:32

Attenuators, the missing link...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/12/03

Foundations of Amateur Radio Having been able to call myself an amateur for over a decade, it might come as a surprise to you that it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that I thought about attenuators for the first time. They're a curious tool and once you come across them, you'll never be quite the same. Before I dive in you should know that an amplifier is an active tool that makes things bigger and an attenuator is a passive tool that makes things smaller. To look at, attenuators are

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3:59

How low can you go?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/11/26

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's common knowledge that power, as in output power, makes your signal heard in more places. If you've followed my adventures you'll also know that I'm a firm believer in low power or QRP operation. It all started when I was told that my shiny new amateur license was rubbish because I was only allowed to use 10 Watts. Seemingly the whole community around me shared that opinion and slogans like "life's too short for QRP" are still commonly heard. As a direct result of

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4:37

The nature of learning things...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/11/19

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I discussed the concept of a VFO, a Variable Frequency Oscillator. It's an essential building block for our amateur radio community. In describing the idea behind it, while making an error in one of the CB radio frequencies, thanks to Ben VK6NCB for picking that up, I skirted around how a VFO actually works. In reality the VFO is a collective term that describes a whole range of different methods to vary a frequency. Naturally I continued my exploration and

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5:06

What's in a VFO?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/11/12

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the many acronyms that define the world of amateur radio is VFO. It stands for Variable Frequency Oscillator. That doesn't explain much if you're not familiar with the purpose of it and just how special this aspect of amateur radio is. Much of the world of radio beyond our hobby, like broadcast television, WiFi and Citizen Band or CB, to name a few, uses radio spectrum in a particular way. On a television you change channels to switch between stations

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5:04

My Virtual Workbench

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/11/05

Foundations of Amateur Radio With the ever increasing pace of innovation, well, change, I'll leave alone if it's actual innovation instead of marketing, we see new software released at an almost alarming rate. There is an urge to stay abreast of this process, to update, upgrade and try new solutions as soon as they are presented to you by well meaning friends and colleagues, not to mention online marketing, uh, reviews and other enticements that make you click the button to install something to

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4:29

A plan for distributed SDR decoding

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2022/10/29

Foundations of Amateur Radio Yesterday I finally discovered the missing piece of information that will allow me to create a project that I've, if not outright spoken about, at least hinted at. In an ideal world by now I'd have built a proof concept and would be telling you that I've published a GitHub repository under my callsign for you to explore. If wishing made it so. Unfortunately, currently sitting at a keyboard for anything longer than ten minutes or so makes it nigh on impossible to stand

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