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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

6:13

Bald Yak, scene 6, chaos will reign

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2025/01/04

Foundations of Amateur Radio Life is messy. This is not a revelation. We attempt to organise this chaos by using all kinds of magic incantations, to-do lists, new year resolutions, plans, projects and anything else you might have in your arsenal. The same chaos reigns, in how we make progress. Some days are harder than others. I'm mentioning this because I've seen a couple of amateurs share all the things they didn't achieve last year. If we used that metric, I could point out that I didn't win the

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5:02

Bald Yak, scene 5, debugging

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/12/28

Foundations of Amateur Radio As you might know, a little while ago I started a new project. "The Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio." In embarking on this adventure I've been absorbing information as I go whilst explaining what I've learnt to anyone who will sit still long enough. Credit to Glynn VK6PAW and Charles NK8O for their patience. For most people, me included, the introduction to GNU

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5:13

Bald Yak, week 4, time

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/12/21

Foundations of Amateur Radio In the analogue world you throw up an antenna, turn on your radio, tune to a station and sound comes out. Aside from propagation restrictions, you don't particularly care when you do this. In contrast, if you fire up a WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, each transmission lasts 110.6 seconds, every 120 seconds, starting on the even minute. An FT8 signal takes 12.6 seconds within a 15 second window. In other words, to use WSPR or FT8 you need to both transmit and

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5:39

Bald Yak - week 3 - Push To Talk

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/12/14

Foundations of Amateur RadioWhen you key your transceiver, as-in, you trigger the Push To Talk or PTT button, you close a switch that activates the transmitter and in turn allows your voice to make it through the microphone and radio, via the coax out to the antenna and the world. When you release the button, the transmission stops. This is pretty much how we're taught that a radio transceiver works, essentially switching between transmit and receive, depending on the state of that magic

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7:02

Bald Yak - week 2

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/12/07

Foundations of Amateur RadioBald Yak, week 2 During the week an interesting question was put to me. Am I going to make this into a GNU Radio tutorial? In short, no and yes. At this point I know enough about what I'm attempting, to recognise that I'll be deep diving into the bowels of GNU Radio and the inevitable idiosyncrasies that a large project like that has and as a result I'll likely have to explain the context in which something broke, which will no doubt result in me having to walk you

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5:30

Bald Yak - week 1

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/11/30

Foundations of Amateur RadioIn the process of developing something from scratch there are a great number of things that need doing. When you start it's unclear what's the most important thing, but experience has told me that starting, anywhere, is the best way to get runs on the board. Here's a smattering of what I'm talking about. What do we call this thing? How will we license it? What does it do? How will we determine what is required and what is nice to have? How will we avoid reinventing the

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5:24

Suddenly there were 700...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/11/23

Foundations of Amateur Radio Thirteen years ago I opened my mouth to express my thoughts on what to do with an amateur license after hearing an operator complain they needed more power to talk to a station across 600 kilometres, whilst I used the same 10 Watts to communicate with a station nearly 15,000 kilometres away. In all, I've shared my thoughts some 700 times, documenting my journey though this majestic hobby, describing what I've been up to, reporting my successes and failures, sharing my

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6:58

Why does your Wi-Fi connection drop out when cooking...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/11/16

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever attempted to download an email attachment, or watch a streaming service whilst your microwave was cooking lunch or dinner and noticed that something odd was happening, or is my asking that question the first time that you joined the dots? This phenomenon is not by accident, though it isn't on purpose. In 1947 the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU, was meeting in Atlantic City where the "delegate of the United States, referring to his request

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6:06

A new radio every week ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/11/09

Foundations of Amateur Radio The hobby of amateur radio is one of experimentation and change. For decades this came in the form of circuit diagrams, components and scrounged hardware from anything that wasn't bolted down. New functionality came with the aid of a soldering iron. More recently, functionality comes from participation in the global electronics market where you can buy any radio you like and have it shipped to your door within hours at an unbeatable price. Mind you, buying all those

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6:55

Unexpected miracles ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/11/02

Foundations of Amateur RadioOver the past weeks, actually, probably more accurately years, I've been carrying around an idea. It's been bubbling away and I've been trying very hard to make it solidify into something that I could explain and then hopefully attack. Today I woke up with a hunger to do some radio and ultimately tell you about it. To get to a point where my Aha! moment emerged, I need to provide some history. Traditional radio activities involve variations on a radio plugged into an

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7:46

The venerable QSL bureau

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/10/26

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the oldest global aspects of our hobby, other than actually using the radio, is the QSL bureau. It uses a postcard-like system to confirm that two stations made contact, sent via the postal service as a so-called QSL card. Of course, that only works if you have each other's address which after World War II was somewhat difficult. As a result the QSL bureau was born. Intended as a single point of contact for a country, a local QSL bureau consists of one or more

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4:29

Amateur Radio connects you in unexpected ways

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/10/19

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the unexpected benefits of this hobby is how it provides you with the ability to connect to others in ways that are not directly related to radio. Take for example Steve. Steve appears at unpredictable times and locations, been hunted by citizens and scientists and unlike Steve's potential invisible cousin, the proton arc, has been photographed by aurora hunters many times. It looks like observations go back as far as 1705. In 2017, physics professor Eric

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4:14

Surprising ideas that change you forever

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/10/12

Foundations of Amateur RadioEvery now and then you come across an idea that throws you for a loop. It comes seemingly out of nowhere and once you've seen it, you cannot unsee it. It's a lot like a 1929 painting I like called "The Treachery of Images", also known as "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", or in English, "This is Not a Pipe" by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. If you're not familiar with it, it's a painting of a pipe, and by being a painting, it's not a pipe. Obviously. Before I go

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2:29

What does an actual minimal set-up look like?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/10/05

Foundations of Amateur RadioThe other day I was packing the car to go on a little trip an hour out of the city to see the Milky Way. I briefly entertained the idea of bringing my radio gear with me to get on air to make some noise. I resisted the urge, mainly because thinking about this didn't fill me with joy, rather it made me groan. Now to be absolutely clear, I adore going out into the scrub with my radio gear. I love getting on air and making noise. I like doing this with friends. If the

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8:16

How effective is the IARU?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/09/28

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the past few months I've been investigating the history of the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, to help it celebrate a century of amateur radio achievements. If you're a radio amateur and you pay anyone a membership fee, I have questions for you. Let me set the stage with a quote from the IARU: "All licensed radio amateurs benefit from the work of the IARU, whether or not they are members of their national IARU member-society. But every licensed

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3:29

Dark Sky for Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/09/21

Foundations of Amateur Radio As I sit here, away from my shack, I'm overlooking a picturesque valley that I'm visiting for a couple of days to see the stars. I learnt recently that my SO, Significant Other, had never seen the Milky Way with their Mark One Eyeball and we thought that it would be fun to remedy that. One of the challenges in accomplishing this is that we're surrounded by light almost everywhere we go. Street lights, porch lights, car lights, stadium and building lights, traffic

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3:22

The history of our hobby

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/09/14

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was handed a sheaf of paper. The person handing it to me, an amateur, was insistent that I take custody of this little collection. I asked what it was that they intended for me to do with it and the response was that because I did things with history, I should do this too. Aside from taking on a new project, trying to juggle life and income, their observation was pretty spot on, even though I had never quite seen it in that way. Over the years I've

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6:08

Adult Fans of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/09/07

Foundations of Amateur RadioTo get into the hobby of amateur radio is easy, but that doesn't mean it's simple. I was introduced to the hobby three times. The first time I was a Sea Scout in the Netherlands. It was JOTA, the annual Jamboree On The Air and radio amateurs across the planet were set up at various Scouting locations with their stations showing off how to make contact with far away places. My memory of it is brief. I recall a green heavy army tent with radios on a table. There was

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3:33

Keep It Simple Stupid

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/08/31

Foundations of Amateur RadioThe other day I lamented to a fellow amateur that my shack was not functioning well. Specifically, my main workstation died three months ago and ever since I've been struggling to reclaim my productivity. One aspect of that is my desk. For half a decade or so I've had my computer clamped to a rolling lectern. It allowed me to move around my office as my mood and the light from the window changed. During the weekly net I'd move my lectern and computer next to my radio

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5:40

How to lose more than half of your membership?

Foundations of Amateur Radio ·

2024/08/24

Foundations of Amateur RadioThe International Amateur Radio Union or IARU, is the governing body of our community. It represents us on the world stage through the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU. As I've discussed before, it consists of four separate organisations working together, the International Amateur Radio Union, the global body, and three regional ones, Region 1, 2 and 3, each representing the hobby of amateur radio. Previously I've looked at the constitution of the IARU to

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