Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day Randall, VK6WR, encouraged me to get on-air. He described it like this: "There is a mystery signal on 40m that you can try your new Universal Radio Hacker skills on. It appears to be a FSK signal separated by 7kHz with the two signals at 7.0615 and 7.0685 MHz. Each of them on their own sounds a bit like a Morse signal, but my CW decoder decodes junk. But if you can see it on a spectrum scope, it is clearly FSK because either one of them is on at any time." He went on to say: "You'll need an SDR to receive the signal given the separation, but could be a fun investigation!" Having just discovered "Universal Radio Hacker", a tool that can help you decode radio signals, that sounded like something I'd love to have a go at. Unfortunately, after the demise of my main workstation last year, my current set-up doesn't allow me to do such recordings, but Randall, ever the gentleman, provided a recording of the signal. He writes: "This was captured with gqrx demodulating the signal as SSB audio with the VFO tuned to 7.060, so both "signals" are there, one very low freq and one very high freq." If you're curious, I've uploaded the file as it was shared with me to my VK6FLAB GitHub repository under "signals". Over the next two days I spent my time attempting to decode this signal. I opened up Universal Radio Hacker and spent delightful hours getting precisely .. nowhere. Some of that is absolutely my unfamiliarity with the tool, but this is a great exercise in learning on the fly, where truth be told, I tend to live most of my life. It wasn't until several hours later that I decided I should at least listen to the audio. To my ear it sounded like 25 WPM Morse Code, but being still in the learning phases, while my brain was triggering on the sequences, decoding wasn't happening. Of course I could cheat and forward the audio to one of my fellow amateurs, but the actual message wasn't really the point of the exercise, at least not at this stage. Instead I fired up "multimon-ng" which has an in-built Morse decoder. I spent some hours doing more Yak Shaving than I was expecting, but even then, I still didn't get more than gobbledegook out of the process. I used "Audacity" to shift one of the signals by one wavelength and mixed them together. This allowed me to reduce the noise significantly, but still none of my tools did anything useful. In case you're wondering why, if you have a tone and noise and shift one signal by the wavelength of the tone, then mix them, the tone adds to itself, but the noise, random in nature, is just as likely to add as it is to subtract, so in effect, you're increased the signal to noise ratio. After multimon-ng failed, I tried an online Morse decoder, which gave me all manner of text, but none of it made sense to me. Of course it's possible that this is someone rag chewing in a different language, but I couldn't make any sense of the thing. I did come up with some issues that prompted me to create the signal repository. I realised that I didn't have any known "good" signals. Previously I'd tried decoding a sample FT4 signal, but that went nowhere, mainly because the signal was noisy. So, what I'm going to do over the next couple of weeks is create some clean, as-in, computer generated, known signals, and add them to the repository. The aim is to have a known good starting point to learn from. In software development this technique is often used to limit the number of unconstrained variables. In our case, if I generate a known good Morse Code signal, then I can learn how to use Universal Radio Hacker to decode it, so when I come across an unknown signal, I can use the techniques I learnt to attempt to decode it. Feel free to make pull requests with known good signals yourself. RTTY, PSK31, WSPR, FT8, etc. Feel free to include non-amateur modes. One thing, I'm not looking for off-air recordings of signals, yet, that can come later, right now I need signals that are pure, as-in, as I said, computer generated. Of course at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, I'll discover that generated signals are no easier to decode than off-air recordings, but that's for another day. Meanwhile, you too can play. Download one or more sample files and decode them. Let me know what you learn. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was discussing with a fellow amateur the increased frustration my mobile phone provider was inflicting. We hit on the idea of figuring out if other providers would fit the bill and how we could determine if their coverage would suit our needs. Aside from using an old mobile phone, I suggested that using a $25 RTL-SDR dongle would provide a way to record mobile phone cell site beacons from the various mobile networks to map what signal levels we might find. To that end, I discovered a tool called LTE-Cell-Scanner by Xianjun BH1RXH. Forked from the original project by James Peroulas, it allows you to use simple hardware to scan for LTE Cells used by mobile phone networks. James points out on his site that this tool can also be used to calibrate an RTL-SDR receiver's oscillator, since an LTE downlink centre frequency is stable to within 50 Parts Per Billion, that's 10 times more stable than my Yaesu FT-857d using a TCXO. If this doesn't mean much, think of it as a local frequency reference standard that you can use in your shack with minimal effort and cost. The story gets better. I started building LTE-Cell-Scanner from source and in doing so discovered a directory on my computer named "uhrr". I didn't remember what it was for, so I looked online. The first search result, when I looked for "uhrr radio" was a repository by Oliver F4HTB, more on that in a bit. The second search result was something called "Universal Radio Hacker". I clicked on the link and discovered a mind boggling tool. There are times in your life when something flips, this was one of those times. It happened when I discovered "csdr" by Andras HA7ILM and again when I discovered "GNU Radio". Diving into "Universal Radio Hacker", by Dr. Johannes Pohl and Dr. Andreas Noack I was introduced to the art of decoding and generating digital radio signals. In 2018 it was presented for the first time during the USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies, or WOOT, as a tool to discover, decode and identify exploits of proprietary IoT devices scattered all over the planet. As an aside, USENIX, Users Of Unix, since 1975. Back to radio. Universal Radio Hacker allows you to dissect recorded radio signals using all manner of interactive processes. When you go looking for it, and you should, I recommend that you start by watching some videos. You'll find an introductory play list on my YouTube channel. By the time you've seen those, you'll likely share my excitement. To encourage you further, the Universal Radio Hacker is open source, written in Python, and runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows. So far there have been 94 releases of the software, so it's seen significant development in the years since it was released into the wild. When installing it I was surprised to discover that its acronym was "uhr", not "uhrr". This was a relief since I still didn't remember what "uhrr" was all about and I couldn't imagine having forgotten Universal Radio Hacker. It turns out that the last time I looked at "uhrr" was apparently in 2021 when I shared my experience in an article titled "The remote edge..."; "uhrr" or "Universal Ham Radio Remote" is a tool that allows you to use a web browser to access a radio remotely. My little journey into unexpected diversions, distractions and discovery has led me into a path where several puzzle pieces have come together. For example, Universal Radio Hacker and GNU Radio can talk to each other, they're both written in Python, they're both open source, have a history of development and have a community of users. The LTE-Cell-Scanner, also open source, will allow me to calibrate most if not all of my radio gear and I'm once again inspired to keep digging into yet another aspect of this wonderful hobby. I'm sure that there are more than a thousand different hobbies under this roof. Go forth, explore, discover, be amazed, and stay curious! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a fellow amateur asked me to help them with lowering their radio mast so they could do some maintenance on the antennas attached to it. This is not the first time I've been a participant in such an activity, but it was the first time I felt explicitly safe. Don't get me wrong, on previous occasions nothing bad happened, but there was always an undertone of "what-if" and an associated anxiety. This time was different. Before we did anything, we sat down, had a cup of coffee, talked and discussed what was going to happen. After coffee we looked at specifics and discussed the process in detail. Then we prepared. Clipping cable ties, winding up loose ends, disconnecting coax, and securing a pulley to a tree. We ran a winch line, discussed distances, looked at potential snags and coax lengths and angles, considered what would happen if something unexpected might happen and discussed various safety considerations, like never walking below the mast whilst it was in its most stressed position, half-way lowered and out of reach. Then we slowly went about doing what we talked about. All that sounds pretty reasonable, and it should. It was the first time I'd ever discussed in detail what the plan was, what could happen if something broke, if something got caught and any number of contingencies. We even discussed handling steel winch lines, something which I was unfamiliar with. Of course it's entirely possible that something bad could happen, something neither of us had considered, but we put ourselves in a position where we both felt safe after mitigating known risks and allowing leeway for unknown risks. Another word for this type of preparation is "Professionalism". It's a fraught word. You might recall me telling a story where I contacted the regulator to discuss wideband interference caused by a train-line, specifically blocking out a range of AM broadcast frequencies, including the emergency broadcast station. I revealed during that conversation that I was an amateur and had some experience with radio. The person I was speaking to shared that they were a "Professional", using a capital "P" to condescend that my amateur credentials were nothing in comparison to theirs. The conversation ended, the wideband interference is still there, years later. It's not the only time I've come across this weird relationship with this word "Professionalism". At one time I worked at a community broadcaster where I was one of the producers and presenters. If you're unfamiliar, it's essentially a special interest broadcaster, in this case radio, run by mostly volunteers. We were having a meeting to discuss plans and during that I raised the notion of "Professionalism" in relation to conduct, things like turning up on time for your shift, documenting labels correctly on tapes, keeping logs, broadcasting advertisements at the allocated time, etc. Unfortunately some in the group equated "Professionalism" with "Commercialism" and expressed their discontent with the notion vocally. I stopped volunteering there shortly after. This to say that I can understand that "Professionalism" has different meanings for different people. In a community like Amateur Radio it might mean that it's considered a taboo word, but I'd like to encourage you to think of it as a way of getting things done .. safely .. and to the betterment of the community. So, next time you have a working bee, an antenna party, a contest, or a ham-fest, think about how you conduct yourself, how you might improve the experience for yourself and for those around you. I call that "Professionalism". I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a report in "Amateur Radio Daily" caught my eye. Under the heading "IARU Considers Consolidation", I read that the International Amateur Radio Union, celebrating 100 years of representing our hobby, is considering significant change. Links in the report reveal a PDF document titled "IARU Consultation on Proposed Restructuring March 2025". The document, dated 21 March, outlines the structure of the IARU, four organisations, one for each ITU Region, and one global organisation, the International Secretariat. It provides some insights on how the funding arrangements between these organisations exist and goes on to talk about how the IARU operates, including incorporation, or not, currencies, committees, priorities and other background and historic information. All excellent. Stuff that should be public knowledge, but having spent the better part of a year reading IARU documents, this one brought several new eye opening things to the table. The document attributes no authors but is at least spell-checked in US English, and appears to be part of a discussion started long before I became an amateur. In 2005, the IARU started the "IARU 2025 Committee" to look into the future of the organisation. It concluded its work in 2012. In 2020 a new committee was started, the "Future Committee", consisting of representation from each of the regions. The introductory wording is curious and includes these words: "We can no longer afford not to move the process forward" - at least implying that this document is a foregone conclusion. Searching for the document on the IARU sites will give you no results. Searching for "Future Committee", gives you two results, neither actually having the words "Future Committee". The only reference which makes any sense in either of those two results, and only after the fact, is a paragraph, published on 12 October 2020, that refers to the Administrative Council, or AC, and states: "The AC received and discussed an in-depth report from its Working Group on the Future of IARU and agreed to steps for evolving toward a more flexible organization and strengthened relationships with all stakeholders in the global amateur radio community and telecommunications ecosystem." For a process that started 20 years ago, this is the first I've heard of it. Curious wouldn't you say, in an organisation that claims to represent both you and I? It's almost like the IARU wants to keep this whole thing a secret. There's more. The thrust of the document is to explore the notion of simplifying the operation of the IARU by consolidating the four organisations into one incorporated body based in Switzerland, where the IARU Region 1 organisation is currently incorporated. It goes on to discuss how this is great for the hobby, how it will save on resources and how it will allow the mostly volunteer run organisation to operate more democratically. It outlines the process for adoption, including a 60 day consultation period for the 167 Member Societies, as-in peak bodies in your country. I'll save you the suspense, the consultation period ended before I saw the document. There's a 30 day "Detailed Draft Proposal phase" and a "Final Proposal and Voting stage", neither of which are on any specific time-line that I could find. You might say, well, Onno, you're not a member society, it's none of your business. That's true. Here's the thing. Let me quote from Section 5, on page 11: "In many cases the IARU Member-Society does not represent the majority of the national amateur community." So .. not to belabour the point, the IARU, who is proud to represent Amateur Radio on the International Stage, writes in its own documentation that the organisation doesn't represent the majority of amateurs while claiming its intention to make the organisation more flexible and democratic. Gotta say, feeling all warm and fuzzy. In Section 6, the document goes into great detail about finance. I'm kidding, it has one sub-sub section about money, section 6.1.3, less than 10% of the document, no less explosive for its brevity. It states that each region contributes to the overall IARU budget, but that this contribution remains insufficient to cover the many critical representation efforts required. It goes on to say that "Historically, the ARRL has played a key role in bridging this financial gap". For its contribution, the ARRL currently nominates the President and Vice President which the member societies get to vote on. I wonder what happens if they don't vote for the nominated candidate and what happens when the ARRL is no longer first among equals, will it continue to fund the IARU? While pointing out that all direct representation of the IARU at the ITU are made by volunteers, as well as "nearly all" other activities, I wonder which activities are paid and how much? There's also discussion about a "not ideal" "compromise", namely that we'll have to be virtual attendees to save money. Really? In 2025, after a century of representing amateur radio, we're still attending meetings in person? Has nobody at the IARU heard of this new technology, you know, the one it claims to promote, radio? Or the more modern version, teleconference? You'd think that a bunch of volunteer radio amateurs would jump at the chance to debate things over radio. Moving on. The finance section includes an interesting statement. "Many regions have accumulated cash reserves" and "where these reserves are substantial and have resulted from a specific region's activities, they may need to be held in trust and designated exclusively for initiatives related to that former region". Let's unpack this. There's three regions. "Many regions" means more than one, but not all, so, two. In other words, one region has no money. Which one? Moreover, "substantial" reserves from "a specific region", means one of the other two, so, one. So, it made money, it's substantial, it's intended to be designated exclusively for that one region. Which one? The Wireless Institute of Australia, which claims to have existed longer than the IARU and the ARRL before it, was a federation. In 2004 the regulator indicated that it should consolidate its efforts because apparently the various state WIA organisations "could never agree on a single outcome". This organisation was incorporated in VK3 where it continues to exist as a first among equals. Curiously the Victorian, Tasmanian and South Australia with Northern Territory Divisions of the Wireless Institute of Australia are each still incorporated and active. Today if you're in VK6, like I am, your experience of the WIA is completely different from that if you're in VK3 and to a lesser extent VK2. Remind you of anything? The document mentions that "only fully paid up member-societies in good standing have the right to vote" and "The current fee structure will need to be harmonized across all three regions, which may lead to increased dues for some Member-Societies". That tells us that some member societies will have to pay more money and if they don't they won't be able to vote. I wonder if these are members of the region with all the money, or from the region without money? I'll remind you that member societies have already been acknowledged by the IARU as being underfunded, offering reduced services with some member societies being disbanded. The point being that we're finding out behind the scenes, after the fact, of a process that has been in play for 20 years, that aims to create a single harmonised body whilst exacerbating existing inequities, and doing so in secret. Is that the kind of body that you want to represent you on the world stage? Is this something that your member society knows about, is it actively participating, does it share that information with you or hide it? Are you informed, or did you learn more today from me than you have in the past 20 years? Before I leave you to your thoughts, credit to Cale K4HCK for publishing the story and thanks to their source for sharing the document. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Right off the bat, let me start with a question. "What do you think you're doing?" To give you some context, it should come as no surprise that I'm talking about amateur radio and what it is that we do, you and I, when we "do amateur radio". Of course the answer is different for every person you ask, and it's likely to change over time. So, let's explore and fair warning, if you know me at all, you'll realise that I'll be asking more questions, so here goes. Is this an activity that you do, for yourself, or for others? Is it a hobby, or a vocation, or something else? Do you use this as part of your life outside this community and if you do, how? At this point I hope you're getting a sense of Deja-Vu all over again, in that I'm asking you to explore your own place in the community. I'm asking because it occurs to me that we spend an awful lot of time looking in the other direction. How do we compare skills and knowledge against other amateurs, how does our shack compare with another, how does our antenna stack up, which modes have you used, what things have you activated, how much power do you use? All things that might form part of the activity of amateur radio, but fail to look at you as a person and your role in this. For example, have you considered if you're interested in helping new amateurs, or would you rather just do your own thing? What about how you gain skills? Would you rather read a book, watch a YouTube video, attend a class or play with others? If you're considering upgrading your license to gain more responsibilities, are you doing that for yourself, or are you doing it because of peer pressure? If you've been part of the hobby for a little while you'll have discovered that radio amateurs are everywhere, often in unexpected places. With that comes the realisation that this implies that we have members who represent all of humanity in all its many-splendored complexity. Where in that spectrum are you and what is your role in participating in that wider community, and is your role what you want it to be? One of the themes I've discovered over the years is insecurity. A recurring perception is that amateurs who've attained the highest license level are somehow "more" amateur than those who are on another journey. Where do you fit in that? How do you perceive amateurs with differing license classes? Do you apply the same metric to moped, car and truck licenses? How do you compare yourself against those who are not amateurs and how did you step into your license? I'm going to stop with the questions now and leave you with a thought. The hobby of amateur radio is a playground where you have the freedom to explore radio and all that it offers, but nobody said that you need to limit yourself to radio. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Around the world are thousands of associations, groups of people, clubs if you like, that represent radio amateurs. Some of those associations are anointed with a special status, that of "member society" or "peak body", which allows them to represent their country with their own governments and on the international stage to the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, through a global organisation, the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union. Some of these are known across our whole community, the ARRL in the USA, the RSGB in the UK, and the WIA in Australia. Some much less so, the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, or the ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, for example. In an attempt to get a deeper understanding of what distinguishes these organisations, I visited a dozen member society websites. Cultural sensibilities and aesthetics aside, the variety and sense of priority is both pleasing and astounding. Starting close to home, the WIA, the Wireless Institute of Australia, shows news as the most important and the top story is a radio contact between the International Space Station and a school, held about two weeks ago. The ERAU, the Estonian Radio Amateurs Association, features an article about the 2025 General Meeting outlining who was there, what was discussed and thanking the participants for their contributions. When I visited, the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League, top news item, was the renewed defence of the 902-928 MHz Amateur Radio Band, from a few days ago. The most important issue for the ARRL is that you read the latest edition of QST magazine, but only if you're a member. The RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain, has an odd landing page that links to the main site, which features much of the same content. The latest news is "Mental Health Awareness Week" and encourages us to celebrate kindness in our community. The DARC, the German Amateur Radio Club, has a page full of announcements and the top one was an article about current solar activity including a coronal hole and various solar flares. The ERASD, the Egyptian Radio Amateurs Society for Development, uses qsl.net as its main website. It features many images with text, presumably in Arabic, that unfortunately I was not able to translate. Curiously the landing page features some English text that welcomes all interested to join. I confess that I love the juxtaposition between a Yaesu FT-2000 transceiver and the images of Tutankhamun and the pyramids. The RAC, the Radio Amateurs of Canada, use their homepage to promote its purpose, and features many pictures of their bi-monthly magazine, which you can only read if you're a member, which is where many of the homepage links seem to go. The RCA, the Radio Club of Argentina, is promoting the 2024-2025 Railway Marathon, including links to descriptions of what constitutes a Railway Activation, how to reserve your station, and upcoming and past activations. There's also a reminder to renew your license. The ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, has a very sparse landing page showing their mission and not much else. Clicking around gives you lots of information about the history, activities, awards and the like. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find out how to become licensed in India. There's hardly any images. In contrast, the URA, the Union of Radio Amateurs of Andorra, lands you on a page with contact details and not much else. Clicking through the site gives you lots of pictures of happy people and maps, lots of maps. The KARL, the Korean Amateur Radio League, features an announcement with a link to the 24th Amateur Radio Direction Finding, from a week ago, but it requires a login to actually read it. The JARL, the Japan Amateur Radio League, features an announcement to a form you can complete to join the "List of stations from which you do not wish to receive QSL cards." The NZART, the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters, features a big button to latest news and clicking on it shows the "Jock White Field Day", which was held several months ago. I wasn't able to see the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, since the page didn't load for me. The "Wayback machine", also known as archive.org, from a capture a few days ago, showed a news item announcing the intent to organise the 1st Class C Amateur Radio Technical "something", I say "something" because I cannot actually load the article and see what it has to say. The event was scheduled for a month ago, the announcement was from several months ago. Content aside, finding sites was interesting too, mind you, there's plenty of member associations that don't have any web presence at all. Is that by choice, or necessity? The IARU list of member societies conflicts with the list of national organisations shown on Wikipedia. The IARU has about 160 entries, I say about, since the list isn't really formatted as much as it's congealed. Let's just say, perhaps a table for tabular data might be a novel approach. Wikipedia is slightly better formatted, it lists 93 national organisations. As it happens, both include a link to the national organisation for China, which is either the Chinese Radio Sports Association, with apparently two different acronyms, either CRSAOA, or CRSA, or if you believe the IARU as a source, it's the one I mentioned earlier, the CRAC. I don't know which one is right, but at least we can assume that the IARU page was updated formally, rather than edited by someone on the internet. Regardless of which one is the "real" Chinese national amateur radio organisation, none of the websites loaded for me. Let's move on. It's interesting that several non-English sites like Korea, Japan and Germany feature a button that allows their site to be translated into English. What's even more interesting is that the English version of the site is not in any way the same content. In many cases it appears to be information relevant to English visitors rather than a translation. One notable exception is Estonia, which allows a visitor to read their site in Estonian or English right out of the box. Unsurprisingly, the ARRL website has no buttons for Spanish, even though that represents about 13 percent of the USA population, let alone any other language. I'd encourage you to visit a few and see what you can learn about the other members of our community around the world. My visits leave me with questions. What do these organisations stand for? What do they do? Are they there for amateurs, for aspirant members, the general public, for regulators, for their members, for fund raising and advertising, or international visitors and tourism? It seems to me that looking at just a few of these organisations reveals a great many things about how they understand their own role and how they deliver service and just how much money they have to play with to make that happen. I'll leave you to ponder how effective they might be and what your role is in that endeavour. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Since becoming a licensed amateur in 2010, I have spent a good amount of time putting together my thoughts on a weekly basis about the hobby and the community surrounding amateur radio. As you might know, my interest is eclectic, some might say random, but by enlarge, I go where the unicorns appear. Over a year ago I mentioned in passing a community called HamSCI. The label on the box is "Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation", which gives you a sense of what this is all about. It was started by amateur radio scientists who study upper atmospheric and space physics. More formally, the HamSCI mission is the "Continuation and extension of the amateur's proven ability to contribute to the advancement of the radio art." If you visit the hamsci.org website, and you should, you'll discover dozens of universities and around 1,300 people, many of whom are licensed radio amateurs, who are asking questions and discovering answers that matter to more than just our amateur community. For the eighth time the HamSCI community held an annual "workshop", really, an opportunity to get together and share ideas, in person and across the internet, a conference by any other name. Under the banner theme of "HamSCI's Big Year", over two days, 56 people representing 27 different organisations across 61 sessions, tutorials, discussions, tours, posters and demonstrations, explored topics all over our hobby, from the Personal Space Weather Network, capable of making ground based measurements of the space environment, to the Whistler Catcher Pi, a project to record the VLF spectrum to 48 kHz using a Raspberry Pi. You'll find research into HF antennas for the DASI or Distributed Array of Small Instruments project and associated NSF grants, exploring measurements of HF and VLF, combined with GPS and magnetometer across 20 to 30 stations. There's discussions on how to explore Geospace Data, such as information coming from the Personal Space Weather Station network, or PSWS, using the OpenSpace project and dealing with the challenges of visualising across a wide scale, all the way up to the entire known universe. Did I mention that there's work underway to add PSWS compatible receivers to Antarctica? There reports on observations and modelling of the ionospheric effects of the April 2024 solar eclipse QSO party, including Doppler radio, HF time differences, and Medium Wave signal enhancements, not to mention planning and promoting future meteor scatter QSO parties. There's, post-sunset sporadic-F propagation, large scale travelling ionospheric disturbances, GPS disciplined beacons, the physical nature of sporadic-E propagation and plenty more. As you might have heard me say at one time or another, the difference between fiddling and science is writing it down. It means that you'll find every session has accompanying documentation, charts, graphics and scientific papers. Remember, there's eight years of reading to catch up with, or learn from, or play with. The publications and presentations section on the hamsci.org website currently has 526 different entries. You might not be interested in the impact of radio wave and GPS scintillation, or rapid fluctuation in strength, caused during the G5 geomagnetic storm that occurred on the 10th of May 2024, or a statistical study of ion temperature anistropy using AMISR, or Advanced Modular Incoherent Scatter Radar data .. or you might. In case you're curious, "anistropy" is the property of being directionally dependent, in other words, it matters in which direction you measure, which might have some relevance to you if you consider that we think of the ionosphere and radio paths being reciprocal. If it reminds you of isotropy, that's because they're opposites. The point being, that amateur radio is a great many things to different people. If you're a scientist, budding, graduate or tenured, there's a home for you within this amazing hobby. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I saw a social media post featuring a screenshot of some random website with pretty charts and indicators describing "current HF propagation". Aside from lacking a date, it helpfully included notations like "Solar Storm Imminent" and "Band Closed". It made me wonder, not for the first time, what the reliability of this type of notification is. Does it actually indicate what you might expect when you get on air to make noise, is it globally relevant, is the data valid or real-time? You get the idea. How do you determine the relationship between this pretty display and reality? Immediately the WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter database came to mind. It's a massive collection of signal reports capturing time, band, station and other parameters, one of which is the Signal To Noise ratio or SNR. If the number of sun spots, or a geomagnetic index change affected propagation, can we see an effect on the SNR? Although there's close on a million records per day, I'll note in advance that my current approach of taking a daily average across all reports on a specific band, completely ignores the number of reports, the types and direction of antennas, the distance between stations, transmitter power, local noise or any number of other variables. Using the online "wspr.live" database, looking only at 2024, I linked the daily recorded WSPR SNR average per band to the Sun Spot Numbers and Geomagnetic Index and immediately ran into problems. For starters the daily Sun Spot Number or SSN, from the Royal Observatory in Belgium does not appear to be complete. I'm not yet sure why. For example, there's only 288 days of SSN data in 2024. Does this mean that the observers were on holiday on the other 78 days, or was the SSN zero? Curiously there's 60 days where there's more than one recording and as a bonus, on New Years Eve 2024, there's three recordings, all with the same time stamp, midnight, with 181, 194 and 194 sun spots, so I took the daily average. Also, I ignored the timezone, since that's not apparent. Similarly the Geomagnetic Index data from the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany has several weird artefacts around 1970's data, but fortunately not within 2024 that I saw. The data is collected every three hours, so I averaged that, too. After excluding days where the SSN was missing, I ran into the next issue, my database query was too big, understandable, since there are many reports in this database, 2 billion, give or take, for 2024 alone. Normally I'd be running this type of query on my own hardware, but you might know that I lost my main research computer last year, well, I didn't lose it as such, I can see it from where I am right now, but it won't power up. Money aside, I've been working on it, but being unceremoniously moved from Intel to ARM is not something I'd recommend. I created a script that extracted the data, one day at a time, with 30 seconds between each query. Three hours later I had preliminary numbers. The result was 6,239 records across 116 bands, which of course should immediately spark interest, since we don't really have that many bands. I sorted the output by the number of reports per band and discovered that the maximum number of days per band was 276. This in turn should surprise you, since there's 365 days in a year, well technically a smidge more, but for now, 365 is fine, not to mention that 2024 was a leap-year. So, what happened to the other 90 days? We know that 78 are missing because the SSN wasn't in the database but the other 12 days? I'm going to ignore that too. I removed all the bands that had less than 276 reports per day, leaving 17 bands, including the well known 13 MHz band, the what, yeah, there's a few others like that. I removed the obvious weird band, but what's the 430 MHz band, when the 70cm band in WSPR is defined as 432 MHz? I manually created 15 charts plotting dates against SNR, SSN, Kp and ap indices. Remember, this is a daily average of each of these, just to get a handle on what I'm looking at. Immediately several things become apparent. There are plenty of bands where the relationship between the average SNR and the other influences appear to be negligible. We can see the average SNR move up and down across the year, following the seasons - which raises a specific question. If the SNR is averaged across the whole planet from all WSPR stations, why are we seeing seasonal variation, given that while it's Winter here in VK, it's Summer on the other side of the equator? If you compare the maximum average SNR of a band against the minimum average SNR of the same band, you can get a sense of how much the sun spots and geomagnetic index influences the planet as a whole on that band. The band with the least amount of variation is the 30m band. Said differently, with all the changes going on around propagation, the 30m band appears to be the most stable, followed by the 12m and 15m bands. The SNR across all of HF varies, on average, no more than 5 dB. The higher the band, the more variation there is. Of course it's also possible that there's less reports there, so we might be seeing the impact of individual station variables more keenly. It's too early for conclusions, but I can tell you that this gives us plenty of new questions to ask. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A recent comment by a fellow amateur sparked a train of thought that made me wonder why there is a pervasive idea within our community that you need a radio transmitter and antenna to be a radio amateur, moreover that for some reason, if you don't have either, you're not a real amateur. I suppose it's related to the often repeated trope that the internet enabled modes like Allstar Link, Echolink and even IRLP, are not real radio, despite evidence to the contrary. Instead of fighting this weird notion, I figured I'd get on with it and find a way to play even if you don't currently have the ability to erect an antenna or key a transmitter for whatever reason. Before I dig in, a WebSDR is a Software Defined Radio connected to the Internet. It allows a user to open a web browser, pick from a massive collection of receivers around the world and listen in. Some of these also have the ability to transmit, but more on that later. Here's the idea. Have you ever considered tuning to a WebSDR, using it to pick a signal and using your computer to decode that signal? I'm aware that some sites provide a range of in-built decoders, but that doesn't cover the wide spectrum of modes that amateur radio represents, let alone the modes that are not specific to our hobby. As I've said previously, many of the modes in use today are essentially the width of an audio stream. This means that if you tune a WebSDR to a frequency the audio comes out of your computer speakers. If that's voice, your job is done and you can hear what's going on. If it's something else, then you're going to have to find a way to decode this to get the message. So, if you send the audio from your web browser into something like Fldigi or WSJT-X, you'll be able to decode the signal if it's supported by those tools. This is true for all the other tools too, Morse, RTTY, you name it. Depending on which operating system you're using the way to implement this will differ. Starting with a search for "WebSDR and WSJT-X" will get you on your way. You might ask why I'm advocating WSJT-X, even though it only supports a small set of modes and that's a fair question. In my experience, it's the simplest to get running and get results. Two tips, make sure you set your configuration to indicate that you don't have a radio, otherwise it's going to attempt to control something that isn't there, and make sure that your computer clock is set accurately using NTP or Network Time Protocol. You can thank me later. Now I hinted earlier at transmitting. There's a growing range of places where your amateur license will give you access to a station somewhere on the internet and with that the ability to get on air and make noise. An increasing number of radio amateur clubs are building remote stations for their members to enjoy. There are also individuals and small groups doing the same independently. A few organisations are offering this as a service to paid subscribers. These tools often implement a remote desktop session where you connect to a computer that in turn is connected to a radio. The supported modes depend on what is installed at the other end. Others implement a slightly different method where you run specialised software locally, sometimes inside a web browser, that connects to a server across the internet, allowing you to run whatever digital mode you want on your own computer. I'll point out that even if you start with receiving digital modes using a WebSDR, you can expand that into transmitting at a later stage. So, no antenna, no transmitter, no problem, still an amateur! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over the years I've talked about different ways of using our license to transmit. I've discussed things like modes such as voice AM, FM, and SSB, and digital modes like FT8, WSPR, RTTY, FreeDV, Hellschreiber, Olivia and even Morse code. Recently it occurred to me that there is something odd about how we do this as a community. Now that I've realised this it's hard to unsee. Let me see if I can get you to the same place of wonder. Why is it that we as amateurs only use one such mode at a time? Let me say that again. With all the modes we have available to us, why do we only use one mode at a time, why do we get our brain into the mindset of one activity, stop doing that in order to move to another mode? It's weird. Amateur radio is what's called "frequency agile". What I mean by that is we are not restricted to a fixed number of channels like most, if not all other radio users. We can set our transmission frequency to whatever we want, within the restrictions imposed by our license conditions, and start making noise. There's agreement on what mode you can use where, but within that comes a great deal of flexibility. We have the ability to find each other. Call CQ and if the band is open and your station is transmitting a signal, the chance is good that someone somewhere on planet Earth will respond. We change frequency at will, almost without thought, but why don't we do this with modes? The closest I've seen is local VHF and UHF contests where you get different points depending on which mode you're using, and even that seems hard fought. It's weird. We have an increasing range of Software Defined Radios, or SDR, where your voice, or incoming text, can be transformed to a different mode at the touch of a button, but we rarely if ever actually use this ability. In case you're thinking that the restriction relates to the availability of SDR in the average amateur radio shack, most amateur modes fit within a normal audio stream and that same flexibility could be applied to the vast majority of transmitters scattered around the globe, but to my knowledge, it isn't. Why is that? Better still, what can we do about it? Can we develop procedures and processes to make us more, let's call it "mode agile", giving us the ability to change mode at the same ease as we change frequency? What would a "mode and frequency agile" amateur look like? What processes would you use? Right now the best we have is to QSY, or announce that we're changing frequency, but I've never heard anyone use that to describe a change of mode. Of course it's possible that I've led a sheltered life and not been on-air enough, but if that's the case, I'd love to hear about it. So, what is stopping us from becoming even more flexible? Do we need to practice this, develop better tools, teach new amateurs, have multimode nets, invent new modes that share information across different modes simultaneously, build radios that can transmit on different frequencies, or something else? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the basic aspects of being human and growing up is the process of learning. From a young age we explore our environment, play with others, have fun, fall over and bruise our knees, get up and try again. The playing aspect of this is often discussed as a way to keep things interesting. We add a competition element as an added incentive, so much so that we formaulate it into global competitions and call it sport. As a species it might surprise you that we spend about 1% of all Gross Domestic Product on sport, compared to science, which is about 2% of Global GDP. To give you some context, Agriculture accounts for about 4%, Manufacturing is 15%, Industry is about 26%, and Services account for roughly 62%. If you noticed that this is more than 100%, take it up with the World Bank, I'm a radio amateur, not an economist. Over the years I've explored different aspects of our chosen hobby of amateur radio. Time and again I return to experimentation, learning and having fun. Now I absolutely concede that my idea of fun and yours might not match, my GDP side quest is likely evidence of this, but in my opinion, this embodies the range of how we as a disparate community interact and exchange ideas across the ionosphere and closer to home using what we all can agree on is pretty close to magic. So, what is my point? Fair question. Having fun and learning. If you've ever had the opportunity to listen to aviation radio, and I'd encourage you to, the YouTube channel, VASAviation is a great place to start, comes with maps, explanations and subtitles. You'll discover that the complex domain of aviation communication is a dynamic environment where miscommunication matters and often has severe consequences. It's not all incidents and accidents though. If you look for Air Traffic Control legend "Kennedy Steve", you'll come across some of the funniest exchanges captured on ATC frequencies, all the while staying professional. So, how does this relate to amateur radio and you? Well, at the moment we have a few types of exchanges where we can practice our skills. The most obvious one is a thing we call contesting. A scored and rule bound activity where you're expected to exchange information and are declared the winner in a category. It's a little like sport and some have attempted to rephrase amateur radio contesting into a field that they're calling "radio sport". I have mixed feelings about this because there isn't much in the way of spectator activity associated with this. Another exchange is calling for DX contacts, sharing an exchange across distance, attempting to contact as many countries as possible, with the prize being membership into the fabled DXCC, the Century Club that acknowledges your prowess in making contact with a hundred countries. The most common exchange is the net or discussion group. It can be formal, like the weekly F-troop I've been hosting since 2011, or it can be ad hoc, one amateur chatting to another, sparking spontaneous discussion among several stations on frequency. We also do things like radio direction finding, someone sets up a transmitter and everyone playing tries to find the source as quickly as possible. First one to find it wins. It made me wonder if there are other things we might come up with. Has anyone played chess across HF? Or if you want to involve a larger group, what about playing Bingo! or a game of trivia? Anyone considered an MMORPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game? The point being that we can play games, have fun, and learn in an environment where there are many factors affecting your ability to communicate, so we can all get better at keying the microphone and getting the message to the intended recipient. While we're having fun, nobody said that this needs to be a voice activity. An FT8 session could well be coerced into transmitting chess moves and nobody said that you have to do FT8 on the same frequency that WSJT-X is using. So, what games can you come up with and learn from? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you join the community of radio amateurs, or when you briefly look over the shoulder of the nearest devotee, you're likely to discover that this is a hobby about a great many different ideas. Over the years I've discussed this aspect of our community repeatedly, talked about the rewards it brings you, about the camaraderie, about communication, learning, research, soldering, disaster recovery, public service, and all the other thousands of activities that this hobby represents to the world. While all those things might be true for some, they're not true for everyone. Many amateurs get excited about antennas, some immediately, some eventually. The same can be said for all the other points of what we think of when we discuss our hobby with others. Recently I saw a random comment on social media from a person who was having issues with their mobile phone on their property. I considered and ventured an opinion about what might be the cause and how they might go about discovering what was going on. I debated about how I signed off. It's a recurring dialogue, should I reveal upfront that I'm a radio amateur, or should I leave that to be discovered at a later date? In my experience, the wider society has a, let's call it a rocky relationship with our hobby. With the decrease in profile and numbers comes an increase in misconception about who it is that we are, and what it is that we do. At some level, there's an understanding that at some point this was an activity that grandpa might have engaged in, or it might be someone preparing for the end of the world, seeing our community as the way forward when all else fails, not at all helped by that slogan being used by a vocal amateur radio body, the ARRL. Given that, as I saw it, the issue was related to radio interference or a weak signal, I signed off, for better or worse, "Source: I'm a licensed radio amateur", and crossed my fingers. This started a discussion about the issue, which revealed that the person was having other problems with other communication tools in their remote village. I don't want to go into the specifics, because it's not about what their issue is, where they live and what other resources they might have access to, or not. It's about us, radio amateurs, because of course it is. Aside from the cringe associated with my sign-off, if you have suggestions on how to improve it, I'm all ears, I had a take-away that I thought was worth discussing. As I'm beginning to suspect, it's about the fundamental nature of our hobby, what it is and what it does. Troubleshooting. Let me say that again. Amateur Radio is fundamentally about "troubleshooting", in other words, systematically finding and fixing complex problems. So, let's explore this. If you consider we're all about communication in difficult environments, I'd point out that getting that message across is an exercise in troubleshooting. If you lean towards learning, then consider deciding what to study and why, more troubleshooting. If you suggest it's about soldering, what happens when you poke the leg of a component into the wrong hole? Do I really need to say it? Every time you think you've nailed down the intangible nature of our hobby, you can point at troubleshooting. Don't get me wrong, it's about having fun too, but you and I both know that fun is balanced by frustration, again, you guessed it, troubleshooting. In our increasingly technical, interconnected and complex world, the ancient pursuit of amateur radio is teaching you an invaluable skill, over and over again, all but inevitably: "The art of troubleshooting". So, next time you are asked why we should be doing this thing, why we are obsessed with this hobby, why we spend many hours, dollars and effort, it's all about finding out why something doesn't work as expected and funnily enough, the more you do it, the better you get. For radio amateurs, troubleshooting is our superpower. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I started an experiment I plan to run for a year. Using a WSPR beacon and a dummy load I'm transmitting 200 mW, 24 hours a day across all bands supported by my hardware, in this case it covers 80m, 40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m, and 10m. The aim of the experiment is to determine if, and to what extent my dummy load can be heard outside my shack. Why? Because I've not seen anyone do this and because a dummy load is widely believed to not radiate, despite evidence to the contrary. Together with the transmission side, I've also configured an RTL-SDR dongle, initially with the telescopic antenna it came with, now, since my HF antenna isn't being used by the beacon, I'm using it instead. It's about five metres away from the beacon, outside. It's a helically wound whip resonant on the 40m band built by Walter VK6BCP (SK). It's what I've been using as my main antenna for the past seven years or so. While I'm telling you this, my beacon has been heard by my dongle 1,182 times across all eight bands. Some of those reports were from inside the shack, some from outside, some while I was monitoring a single band, and for the past week or so, I've been monitoring all the bands supported by "rtlsdr_wsprd", 18 in all. Purposefully, this includes some bands that I'm not transmitting on, because who knows what kinds of harmonics I might discover? The receiver changes band every half hour, so over time when I monitor a band will shift across the day, this is deliberate. I don't know when a stray transmission might suddenly appear and this will give me the best chance of hearing it, short of using 18 different receivers. At this time, my beacon hasn't been heard by any other station. I'm not expecting it to, but that's why I'm doing this experiment in the first place. I'm not in any way reaching any sense of "DX on a dummy load", but it got me thinking. My beacon can be heard, albeit by me, from five meters away. So it's radiating to some extent. I've already discussed that this might come from the patch lead between the beacon and the dummy load, or it could be the dummy load itself, or some other aspect of the testing configuration. Regardless of the situation, there is a signal coming from my beacon that's wirelessly being heard by a receiver. That's the same as what you'd hope to achieve with any antenna. So, in what way are an antenna and a dummy load different, and in what way are they the same? Whenever someone asks this, the stock answer is that an antenna radiates and a dummy load doesn't. My experiment, 20 days in, has already proven that this distinction is incomplete, if not outright wrong. Even so, if we take it on face value, and we say, for argument's sake, that a dummy load doesn't radiate and an antenna does, then how do we materially distinguish between the two? How does an antenna compare to a dipole, Yagi or vertical antenna and where does the isotropic radiator fit in this? The best I've come up with so far is a spectrum line comparing the various elements. Let's say that at one end of the spectrum is a dummy load, at the other is an isotropic radiator, to refresh your memory, that's the ideal radiator, it radiates all RF energy in all directions equally. Somewhere between the two ends is a dipole. We might argue if the dipole sits equally between a dummy load and an isotropic radiator, but where does a Yagi or a vertical fit in relation to the dipole? Also, if you turn a Yagi in the other direction, does it change place? So, perfect this notion is not, but here's my question. What's the measurement along the axis between the dummy load and the isotropic radiator? It's not SWR, since the ideal antenna and a dummy load share the same SWR, unless this line is a circle that I don't know about. It might be Total Radiated Power expressed in Watts, but that seems counter intuitive. It would mean that in order to determine the effectiveness of an antenna we'd need to set-up in an anechoic chamber, basically a warehouse sized room where incoming radiation is shielded to some predetermined standard. Do we measure gain using a VNA and call it a day, or is there something else going on? Remember, we're attempting to quantify the difference between a dummy load and an antenna. In case you're wondering, I'm asking the question. In the 15 years I've been part of this community, I've never seen any coherent response. The Internet seems to return a variation on the radiation vs. not-radiation pattern, but so far I've not seen anyone quantify this, or perhaps I haven't understood it while it was staring me in the face. I even checked the syllabus for the three license classes in Australia. The single reference that the regulator appears to specify is that at the introductory level you are required to, wait for it, recall that when testing a transmitter, a non-radiating load, or dummy load, is commonly used to prevent a signal from being radiated. Very illuminating. Obviously my dummy load is of the wrong type, the radiating variety. Which begs the question, if there's an ideal radiator, is there a theoretical ideal dummy load that doesn't radiate in any way, and if so, how far away on this line is it from my actual dummy load? Over to you. What are your thoughts on this? Better yet, got any references? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently Glynn VK6PAW and I had the opportunity to play radio. This isn't something that happens often so we try to make the most of it. For our efforts we had plenty of frustrations, to the point where we were joking that I should rename this to "Frustrations of Amateur Radio". That was until we heard something weird on-air. All setup shenanigans forgotten, we marvelled at the experience. I was playing around on the 10m band, trying to hear people making noise and potentially our first contact for the field day we were participating in, when I heard something odd. Two stations talking to each other, but the audio was strange. It was like they were doubling up, the same audio played a fraction of a second later, until that moment, something I've only ever heard in a radio studio whilst editing using a reel-to-reel tape machine with separate recording and playback heads. Having just started using a digital only radio, at first I thought this was an artefact of the radio. I took note of the frequency, 28.460 MHz and told Glynn about it. After we moved the telescopic vertical antenna to the analogue radio, we discovered that this was in fact real, not caused by the radios, no doubt a relief to the proud owner of both radios, Glynn, who was thinking more clearly than I. He took note of the callsigns, Dom VK2HJ and Yukiharu JE1CSW. Looking back now, an audio recording would have been helpful. At the time I suggested that this might be a case of long path and short path signals arriving at our station and being able to hear both. If you're not sure what that means, when you transmit, an antenna essentially radiates in all directions and signals travel all over the globe. Some head directly towards your destination, the short path, others head in exactly the opposite direction, taking the long way around Earth, the long path. You might think that the majority of contacts are made using the short path, but it regularly happens the other way around, where the long path is heard and the short path is not. As you might know, radio waves essentially bounce up and down between the ionosphere and Earth and it might happen that the signal arrives at the destination antenna, or it might happen that it bounces right over the top, making either short path or long path heard, or not. In this case, both arrived clearly audible. It wasn't until I sat down on the couch afterwards with a calculator that I was able to at least prove to my own satisfaction that this is what we heard. So, what were those calculations and what was the delay? The circumference of Earth is roughly 40,000 km. RF propagation travels at the speed of light, or about 300,000 km/s. It takes about 0.13 seconds or 130 milliseconds for a radio signal to travel around Earth. At this point you might realise that 40,000 km is measured at the surface, but ionospheric propagation happens in the ionosphere, making the circumference at the very top of the ionosphere about 45,000 km, which would take 150 ms. There are several things that need to line up for this all to work. Propagation aside, the distance between all three stations needs to be such that the number of hops between each combination is a whole number so we can all hear each other. As it happens, the distance between Perth in Western Australia and Maebashi City in Japan is pretty close to the distance between Goulburn in New South Wales and Japan, and the distance between Goulburn and Perth is roughly half that. Using back of napkin trigonometry, it appears that 27 hops around the planet are required to make this happen. That's five hops between Perth and Japan, and between Goulburn and Japan, and two hops between Goulburn and Perth, and 27 hops between Perth and Japan the long way around. Given that the F2 layer where the 10m signal is refracted exists between about 220 km and 800 km, we can estimate that the total delay for the long path is at least 144 ms. That doesn't really translate into anything you might relate to, but at 8 wpm a Morse code dit takes 150 milliseconds, which gives you a sense of how long the echo delay is. In other words, it's something that you can absolutely hear without needing to measure it. There are other implications. WSPR signals are used to test weak signal propagation. Stations around the globe report on what they can hear and when. For this to work, the signal need to be synchronised, something which is commonly implemented using something called NTP, or Network Time Protocol. It can achieve a time accuracy of 10 ms. GPS locked WSPR beacons can achieve an accuracy of 40 nanoseconds. In other words, if we know that the beacon and the receiver are time synchronised, we can probably detect if the signal arrived using a short path or a long path. The WSPR decoder tracks the time between when the signal arrived and 2 seconds past an even minute as perceived by the receiver. Gwyn G3ZIL wrote an interesting document called "Timescale wsprdaemon database queries V2" on the subject of the data format used by wsprdaemon, a tool used to analyse WSPR beacon transmissions. If this is something you want to play with, check out wsprdaemon.org From our adventures there was plenty to take away. Stay curious, go portable, take notes, practice putting up an antenna, keep a log, laugh and have fun, and last but not least, get on air and make noise. Before I forget, make sure your mate brings a pen for logging when your own trusty scribble stick suddenly gives up the ghost for no apparent reason. I knew there was a reason I prefer pencils. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I received a question in relation to the Bald Yak project. If you're not familiar, "The Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio." I know that I've said that several times now and I suspect I'm going to say it several more times before we're done. I was asked about a specific radio and if this project could make it use a frequency that the supplied software didn't cover. The answer is deceptively simple and if you know me at all, you know what's coming: "It depends". As with many things, what it depends on is not fixed. I'll come back to the question, but I'm making a diversion past a magical place, the local hardware store. You can buy everything you need to build a house with the caveat that some assembly is required. GNU Radio is similar for building a signal processing system, but, wait for it, some assembly is required. In the context of GNU Radio this means that you'll need to collect all the bits and wire them together, fortunately you're unlikely to need Personal Protective Equipment or access to a First Aid Kit, unless of course the idea of playing with computers gives you palpitations, in which case I'd recommend that you go see your doctor. One of the less obvious things you'll come across with GNU Radio is how to bring signal processing into the physical realm, in other words, how do you get a signal into your computer, known as a "source", and get it out, called a "sink". The ability to talk to physical hardware arrives in roughly three different ways. Let's call them, "native", "library", and "abstraction". Native access requires that GNU Radio already knows about the hardware out of the box. Library access requires that the hardware manufacturer has provided software libraries, also known as drivers, allowing GNU Radio to communicate, and finally, abstraction is where a third party has written a library that knows how to talk to hardware from different manufacturers. The distinction between these is almost arbitrary, for example abstraction might require a driver from a hardware manufacturer. Similarly, because all this software is open source, native can include software from other projects, like the RTL-SDR blocks from Osmocom, Open Source Mobile Communications, and UHD blocks written by Ettus Research, which in turn can be seen as an abstraction. As I said, some assembly required. I will point out that this provides a great deal of flexibility, albeit at the cost of complexity, there's still no such thing as a free lunch. At this point you might shake your head and run away. I get that, it can be daunting. Before you do, consider the scenario where you have a working system and you upgrade your hardware. In a GNU Radio world you'll need to figure out how to configure the new hardware and then all your other stuff will continue to work. The alternative is upgrading each of your applications to connect to your new radio and in doing so, run the risk of making your old radio obsolete, even if you are collecting them .. let's say for posterity rather than hoarding .. because radio amateurs never hoard anything .. right? Back to the original question. Can GNU Radio make a radio use frequencies that the software that came with the radio cannot? As I said, "it depends". First of all, the hardware needs to actually be able to support the frequency. Then someone needs to have written a library to use that frequency, then GNU Radio needs to be able to use that library. That said, the chances of that happening are much higher than the chance of the hardware manufacturer rolling out this feature within your lifetime. Before you start yelling at me, yes, this is manufacturer dependent, some provide open source tools, many still don't. There are alternative ways to access different frequencies. The PlutoSDR is a computer and radio in a box. You can connect to it, change some settings and have it access a whole lot more frequencies. In some ways it's like adding or removing jumpers on a traditional circuit-board. Another approach is to use an up- or down-converter. Essentially a piece of hardware connected between antenna and radio that translates frequencies to different bands. A down-converter allows you to use the 23cm band on a radio that's only capable of 70cm. Similarly, an up-converter allows your 70cm radio to hear HF signals. If you see a symmetry here, you didn't imagine it. You need both to transmit and receive, sold together in the same box as a transverter. Just so we're clear, the radio is still using the 70cm band, but the RF coming in and out of the antenna connected to the transverter is on a different band entirely. It's why my Yaesu FT-857d has three menu options, 89, 90 and 91, to adjust the display to show the actual RF frequency. As an aside, you could use this functionality if your radio is off frequency by a known amount. As I've said before, GNU Radio is a powerful tool. It contains many different moving parts, the system is complex and unwieldy, but with it comes the promise of doing some amazing stuff. The whole point of the Bald Yak project is to make this all accessible to the wider amateur community, not just computer geeks and software radio nerds. If you have questions, feel free to drop me a line. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I made a joke about operating your station with a dummy load in response to John VA3KOT operating their station with the craziest antenna they ever used. It got me thinking about the ubiquitous "dummy load" as an antenna. Since becoming licensed I've spoken with several amateurs who tell a similar story, one comes to mind immediately, Lance VK6LR, now SK, who told me that they managed an unexpected 2m contact with another station using a dummy load, across the city. There's various versions of this doing the rounds, incandescent light bulbs used as both dummy load and antenna, coiled up roll of coax, everyone has a story to tell. Having spent several years proving that you can in fact use 10 mW and be heard on the other side of the planet, 13,945 km away, it tickled my fancy to think about what would happen if I replaced my antenna with a dummy load on purpose, as a test. For the past two or so months my WSPR beacon has been transmitting every ten minutes on the 15m band. It was heard 3,493 km away. Interestingly, even in that short amount of time, the radiation pattern of my antenna as seen on the "wspr.live" website shows a similar outline to the 10m transmissions I've been doing since late 2021. The number of total spots wasn't nearly as significant. I added a local receiver to my shack, just to prove that I was in fact transmitting, but there were plenty of days without a single external report, this in contrast with my 10m experiment where most days I had at least one or more reports from outside my shack, most of them outside my state. In other words, not every band gets the same kind of report. My license restricts me to the 80m, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm bands. The two antennas I've used so far are essentially limited to a single band, unless I start tuning it every time I change bands. As you might recall, I purchased a Hustler 6BTV antenna several years ago. Unfortunately, it's still sitting in the box. Climbing on my roof has not been an option for several years, but its time will come. The purpose of getting that antenna was specifically so I could use WSPR across multiple bands and see how propagation was in my shack in real-time without needing to rely on external forecasts or predictions. Switching to a dummy load has several benefits and impacts. First of all, it's not something I've seen anyone do. Then there's the idea of band hopping without needing to re-tune. The idea of radiating into something that's not supposed to radiate, is something that makes me smile. Given that each band has a different level of propagation, which ones should I choose? I could pick all the ones I'm licensed for, but that would leave out the WARC bands and the ever popular 20m band. What if I ignored convention and transmitted on all bands supported by my WSPR transmitter? Remember, I'm transmitting into a dummy load. By all accounts this should not radiate. It's taken as gospel by the amateur community that it doesn't. So, using a dummy load, one that's rated at 15 Watts between DC and 150 MHz, feeding it with 200 mW, or 23 dBm, my WSPR transmitter is currently merrily pinging away across 80m, 40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m. If all goes to plan, nobody will ever hear this. That said, I can hear the uproar from here. What's the point? You're illegally transmitting on bands you're not licensed for. I'll report you to the regulator. Here's the point. The community and the regulator both state that the dummy load is the approved method for testing equipment. It's implied that the equipment will be happy and there will be no radiation. I'm testing and monitoring that assumption. I'm using all bands because if conventional wisdom is right, nobody will hear this. On the other hand, if conventional wisdom is wrong, there will be reports from bands where there are many people monitoring. I'll note a couple of other things. There's a patch lead between the WSPR transmitter and the dummy load. It's about 200 mm long. It's the shortest one I have. It was terminated at the factory and connects the SMA output of the WSPR transmitter to the SO-239 on the dummy load. Theoretically it might radiate. Perhaps this is where other transmissions into a dummy load emanate from, perhaps not. I discussed the idea of measuring the emissions from a dummy load with a fellow amateur versed in testing much more sensitive equipment. We were not able to come up with a way that would be simple to do by any amateur. If you have ideas, feel free to share. I'm likely going to cop flack from those who think I'm doing something illegal. You cannot have it both ways. Either I'm transmitting legally or a dummy load isn't a suitable testing tool. Unless instructed by the regulator to cease, I'm confident that I'm operating precisely within the obligations and requirements of my license which encourages me to test and monitor interference, which is literally what I'm doing. One other point. Until now my WSPR transmitter has paused for eight minutes between transmissions, transmitting once every ten minutes, or six times per hour. It was the default as I recall. I've changed that to transmitting every cycle on a different band. This means that every 16 minutes, the same band will get activated. It also means that because 16 minutes doesn't fit neatly into an hour, the band will move over time, which I think is a good thing. The frequency hopping appears to be round robin, so no grey-line changes, but feel free to correct me. I don't know what this will do to the transmitter and if it will sustain this. I haven't asked Harry SM7PNV, but if it cooks itself, I'm sure that I can order a new one and mark it down as a lesson learnt. So, have at it. Point your receiver at VK6 and see what you can hear. I expect to keep this running for a year and see what we learn. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When you joined the global community of radio amateurs you did so with a perspective that represented, at the time, what you thought the hobby was and how it operated. Since then, years, months, even days ago, that perspective has shifted in both subtle and obvious ways. One of my local amateur radio clubs, Ham College, was specifically formed to provide amateur radio education and license exams. It's where I went to get my Foundation license in 2010 and it's where many of the local amateurs have been taught over the years. For years I've been semi-regularly visiting Ham College during their Foundation course sessions. The purpose of my visit is to share what it's like to be an amateur, what things you don't really know about before you get licensed, and what things to look out for when you are. In general I talk about how to find the rest of the community, what you can expect and what to do with your license once you pass the exam. I try to cover the highlights without overwhelming the audience who technically are not yet amateurs at the time I'm sharing my thoughts. I talk about the endless variety of amateur radio activities, from activating anything that's not moving, or anything that is, depending on the level of adrenaline required, through contesting, camping and bushwalking, antennas, endless antennas and electronics. I talk about low power versus high power, and about community expectations in relation to upgrading to a "real" license. In case you're wondering, a "real" amateur license is any amateur license, including the Foundation license I hold, the introductory license. In my view, ultimately, this is your hobby, where you decide when and how much you want more responsibility and decide to pursue what this means for you. I discuss that the amateur radio community is global, attracting people from all walks of life, from submariners to scientists, from tow truck drivers to teachers, aged from nine to ninety, across all languages. I also touch on some of the less fun aspects of our hobby, specifically bullies. Over the years you've heard me discuss diversity, equity and inclusion in our community and also how there is a vocal minority who make it their mission to present obstacles to anyone who is different in any way. As I've said previously, the only antidote against this intimidation is to call it out and make your views heard, "this is not in the spirit of amateur radio", rather than change the dial and move on. In case you're wondering, changing the dial does nothing to address the issue and has a lasting effect on anyone else on frequency who might feel, or worse, has been, threatened by the bully. I also point out that this obnoxious behaviour is an exception, even if you feel personally attacked, and what you might do and whom you might talk to. For the record, my door is always open. Another example of what I discuss is the local amateur news and the weekly net for new and returning amateurs, F-Troop, midnight UTC on Saturday for an hour, a place where you can ask questions and discuss your issues with a supportive international community of amateurs. As you can tell, I'm not shy in voicing my opinion. Although I set myself a limit of 15 minutes, of late I've been wondering what other things might be of interest to someone who is just taking their first steps on their amateur radio adventure, hours away from taking their exam. What kinds of things would you have liked to know when you started your amateur journey? Get in touch, my address is cq@vk6flab.com. Don't be shy, express your opinion, it's the only thing that changes the world. What do you want the amateurs of tomorrow to know today? How would you equip yourself if you had the chance to start again? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I received a lovely email from Michele IU4TBF asking some pertinent questions about the Bald Yak project. If you're unfamiliar, the Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio. The short answer to how I'm doing getting GNU Radio to play nice with my computer is that I have bruises on my forehead from banging my head against the wall. When I get to success I'll document it. To be clear, I'm not sure what the root cause is. I suspect it lies between the GNU Radio developers, the people making packages and the manufacturer of my computer. I'm the lucky one stuck in the middle. A more interesting question that Michele asked was, for Bald Yak, what is the A/D and D/A requirement for making GNU Radio talk to an antenna? This is a much deeper question that meets the eye and I think it serves as a way to discuss what I think that this project looks like. Ultimately in the digital realm, to receive, an analogue antenna signal needs to be converted to digital using an Analogue to Digital or A/D converter, and to transmit, the reverse uses a Digital to Analogue or D/A converter to make an electrical signal appear on your antenna. The specific A/D or D/A converter determines what you can do. The sampling rate of such a converter determines what frequencies it can handle, the sample size determines the range of signals it can handle. You can compare it with a video screen. The sample rate determines how many pixels on the screen, the sample size determines how many colours in each pixel. The sample rate of an A/D converter is measured in samples per second. If the device only has one channel, you could think of this as Hertz, but if there are multiple channels, like say a sound-card, the sample rate is likely equally divided across each channel. You might have a sound card capable of 384 thousand samples per second, or kilo-samples, but if it supports simultaneous stereo audio input and output, only 96 of those 384 kilo-samples will be allocated to each channel and only half of those will actually help reconstruct the audio signal, leaving you with 48 kHz audio. In other words, the advertised frequency response might not have a direct and obvious relationship with the sample rate. At the moment I have access to a few different A/D and D/A converters. The simplest one, a USB audio sound card, appears to do up to 192 kilo-samples at 16 bits. The next one, an RTL-SDR tops out at a theoretical rate of 3.2 million or mega-samples at 8 bits. The Analog Devices ADALM-PLUTO, or PlutoSDR handles 61.44 mega-samples at 12 bits. Now, to be clear, there are other limitations and considerations which I'm skipping over. Consider for example the speed at which each of these devices can talk to a computer, in this case over USB. I'm also going to ignore things like mixers, allowing devices like the RTL-SDR and PlutoSDR to tune across frequency ranges that go beyond their sample rate. Each of these three devices can convert an analogue antenna signal into bits that can be processed by GNU Radio. All of them can also be used to do the opposite and transmit. Yes, you heard me, several amateurs figured out that an RTL-SDR can actually transmit. Credit to Ismo OH2FTG, Tatu OH2EAT, and Oscar IK1XPV. The point being that whatever Bald Yak looks like, it will need to handle a range of A/D and D/A converters. As I've said previously, I'm aiming for this to work incrementally for everyone. This means that if you have a sound card in your computer or an $8 USB one, this should work and if you have an $33,000 NI Ettus USRP X410 lying around, this too should work. Also, if you have an X410 lying around not doing anything, I'd be happy to put it to use, you know, for testing. So, kidding aside, what about the rest of the Bald Yak experience? GNU Radio works with things called blocks. Essentially little programs that take data, do something to it, then output it in some way. It follows the Unix philosophy, make each program do one thing well, expect the output of every program to become the input to another, design and build software to be tried early and use tools rather than unskilled labour. Amateur radio transceivers traditionally use electronics blocks, but if we move to software, we can update and expand our capabilities as the computer we're using gets faster and the GNU Radio blocks evolve, and because it's all digital the computer doesn't actually have to be in the same box, let alone the same room, it could be in multiple boxes scattered around the Internet. So, the idea of Bald Yak is a collection of blocks that allow you to do radio things. You might have a separate box for each amateur radio mode, AM, FM, SSB, RTTY, CW, WSPR, FT8, FT4, Q65, but also modes like Olivia, FreeDV, SSTV, Packet, PSK31 or Thor. Instead of having to figure out how to wire these modes into your radio and your computer, the infrastructure is already there and you just download another block for a mode you want to play with. We'll need to deal with variables like which A/D and D/A converter is being used and what their limitations are. We'll also need to build a command and control layer and probably a few other things. I'm considering a few other aspects. For example, GNU Radio is mostly run with text files. We might distribute those using something like a web store. GNU Radio is proving hard to install, perhaps a LiveCD is the way to go. We'll need to come up with a base level of functionality and the documentation to go with it. I'm still contemplating how to best licence this all, specifically to stop it from being exploited. Feel free to get in touch if you have ideas. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever come across a solution to a problem that you sort of knew you had, but didn't really appreciate until that moment? I had one of those recently. To set the scene, fair warning, we're not going to solve this today, we're still very much shaving yaks, but there's plenty to take away. So, the scene. I'm hosting my weekly net. It's going well. All the internet links are up and running again, thanks to the hard work behind the scenes of several unsung heroes, I can name a few, Bob VK6ZGN, John VK6RX and Rob VK6LD, but there are plenty of others whom I don't know and who have yet to stick up their hand to say, I was there. Regardless, thank you. Anyway, I'm hosting my weekly net, F-troop. A curious thing is occurring. Two of the stations are emitting a tone during their transmission. I'm pretty hot on how things sound, so I ask. We talk about it for a bit when Allen VK6XL comes in and tells us that according to his spectrum analyser it's a 1 kHz tone with harmonics and it's on all transmissions, just audible on two. This starts a conversation about spectrum analysers when Allen mentions that he's using an audio spectrum analyser, a piece of software running on his computer. The software has a copyright from 1999 and based on the documentation I saw, has lots of excellent functionality. I might even be able to run it on a Linux machine using WINE, but that's an adventure for another day. Randall VK6WR points out that I could use the spectrum display on Audacity. This is a much more current piece of software, but it's not intended for real-time use, it's what I use to edit the audio after recording my podcast. Not even sure if the spectrum display can show during recording, I've never tried. In the past I've used SoX, the Swiss Army knife of sound processing to create sonograms, but that too isn't real-time. Then it hits me. I have a real-time tool. I've been playing with it for weeks. GNU Radio. Surely it has a spectrum display, and indeed it does, several. So, I already have a tool, purpose built for processing signals, that can do all the things I'm looking for and some I've not yet imagined. Before I proceed, I'll remind you that we're in the middle of the Bald Yak project, so named because by the time we're done there won't be much hair left, if any. In case you're unfamiliar, the Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio. So, boldly clicking about, I set on the notion of making a block called "fosphor" work. Depending on which description you use, it's an Open Source, GPU-accelerated FFT and Waterfall display tool. What that means is that it uses a graphics processor to do the heavy lifting and has the ability to show signal levels across frequencies and on a waterfall display. Apparently it's a block for RTSA-like spectrum visualisation. I'm fairly sure that doesn't mean Railway Technical Society of Australasia or has any relationship with Reverse Total Shoulder Arthroplasty or the Road Transport and Safety Agency of Zambia. I'll admit that I didn't see the GPU part of that description until several days later. Had I seen it at the time, I would likely have carefully backed away and shelved the idea, but that's all water under the bridge. To cut to the chase, I have yet to make this show a single pixel. I smelled trouble for the first time when I discovered a post asking if anyone had gotten this to work on a current release of Debian. I came across a lovely post by what appears to be the author helping some hapless user, and I'll confess that's the camp I'm currently in, to make it work. I have no doubt that I can make it work, but that's going to take some effort. Now, at this point you might ask me why I wasted your time with this tale of woe? Well, the answer is simple. This is what "Yak Shaving" looks like. You solve a thousand little problems, one at a time, and if you manage to keep track of what you're doing and why, you can get stuff done. This applies here, but it also applies in your life, in radio, in antenna building, in making a contact, in participating in a contest, in activating a park. Each activity reveals myriad issues that you'll each need to resolve. The more practice you have at this, the better you'll get. I will point out that for me it's not without stress. When I go though intractable problems I'm often as grumpy as a bear with a sore tooth whilst my brain is running like a hamster in a wheel generating kilowatts of power. This too shall pass. Oh, because I know it's bothering you. RTSA, Real Time Spectrum Analyser, obvious, right? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I built a first attempt at a noise cancelling circuit, on my couch, in GNU Radio, without holding a soldering iron and running the risk of the room smelling like burnt chicken, because if you believe the Internet, sometimes holding a hot piece of metal by the hot end is not the best way. The idea behind the circuit, or more accurately, flowgraph, is that you take a signal from two sources, invert one, combine them, and they cancel each other out. If the signal with the noise only contains noise, then you can, at least theoretically, remove the noise from the actual signal. Before you think that I'm inventing something new, I'm not. I'm merely attempting to recreate the same notion I came across decades ago, where you combine the signals from two microphones, preferably identical, reversing the wiring in one and talking into a microphone whilst holding the other one away from your mouth. I did essentially the same thing using RF signals from two RTL-SDR dongles. Randall VK6WR pointed out that, aside from misusing the word "mix", which in electronics really means multiply, but in audio means combine, Randall suggested I use "add" and "subtract". I'm still working out how best to name things, because we're talking about audio and RF, sometimes at the same time. Perhaps that's where I went wrong. I'm currently using "combine" as my technology neutral word, but I'm happy to take suggestions. All that was the side show, because as Randall points out, doing this in RF is much harder than in audio. This is already something I knew. At the time I didn't really know how to get two different but the same sources of audio to experiment with, so I started in the deep end at the RTL-SDR dongle side. Now, armed with the encouragement from Randall I built a horrible thing, which is easy when you just drag and drop blocks on a screen. I built two independent FM decoders that use the exact same parameters, so they're tuned to the same frequency, they're amplified and tweaked identically. The only difference is that they each decode a different dongle. I then piped each of those into my magic noise cancelling circuit and tried again. Aside from dealing with hardware restrictions, causing things like buffer under-, and over-run, that's when the computer isn't processing all your samples, or is getting ahead of itself and is running out of samples, I can make audio come out of the speaker in my computer. I can prove that there are two signals, by setting the amplification of either to zero, and still get sound from the other source, however, noise cancelling, no matter what I tried, didn't work. Then I decided to simplify, rather than trying to cancel out "the Heat is on", word of honour, I'm not making that up, that's the song that was playing, I went back to basics starting with a tone. I fed the same tone into the noise cancelling block twice, once as signal, once as noise. Magic, the cancelling works. I also learned that changing the frequency of the noise and changing it back gets you into all kinds of problems and even if you send the same tone, one shifted in phase by a known amount, getting the two to cancel each other out is non-trivial. You might think that this was all a complete waste of time and if you're just driving past it looks like a swollen electrolytic capacitor about to burst your bubble, but it's not that bad. Here's what I learned from this little adventure. I can make hierarchical blocks out of flowgraphs. This is important because at some point all the functionality associated with Bald Yak will likely end up being implemented like this. I also learned that such a block can contain user interface elements, which means that we can build blocks that know how to do stuff and tweak how they operate without having to build a user interface every time we use such a block. I learned that we can implement an idea that would be hard using physical components and test it really quickly, in this case my available time was the limiting factor, not the testing. If I'd done this with components I'd still be trying to figure out where to get them from, let alone turn up the heat. Another bonus is that I didn't spend a single dime and I can dispose of it with the click of a button, rather than trying to figure out how to recycle components and circuit boards. I also learned that the idea as I built it doesn't work quite as I expected and that things that I didn't anticipate, like changing the frequency, buffer under-, and over-runs, impacted my efforts in unexpected ways. There's a delay between making a change on the user interface and the effect becoming audible, and I learned I can make a dongle work on my computer and that installing GNU Radio is a challenge at the best of times. In other words, even though I'm unlikely to use the noise cancelling efforts in their current form, there was plenty I learned from the experience. From my perspective, this was a success. What have you experimented with and learned? On a completely unrelated matter, long overdue, and music to the ears of some, can you spell SKCC, I've finally put all the Morse Code versions of my podcast on a thumb drive and plugged it into my car. During the week I've managed to listen to about two hours of Morse. While I don't know most of the letters of the alphabet, I can still detect letter and word boundaries. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio As you might recall, recently I stumbled on an excellent list of 52 weekly challenges put together by Fabian, DJ5CW and friends. You can find it at hamchallenge.org. As I've previously mentioned, it contains activities right across the amateur spectrum, from designing a QSL card to making a contact on 80m or 160m, with everything in between. It's an excellent tool to set a weekly goal to achieve and I recommend that you have a go. It's not the only interesting tool around. Amal VU3FTH and Steph Piper, whom you might know as MakerQueen AU, have put together an "Amateur Radio Skill Tree". It's a collection of hexagonal tiles, each with a skill, displayed together in an attempt to track what you know and could know about amateur radio. The idea is that you print it out and colour in each tile as you complete it. You'll find things like "Explore D-Star", "Build a cw key", "Teach a friend about Amateur Radio", and plenty more. Can you get four activities in a row and which skills could do with more effort? There are 68 tiles ready for your colouring pencil .. Bingo! The Radio Amateur Training Planning and Activities Committee, better known as the RATPAC, put together an "Amateur Radio Challenges Checklist for 2025" and published it on mastodon.radio. It's a list of bands, modes, activities, builds and clubs that help you track what you've been up to throughout the year. While we're here, I should mention that the RATPAC in their words "comprises Amateur Radio Operators of a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences", and hosts two weekly Zoom meetings so anyone can participate in the talks published on the ratpac.us website. If you're unable to attend, you'll find the presentation on YouTube. Over the years I've been part of this amazing hobby, I've been telling anyone who will listen that there is plenty to do and see in our community, a thousand hobbies in one. The tools I've mentioned represent around one hundred and fifty activities and pursuits, but hidden behind each one is plenty to explore. For example, hamchallenge asks you to spend week 21 creating a GNU Radio flowgraph. That topic alone could fill a decade worth of exploration if you were so inclined. Similarly, one of the Skill Tree tiles is "Study RF propagation", something which you might realise is easier said than done. The RATPAC checklist has a tick box for "Work 100 countries", not something you're likely to achieve in an afternoon. My point is, you can do as much or as little of this as you like, to what ever degree floats your boat. As you might know, I'm deep in the weeds with GNU Radio and I expect to stay there for plenty of time to come, but you are under no obligation to follow me down the rabbit hole. In other words, it interests me, but it might not do the same for you. One final comment. None of these activities require you to upgrade your license, well, other than the Skill Tree tile "Upgrade your radio license". You can do most if not all of the activities I've shared with any amateur license and plenty of it can be done without a license at all. So, what are you waiting for? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was sitting on the couch lounging about when I came up with an idea and there and then I picked up a circuit board, soldered down a hundred or so components and built a noise cancelling gadget, all within about an hour .. right there, on my couch. Yeah, that didn't happen, least of all, my soldering skills are not up to scratch, never mind the couch. I did however build a noise cancelling circuit, on my couch, in about an hour, but no soldering iron was hurt and the room didn't smell of chicken afterwards. Instead I used GNU Radio to put together a series of blocks that allow me to apply noise cancelling to a signal. How does this work? Well, imagine a signal mixed together with the negative version of that signal, think of it as swapping positive and negative if you like. If you mix two identical signals together, one of them inverted, you end up with nothing, because they cancel each other out, where one is high, the other is opposite and low and vice versa. Mix a high signal with a low signal, you end up half-way. If they're the same but opposite, half-way is zero. Hearing nothing is not helpful, but what if the two signals were slightly different, let's say, one is connected to a proper 10m antenna and the other is connected to an antenna that picks up local noise. We'll call the antenna on 10m the "signal" and the local noise antenna the "noise". If you mix these together, you end up with a signal and noise combined, but if you invert the noise signal, you can, at least theoretically, filter out the noise that's common to both antennas. Now I did say "theoretically" and that's because while it sounds simple, it's far from it. Unless you have a special radio, the two signals are not coming from the same device and won't really be identical where it matters. For example, let's call it the volume or gain of one might be higher than the other. One might arrive slightly later than the other if the coax isn't the same length or the electronics in both radios are different. There are other things too, but let's just stay with this for a moment. You could amplify or attenuate one or both signals to make them the same or similar levels. You could change the phase, think of it as the time when a signal starts, and synchronise the two signals in time manually. Of course whilst you're doing this, inside GNU Radio, the computer is doing some serious math, which takes time to make these changes, which introduces further delays you'll also need to account for. Building it was simple. Testing it much less so. After coming to grips with the USB port on my computer, which for reasons best known to the manufacturer, cough, Apple, switches off ports that are in use, I managed to get two RTL-SDR dongles connected and working. This involved removing GNU Radio, which was installed using a tool called "homebrew", then installing it instead using "radioconda", twice, since the first time the installer failed with an error, actually three times, because the failed installation left all manner of rubbish behind, so that needed to be removed; then I had to disconnect my keyboard and track pad, because for reasons only known to the manufacturer, yeah, the same one, they won't play nice if there's an RTL-SDR dongle plugged into the USB-C hub, I finally got this running, which in turn involved figuring out what the GNU Radio "Device Arguments" look like for a locally connected dongle, in case you're wondering, it's "rtl=0" for the first one and "rtl=1" for the second. Clearly this project is living up to its name, Bald Yak. Now I can invert a signal, I can amplify and attenuate it, change the phase, shift the frequency, swap the I and Q, do a complex conjugate, and have a user interface that can change these settings as required. I'm going to ignore the hour of my life I'm not getting back to understand how variables, parameters and user interface items hang together and how they interact. It's logical, but it takes a bit to wrap your head around it and I'm a software developer, so I don't envy you if you're not. Anyway, I tuned to a local FM broadcast radio station and couldn't make any noise go away. I then discovered that my noise antenna was picking up the station just fine, so that didn't help. Then I swapped radios, actually, I just swapped the zero and the one in the "Device Argument" fields and tried again. In the process I discovered how you can create a so-called "Hierarchical Block" in GNU Radio and to my delight also discovered that there is one that can have a user interface, so I can make a stand-alone block, that has a user interface, that I can use in another project, which is how I intend Bald Yak to function. So, changing stations, I could finally hear noise, but still no reduction. Then I realised that I was using FM, not single side band, so I started hunting for an SSB decoder but had to abandon ship to go and do life. Overnight I realised that if everything went to plan, the two FM signals should have cancelled each other out, making silence, which they didn't, despite my efforts. So, at this point I have a thing that can alter noise and mix it with a signal for the purposes of noise reduction. That it doesn't work is potentially because I have not enough range in my adjustments, or too much range with not enough steps, just as likely it's because I'm missing some fundamental understanding somewhere. If you have any documentation I should read, please don't be shy. As life adventures go, I'm hooked, but it's not without shaving Yaks, Bald or otherwise. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio For quite some time I have operated a WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon on the 10m band. If you're not familiar with it, I've dialled the power right down to 10 dBm, or 10 milliwatts. You'd think that this would be a fool's errand, but it was heard 13,945 kilometres away. Of late the reports have been far and few between, despite the 10m band being quite active. Encouraged by a friend playing on 15m, I made the decision to change bands. At the moment this is not a trivial process, though at some point in the not too distant future, hopefully before I need a Zimmer Frame, I intend to erect a multi-band Hustler 6-BTV antenna that has been in storage for several years. Before that occurs, since it involves all kinds of shenanigans, I went for a simpler option, replace the 40m helical whip antenna with a 15m helical whip, something I can do without climbing on the roof. In case you're wondering, using an SG-237 antenna coupler, the 40m antenna tunes fine on 10m, but not so much on 15m. After pulling the replacement antenna from its hidey-hole I discovered that it was missing a tip. I don't recall if it ever had one, it came from the estate of a fellow amateur, Walter VK6BCP (SK). I took it on faith that it worked on the band that it was labelled with and went looking for a way to close off the tip. In the end I used heat shrink with a glue lining and sealed it off, folded over the tip and used more heat shrink to keep it folded over. We'll see how well that works. I then unscrewed the 40m antenna from its mount and was frustrated that it would only come with the spring attached. Using a crescent and a pipe wrench I was able to unscrew the spring but discovered that the threaded stud that connects the two didn't stay in the antenna, instead it stayed in the spring, which meant that I couldn't attach my 15m antenna without breaking something. I remembered that I had another spring lying around, so I dug that out of storage, I really need to set-up a "part-db" to keep track of where everything is, and attached the 15m antenna to the spring and screwed it back into the antenna mount and I'm back in business. In putting away the 40m antenna I lifted it up after removing the spring and promptly got wet. Litres of brown water came pouring out of the antenna. It turns out that the adjustable tip isn't sealed and sitting on my roof for several years managed to fill it full of water, that's through a tiny opening at the tip, in a country known for hot and dry, it's expected to be 40 degrees Celsius here today. It made me wonder if that water was why the beacon wasn't heard recently. The next step involved changing the beacon frequency. The hardware is a ZachTek 80To10 desktop transmitter, built by Harry, SM7PNV. The software to change settings runs on Windows and since my system crash in June last year I've not had any Windows machines lying around. I went to the ZachTek website and discovered in the downloads section that there is a link to a web page configuration tool written by Phil VK7JJ, of wspr.rocks fame, that allows you to open a website, plug in your beacon, and configure it from any Chrome web browser. I was both astonished and delighted that this exists. I changed the beacon band from 10m to 15m and powered it up. One final step. As I said, for the last little while my beacon has only sporadically been heard, so I set up a local monitoring system. It consists of a little computer connected to an RTL-SDR v3 dongle and the included telescopic dipole. Using a Docker container written by Guenael VA2GKA, I monitor my own beacon. After updating the band from 10m to 15m, reports started flowing in. As an aside, the last time I did this I built a custom Raspberry Pi image and had to change several things to start monitoring after a reboot. This time I used an inbuilt Docker mechanism, "restart unless stopped", to launch the container. This means I don't need to alter the system and I can add and remove containers as I need to. This is important because it's likely how some of the "Bald Yak" project will also gain functionality. I'm feeling rather chuffed that on my first day back as a human after recovering from my first bout of COVID, I managed to move my beacon to 15m, get it on-air, configured and transmitting with confirmation in the log. The only thing missing now is your signal report. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I noticed a flurry of QSL card designs come across my screen and it sparked me into action on actually creating such a card for myself. I've previously talked about what I think of the current offerings in terms of validating contacts, but having a QSL card design is step one of confirming a contact, well, technically step two, since you have to make the contact first. I'm intending to use SVG as the design platform, since it's a text file that describes an image, so I can use my favourite command line tools, like "grep", "sed", "cut" and "awk" to replace parts of the file, so I can make a personal card for every contact, but that's a story for another day. Accompanying the rush of new card designs was an intriguing hash tag, #hamchallenge. Looking into this further I discovered a project by Fabian DJ5CW with an accompanying website, hamchallenge.org. When you go there, and you should, you'll discover 52 challenges with varying levels of difficulty that you can use as inspiration to do something with your hobby. The usual suspects are there, things like week 42, receive an SSTV image, or week 50, receive an APRS message or beacon. Then there are those like week 38, make a contact on Morse code, and week 19, simulate an antenna. It goes well beyond those essential skills into important stuff like, week 14, implement and describe a backup solution for your ham radio log, and week 24, make a contribution to an Open Source ham radio software package. Not all challenges require an amateur license either. For example, week 32, listen to a broadcast station from another country, is open to anyone with a sense of wonder. The difficulty level is included in a challenge, so week 17, which VHF or UHF repeater is closest to you, is marked as easy, where week 3, work another continent on 80m or 160m, is marked as hard. There's also helpful information about a challenge, for example week 6, take part in a contest, includes a link to the contestcalendar.com website where you'll find most if not all amateur radio contests. Of course this is your hobby and it's not up to me to tell you what to do, but I have to say that the items in this list are exciting, they speak to me and I have to say that I'll be taking inspiration from this list and I recommend that you do too. Not all of the challenges will be something new to everyone. I've already built an antenna, participated in a contest, worked a 10m FM repeater and several other things on this list, but if I'm going to make a Morse Code contact, I'm sure going to have to find some time to actually, you know, learn Morse. I know this will come as music to the ears of several of my amateur friends. There will be challenges that speak to you more than others, week 21, create a GNU radio flowgraph, is right up my alley, but that might not be the case for you. If you feel inspired, week 47 encourages you to submit an idea for the Ham Challenge next year. So, thank you to Fabian for the efforts and many amateurs who have already contributed to this adventure. What a beauty. I'm off to finish my QSL card. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 lotto, likely, neither did you, or your friends. I didn't get on HF to make a contact, I didn't put up a 6BTV antenna, the list is never ending. In other words, it's easy to say what you didn't do. What if you turned this upside down? I hosted my weekly radio net for its thirteenth year, I had my beacon heard more times than I have bandwidth available to check right now, I started a project that looks like it's going to keep me busy for some time to come. I've been working my way through a full system crash and I can see light out the end of the tunnel, six months later. So, don't beat yourself up about all the things you didn't do. Speaking of that, making plans is fine, but don't use the to-do list as a way to describe all the things you didn't do, instead, think of it as an inspiration for what to do when you're bored. Chaotic aspects of life aside, the same disorder reigns supreme in the software world. GNU Radio on which I'm basing the "Bald Yak" project is just as chaotic. New versions are released regularly. Right now it's at version 3.10.something. On my Mac, it's 3.10.11.0, on my Debian machine it's 3.10.5.1. Depending on which operating system you use it's different, there's a wiki table, but that's out of date, before you ask, yes, I've requested an account on the GNU Radio wiki so I can fix it. This only scratches the surface of things that are, for want of a better word, disharmonious. This might be perceived as chaos, but the reality is that this exists throughout the computing world. If you're not a software developer you might have only scratched the surface of this, trying to open a document written for a different version of your word processor, installing a new operating system and finding software that was working perfectly before, suddenly doesn't. GNU Radio is a complex beast. The latest release has 5,570 files, making nearly 80,000 lines of source and related code. The git repository shows 579 authors and I will point out that it's likely there are more, since the project was first released in 2001, but the git repository only goes back to 2006. Said differently this is a big project that nobody is likely to hold entirely inside their brain. It means that things change without everyone involved knowing about it. I'm raising this because we're diving into a complex environment that we're using to build ourselves a new thing. At this point you might want to run for the hills. I understand. One of the great things about society is our ability to abstract. It's why I'm typing on a keyboard with letters of the alphabet and not punching holes into cardboard. It's why I'm looking at a screen with graphics and controlling images with my finger, rather than looking at dozens of blinkenlights that provide a lifetime of memories. GNU Radio is the abstraction of radio. That's the whole point. It allows us to pick up a signal block, tell it to make a kilohertz tone, connect it to my loudspeaker so sound comes out. It looks simple on the outside, but underlying that is a level of complexity that you will only encounter when it comes to raise its chaotic head. This all to say that I did make some progress. When you play an audio tape at half speed, or play a single at 33 RPM instead of 45 RPM, the result is that the audio is slower, but it also means that the audio is lower in frequency. It led me to wonder if I can use that phenomenon to help me hear better. What if I could play audio slower and have my ears be able to hear better. Right now, anything above 2 kHz is hard to hear. I keep asking my partner, "Say again?", "Sorry, what?", "Sorry, I didn't hear that." Hearing aids seem to attempt to deal with the problem by amplifying the sounds you cannot hear. This results in squealing and all manner of other unpleasantness. It also doesn't seem to help me. Instead I wondered if I could halve a 4 kHz tone to 2 kHz, I could hear it. So, if I play audio at half speed, I can hear more. Unfortunately it would also mean that I would be running behind all the time. So, what if I could play at half speed and remove half the audio samples? I can confirm that with simple tones this works and I did this inside GNU Radio with pretty much one block, "Keep M in N samples", in this case, keep one in two. I halved the sample rate and all was well. Why is this significant? Well, aside from that it might help me hear better, it represents the first time I had an idea that I could try out in realtime and see what it did. For a bunch of reasons I haven't yet moved on to actually hearing it, by setting the source as the microphone and the sink as my headphones, but that's on the cards soon. Making progress is a series of chaotic steps that take you on a journey. If you're lucky, the journey will get you where you want to go. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 Radio happens via a graphical user interface where you build so-called flowgraphs. These are made up of little blocks that you wire together to get from a Source, where a signal originates, to a Sink, where it terminates. Each of these blocks does something to the signal, it might be a filter, an amplifier, it might encode or decode a signal like FM, AM, Wideband FM, or some other modulation like Phase Modulation or OFDM, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, a way of transmitting digital information using multiple channels. It's used in places like WiFi, ADSL and DSL, Digital Television as well as modern cellular systems. Those blocks generally expect a specific type of input and generate some particular output. After you save your design you can run the flowgraph and behind the scenes some magic happens. Your visual representation of signal flow is translated into either Python or C++ and the resulting application is what is actually run, which is why the user interface that you design your flowgraph in is cunningly named, GNU Radio Companion. So, what if you want to do something that doesn't yet exist? As it happens, that's where I came across a YouTube video by John VE6EY called "GNURadio Embedded Python Block" which neatly describes a fundamental aspect of how the GNU Radio framework actually operates. One of the blocks available to you is one called "Python Block", which you can add to your flowgraph just like any other block. What sets it apart from the others is that you can open it up and write some Python code to process the signal. When you first insert such a block, it's already populated with some skeleton code, so it already does something from the get-go and that's helpful because if you break the code, you get to keep both parts. Seriously, it allows you to figure out what you broke, rather than having to worry immediately about how specifically the code is wired to the outside world, which let's face it, is not trivial. If you're a programmer, think of it as the "Hello World" of GNU Radio. If not much of that means anything, think of it as a variable electronic component. If you need it to be a capacitor, it can be that, or a transistor, a whole circuit, or just a filter, all in software, right there at your fingertips and no soldering required. Now I'm under no illusion that everybody is going to want to get down and dirty with Python at this point, and truth be told, I have a, let's call it "special" relationship with the language, but that is something I'm just going to have to get over if this project is going to go anywhere. For my sins this week I attempted to recreate the intent of John's video on my own keyboard and discovered that debugging code in this environment might be tricky. It turns out that you can actually print out Python variables within your code and in the GNU Radio environment they'll show up in the console inside the companion window, which is handy if you committed one of many Python sins, like say attempting to compare an integer against a list. Don't ask me how I know. One thing I'm planning to attempt is to get the same thing going for C++ output. By default GNU Radio Companion uses Python, but you can change it so instead of generating Python, it can generate C++. Whilst I have no immediate need for that, I do know that at some point it's likely that I will, like say when I want to run something on an embedded processor, or some other contraption. So, whilst I have nothing to lose, I want to try out the boundaries of my new toy, besides, I have form, in testing boundaries that is. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 receive at the right time for this to work. You don't need to go to modern modes to get the idea that time matters. Listening to any CW signal will give you an idea that time and timing is important. To give you a sense of what I mean, if you turn on your radio in the middle of a dah, in the middle of a letter, you're likely to hear the wrong symbol, perhaps decoding the partial dah as a dit and missing the first part, hearing a partial letter Q, dah dah dit dah as a dit dit dah, the letter U, and that is completely ignoring inter letter and inter word spacing. The point being that time matters for radio signals. So, if we're going to build a system that can handle radio signals inside a computer, we'll need to deal with time. Decoding is one thing, but what if you want to compare two radio signals from two different antennas? You can build a direction finding tool consisting of multiple antennas that can determine the direction of a signal by calculating the difference in time between when a signal arrived at one antenna and when it arrived at another. Of course, the distance between each antenna matters, so we'd need to deal with time in such a way that we can actually measure this. RF travels about 30 centimetres in a nanosecond. If that's not enough, what happens if you're digitising an analogue signal and sending it across the network to be processed? Not only do you need to track if information arrived at its destination or was lost in transit, if you're combining multiple signals, you'll also need to know when the information was captured. Which brings us to something entirely different and perhaps surprising. If I say "now", that moment is not the same for everybody on the planet. You might be listening to this on the train to work, your local repeater, on YouTube, or reading it on social media or in your email. Even me writing the word and reading it out loud are two different times. In other words, agreeing on time is not obvious. We could all look at the clock and share the information, but is that accurate enough? Do we tell each other how many seconds past midnight UTC, or do we need to know half or tenths of seconds? To use WSPR and FT8 it's generally enough to use the NTP or Network Time Protocol. It can be as accurate as 1 millisecond, but is that enough? To give you a sense of how precise we might need to be, a HF signal takes about 66 milliseconds to travel halfway around the globe. A mobile phone tower signal travels 6 kilometres in about 0.02 milliseconds, so NTP isn't really precise enough for what we might need. If you've played with a GPS, you might know that you can use it to determine when "now" is. It's theoretically capable of a 14 nanosecond accuracy, but by the time you actually use it, it's more like 100 nanoseconds. There's a million nanoseconds in a millisecond and a billion nanoseconds in a second. If you were to store nanoseconds as a 64-bit unsigned number, you could count between now and just over 584 years from now. Something else to consider. If you had two analogue to digital converters and you wanted to synchronise them, 1 nanosecond would allow you to get two 1 GHz signals to start at the same time, providing that you knew what time it was to that level of accuracy. If you're keen, look up maser. Before you point out that this means we'd be limited to anything below the 23cm band at 1.2 GHz, I'd like to mention that this is about representing all of it, 0 Hz to 1 GHz as one chunk of spectrum at the same time. In reality, you're much more likely to only want part of that, not to mention that we'd need to transport and process all that data as well. Which brings us to bandwidth considerations, but that's a conversation for another time. Credit to Nick VA3NNW, Kent AC1HJ, Dave VK6KV and Randall VK6WR for their thoughts and explanations. Any mistakes are all mine, feel free to point them out. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio When 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 switch. If you want to create a transmitter in software using GNU Radio, you might get to a point where you start looking for a conditional block, a magic piece of code that you can add to the system that checks the state of the PTT button and sets the state of your contraption accordingly. In programming terms, you might start looking for an IF .. THEN .. ELSE block, as in, IF PTT THEN transmit ELSE receive. Let me save you the trouble of looking for such a thing, because it doesn't exist. With that revelation you are forgiven if you come to the conclusion that you cannot create a PTT system using GNU Radio. It's a perfect example of attempting to think in a certain way and I'd like to show you that there are alternatives if only to help you experience an insight into how we do the things we do. I've told this story before, but it bears repeating. Over a decade ago I was helping with the erection of an antenna during a field day. It was a massive multi-element 10m yagi, heavy, unwieldy and precariously bolted to the top of a spindly mast strapped to the tray of a ute. Before lifting it to the top of the mast I was tasked with checking the SWR. I dutifully plugged in the coax, turned on my radio, keyed the microphone and confidently reported a 1:1 SWR. Over the next hour the antenna was manhandled into the air by half a dozen people and we set about making noise only to discover that the SWR was horrible. My lesson was that you need to whistle or hum into the microphone when you use SSB to test the SWR. Said differently, using SSB, if you transmit no sound, there is no signal and no standing wave to measure. Right now you're likely to picture a PTT switch as switching between open and closed. In one state nothing gets through, in the other, everything gets through. For example, you could construct a switch where in one position your analogue signal is connected to ground and disappears. In the other state it reappears. If you think about it, yelling into the microphone whilst not activating the PTT does exactly this. A Software Defined Radio or SDR uses an Analogue to Digital Converter, or ADC, to receive an analogue signal from an antenna and convert it into a series of numbers. To transmit, it uses the reverse, a Digital to Analogue Converter, or DAC, that converts a series of numbers into an analogue signal. No analogue signal means a voltage that doesn't change. In the digital world, it's the same, a series of numbers that don't change. When you multiply a number by zero, you get zero and when you multiply a number by one, you get the number. So, if you were to take a digital signal, which is nothing more than a series of numbers, and multiply it with zero, you'd get a series of zeros. If you multiply it by one, you'd get the original numbers. If you sent that series to a SDR transmitter, remember, it's essentially nothing more than a Digital to Analogue Converter, you'd get either no signal when you were converting only zeros, or you'd get an analogue signal when you're converting numbers. So, if you made a button that changed a variable to one when you pressed it and changed it to zero when you released it, you could multiply your digital signal by that variable and switch between getting a series of numbers or a series of zeros. Remind you of anything? That button, that changes between zero and one is your software defined PTT. It represents the software version of a switch and it shows us that signal processing requires that you look at problems in subtly different ways. This all to illustrate that using GNU Radio is going to take some time to get your head around. For some this happened years ago, for others like myself, we're in the thick of it. While you're thinking about that, consider time. What type of time accuracy would you need to synchronise two signals from two different antennas and why would you want to? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Bald 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 through the details. So, this means that there will be trips into how this thing works, but I'm not currently planning a GNU Radio course, not only because that's not what Bald Yak is about, but because I like to know what I'm talking about, even if the peanut gallery might at this point call out: "Why start now?" -- yes, from time to time, what I'm talking about here is based on something I'm still in the process of learning and obviously I make mistakes. Now, if you haven't been playing along, let me state the purpose of why I'm here. "The Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio." In the pursuit of happiness, I've been resisting making a table with the various communication protocols in use to extract data and control the data stream within the software defined radio world. I've been avoiding this because I don't feel like I know the landscape well enough. Of course, making the table will create a better understanding, chicken and egg. I do have a handle on what functionality is required. So, in the spirit of writing it down or it didn't happen, here's what I know. This thing needs to be bi-directional because it needs to be able to receive and transmit. I don't yet know if this functionality needs to be symmetric. What I mean by that is that I don't know if both directions need the same functionality. Consider for example a distributed receiver decoder. Imagine a device that spits out bytes at a particular rate. These bytes represent received radio signal. How and what they are specifically I'll leave alone for the moment. This information needs to be read and processed. The processing could happen on the same computer, or it could be a separate computer connected to the local network, or a remote network across the internet. There could be more than one computer doing the work. We could choose to send the whole stream of bytes, our radio signal, to every computer. This is how YouTube works when multiple people watch the same video - and yes, I'm ignoring caching for the moment. It requires a boatload of network bandwidth and hardware. You could send part of the signal to a receiver, this is how WebSDR works. This requires a mechanism to select and control each part of the data stream. A third option is to use a networking technique called multicast. It provides a way to send a data intensive stream, like our radio signal, to multiple computers simultaneously. NASA uses this to distribute radio signals all over the place. I used it in the early 1990's to broadcast a live radio show I hosted, Online Computing Radio, across the globe with listeners in Sweden, Switzerland and Greenland whilst I was in a radio studio in Perth, Western Australia. This only to say that multicast has been around for a long time. Another way to look at this is that a radio transmission is a multicast signal. As long as you're within range, anyone can receive the same signal. To keep track of what we were talking about, this is discussing how a digitised received radio signal is distributed to various computers for processing. Each of those three methods can be combined in interesting ways depending on requirements. For example, a spectrum logging tool might expect the entire stream, but an FM decoder might only want one little slice, a RTTY decoder might want a different slice and an FT8 decoder yet another. Before I go on, let me come up with some terms. No doubt these will get refined, but for now, I'm going to define a receiver as a computer that acts as a destination, or sink, for a stream of radio bytes across the network. Similarly, I'll define a computer that generates a source of radio bytes as a transmitter. I'm not yet sure what to call the computer that's physically connected to the antenna, but I'll start with using the term "antenna node". This isn't strictly accurate, since there's more than an antenna there, but I have to start somewhere. I note that GNU Radio calls a transmitter a source and calls a receiver a sink. With that nomenclature, our "antenna node" would be considered both a sink and a source, which doesn't really help us here. Back to the receiver. All of this needs some form of control intelligence, as-in, a receiver needs to be able to control where the signal comes from, or said differently, you need to be able select an antenna node. Not only that, you need to be able to tell the antenna node specifically what data you want and perhaps in what form. Now, on the reverse side of this, the transmit chain, do we need the same functionality? Does an antenna node need to be able to accommodate multiple transmitters? Does such a thing exist? Do we want it to exist? How would we get one data stream from the transmitter to the antenna node? How would we do this with multiple streams? Is the same control system required? At this point you're likely to realise that this isn't trivial. We can pick something and just start, but I'd like to spend at least a little amount of time considering the options. With over 40 years in the computing field I'm leaning towards making the transmit and receive identical because we don't yet know what we don't know and besides I can sort of see how multiple transmitters might use the same antenna node and what the real world applications of this might be. Something else to wrap your head around, what if the transmit logic was the reverse of the receive logic, as-in, the same thing, just swapping sink and source around. It has a certain elegance about it, even if I don't yet know how this might be achieved. I'd also like to take a moment to thank Kevin VE7ZD, Nick VA3NNW and Mark W1MM for their thoughts and suggestions. Keep them coming. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio In 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 wheel and how will we make sure that it's something that people want, rather than yet another solution looking for a problem? I started by looking at what else is going on. Specifically, the Software Defined Radio or SDR world isn't something that arrived yesterday. There's lots of stuff around and plenty of it is open source, so we can look inside and learn. I asked around to see if there was a table that compares how the various SDR tools talk to the world, or rather what protocol they use. Think about how you'd get the data from a radio to a computer and how you'd control the radio and the data flow. Now imagine that neither are in the same room, or even in the same country. I started writing down what I think is needed, and then realised that this replicates stuff that has already been done. Tools like rtl_sdr, soapy, OpenHPSDR and spyserver already do some or all of this, there are others. Thus the request for the table. This resulted in no table, but plenty of questions, including a discussion about protocols versus drivers, which lead me to the realisation that I'm going to be doing a lot of yak shaving before this project has anything to show for itself. This neatly prompted the idea that by the time I was done, the yak was going to be well and truly shaved and now the project has a name, "Bald Yak". At some point it appears that there was a coffee shop in 2012 with that name and there was an engineering student using it in 2004, so no major conflicts I can see, but feel free to point out any I missed. "Bald Yak" works as a name, two words, no hyphen, because it says nothing about what the project is about, which is what you do when you cannot think of a suitable relevant name, and you'd have to admit it rolls off the tongue better than "Amateur Radio GNU Radio Project" or "ARGRP". Another consideration is how to license this thing, whatever it is. As you might know, I'm a firm believer, advocate, user and contributor to something called Open Source Software. It essentially says that if you distribute the software, you are required to share the source code. Lofty goal, but the outcome is not particularly equitable. Bruce Perens K6BP is the creator of the Open Source Definition, derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines where he was the primary author in 1997. In other words, Bruce has embodied these concepts for almost half my life. Bruce says this about Open Source today: "Open Source is the infrastructure of business, but the economic structure of Open Source is one of resource extraction like logging or mining: many businesses extract wealth from Open Source, but do not return significant value to the developers." Bruce is in the process of developing something called "Post Open" that attempts to address this inequity. Full disclaimer, I've been commenting on some of what Bruce is doing and he has graciously accepted most of my suggestions. I'm not yet a convert, but I think that what Bruce is attempting is crucial for the future of sustainability of the Open Source community. Which brings me back to licensing. How do we license "Bald Yak" and how do we strike a balance between eating food and allowing others to play with our toys? If you have suggestions, please let me know. For now I'm storing my stuff locally but fully plan to show and tell once I've figured out how. So, what is "Bald Yak"? Here is what I have so far. "The Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio." I hasten to add that this is a work in progress. I'd like the definition to be small and specific. If it can be improved, please feel free to make your pitch. My email address is cq@vk6flab.com. I'll also point out that this is slow, deliberately so. I want this to be fun, but I also want this to be real. I also need to manage my own life, family, health, finances and humour, so be gentle. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 observations and making recommendations. I've built projects and attempted to start new processes, I've encouraged, cajoled, on occasion berated or applauded as I found it. Throughout the experience I've attempted to build this wonderful community, to inspire and to grow it. Sometimes I might even have succeeded. I could not have done this without you. So, thank you. If I haven't mentioned your name or responded to your email, it's not because I didn't see your contribution. You have delighted me and lifted me up and I thank you for sharing your thoughts. At this point you might wonder if I'm hanging up my microphone and to that I say: No, not even close. Instead I'm continuing with this experiment, rough and ready though it is. It occurs to me that over the years I've started a great many projects and documented them as they happened, either here, or on my vk6flab.com website, or on GitHub. These projects take time and effort that go beyond what you encounter here. Sometimes it's hours, sometimes it's weeks. Recently a lot of my musings have been about things I've wanted to do, rather than describing things that I've done. Mind you, not for lack of desire. I want to try something different. I'm going to, at least for the next little while, bring you along with a project as I'm building it. No doubt I'll get distracted by squirrels along the way, but I'm going to attempt to build something for us as a community, for amateur radio, because I want to actually do something, rather than talk about it and I need to manage my limited resources and this way I get to build something and you get to have me sharing my thoughts. From my perspective, win-win. So, let's dive in. Amateur radio is a hobby that takes all kinds. A lot of activity is curtailed by money, or rather, lack of money. That doesn't have to be the case and I think I can show you how. That's not to say that this is going to cost nothing, but you can likely start with what you already have and work your way up as your budget allows, rather than require a significant outlay just to get your toes wet. Over the past few weeks I've been talking about a toolkit called GNU Radio. It can be used to build systems that can process data, like say radio signals which come in all shapes and sizes. You can start by connecting an antenna to a sound card and use that as a radio tuner. You can also use a sound card as a way to listen to signals coming in via the Internet, or a radio you might already own. Sound cards exist in most computers but can be purchased for around $10. If you want to handle more data, you can spend $50 and use an RTL-SDR dongle. This incremental path continues. You can build a digital radio, or buy a learning kit, or something else, all the while still being part of the same ecosystem. I want to build a system where you can experiment with radio without needing to buy new hardware every time you want to try something new. I want it to work with a sound card as well as with the latest $7,000 radio you can get shipped to your door. I want to do this in such a way that we can start to embrace all that is possible within the realm of software. Ultimately I want to be able to use any signal source anywhere and GNU Radio seems ideally suited as the tool for the job. I envisage that we'll build a distributed system, where signal processing and the signal itself don't have to be in the same spot, which is useful for a whole host of reasons, even though it increases the level of complexity by at least an order of magnitude. This isn't going to be easy. It's not going to be working tomorrow, perhaps not even a year from now and as long as new radios are invented, it will never stop, but we'll see how it goes. For example, I spent a week attempting to install GNU Radio on my Macintosh, asked two expert groups and got nowhere. In stark contrast, I installed it on my Linux Debian workstation and the example I tried worked out of the box. In other words, plenty of obstacles to overcome. Before I go, I'll make this explicit. I want this to be open source, so anyone can play. I haven't yet decided on which specific license to use, but I'm cognisant that there are many large companies making obscene amounts of money from the volunteer efforts of the open source community and as one of the volunteers, I'd like to be able to pay for food and a roof over my head. I expect and appreciate your feedback, so don't be shy. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 that the frequency 2450 Mc/s be allocated for I.S.M., indicated that there was in existence in the United States, and working on this frequency a diathermy machine and an electronic cooker, and that the latter might eventually be installed in transatlantic ships and airplanes. There was therefore some point in attempting to reach world agreement on this subject." Several things to unpack there. It's 1947 and experimentation is happening at 2,450 Mega-Cycles per second, what we call megahertz today; you might recognise the frequency as 2.45 GHz. At that time, experiments using radio frequencies for medical purposes has been in full swing for decades. Nikola Tesla wrote a paper on the subject that was presented in absentia to the American Electro Therapeutics Association in 1898. In 1947, a diathermy machine exists; today its used to aid with blood flow, muscle and joint pain as well as inflammatory and degenerative bone disease. There is a working electronic cooker, a microwave oven to you and I, and whilst the one you could buy in 1947, a Raytheon "Radarange", if you forked over $5,000, or $70,000 in today's money, had space for a 2 meter tall, 340 kilogram, 3 kilowatt behemoth, you have to admire the imagination that one day this would fit on an aeroplane to travel the world, let alone be available for $100 at your local supermarket. One other thing, I.S.M. or Industrial, Scientific and Medical is a concept we still use today. The idea being that there are uses for radio waves that are nothing to do with communication, like microwave ovens, steel smelting through induction heating, surgical uses like cauterising wounds, some cancer treatments and plenty more. One of the ideas behind ISM is that equipment operating in those frequencies must tolerate any interference generated by ISM applications. The other part of the ISM idea is that it's unlicensed, which is very attractive to people who experiment and why it became popular for other uses beyond heating your lunch. Consider that baby monitors, garage door openers, car security systems, video senders, cordless phones, wireless speakers and microphones, cordless keyboards and mice, radio controlled models, and smart power meters all share the same radio frequencies. Then there's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee, also using the same 2.4 GHz ISM band. Yeah, even the two most popular network technologies on your phone and computer, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are competing with each other and the microwave oven in the kitchen. There are six global ISM bands and six additional ones with specific local requirements. Things like industrial microwave ovens, Near Field Communications or NFC and LoRaWan use frequencies like that. You'll also find satellite communications, radio location, CB radio, radio astronomers and radio amateurs on those bands. So, why are these technologies sharing the same frequencies? Essentially because they're unlicensed spectrum. Just so we're clear, this doesn't mean that it's unregulated spectrum. All it means is that unlike licensed spectrum, you don't need to buy access to the spectrum to use it, but you do need to have compliant equipment when you do. Compliance depends on local laws, location, band and power levels. So, next time you need to watch a movie whilst cooking lunch, eat an apple or go outside and get some daylight onto your skin instead. A quick word on power. Whilst all these uses share the same frequency band, their human impact varies considerably. A Wi-Fi network uses a tenth of a Watt. A diathermy machine uses 250 Watts and produces a "gentle heat" at the surface of the skin, suitable for treatment. Contained inside a metal box, a microwave oven uses 1,000 Watts or more. Even that doesn't cook food from the inside out, instead it vibrates water molecules in the food, which heat up, which in turn cooks the food. It doesn't penetrate very far and doesn't work on frozen water, which is why you need to defrost your food before you can cook it. It's also why when you stand between your Wi-Fi router and the computer things slow down, or why your hand position on your phone or tablet can make a difference, since your body, made from 60% water, is blocking the signal. Finally, here's something to consider. A licensed radio amateur has access to some ISM bands, but does it require an amateur license to actually use any of those bands? In other words, if my amateur license doesn't permit my access to 2.4 or 5.8 GHz bands, can I legally use a transmitter in the unlicensed spectrum that is the ISM band on those frequencies? If you answered yes, and you're considering experimenting on the ISM bands, you'll find the Low Frequency Experimental Radio or LowFER, MedFER and HiFER community has already beaten you to it. Within the ISM regulations are provisions for all kinds of other experiments, generally using low power, sometimes a Watt, sometimes less, but you already know that my 10 mW beacon on the 10m band has been heard 13,945 km away, so there's plenty of opportunities to play. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 unbelievably cheap radios does start adding up and if you want to use more sophisticated hardware, that too is possible, at a price, somewhere between $50 and a new Porsche. Whilst that's an option for some, for the rest of us, there are better and cheaper ways. Of course it doesn't stop there. If you connect any radio to a computer, you can use whatever software you like to encode and decode any signal you can imagine. With a traditional radio connected to a computer you can make it participate in hundreds of different so-called digital modes. Before I continue, let's look at radio in a slightly different way. Consider an antenna as a continuous source of voltages that are amplified, filtered and demodulated in some way by a radio. You can think of the combination of antenna, radio and computer as a stream decoder. To decode a signal in a new way requires a new decoder, which you could build from components or as I've said, buy online. During the week I've continued experimenting with GNU Radio. If you're unfamiliar, it's a toolkit that allows you to build so-called flow graphs that can process a signal stream. Think of it as a box of Lego that you can put together to build any type of decoder. Let me say that again. Imagine that you want to decode or transmit a mode like FreeDV, M17, APRS, Olivia, Contestia, or Hellschreiber. With the GNU Radio toolkit, all of this is possible and you won't need to buy new hardware or bust out the soldering iron every time you want to experiment with a new mode. If you have been playing with digital modes already, you'll likely point out that you can already do this today by using software running on a computer, and that's true. What that doesn't tell you is that this comes with a very specific limitation, namely that all those modes require that they fit inside a single audio channel because all those digital modes you might be familiar with are essentially using an SSB or FM signal with the audio generated or decoded by a computer. Even if you have a modern radio like for example an ICOM IC-7300, you'll still be limited in what modes of transmission you can make. ICOM limits the transmit bandwidth to 2.9 kHz. Flex Radio appears to double that to 7.9 kHz, but numbers are sketchy. The point remains, most current amateur radio technology is based around the notion that a mode essentially fits within a single audio channel and a very narrow one at that. So, why does this matter? If you run out of FT8 space on a band, right now you need to change to an alternate frequency to play, but you'll only be able to see the stations that are using the same alternate frequency, as long as they fit within the bandwidth of an audio signal. If you wanted to check out the main frequency, you'd have to change frequencies and keep switching back and forth. Using this idea, monitoring all of FT4, FT8, WSPR and all CW beacons, all at the same time becomes unimaginable, not to mention costly if you needed a radio for each band and each mode. What if you wanted to use another mode that took more than about 4 kHz, like say a 5 MHz wide DVB-T signal which you could be experimenting with on 70cm? Or, what if you'd like to compare a repeater input with its output at the same time? Or compare two repeaters together? Or find the best band to operate on right now? The point being, that there are things that simply don't fit within a single audio channel that you won't be able to play with using a traditional radio. As it happens, that too is a solved problem. Remember that I mentioned that you can think of an antenna, radio, and computer combination as a stream decoder? What if I told you that an SDR, a Software Defined Radio, is essentially a device that translates antenna voltages into numbers which you can process with GNU Radio? Whilst that does imply replacing your radio, you don't have to jump in at the deep end to start playing and even if you do decide to buy new hardware, you can get your toes wet with all manner of self build or commercial kits. Even better, you can start with the gear you already have today and become familiar with GNU Radio and when you're ready to expand your station, you can add in an SDR and continue to use the same tools to experiment. Not only that, you can do interesting things by combining what you already have. Consider for example the idea of using an RTL-SDR as the receiver with a traditional radio as the transmitter. You could decode all of the FT8 signals on a band and transmit where there was space to do so. The point being that you can do this one step at a time. Every time you download or build another GNU Radio flow graph, you can have a new decoder and as time goes on, you'll be able to decide what hardware you might want to pair it with. To be clear, I'm talking about the gradual change from component based radio using audio interfaces into software based radio. It's not like we haven't done this before. Anyone recall spark gaps, or valves? The future of experimentation is bright and it's filled with bits. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Over 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 antenna with the operator talking into a microphone or torturing a Morse key. If you want to operate digital modes, you essentially have two choices. You can use a rare radio with in-built digital modes or, more commonly, connect a computer to the radio via an audio interface, which essentially replaces the operator with a computer. This implies that the radio is physically connected to the computer and in the same room. What if you don't want either? There's another aspect to this. Modern SDRs or software defined radios, tend to use the network to get information from the antenna to the user. The network can transport the radio signal, but also control signals, to change things like frequency and mode, and if the radio supports it, bands, antennas and other fun stuff like filters. There are ways to control a traditional radio across the network with so-called CAT commands, or Computer Assisted Tuning. This same technology can be used to connect a logging tool, so it knows what frequency and mode to log when you make a contact. What CAT control lacks is audio. Said differently, although some solutions exist to send Morse code, you cannot use CAT to listen to the radio, or speak into a microphone. This isn't an issue if the radio and you are in the same room, but if they're not, then things get tricky. And as a final piece of background information, a traditional radio is based around audio, that is, the information going between you and the radio, or a computer and the radio, is limited to audio. This represents about 4 kHz of signal. In other words, if you're tuned to 28.500 MHz, then a traditional radio can "hear" the radio signal between 28.500 and 28.504 MHz, sufficient for a single audio signal, but even a simple digital radio, a $50 RTL-SDR using a USB cable, can handle 2.4 MHz, plenty to cover all of the 10m band between 28.0 and 29.7 MHz with room to spare. I've been looking for something, anything, that brings these two vastly different worlds together for a number of reasons. I've spoken previously about some of these. For example, I do not want to physically connect my traditional radio, a Yaesu FT-857d, to my computer because I do not want to have the potential of stray RF coming into my computer. I'd also love to be able to run the same decoding and control tools for various radios, the Pluto SDR, several RTL-SDR dongles, my 857 and other radios as they come into my shack from time-to-time. Then there's the signal processing side of things. I'd love to be able to learn how to decode Morse and eventually other modes using a computer. I also want to be able to use a voice-keyer during a contest so the whole house doesn't ring from the sound of me calling CQ Contest, or CQ DX for hours on end. I've been making inroads into this. I managed to get rigctld to work across the network using Docker containers at both ends. I attempted to get audio working, but that has so far been a dismal failure, despite assistance on several fronts. This morning I stumbled on the idea of using "GNU Radio" for both. I even came across some examples where two so-called "flow-graphs" can talk to each other across the network. Now at this point you're either going to be nodding your head, or you're going to be asking yourself what gibberish I just spouted. If you're already nodding your head, stand-by, if not, GNU Radio is a software toolkit that provides signal processing blocks that you can link together to create simple or sophisticated systems to manipulate signals, like those that come from radios, or radio telescopes, or mobile phone base stations, radar, ADS-B, or whatever else you can imagine. It's widely used in academia, government, industry, research, and of course by us, hobbyists. A collection of blocks and links is called a flow-graph and in essence it's a program or if you like, an App, that you can run. It comes with a tonne of examples and tutorials, including one where one flow-graph can manipulate another, either on the same computer, or somewhere on the Internet. What this means is that you could build a flow-graph that can talk to a Yaesu FT-857d and one that can talk to a Pluto SDR, or an RTL-SDR, or any other radio, and use that to talk to a flow-graph that understands how to deal with audio, CAT and anything else you might want to. It means that for the first time in years I can at least imagine a unified world where my 857 isn't a boat anchor when compared to my Pluto SDR. Of course they don't have the same functionality, but at least I can handle their signals in the same way. Unlike the path I was previously on, where I was attempting to cobble together several tools whilst attempting to avoid a headache from banging my head against the wall, today I can use one toolkit to build Apps that run on pretty much anything with a CPU and see the fruits of my labour. I'm working on a proof of concept and when I've got it to show-and-tell, I'll put it up on my GitHub page, cunningly named after me, VK6FLAB. A final observation. Amateur radio means different things to different people at different times. For me, today, it's about software and GNU Radio. Tomorrow it is just as likely to be about something else. What is possible depends entirely on your imagination, so get playing, either on-air, or on-line, whatever gets you smiling and remember, the impossible happens immediately, miracles take a little longer. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 volunteers, paid staff or contractors, who act as the distribution point for incoming and outgoing QSL cards. If you and I agreed to confirm our contact via the bureau, my QSL card to you would be sent to the VK outgoing QSL bureau, which would hold my card until there were sufficient outgoing cards from all over Australia to your country to package them all up and send them to the incoming QSL bureau in your country. Your QSL bureau would then wait until there were enough QSL cards for your region to send it on, where it would eventually get into your hands in a variety of ways, via the postal service, through your local club, or at a local hamfest where the QSL bureau might have a stall. Your QSL card to me would make a similar, reverse, journey. This process could take weeks or sometimes years. Although not fast, this worked for many decades, but once electronic communications and computers started appearing, combined with increased costs associated with privatised international postal services, the wheels started coming off. Getting access to historic documents has proven challenging. I can tell you that over the years the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, has coordinated and controlled how the QSL bureaus should work. For example, a resolution adopted in 1985 and updated in 2009 "strongly encouraged" its member societies to accept incoming QSL cards for all amateurs in their country, regardless of affiliation. It also instructed QSL bureaus to only send cards to the official QSL bureau if there was more than one. Several years ago, the IARU administrative council recognised several trends, among them the environmental impact of unwanted cards generated in bulk by computer logging software, lower levels of adoption and ultimately the closing of some smaller QSL bureaus after being overwhelmed by undeliverable cards from increasingly popular holiday DXpeditions. In September 2018, the IARU adopted resolution 18-1 that stated that it "resolves that member societies are encouraged to continue to offer QSL bureau service in their countries, exchanging cards with the bureaus of other member-societies, for as long as doing so is economically justifiable, and further resolves that amateurs are encouraged to adopt confirmation practices, including but not limited to using electronic confirmation systems, that reduce the volume of unwanted and undeliverable QSL cards being introduced into the bureau system." This resolution took effect on New Year's Day, 2019. I'll also note that the IARU has its own year 2000 issue, having been in existence for nearly a century, its resolutions are named after the last two digits of the year followed by a sequential number, so resolution 25-1 could refer to 1925 or 2025, but I digress. The internet has introduced several confirmation processes. The most vocal of these is "Logbook of The World", or LoTW. I'm not a fan and haven't been for some time. I'll get into why in a moment. Other contenders are eQSL.cc, qsl.net, qrz.com, clublog.org and others that have yet to steal the limelight. If I've forgotten the one you run, let me know. Saying that I'm not a fan of LoTW is understating it. Recent ARRL ransomware payments aside, why do I need to legally prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I made contact with some random amateur? Why does this need to be authenticated, signed with a time-limited certificate and verified with 100 points of identity and why do we continue to roll out new and interesting procedures for what is essentially a postcard saying that on this day, time and frequency we made contact using this mode for the purposes of .. wait for it .. our hobby? The eQSL website has an interesting statement: "One of the problems with an e-mail based system is that there is no security inherent in that mechanism. Anyone can purport to be P5ABC, and you'll have a difficult time verifying it." So what .. and what made you think that the postcard ending up in your letterbox was guaranteed to be from P5ABC? If you're going to the effort of pretending to be P5ABC, what harm does that do in the scheme of things? For that matter, how do you know that the station you talked to on-air was actually P5ABC? I ask because I've spoken to an amateur who recently did some HF direction finding during several popular DXpedition pile-ups. They discovered that there were several stations purporting to be the DXpedition that were not. So. Right now we're in a situation where many if not all amateurs are connected to the internet. Most will have an email address. You already know mine, cq@vk6flab.com. If we made contact on-air, send me an email. If what you wrote matches my logs, I'll send you a reply to confirm it. How do you get the address? One possible approach is to create an online email database where you could submit the email address associated with your callsign and you could look-up a station to contact them. Another is for member societies to offer email addresses, the ARRL and the WIA already offer this service to current members. I'll also point out that one of the reasons that the QSL bureau was instigated in the first place was because some addresses for amateurs were not available. If you make contact today and you want to send them an email confirmation the question to ask is simple: "Hey, what's your email address?" Will that cover everyone? Nope. Neither does the current system. What it achieves is that my personal private identifying information isn't stored at the ARRL if I'm not a member. Besides, in my opinion a list of email addresses combined with callsigns is hardly something worth getting excited about, unless of course it's used by manufacturers to send out product announcements and discount codes. We should be so lucky. If you have a better idea, you know how to get in touch. What I can say is that this is the ultimate decentralised QSL system, not unlike the contact you made on HF. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 Donovan saw some of these photos and got curious. Assisted with GPS coordinates from an aurora hunter in Alberta, Song Despins, Eric correlated the time and location and it turns out that Steve was observed as a ribbon of gas 25 kilometres wide, 300 kilometres above Earth with a temperature of 3,000 degrees Celsius by the European Space Agency's Swarm, a constellation of magnetic field measuring satellites in orbit since 2013 and planned as a four year mission, so-far it has almost managed eleven years. Steve? Yeah, it's not named after Steven Hawking or Steve Martin, rather, if you're seeing something unexplained, you might name it something less scary, like the hedge in the movie "Over the Hedge". Steve was given a backronym, finding words after the fact, Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, but I prefer Steve. The NASA team at Goddard Space Flight Center have adopted Steve, so it looks like a keeper. I would never have even stopped to read the recent article in the local news, let alone dig into the various publications, if it weren't for the notion that Steve is one of many phenomena affecting the ionosphere and with it our hobby. Here's another example. Vance KV4P published a plan on kv4p.com, outlining a $35 project that requires minimal soldering that makes any Android phone into a handheld radio for 2m. Using a radio module, a micro-controller, a short USB cable, antenna connector, antenna and some sticky gel pads, Vance has come up with an open source project and circuit-board design that will get you on your way. He's even designed a 3D printable enclosure so you don't have to scare your friends with a bare circuit board. Whilst the Android app is in beta, that is, not quite fit for human consumption, you'll need to drop an email to Vance to get in on the action. Source code is on GitHub. I came across this project after breakfast, reading the "Y Combinator - Hacker News" which features all manner of weird and wonderful projects, links and questions from all over the technology sphere. The post has expansive discussion on Vance's project, including thoughts on other ideas on how to do interesting things related to our hobby. Again, if it weren't for the fact that I'm already an amateur, I would never have taken more than a glance at this and I would never consider that this was a doable project, let alone discover other amateur radio projects like HamWAN and AREDN, or the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network. The point being that we as amateurs are often pigeonholed by society into the idea of obsolete, disconnected and quaint. I'm here to tell you that our hobby has made me more alive than ever, more connected to others around me, more observant to electrical and physical phenomena and if that makes me quaint, I'm Okay with that. Also, while we're on the topic of being Okay. Charles NK8O reached out and told me that after listening to me talk about FT8 and his Morse code achievements, he cracked up and then raised the stakes by pointing out that you can get on HF with CW, that's continuous wave, or more commonly, Morse Code, for about $100, where a kit capable of SSB, Single Side Band, or more generally audio, will likely set you back significantly more. His advice, which I cannot fault, "Get on the air!", presumably to make some noise. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Every 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 into the idea that rocked my world, I need to set the stage a little. There are several modes I've discussed before, WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, FT8 or Franke-Taylor design, 8-FSK modulation and plenty others. Each of these modes has one thing in common. They require that all participants are using the same time. That is, both sender and receiver need to agree on when "now" is for this to work. A WSPR signal takes 110.6 seconds, every 120 seconds, starting on the even minute. It requires that the transmitter and receiver agree on the time within about 2 seconds. An FT8 signal takes 12.6 seconds within a 15 second window. It requires an accuracy of about 20 milliseconds. These timekeeping requirements are pretty easy to achieve in a modern network connected computer. You turn on a thing called NTP, or Network Time Protocol, point it at an appropriate clock and off you go. If you're not connected to the Internet, then things get squirrelly pretty quickly. You could buy yourself a GPS, set up a link between the GPS and your computer, run some software and use the GPS clock to synchronise time on your computer. Of course, this requires a GPS, a serial cable, software, configuration, battery power to keep the GPS running and probably a couple of other things. I've never done this, but given what I'm about to share, I don't think I ever will. What if you used a WSPR, or an FT8 signal, from someone else to synchronise your clock? If you've ever launched WSJT-X, you'll have seen a column marked DT, that's Delta Time, or the difference in time between the clock on your computer and that of the transmitter. If you could read the difference and use it to adjust your clock, you'd be in business. Charles NK8O pointed me to a GitHub Gist with a single little Python script, written by Peter K6PLI. It updates the clock on your computer using the Delta Time from WSJT-X. I'd point you at the script from here, but 3a730575, and 24 more characters, and that's just one element of the URL, doesn't run quite off the tongue, so I've cloned it into my VK6FLAB GitHub repository where it's called wsjt-time-sync. I added Peter's description to the ReadMe file, but I can take no credit for the effort, or the idea, that's all Peter. So, synchronise your clock using the signal that you're trying to decode. Seems pretty obvious now, but that was a brand new notion for me. Of course now I'm excited and wondering where else I might use this. Let me know if there's more to this that tickles your fancy. Also, just because I know Charles will poke my eye out with a Morse key if I don't mention this, you could use this script on your next POTA, Parks On The Air, or WWFF, World Wide Flora and Fauna activation, or anywhere else you go portable to make some noise. I know, right, Charles, using FT8 instead of Morse Code, what's next, the end of the hobby? I'll tell you a secret. From time to time, he even uses his voice! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The 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 time spent is about amateur radio, in other words, if I'm doing this with other amateurs, preparation and set up are part of the experience. However, if I'm on my own, or with my non-amateur SO, significant other, then preparation and set up often take more time than the actual on-air activity and by the time that things are humming along, we're ready to do something else, fine food, nice view, coffee, you name it, anything other than radio. So, how can I make the preparation and set up to be something much less time consuming? I don't really want to take over our car and bolt the radio back into it, nor do I want to strap a multi-tap antenna to the roof. At the other end, I also have no desire to bring a wire, look for a tree, do some throwing, find a place to sit and do the rest of the preparation to get on air. In other words, I want my cake and eat it too. What might that look like? One of my fellow amateurs has a telescopic whip, looks like a transistor radio antenna on steroids, but using that requires that you bring something to tune it, given that the ground is going to influence the antenna in unexpected ways. I could go out and buy a QRP radio with an in-built tuner, make the whip as long as it goes, perhaps even make it into a vertical dipole by combining two and start playing, but I'm not there yet. Of course I'm not the first to try any of this. The Parks On The Air and Summits On The Air activators are all over this type of activity, hopefully they've written some of their learnings down. I confess that I haven't found anything yet. How much of this have you achieved? What compromises did you make, what modes do you use when you're operating like this, mind you, I can hear my friend Charles NK8O from here, "Use Morse Onno", so I can take that as a given. All I need to do is learn it. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 radio amateur should be a member. Only by combining our efforts in this way can we ensure the future health of amateur radio, for ourselves and for future generations." That's straight from the IARU website. It seems like a lofty and worthy aspiration. Before I proceed, let me assure you that I'm absolutely committed to improving this hobby and this community, committed to strengthening its representation, its reach and increasing its activity levels. The IARU has existed for nearly a century. It consists of a global organisation and three regional ones, each working towards improving on, and advocating for, the amateur community. Governed by different constitutions each organisation pursues similar but not identical roles within its sphere of influence. Most, if not all IARU organisations are run by volunteers, people like you and I, who stick their hand up and help out, writing documents, attending meetings, updating websites, managing membership information and all the other things that the IARU apparently does. I say apparently because getting anything other than motherhood statements from any of the IARU organisations is like pulling teeth. To construct a historic list of elected office bearers, President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer and various regional Directors is an exercise in archaeology and much of the information doesn't appear to exist. That also seems to be true for what the IARU is spending its money on, your money. The IARU is funded by the fees that we pay to the representative body in our country, either directly, or as a member of a club who contributes. In my case, if I was paying a membership fee to the Wireless Institute of Australia, like I did for a decade, some of that would pass to IARU Region 3 and then from there, some would pass to the global IARU secretariat. Multiplied by every country and every paying member in that country across a century, there are significant, and to the best of my knowledge, unaccounted for sums of money involved. Then there is the list of things that the IARU has achieved. I don't doubt for a moment that people have been working very hard, giving it their all, helping, working late, doing things above and beyond to make outcomes appear, as-if by magic, without any of the blood sweat and tears associated with the process. I suppose it's like sausage, nobody wants to see how it's made, and I understand the sentiment. What of the outcomes, the published results? Should they be secret too? At the moment the IARU claims that it represents amateur radio on the global stage and on its website lists its achievements, namely: 21 MHz, Amateur Satellite, WARC bands, more Amateur Satellite bands, more 7 MHz frequencies, easing of restrictions in relation to disaster communications, 136 kHz, 472 kHz, 5 MHz, 50 MHz in Region 1, international roaming, and emergency communications. Impressive list right? There's twelve achievements listed in all, across 100 years, with meetings in cities all over the globe, with hundreds of people participating. Mind you, it appears that only recently has some level of coordination emerged between where meetings are held, by and large, each organisation meets every few years, staggered so there's always a meeting in a different country every year. Those frequent flyer miles must be adding up. If only there was another way to communicate across the globe. So, let's look at this in terms of effort and reward. Let's say that across the globe that at any one point in time there are 100 people part of the IARU infrastructure across the four organisations, or 25 in each. It's a modest representation. Let's say that they each volunteered 1 hour per week, so 52 hours a year, 5,200 hours across the entire IARU per year, or 520,000 hours across a century. This means that each achievement took more than 43,000 hours of volunteer effort. Unless of course there was more achieved that is undocumented. Mind you, 52 hours a year per volunteer is also probably light on, potentially by orders of magnitude. I note that for example there's no mention of things like quashing the 2m proposal by France where the local aviation authorities were looking to acquire some extra spectrum, or negotiations in relation to 1.2 GHz at the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 or WRC-23 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, held between 20 November and 15 December 2023. My point is this: What is the IARU doing? Is it really effective, or is it burning volunteer hours like it's going out of fashion? What is it spending your money on? Where is the record of all this activity? What level of accountability is there? Is your peak body looking at the IARU books? Are they holding the IARU accountable, or are they part of the problem? There is plenty of evidence that there are other issues too. As I said, I attempted to write down who was elected president in what year in which IARU organisation. Aside from missing decades of information, there are amateurs in that line up who served as president for 26 years. Imagine that, a representative body that elects the same person for nine straight terms. I'm not naming them, the information I have is incomplete; right now I cannot tell you who was previously elected across IARU Region 3, or list anyone between Hiram Percy Maxim elected in 1925 as the first IARU president and 2009 when Tim Ellam, VE6SH and G4HUA, was elected president to the global body, but it's unclear if he was the only president between 2009 and 2024 when he was re-elected. So, what do we do about this? First of all, am I just tilting at windmills or is this an actual issue that needs fixing and if so, what might that look like? Engagement would be my first guess. Is your club sending money to your peak body? Has it asked what the funds are used for? If you're a member of your peak body, have you asked them where the money goes and how much of it goes to the IARU and what it's spent on? Contacting your peak body and asking questions might be the first place to start, but if your peak body is dysfunctional as plenty of them appear to be, perhaps it's time to contact the president of your own IARU region and ask them what gives, that is if you can find out who they are. As I said, I think that our hobby is important, I think it needs advocacy, I think that takes money and effort, but right now I have very limited evidence that what we're doing and how we're doing it is the most effective way to go about it. What will you do about this? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 lights, even emergency lighting on various towers dotting the landscape. Last night we laid on our backs on a picnic blanket tucked into a sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. The valley where we are is pretty good, there's much less light pollution than in the city, but it's not pitch black. We fantasised about knocking on neighbours' doors to ask them to turn off their porch lights, but quickly came to the realisation that this was not going to be either acceptable, or reasonable. While I entertained the notion of creating a community Milky Way watching event, increasing local awareness of the new moon, light pollution and making it a local monthly event I discovered that Astro Tourism is a thing and our location happens to be part of the local scene. Of course I couldn't help myself and started explaining to my SO about how light and radio are the same thing when it struck me that in our hobby we have a similar issue. We don't refer to it as light pollution, instead we call it noise, specifically, QRM, or man-made noise, as opposed to QRN, natural noise. I wondered what a community event might look like if we did this with radio amateurs, rather than star gazers. How far would we need to go to get away from noise and could we realistically make something that was actually noise free? In reality the radio gear we bring, the power supplies, the solar panels, generators, inverters, computers and pretty much all the other stuff to make life come with radio noise to more or lesser degree. How could you set up an event where that type of noise was contained? Could it be done? What would it take? On a small scale, I can go to my local park with a fully charged 12 volt battery and a radio and get some sense of what it might look like, but all that really does is whet your appetite. What does this sound like if it's really quiet? For star gazers, there is a project called DarkSky with a .org website. It documents where designated Dark Sky Places are and promotes the protection of communities from the effects of light pollution through outreach, advocacy and conservation. We as radio amateurs could do with such a thing. What would our radio quiet spaces look like? How would we find them, how would we coordinate our efforts and what would outreach, advocacy and conservation look like for a radio quiet space? From a star gazing perspective, I've experienced the middle of nowhere, Lake King in Western Australia, in a paddock, lying in my swag, looking up. The sight is overwhelming. I felt like I was falling, even though I was lying flat on my back, physically not moving. I wonder what such a level of quiet looks like with a radio? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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 often explained things in the context of the era in which it came into being, the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, the first 20m contact between the UK and Australia, back in 1925, the founding of the IARU, also in 1925. For some years I've been playing with the idea of documenting the journey from Spark Gap to SDR. I started writing down milestones, collecting information about the various protagonists along the way, attempting to capture their life milestones and their radio related accomplishments. One friend went so far as to take photos of the replica spark gap transmitter in Hobart, Tasmania as used by Douglas Mawson between 1911 and 1914 during their Antarctic expedition. Between being entrusted with the written history of 28 Chapter of the Ten-Ten International Net and today I've started a spreadsheet. If you know me at all, you know that I love a good spreadsheet. This one is pretty simple, date, event, event type, protagonist, note and source. So far I've got about 85 rows. I'm using it to capture milestones directly related to our hobby, when the first EchoLink node went live, when RTTY came to be used on-air, the invention of FM, when we got access to the 2m band, when 160m was taken away during World War II, ultimately, all of it. There is already a website that documents some of this but it's USA centric, even though our community is global, and it does not include any sources, so there's no way to verify any of the events, which I think is essential if you're going to capture this in any meaningful way. I want this list I'm creating to include all manner of amateur related things, the first time F-troop went on-air, the first CQWW, perhaps even every CQWW. I have also set-up a form so you can contribute your events and over time grow it into something that captures what it is that we've done over the years. Perhaps it will grow into a section on Wikipedia, perhaps it will become its own thing, it's too early to tell. As I've said many times, if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. So, this is me, or us, writing it down. Perhaps we'll be able to find a way to make it through the next 100 years. You can find the Amateur History Project under Projects on my home-page at vk6flab.com - I look forward to reading your contributions. So, thank you Christine, VK6ZLZ for pushing that sheaf of paper into my hands. I hope I'm worthy of the history that it represents. I'm Onno Vk6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio To 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 noise everywhere. I was told that I was hearing a station in Brazil, which seemed incongruous, given that I was standing on an island surrounded by other Sea Scouts, a place where I had been camping and sailing for several years. We trooped out of the tent and ten minutes later I broke a finger playing a game where you sat on a mast trying to upend the other person using a canvas bag with a jib in it. I was unceremoniously upended and landed poorly and broke the middle finger on my right hand. Being a teenager that was of course a source of immediate ridicule and innuendo and getting a dink, that's Aussie slang for getting a ride on the back of the pushbike of my boatswain to the local hospital, after rowing from the island to the mainland caused me to completely forget that amateur radio experience. The second time I came across the hobby was through my then manager, Ian, whom I now know as VK6KIH, but at the time he was a quiet spoken man thrust into the role of manager. The introduction came in the form of a Daihatsu Charade with a massive, what I suspect, was a 40m HF whip. The amateur radio aspect made little or no impression. The antenna, clearly much too large for such a tiny vehicle, did. I don't recall ever talking about amateur radio or even seeing his setup. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I ever have. The third time I came across the hobby was at a dinner table surrounded by fellow "dogcow" geeks. One of them, Meg, then with the callsign VK6LUX showed us her brand new shiny purchase, a drone, that could be controlled remotely via WiFi on 2.4 GHz. She went on to tell us that the range was pretty limited because it was WiFi, but because she was a radio amateur, she was going to experiment with an amplifier. This was permitted because as I learnt, the 2.4 GHz WiFi frequencies are shared with amateur radio. You might know it as the 13cm band. I asked about this thing called amateur radio. I wanted to know what was involved, how would you become one, what would it cost, you know, all the things everyone always asks. I was told that there'd be a course in two weeks with an exam the weekend after. I asked if we needed a group booking and was told to "just rock up". So I did. I got my license in 2010 and my world changed forever. I will add, just to make sure that if you're planning to do this, that during my course I discovered that my license wouldn't permit my use of the 13cm band, so I'd have to upgrade. I promptly purchased the requisite course material and started reading. In the mean time I got distracted by the activities at a local club, then I bought a radio, then I was told I wasn't a real amateur because I only had a beginners' license, so to prove a point, I started having fun with my license. I haven't stopped since. Now, some, or maybe all of this, I've shared before. Here's something new. I'm a so-called A.F.O.L, or an Adult Fan Of Lego. It's not a guilty pleasure, I'm happy to admit it. I have too much Lego around me. My oldest set is from 1964, House with Garage, number 324-2. It's not complete any longer, the car is long gone, the garage door weights are broken off, but it has pride of place in my living room. History does not reveal how I came into possession of it. Best I can reconstruct is that in the deep dark corners of Australia it takes a little while for kits to arrive, since I was born after the kit came into existence. I do know that I had it before 1976. The other day I was watching a documentary about Lego and one thing stood out to me. I'll share the entire quote by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen the then President and CEO of The Lego Group: "During the 1990s, we kept thinking that much more should be done for the adult "hobbyist builders," as we called them at the time. Most people on the management team thought we should concentrate on children instead, but I felt that a person could have an inner child at any age." Why this is important is because of my activities as a radio amateur. We as a community keep saying that we should grow, that we're losing too many people, that we need to engage with S.T.E.M., or Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Whilst that may be true and whilst JOTA and Scouting might give us exposure to fresh new people, there's a massive community of adults who already know about our hobby. They just don't yet know how it might interact with them, personally, or how they might find it interesting, or engaging, rewarding, and all the other things that you as an amateur already know about. So, if there's Adult Fans Of Lego, why not Adult Fans Of Amateur Radio? While thinking about that, how would you talk to them, how would you go about finding them, relating their interests to our hobby, finding common ground and discovering even more things that we can add to the thousands of amateur activities we already know about? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The 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 and host the net whilst logging on my computer. That's no longer possible because of a number of reasons, so instead I was trying to accomplish the same thing on a tiny 13 inch screen which didn't work for me. My friend asked me why I hadn't just extended the microphone lead from my radio, so I could sit at my now stationary computer and still key the microphone. I located an Ethernet joiner, an Ethernet cable and did just that. Simple. Job done. Then I started wondering why I wasn't on HF with my station and if there was a simple solution that was eluding me. Spoiler alert, it still eludes me. The requirements are not too complicated, well at least in my mind they're not. I want to operate on HF. I want the computer to not be physically, or specifically, electrically connected to the radio, in any way. I need to be able to use logging software that tracks the radio band, mode and frequency. I'd like to use digital modes, I'd like to have a computer controlled voice keyer and I do not want to run Windows and if I can at all help it, I'd like to spend as little time as possible doing this without spending an arm and a leg. So, then I started wondering what this looks like for other people. What kinds of compromises have you made in your shack? What have you accomplished and how did you get there? What choices of hardware and software did you make, and why? Did you give up, or face the challenge head on? How did you gather information and how did you find out what others did? Not for a moment do I think that this is a simple thing to solve, but it's clear to me that I'm so far down the complicated rabbit hole that I'd like someone to show me the light at the end of the tunnel to make some progress. Of course I've not been idle while all this is happening. I configured a Raspberry Pi, a small single board computer, to talk to my radio via USB. I connected a sound card to the audio connector on my radio. Theoretically this should give me all that I need, but the difference between theory and practice is common knowledge, in theory it works, in practice it doesn't. The Pi is a few years old, but it's not doing much at all. It connects to my network wirelessly, so my main computer isn't physically connected to the radio, but it's still pretty unreliable and I have to say, calling CQ, either using voice or digital modes, should be rock solid. You don't want your radio to keep transmitting after it's supposed to and other little issues like that. So, how did you do this? I'm interested to know. I'm not the first person to run into this issue and I'm not the last. Your experience might help me and it might help others. Drop me an email, cq@vk6flab.com and I look forward to hearing about your adventures. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The 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 get a sense of its purpose in the world. At the time I mentioned the notion of comparing the four organisations against each other, since ostensibly they're doing the same thing for a different part of the world. Each of these regional bodies was created separately by different groups of people and their constitutions reflect that. The Global IARU constitution, last updated in 1989 consists of nine pages. The IARU Region 1 constitution, with proposed amendments from 2020 has 31 pages, the English version of the Region 2 constitution, since there's also a Spanish one, was amended in 2019 has six pages including two copies of Article 2, and refers regularly to the Global IARU constitution and finally, Region 3, amended in 2012 has 15 pages. What is striking at first glance is just how poorly these documents are constructed. Formatting, inconsistent spelling, indentation, general layout and all are lacking attention to detail. I think that this reflects poorly on the internal workings of the IARU, but I digress. Curiously, the Region 3 website has a whole section on proposed changes to the constitution. Many of those changes are around the election of officials and voting procedures. It also includes the use of modern communications like email and remote conference facilities on internet platforms. One paragraph stood out: "It was also realised that changes would need to be made to formally recognise that we will (as happened at the online conference in 2021) have females as well as males taking responsible positions in IARU Region 3." It must have come as quite a shock to the delegates to learn that there are females in our hobby. This must have already happened in Region 1, since there is a reference to "he/she" in relation to being elected. Mind you, use of the word "they" must not have occurred to the authors. But don't worry, we shouldn't rush these things, the International body and the Region 2 constitutions both use "he" for roles. I will point out that the International body has a weasel clause where it states, among other things, "words importing only the masculine gender include the feminine gender and the neutral gender". It's a good start, but falls short of standards expected today. If you're not sure what all the fuss is about, let me illustrate: "The term of office of the President shall be for a period of five years from the date of ratification of porcupine nomination, and porcupine shall remain in office until the nomination of porcupine successor has been ratified." If that felt jarring for you, you might get some sense of what it feels like for someone reading that with gender pronouns that don't match the text. A better solution would be: "The term of office of the President shall be for a period of five years from the date of ratification of their nomination, and they shall remain in office until the nomination of their successor has been ratified." It's not the first time we've struck this type of issue. It's high time that we did something about it. Over a year ago, I pointed out that OM, Old Man, and XYL, eX Young Lady, were derogatory and we should replace them with OP, operator, and SO, significant other. A year before that I proposed a revision of the Amateur's Code to make its language inclusive and reflective of the wider community in which we operate. I've had discussions with people who identify across the gender spectrum about much of this and the overwhelming feedback I received is that our community is Old White Men clamouring to grow the hobby without a clue that the words they use are part of the problem. So, credit to Region 1 for implementing some of this and to Region 3 for starting this conversation. I don't doubt that there are members in the Global IARU and Region 2 who would like to see this implemented and to you I say: It's time, high time, to review what language our community uses to identify itself to the wider community. More generally, as the governing and representative global bodies you should be leading the way and providing guidance to the member societies. So, next time you promote our community, refer to others, link to articles, and attempt to encourage participation, you should take a moment and ask yourself if what you're saying is truly speaking to people who are not Old White Men and if that's the case, what you might do to embrace the wider community. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Getting started in our hobby can be a challenge. Even if you've got a shiny new license and you've been taught what the legal requirements are, you might even have your first radio, but after that it might feel like you're all on your own in this bright and shiny new world. It doesn't have to be that way. First thing to know is that you are exactly where all other amateurs have been before you. In other words, don't stress too much about what you don't know or what mistakes you might make. I recently read a comment from a new amateur who was so scared of making a mistake that they hadn't made their first contact. You should know that there is a massive difference between making an accidental mistake and knowingly interfering with another service. Here's some mistakes I've made. My license permits a maximum power level of 10 Watts. I dutifully set-up my radio to do just that, made my first contact on HF using 10 Watts, only to learn later that power levels are set separately for HF, 6m, VHF and UHF on my specific radio. So, the second time I keyed up my microphone, I was using 50 Watts. Not only that, I didn't quite understand how to set-up my radio for repeater use, so I keyed up on the output frequency and happily talked to the other station, blissfully unaware that I wasn't actually using the repeater. It wasn't until several years later that I learnt that the minimum power level was 5 Watts on all bands, except UHF, where it is 2 Watts. And as icing on the cake, one day I managed a 2m contact across about 70 km, from my car. It wasn't until later in the night that I discovered that all the settings on my radio had reset and it was again using 50 Watts. Another time I was in the club radio shack and having some fun with the club station. I tuned to a 2m frequency and called CQ. Didn't hear anything. Then I discovered that I'd missed a decimal point and was actually transmitting on the 20m band, where I'm not permitted with my license. Each of those things are outside the restrictions of my license, but made by mistake, not on purpose. Instead of stressing about it, I went, oops, and carried on with a new lesson learnt. I will point out that I'm certain that there are more, mistakes, feel free to let me know. Those concerns aside, finding people to talk to is another barrier to entry. We have all these bands and there's nobody about. It reminds me of a funny story I've shared before, told by Wally VK6YS, now SK. In his early amateur radio days he operated from Cockatoo Island, an island off the north coast of Western Australia, near Yampi Sound, which is where his callsign came from. With a new radio and transverter for 6m, Wally had been calling CQ for weeks, but nobody would talk to him. Occasionally he'd hear a faint voice in the background. Meanwhile it transpired that amateurs across Japan were getting upset that he wasn't responding to their 20 and 40 over 9 signal reports. His transmission was getting out just fine, his receiver wasn't working nearly as well. Turns out that during manufacturing, a pin on the back of his transverter hadn't been soldered correctly. Oops. Once he fixed that, he worked 150 Japanese stations on the first day and a lifelong love of the 6m band was born. One hard learnt lesson is that the bands are constantly changing. If you cannot hear anything on one band, try another. If the band is quiet, it's likely because the conditions for that band are bad, but generally this is only true on HF. On VHF and UHF, the opposite is often true. Some bands, like 10m and 6m behave more like VHF, but not always. 20m can go from brilliant to abysmal and back in seconds, sometimes during the contact. Each band has its own idiosyncrasies that you'll need to explore before you can hope to improve your chances of success and even years of playing will often get you surprises. I recall trying, for giggles only, to call CQ on a pretty quiet band only to score an unexpected contact with a Central European station on the other side of the globe. A good rule of thumb is to go where the action is. If you can hear others, they're much more likely to hear you. While this is not universally true, it's a good starting point. Of course, you don't need to physically have a radio to experience any of this. There are many websites that provide you with access to radio tuners. If you search for WebSDR or KiwiSDR you'll come across hundreds of online receivers that you can tune and operate on the frequencies they support using just your web browser. Some have the ability to decode digital modes within the web page, so you won't even have to install any extra software to play. You might think that using such a receiver is not really amateur radio, but I'd like to point out that a transceiver is both a transmitter and a receiver. You can get the receiver right there in your web browser. The transmitter is a little more complex, but technically also possible. Many amateur clubs have a remote accessible station which will allow you to get started. That kills two birds with one stone, you get to interact with the people in the club and you get to play on-air without needing to figure out just which radio to get and what antenna to connect it to and where to put either. Other places to find new friends are of course social media, the so-called fediverse, a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other, has several communities. You can get started at https://mastodon.radio and https://lemmy.radio. There's plenty of other on-air activities like Nets, discussion groups where you can get to know other amateurs. I run a weekly Net for new and returning amateurs called F-troop on Saturday morning midnight UTC for an hour, where you can say hello and ask questions. We pass the microphone around a circle, so everyone gets a go. You'll find more information at https://ftroop.groups.io. Getting started does not have to be a daunting experience. Get on-air, make noise and before you know it, you'll have forgotten just how much you worried about things that really didn't cause any issues in the big picture. If you're still stuck, drop me an email, cq@vk6flab.com and I'll attempt to point you in the right direction. What are you waiting for? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Internet access across HF radio In the mid 1980's there was this thing called a Bulletin Board System or BBS. You would connect your computer to a gadget called an acoustic coupler that you would sit next to a telephone. You'd pick up the handset, dial a phone number and wait until there was a squeal in your ear. Then you'd push the handset into the rubber cups on the coupler and watch as your computer started putting characters on your screen. Now, truth be told, my first foray was the next generation of this, an actual modem where you didn't actually have to touch the telephone, instead, the device could dial on your behalf using so-called AT commands. And if we're being totally honest, I never actually connected to a BBS. My adventures with global communications started with Usenet News in 1990, but I'm here to make a point, I promise. Amateur radio is a hobby that is for experimentation. One such experiment is a thing called packet radio. Before you roll your eyes about ancient technology, this gets very cool, very fast. At its most basic, packet radio is about digital radio communication. Until not that long ago to play you needed a thing called a TNC or a Terminal Node Controller. When I got my license in 2010 I was told that this was a magic box to make digital communication possible between a radio and other radios and amateurs. Right now, many people are playing with WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter as well as FT8, both examples of things intended to get specific chunks of information exchanged between two stations. What if I want to chat, or send a file, or a picture? There are tools like "js8call" which is experimenting with the idea of using FT8 to chat, but what if I told you that there's a better way? Written by John WB2OSZ, named after a canine that became extinct 9,500 years ago, "direwolf", is software that implements an expensive piece of 1980's hardware, a TNC, that runs just fine on a $5 Raspberry pi. It's been around for over a decade, the oldest date I can find is March 2013 though undated versions before that exist. It's an example of a so-called software-modem, simple to get started, and it implements the essential pieces of packet radio. It's currently running connected to my radio and I can see packets of information scrolling past. In this case I'm tuned to the local APRS, or Automatic Packet Reporting System frequency of 145.175 MHz. It's the same information that you can see if you point your web browser at aprs.fi While that's great, it's just the beginning. Tune to another 2m or 70cm frequency and you can use it to connect to a BBS being run by a local amateur, or, you can tune to a HF frequency and connect to one run somewhere else. Direwolf also supports a technology called KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, yes really, developed by Brian WB6RQN, Phil KA9Q, Mike K3MC and others. KISS allows you to connect a modem, like direwolf, to a computer and use technologies like TCP/IP, the primary language of the internet, across a radio link, any radio link. Let me say that again with different words. You can use your HF radio to browse the internet. No proprietary modes in sight, weak signal, error correction included, all open source, all free, all ready to go. While we're singing its praises, direwolf can also act as an iGate, an interface between radio and services like aprs.fi, a digipeter that receives and re-transmits APRS data and plenty more. It gets better. What if you wanted to use something like RTTY, PSK31, Olivia or some other mode? You could use "fldigi" instead of direwolf since it too supports KISS. To be fair, there are lots of moving parts here and I've glossed over plenty. This isn't intended to discuss precisely how to do this, rather that it's possible at all and has been for quite some time. I can't wait to attempt to browse the internet using my radio, for nothing other than the thrill of attempting it. I wonder if I can do this with Morse Code as the underlying protocol. Only one way to find out. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Having been a licensed member of this community since 2010 I feel qualified to answer a recurring question: "What kind of hobby is amateur radio?" The single best answer I can give is that it's big. The deeper you become involved, the bigger it gets. I stole the phrase, "amateur radio is 1000 hobbies in one" and I've remarked that I suspect that it's underselling the experience. Point being, whatever you've heard about amateur radio is likely true and guaranteed to be only part of the story. There was a time when amateur radio was a concept regularly seen in general discussion. That's no longer the case, but you'll soon discover that amateurs are everywhere and the things we get up to still make the headlines from time to time. That said, as a community we tend to use complex language and in specific ways. For example, a radio amateur is unlikely to broadcast, instead they transmit. From the outside looking in the two are synonymous, but within amateur radio the two couldn't be more different. Broadcasting is one to many, transmitting is one to one. Broadcasting separates the operator from the equipment, transmitting has the operator actively engaged with it. Amateur radio is about curiosity, about trying things, about learning and sharing, it's about technology, electronics, nature and physics, it's about software and hardware, about camping and competing and plenty more and with that come friendships that seem to last a lifetime, perhaps forged in the fire of fascination, perhaps made almost perchance in passing. I have more amateur friends than not and among us we have a massive variety of interests. Unlike most hobbies, you need to obtain a government issued license to become a fully licensed amateur, as-in, be permitted to transmit. For some this requirement might be a deterrent, but once you understand why, since radio waves don't stop at political boundaries and every human shares the same radio spectrum, licensing becomes a necessity, not an obstacle. That said, you can start long before then by receiving, no license required. Amateur radio is a global activity. It's centrally regulated, but administered locally in each country and locality. As a result I cannot tell you specifically how much things will cost where you are, but the fees are generally not cost prohibitive and in many cases they are low or even free. You become licensed by completing a training course, passing an exam and receiving a certification that lasts for life. Once you are certified you can apply for a callsign and operate an amateur station. The closest equivalent to a callsign outside the hobby is a car license plate. It's a unique combination of letters and numbers that identify an amateur. For example, my callsign is VK6FLAB, said phonetically, it's Victor Kilo Six Foxtrot Lima Alpha Bravo. We use phonetics because often individual letters are lost due to interference which comes in many different forms. Depending on where you are, a callsign might be subject to a renewal fee. If doing a course and passing an exam seems scary, getting started at the introductory level is generally a weekend worth of effort. That introduces the notion that there are different levels, or to use an amateur phrase, classes, which, again depending on where you are, permit different access to the radio spectrum where your WiFi, mobile phone, garage door opener, emergency services, aviation, satellite and free to air television all share the same limited resources with radio amateurs. The higher your license class, the more access you get, but the more you become responsible for. Again, using a car analogy, you graduate from moped to car to truck. If you've come across this hobby before, you should consider that one of the historic international license requirements hasn't existed for decades, namely Morse code. Mind you, some countries still require Morse, but their numbers are dwindling rapidly. There is an often repeated concept that amateur radio is old white men sitting in the dark talking to each other about the weather, their station and their ailments. While there's some of that around, you'll soon discover that there's people from all walks of life, all ages and interests and backgrounds. Given that this is a global experience, you do not need to limit your interactions to the people within your local community. I've been contributing a weekly article about amateur radio since 2011. Detailing the many and varied aspects of this hobby and if you're curious about what you might find here, warts and all, jump in. There are two series of articles, "What use is an F-call?", which covers 2011 to 2015 when it was renamed to "Foundations of Amateur Radio". Available as an audio podcast, as text, as email and there are eBooks too. You'll find plenty of amateur radio resources online and social media communities with different interests and sensibilities. As with any community, amateur radio has its share of gatekeepers who hark back to the days of yore, some literally, some in their language and behaviour. Don't let that dissuade you from exploring this magical community. Feel free to drop me an email, cq@vk6flab.com and I'll do my best to answer any burning questions you're left with. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The International Amateur Radio Union or IARU was formed on the 18th of April 1925 in Paris. Today, split into four organisations, consisting of one for each of the three ITU Regions, and the International Secretariat, are said to coordinate their efforts to represent the globe spanning activity of amateur radio. Each organisation has its own constitution, which at some point I might compare, but for now I'll focus on the International Secretariat. Last updated on the 9th of May, 1989, the constitution has nine pages detailing how the IARU works. After defining its name, it describes its purpose. Its objectives shall be the protection, promotion, and advancement of the Amateur and Amateur-Satellite Services within the framework of regulations established by the International Telecommunication Union, and to provide support to Member-Societies in the pursuit of these objectives at the national level, with special reference to the following: a) representation of the interests of amateur radio at and between conferences and meetings of international telecommunications organizations; b) encouragement of agreements between national amateur radio societies on matters of common interest; c) enhancement of amateur radio as a means of technical self-training for young people; d) promotion of technical and scientific investigations in the field of radiocommunication; e) promotion of amateur radio as a means of providing relief in the event of natural disasters; f) encouragement of international goodwill and friendship; g) support of Member-Societies in developing amateur radio as a valuable national resource, particularly in developing countries; and h) development of amateur radio in those countries not represented by Member-Societies. Those are lofty goals and no doubt they have changed over the past century. The objectives as described have been in effect for over 35 years, so we can safely say that they are part and parcel of the current workings of the IARU. This leads me to several questions, mostly uncomfortable ones. Over the years I have witnessed the incessant cry for the growth of the hobby in the face of apparent global decline. What I haven't seen is any evidence of the IARU actually doing much towards its own objectives. At this point you might well be chomping at the bit to enlighten me, please do, and you might well be right that the IARU is doing stuff, but the key here is seeing evidence. As I keep saying, if you don't write it down, it didn't happen. You do this for contacts between stations, why should the IARU be any different? While the IARU is a recognised United Nations organisation, it's entirely volunteer run and paid for by its members. The International Secretariat is funded by its three regional organisations, which in turn are funded by the member societies in each country like the WIA in Australia, ARRL in the U.S., RSGB in the U.K., JARL in Japan and VERON in the Netherlands; over 160 organisations in all. Those in turn are funded by their members. For a decade or more I contributed to the funding of the IARU through my WIA membership. I note, as an aside, that organisations like the Radio Amateur Society of Australia or RASA and the European Radio Amateurs' Organization or EURAO, which are not recognised by the IARU, do not fund it, unless they're making donations on the side. That's important because this hobby, despite its amateur nature, runs on money. If you want to help the IARU, the only way to do so is as a volunteer. That's great if you have money to pay for food and housing, less so if you don't. Similarly, member societies are also, by enlarge, run by volunteers, each doing so in the face of big business and government attempts to increase their spectrum allocation at the expense of amateur radio at every turn. This leaves us with an organisation with lofty goals to foster, promote and grow our community, funded and run by volunteers, with in my opinion little to show for its century history. Is this the best model? Is this how we make a robust, representative and effective organisation? Speaking of representative, in 2018 Don G3BJ, former president of the RSGB and then president of the Region 1 IARU, talked in some detail about how the IARU operates in an enlightening video you can find on YouTube called "RSGB Convention lecture 2018 - So what has the IARU ever done for us?". In that lecture Don makes the statement that "the ARRL provides significant additional funding" and "without that [the] IARU would be in very serious problems". If you're not a member of the ARRL, what does that mean? How much is significant funding? Is it real money, or is it paper money in the form of office space provided within the ARRL offices in Connecticut? If a member of the IARU International Secretariat is also a member and office bearer of the ARRL, does that buy access? For example in 2021 the ARRL executive committee nominated their past president to become the Secretary of the IARU, which at least according to the ARRL, it "has the right and obligation to". I don't know how you feel about that, but it makes me uncomfortable and here in Australia I can't say that I feel represented, even if I was a current and paid up member of the WIA, which I'm not. I think organisations like the member societies and the IARU have a very important role to play in our hobby, but what I don't see is evidence that they are. No doubt I'll get emails telling me to step up. I would if I had a functioning money tree in my backyard. Transparency is an issue in our community. I left the WIA because I felt that there was no transparency. The ARRL had a wide ranging security breach recently and whilst it has written a great many words on the subject, most of them are, at least in my professional opinion, the opposite of transparent. I have yet to see the operating budget for the WIA, the ARRL or the IARU, despite having paid money into at least two of those. So, what of the future of our hobby? What does representation in a modern global community look like and does the structure of our hobby need scrutiny and discussion? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The story goes that the name of our hobby, at least in some parts of the world, ham radio, stems from the notion that we as a community were perceived as being ham-fisted in our ability to operate a Morse key. We apparently claimed that slur and made it our own. I've never actually been able to verify this narrative, but it goes to the heart of what it is to be part of the hobby of amateur radio, as opposed to Professional radio, which is what I once heard someone refer to themselves as. This notion that we are playing outside our sandbox, that we're doing something less than real, that we're somehow not whole as a result is absurd, especially in the context of how we are an integral part of how spectrum is allocated around the globe. It's fun to remember that playing outside the box, trialling things, exploring, inventing and learning, is the reason we're here. The whole thing is incremental, much like learning to walk, sometimes you fall flat on your face, yet here you are perambulating like a champ. As an aside, did you know that how you get up off the floor is pretty much how you learnt to do it as a toddler, it might not be the most efficient, but it's how you do it. Speaking of falling down, making mistakes on-air is part and parcel of being an amateur. There's no protocol police, nobody to issue a fine if you make a mistake, just dust yourself off and try again. The urge to optimise pervades our hobby. We optimise our antennas, our gear, the time and band we choose to communicate on, the modes we use, the places we operate from, even how we participate in contests, all of it is a cycle of optimisation. During contests I've regularly attempted to flex my imagination to optimise my activities. For example, the VK Shires contest rewards you for combinations of shires, so, I created a map of all the shires, then looked for places to activate, preferably on or near borders, so I could change shire with minimal effort. There are contests that reward different maidenhead locators, so I set about finding spots where you could activate four at once. By the way, a maidenhead locator is an amateur radio geo-locator which I'll dig into some other time. Contesters regularly use multiple radios to optimise their ability to talk to stations that double their points, so-called multipliers. Over the years I've come across many different excuses for getting on-air and making noise. Popular activities like Parks On The Air, or POTA, Summits On The Air or SOTA, and plenty of others are all programs that aim to get you out of your shack, set up your station at a particular location and make contact with anyone and everyone. On occasion you'll hear a station combining activities, doing both a POTA and a SOTA activation because the summit is inside the boundaries of a national park. Ian M0TRT took this idea to a whole new level. He wondered if you could qualify for multiple programs simultaneously and if so, how many. Gathering data from Summits, Parks, Islands, Beaches and Bunkers on the Air, together with UK Castle and Lighthouse awards and adding World Wide Flora and Fauna or WWFF, eight programs in all, he set about exploring. For some programs like Castles, Lighthouses and Bunkers you need to be within 1 km of the entity and summits need to be activated within 25 meters altitude from the peak. For other programs, beaches, parks and islands plenty of extra work was needed. Ian's code is available on GitHub, in the "weeaaoa" or "Worked Everything Everywhere All At Once Award" repository. If you have time to head out to the beach just east of Devil's Point near Plymouth you'll be able to activate 21 different programs at the same time. The Maidenhead locator is IO70WI06. As with any outdoor amateur radio activity, take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints and kill nothing but time. Be mindful of creating obstacles and trip hazards for your fellow humans and be prepared to have a park ranger turn up as soon as you sit down. Oh, and if you think that's not in the spirit of amateur radio, you haven't been paying attention. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of my recurring, you might call it, regrets, but probably not quite that strong, is that I often find myself discovering that an amateur radio contest came and went, or worse, I found out on the day, preferably at midnight UTC when many contests start, which happens to be 8 am Saturday morning where I live, right when my weekly radio net for new and returning amateurs, F-troop, begins. Often by that time I already have plans for the weekend and now I know I'm missing out on some or other activity that might encourage me to go outside and get fresh air whilst playing radio. Don't get me wrong, it's my own responsibility to manage my time, but that doesn't explain what's going on, so I started exploring what might be causing this. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard, there's pretty much a contest on every weekend, so I could sort out my radio and get on-air to make noise at any point of any day. That this doesn't happen can only partially be explained by the state of my shack, which I have yet to get working the way I want, but it doesn't explain everything. I'm subscribed to several contest calendars. The most prominent of these is one maintained by Bruce WA7BNM. The contestcalendar.com website is a great place to start. Another is the personal site of prolific contester and contest manager, Alan VK4SN. Both sites offer a calendar feed file that you can subscribe to. So, subscribe to the calendar, job done, right? Unfortunately not. As it happens, for several years I have in fact subscribed to both those calendars. I even shared these with my partner, which results in a fun exchange at the breakfast table that goes something like this: "Hey, do you need the car on Saturday?" "Why?" "Well there's an amateur contest on." So, my partner is often more aware of contests than I am and supposedly I'm the amateur in this household. It occurs to me that I need an alert to point at an upcoming contest. Preferably one that I can configure that's specific to me. I don't tend to look that far into the future, I have plenty of stuff that needs to happen today without worrying about next month. I started exploring what I might do about this. Be the change you want to see, so I contacted Bruce and asked what views he might hold on the addition of an alarm in the calendar file he publishes. I also asked if there was a way to configure what contests are visible in that file. Whilst hunting through his site, I discovered that there's plenty of Australian contests not on the site, so I created a list of contests I know about that I thought should be on the calendar. I might point out that Bruce's job isn't easy. Trying to get information out of contest managers can sometimes be like powering a spark-gap transmitter using a pushbike. Here's an example of one contest that has an algorithm to determine when the next contest is, I kid you not. There's a Winter, Spring and Summer version of this contest, for Winter, when the June solstice is on a weekday (Monday through Friday), the weekend following shall be the weekend of the event, if not, that weekend shall be the weekend of the event. The Spring and Summer versions are even more involved, counting forwards or backwards four weekends from the December solstice. It helpfully includes a link to the solstice dates for this century, because really, that's how the dates are determined. If I'm feeling particularly sparky, I might even make a calculator, since the contest manager for that contest hasn't announced the dates for the next contest, though my previous experiences whilst attempting to calculate moon bounce windows using the Python Astropy package was challenging. I did find PyEphym which has several solstice and equinox functions. So, now all I need to do is make my shack work as I want it, bolt a radio back in my car, win lotto and something else, I forget what. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Australia has a long relationship with callsigns. Over time the regulator, today the ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, has seen fit to introduce different types of callsigns and restrictions associated with those callsigns. The change that made the most waves most recently was the introduction of the so-called F-call. It's a callsign that looks like mine, VK6FLAB. It has a VK prefix for Australia, the number 6 indicating my state, Western Australia, then the letter F, followed by a suffix of three letters. This type of callsign was introduced in 2005. To this day there are plenty of amateurs on-air who don't believe that this is a real callsign, to the point where some refuse to make contact, or worse, make inflammatory statements about getting a real callsign, and that's just the letters, let alone those who think that the callsign denotes a lack of skill or knowledge demanding that the amateur "upgrade" their license to a real one. At the time of introduction, the apparent intent was to indicate that the holder was licensed as a Foundation or beginner. In 2020 this was changed, and existing F-call holders were able to apply for a new callsign if they desired. Some did, many did not. Currently there are 1,385 F-calls active and there are 3,748 Foundation class callsigns in the registry. After this change, you might think that all callsigns in Australia are now either two or three letter suffixes, as-in VK6AA or VK6AAA. Actually, the F-call continues to exist and there are now also two by one calls, VK6A, intended for contesters. A popular idea is that the F-call is for Foundation license class amateurs only. There are currently 10 Standard and 16 Advanced license classed holders with an F-call. There are also two special event callsigns that sport an F-call. With the addition of contest callsigns, new prefixes, VJ and VL, were introduced which brought with it the notion that you could use those new prefixes for your callsign. Currently, only contest callsigns are allocated with VJ and VL prefixes. An often repeated idea is that we're running out of callsigns. Well, there are 1,434,160 possible callsigns if we count each prefix, each state, single, double, triple and F-calls across all prefixes. As it happens, there are at present 15,859 assigned and 53 pending callsigns. If not all, then surely, we're running out of real callsigns. Nope. If we look at the VK prefix alone, less than 10% of available callsigns have been allocated. Okay, we've run out of contest callsigns. Nope. There are 1,040 possible contest callsigns and only 188 allocated. Another popular notion is that we've run out of two-letter callsigns, that is, the suffix has only two letters. Again, no. There are 3,553 allocated out of 6,760, less than 53% has been assigned. Surely, some states appear to have run out of two-letter callsigns. Well, maybe. Theoretically each state has 676 two-letter callsigns but none have all of those allocated. For example, VK3, with 675 allocated two-letter suffixes, is missing VK3NG for no discernible reason. More on the missing ones shortly. It's impossible to use the current register to determine how many amateurs hold more than one two letter callsign. Another notion is that you can have a special event callsign as long as it starts with VI. As it happens there are currently special event callsigns registered with VI, VK and AX prefixes. Just over half of them have any online activity to promote the callsign for their event. You might think that a callsign can only be "Assigned" or "Available". According to the register a callsign can be "Pending", it can also be "Reserved", more on that in a moment, and it can not be in the list at all, "Missing" if you like. Take for example JNW, it's assigned in VK2, it's available in all other states, except VK3 where it simply doesn't exist. This oddity doesn't restrict itself to VK3. Take XCA, available in all states, except VK4. TLC doesn't exist in VK2. Many more examples to go round. And that's not looking at exclusions due to swear words and reserved words like PAN; but SOS is an assigned callsign. Combinations that you think might be unavailable, like QST, are fine, except in VK2 where it doesn't exist. It's thought that reservations are only for repeaters. Nope. Suffixes with GG followed by a letter are reserved for the Girl Guides, those that start with S followed by two letters are reserved for Scouts, those starting with WI are for the Wireless Institute of Australia and those with IY are for the International Year of something. Interestingly there is no reference to repeaters or beacons at all in the callsign register since they fall under the old license regime, rather than the new amateur class. And you thought that the system was getting simpler and cheaper to run. You might think that every state has the same number of callsigns. Ignoring F-calls, VK5 has the most callsigns available and VK3 the least. No doubt this is due to the callsigns that are "Missing" from the register. This likely leaves you with plenty more questions, but next time someone asserts something about callsigns, perhaps it's time to have a think before you spout. Note that this information is based on the ACMA callsign register as I found it on the 29th of June 2024. This started as an exploration of just how many different amateur calls were registered. At the time there were 3,748 Foundation class, 2,079 Standard class and 9,946 Advanced class callsigns assigned or pending. Without knowing how many callsigns each amateur has been assigned, it's impossible to know just how many amateurs those 15,773 callsigns represent. Perhaps it's time for the regulator to start publishing some data on our community, rather than relying on the likes of me to download 1,774 pages of data and two days analysing it. I can tell you that I have been assigned two callsigns, one for day-to-day use and one I use for digital modes and contests, given that WSPR doesn't play nice with VK6FLAB and I really have no desire to give up my call. Before I go, every VK callsign also has an AX equivalent on three days every year, 26 January, 25 April and 17 May and as I said, you can apply for a special event callsign with an AX prefix. I'm Onno VK6FLAB