Podcasts about wspr

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 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 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 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 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

PODCAST: This Week in Amateur Radio Edition #1352 - Full Version Release Date: January 25, 2025 Here is a summary of the news trending...This Week in Amateur Radio. This week's edition is anchored by Chris Perrine, KB2FAF, Tammy Walker, KI5ODE, Steven Sawyer, K1FRC, Don Hulick, K2ATJ, Will Rogers, K5WLR, Eric Zittel, KD2RJX, Marvin Turner, W0MET, George Bowen, W2XBS, and Jessica Bowen, KC2VWX. Produced and edited by George Bowen, W2XBS Approximate Running Time: 1:47:31 Podcast Download: https://bit.ly/TWIAR1352 Trending headlines in this week's bulletin service 1. EAB: Secret Listeners – Revealing The Life Of Amateur Radio Heroes 2. DLARC: What Is New At The Digital Library Of Amateur Radio and Communications 3. AMSAT: SpaceX Launches Hamsats on Rideshare Mission 4. AMSAT: Two Private Moon Landers Have Launched At Once 5. AMSAT: Blue Origin New Glenn Reaches Orbit On Its First Launch 6. AMSAT: SpaceX Success & Failure In Starship Flight 7 7. AMSAT: New ARISS Proposal Window Is Now Open 8. AMSAT: AMSAT Satellite Shorts From All Over 9. WIA: Remotely Controlled Vehicles Over Starlink 10. WIA: Binghamton New York Radio Club Hosts Kids Day 11. RI: With Trump Designation, Brendan Carr Is Now FCC Chairman 12. HACK: Forget the Coax, Wire Up Your Antennas With Cat 6 Cable 13. ARRL: Get Ready For Ham Radio Open House On World Amateur Radio Day 2025 14. ARRL: ARRL Club Grant Program Awards A Half Million Dollars To Grow Ham Radio 15. ARRL: ARRL Club Grant Funds Hardware For Florida Students To Make Contact With The ISS 16. ARRL: Ham Radio Demonstration Helps Survivors Of Violence At Camp 17. ARRL: Former QST Columnist, Doctor Emil Pocock, W3EP, Silent Key 18. ARRL: Winter Field Day Is This Weekend 19. ARRL: The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program To Conduct Research Campaign January 27th-31st 20. ARRL: The 76th Annual International DX Convention Is Announced 21. ARRL: The National Traffic System 2.0 Subcommittee Have Completed A Number Of Projects And Initiatives 22. ARRL: The Southeastern VHF Society Will Hold Its Annual Conference On April 4th and 5th, 2025 23. Wearable Avalanche Transceiver Helps To Pinpoint Trapped Skier 24. Lake Placid Olympic Museum Receives Amateur Radio Gift 25. Ofcom Announces More Privileges For Visiting Amateurs To The United Kingdom 26. Ham Radio Ireland Magazine Is Published On Line Once Again 27. Award Recipients Named By The Organizers Of The Orlando HamCation 28. Amateur Helps Find Children Lost During Pilgrimage 29: ARRL: Upcoming RadioSport contests and regional convention listing 30. WIA: International Amateur Radio Union to celebrate its upcoming 100th Anniversary 31. WIA: Are you ready for a twenty dollar windfall from Apple? 32. HR: Harvey Laidman, W8DX, Director of The Waltons and Matlock, SK at 82 33. FCC: FCC proposes $200,000 in pirate radio fines 34. FCC: FCC seeks comments on reallocating the 1675-1680 MegaHertz band for shared uses 35. ARRL: The league issues a call for QST articles about Field Day Plus these Special Features This Week: * Working Amateur Radio Satellites with Bruce Paige, KK5DO - AMSAT Satellite News * Foundations of Amateur Radio with Onno Benschop VK6FLAB, will tell us why he moved his WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon to 15 meters. * The DX Corner with Bill Salyers, AJ8B with with all the latest news on DXpeditions, DX, upcoming radio sport contests, and more * Weekly Propagation Forecast from the ARRL * Will Rogers - K5WLR and A Century Of Amateur Radio. This week, will takes us aboard The Wayback Machine to the year 1920, where we find a young radio engineer by the name of Edwin H. Armstrong gave QST permission to reprint his article entitled A New Method for the Reception of Weak Signals at Short Wavelength. ----- Website: https://www.twiar.net X: https://x.com/TWIAR Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/twiar.bsky.social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/twiari YouTube: https://bit.ly/TWIARYouTube RSS News: https://twiar.net/?feed=rss2 Automated (Full Static file, updated weekly): https://twiar.net/TWIARHAM.mp3 Automated (1-hour Static file, updated weekly): https://www.twiar.net/TWIAR1HR.mp3 ----- This Week in Amateur Radio is produced by Community Video Associates in upstate New York, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. If you would like to volunteer with us as a news anchor or special segment producer please get in touch with our Executive Producer, George, via email at w2xbs77@gmail.com. Thanks to FortifiedNet.net for the server space! Thanks to Archive.org for the audio space.

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 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 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 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

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-370 on March 8, 2014, remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries in modern history. After departing from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 passengers and crew, the Boeing 777 lost contact with air traffic control and vanished from civilian radar. A later analysis revealed that the plane had sharply deviated from its flight path, flying westward over the Malay Peninsula and into the Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed after running out of fuel. Despite an extensive international search covering vast areas of the Indian Ocean, only small pieces of wreckage have been recovered, and the plane's main body, along with its black boxes, remains missing.Theories about the disappearance range from pilot suicide and mechanical failure to hijacking and government cover-ups. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the experienced pilot, has been scrutinized, with some suggesting he may have intentionally downed the plane, though no conclusive evidence has been found. Families of the missing passengers have endured years of emotional torment, desperate for closure. Recent technological advances, like the WSPR tracking method, have pointed to a potential new crash site, but as of 2024, no new search has been approved. The mystery of MH-370 continues to baffle experts and leaves the world searching for answers.(commercial at 11:15)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.com

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-370 on March 8, 2014, remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries in modern history. After departing from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 passengers and crew, the Boeing 777 lost contact with air traffic control and vanished from civilian radar. A later analysis revealed that the plane had sharply deviated from its flight path, flying westward over the Malay Peninsula and into the Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed after running out of fuel. Despite an extensive international search covering vast areas of the Indian Ocean, only small pieces of wreckage have been recovered, and the plane's main body, along with its black boxes, remains missing.Theories about the disappearance range from pilot suicide and mechanical failure to hijacking and government cover-ups. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the experienced pilot, has been scrutinized, with some suggesting he may have intentionally downed the plane, though no conclusive evidence has been found. Families of the missing passengers have endured years of emotional torment, desperate for closure. Recent technological advances, like the WSPR tracking method, have pointed to a potential new crash site, but as of 2024, no new search has been approved. The mystery of MH-370 continues to baffle experts and leaves the world searching for answers.(commercial at 11:15)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-epstein-chronicles--5003294/support.

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-370 on March 8, 2014, remains one of the greatest aviation mysteries in modern history. After departing from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 passengers and crew, the Boeing 777 lost contact with air traffic control and vanished from civilian radar. A later analysis revealed that the plane had sharply deviated from its flight path, flying westward over the Malay Peninsula and into the Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed after running out of fuel. Despite an extensive international search covering vast areas of the Indian Ocean, only small pieces of wreckage have been recovered, and the plane's main body, along with its black boxes, remains missing.Theories about the disappearance range from pilot suicide and mechanical failure to hijacking and government cover-ups. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the experienced pilot, has been scrutinized, with some suggesting he may have intentionally downed the plane, though no conclusive evidence has been found. Families of the missing passengers have endured years of emotional torment, desperate for closure. Recent technological advances, like the WSPR tracking method, have pointed to a potential new crash site, but as of 2024, no new search has been approved. The mystery of MH-370 continues to baffle experts and leaves the world searching for answers.(commercial at 11:15)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.com

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 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

Foundations of Amateur Radio If you've heard the phrase "shortwave listeners", you might have wondered what on earth that was all about. It relates to the length of a radio wave used to transmit information. The length of a radio wave is tied to its frequency. The longer the wave, the lower the frequency. When radio amateurs talk about bands, like for example the 40m band, we're talking about a range of frequencies where the wavelength is around 40m. From a frequency perspective, this is around 7 MHz. The 160m band, at about 1.8 MHz, or 1,800 kHz is considered the beginning of the short wave bands. This implies that there are longer waves as well. If you've ever seen or owned a mid 1980's transistor radio, you'll have seen the notation MW, which stands for Medium Wave, today it's called the AM band. Older radios might have the notation LW, or Long Wave. The medium wave band is a broadcast radio band that runs between about 500 and 1,700 kHz. The wave length is between 600 m and 170 m. When radio was still in its infancy, there was also a popular long wave band, with wavelengths between 800 m and 2,000 m, or 150 to 375 kHz. Today much of that has gone by the wayside. With the advent of digital radio, in Australia it's called DAB+, Digital Audio Broadcasting, the whole idea of "wave" has pretty much vanished. Some countries like Japan and the United States are in the process of discussing the phasing out of the AM broadcast band. Much of that appears to be driven by car manufacturers who claim that the AM band is no longer useful or used, but forget to tell anyone that they really want to stop having to put AM radios in their cars because it's difficult to isolate the electrical noise from their modern contraptions in order to make it possible to actually listen to that band. If you ask me, it's a good incentive to make electronics RF quiet, something which is increasingly important in our wirelessly connected world. This might lead you to believe that all activity on air is moving to higher and higher frequencies, but that's not the case. The properties that made long wave and medium wave radio possible in the early 1900's are still valid today. For example, there are WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacons on the 2200m band, or at 136 kHz. Whilst your RTL-SDR dongle might not quite get down that low, most of them start at 500 kHz, you don't need to spend big to start playing. My Yeasu FT-857d is capable of tuning to 100 kHz, plenty of space to start listening to the 2200m band, even if I cannot physically, or legally, transmit there. If you want to build your own receiver, you can check out the weaksignals.com website by Alberto I2PHD where you'll find a project to build a receiver capable of 8 kHz to 900 kHz using a $50 circuit board. If that's not enough, there's radio experimentation happening at even lower frequencies. Dedicated to listening to anything below 22 kHz, including natural RF, with a wavelength greater than 13 km, Renato IK1QFK runs the website vlf.it where you'll find receivers and antennas to build. Given that most sound cards operate up to around 192 kHz, you can start by connecting an antenna to the microphone port of your sound card and use it to receive VLF or Very Low Frequencies. On your Linux computer you can use "Quisk" to tune. There are VLF transmitters on air. For example, SAQ, the Grimeton Radio Station in Sweden opened on the 1st of December 1924. Capable of 200 kW, today it uses about 80 kW and transmits twice a year on 17.2 kHz. While we search for higher and higher frequencies, there is still plenty of fun to be had at the other end of the radio spectrum. Consider for example that VLF or Very Low Frequency radio waves, between 3 and 30 kHz can penetrate seawater. I'll leave you to explore. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Much is made in our hobby about working DX, that is sending and receiving distant radio signals. How distant is up for debate. Depending on where you are, DX might be outside the continent, outside the country, or in my case you could easily say, anything outside of my state, since the nearest border is about 1,240 km away from here. For giggles, the distance between Albany in the South West and Wyndham in the North East of the state is 2,400 km and that's via radio wave. By car it's 3,570 km. To be clear, we're still inside VK6. All that to say, DX is in the ear of the beholder. If that's not enough, there's a group of amateurs who are of the strident opinion that for DX to count it must be a two-way contact. That is, both stations need to hear each other and as such, those amateurs believe that a mode like WSPR, the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter can't possibly be considered DX, even if you can discover that your station was heard on the other side of the planet. I'm going to skip right over those who tell anyone who will listen that FT8 isn't real radio because it's just computers talking to each other. This to give you some context when I introduce the next idea, namely FM Broadcast DX. I'm acutely aware that this isn't amateur radio, there's no two-way communication, it's probably not DX and besides, it's computers. That out of the way, let me tell you about something I discovered. Many, but not all, FM broadcasters transmit multiple signals when you tune to their station. One of those is a signal called RDS, or Radio Data Systems. It's used to show you the name of the station, sometimes what song is playing, what style of station it is and other information like road traffic alerts and emergencies. You can decode this using an RDS decoder. Recently I was browsing YouTube. I came across a video on the Broken Signal channel that digs into the world of FM-scanning to log any RDS information for the purpose of finding DX stations. The video goes into great detail on how to set this up with Windows, by copying files into various places, updating XML files, configuring sample rates, connecting virtual audio cables, running several tools simultaneously and it goes on to demonstrate how this all hangs together. While I was impressed with the idea, the implementation didn't speak to me, since I wince at the notion of copying random files into an application installation directory and besides I'm a Linux user. So, I went hunting. Turns out that there is an RDS decoder for Linux, called "redsea", written by Oona OH2EIQ. It's on GitHub. Compiling it is pretty straightforward, follow the instructions and it should work as advertised. You'll also need to have "rtl-sdr" installed so you can run a tool called "rtl_fm". Again Oona's instructions should help you out. I will add that I'm assuming that you have a so-called RTL-SDR dongle, it's a cheap USB device that can be coerced into pretending to be a software defined receiver with about 2.2 MHz of bandwidth. Based on the example shown, I immediately tuned to a local station and RDS information started filling my screen. To let you know how simple this is, you run the "rtl_fm" tool and send its output to "redsea" which decodes the information and displays it on the screen. That's it. No more moving parts, no XML files, no shenanigans with virtual audio cables and the like. Stage one complete, on to stage two, scanning. The "rtl_fm" tool has the capability to scan a range of frequencies. I tried this, but didn't really get anywhere, since for the scanner to work you need to set the squelch in order to switch between frequencies, but if you're aiming for a weak signal, it will never be heard if your local FM broadcasters are belting away 24 hours a day. So, instead I'm scanning each frequency between 87 MHz and 109 MHz, every 10 kHz, for 10 seconds, to see if there's any RDS data to be heard. I send that to a file and when I feel the urge, I can go check to see what I've heard. I haven't yet put this up on GitHub because I'm considering making it a contribution to the "redsea" project instead of a project of my own. Now, at this point you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Well, the same method could be used to decode your local amateur repeater idents, or the NCDXF beacons, or any other kind of interesting information. I saw one user link "rtl_fm" to "multimon-ng", a tool I've spoken about before. You should also check out Oona's website, windytan.com, there's a whole range of signal processing stories to be found, including dealing with flutter distortion on Steamboat Willie and a very cool spiral spectrogram. I'll leave you with one question. Why haven't you installed Linux yet? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

How do you make something disappear? Nobody understands that better than practitioners of the ancient art of stage magic, who for centuries have used the principles of applied psychology to make seemingly impossible things occur. In today's episode Jeff talks to Ed Dentsel, host of the Unfound podcast, who for years worked as the stage manager for a magic show in Las Vegas, helping magicians perfect their routines. In the second half of the show we discuss the viral video about MH370 produced by the popular YouTuber Mentour Pilot, and in particular its discussion of a supposed new technology called WSPR whose inventor claims can pinpoint the exact flight path of the plane on its fatal last leg. Ed Dentsel's Unfound podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCz4bh2ppqACeF7BdKw_93eA David Copperfield's Great Wall of China trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp4fG_RNQM4&t=10s Mentour Pilot's MH370 Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk Victor Iannello's WSPR Debunking: https://mh370.radiantphysics.com/2021/12/19/wspr-cant-find-mh370/ More information at our show page here: https://deepdivemh370.com Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUXIrQ2rO5B_z-AEpjmKaAw/join

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever had a day when nothing you started actually got anywhere? I've had a fortnight like that. Several weeks ago I wrote a couple of articles about emergency communications and its tenuous relationship with our hobby. As a result I managed to get a week ahead of myself and started using that week to do some long overdue analysis of the WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter data set. I've started this process several times and I finally had a whole fortnight to come to grips with 6.7 billion rows of data. Spoiler alert, it hasn't happened yet. The data contains a record of every reception report uploaded to WSPRnet.org since Tuesday 11 March 2008 at 22:02 UTC. It's published in compressed comma separated value text files and after previously spending weeks of wrangling I managed to convert each one into an sqlite3 database. This wrangling was required because some amateurs used commas in their callsigns or grid squares, or backslashes, or both, and SQLite import isn't smart enough to deal with this. After doing this conversion, I could actually query 191 different databases. I could collect the results and three weeks later I'd have an answer, just in time to download the next month of data. Garth VK2TTY suggested that I look into parquet as an alternative. No joke, This Changed My Life. I managed to convert all the compressed CSV files to parquet, a process that took a day, rather than a week with SQLite, and then I could start playing. If you're going to do this yourself, make sure you have a big empty hard disk. After a few false starts, the report that previously took three weeks, returned in three hours, and if we're getting technical, since I know this will make at least somebody laugh, the parquet files are stored on a USB drive connected to an iMac that has the directory mounted via sshfs to a virtual Linux desktop machine that's running the duckdb binary inside a Docker container running on a different virtual Docker machine. If you're keeping track, the database travels across USB via two SSHFS mounts to duckdb and it still only takes three hours. So, impressed doesn't even begin to describe my elation. If you're asking "why?" - the answer is that I don't run untrusted binary executables on my host machine. This allowed me to start doing what-if queries when I discovered a fun issue. A chart I generated with minimum, average and maximum power levels over time showed that there was at least one station that was claiming that it was transmitting with 103 dBm. For context, that's multiple times the power of HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program which in 2012 was the most powerful shortwave station using "only" 95.5 dBm, or 3,600 kilowatts, and only 2 dBm shy of the 105 dBm or 32 megawatts used by AN/FPS-85, part of the US Space Force's Space Surveillance Network, able to track a basketball-sized object 41,000 km from Earth. In other words, 103 dBm is less of a whisper and more of a roar. Funnily enough, not every receiver on the planet reported these transmissions, but more than one did, so the issue is at the transmitter. Unfortunately, when I started looking for reports using more than 60 dBm, there were plenty to choose from, over 18 thousand. While that's less than 0.0003%, it made me wonder how much of the data is dirty and what should I do about it? There's other examples of dirty data. My beacon has been reported on 24 MHz, which is odd, since my licence conditions do not permit me to use that band. Odder still is that several other beacons, normally on 28 MHz like me, were also reported on 24 MHz by the same station. How often does that happen? I've previously reported the missing data from the hybrid solar eclipse in 2023, just under two hours and 12 minutes before the eclipse and the 38 minutes following it was missing. I've not yet checked to see if it magically reappeared. Then there's the faulty decodes. I've talked about this before. Different WSPR versions are better or worse at decoding and the point at which it breaks down varies. In other words, some decoded data is inevitably wrong. I have previously charted activated grid squares. Apparently, all of Earth, yes, all of it, has at one time or another been used both as a transmission or reception site. Including point Nemo, the top of Mount Everest, all of the arctic and antarctic and plenty more out of the way places, like say the Surveyor Generals Corner located in the Ngaanyatjarraku shire - look it up. Interesting patterns emerge when you split activations down per band. It's not clear if those are decoding artefacts or man made claims. I've asked the HamSci community for guidance, since dropping incorrect data on the floor doesn't seem to be the right way to go about things, and whilst correcting data seems obvious, what do you change it to and how do you know what's correct? So, no progress to show for two weeks of work and barely enough to whet your appetite to get on air and make some noise. Some days are like that. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A few weeks ago I discovered that the regulations for amateur radio in Australia had some definitions that caused me to wonder if 2,312 amateurs in VK, me among them, had been operating illegally? Specifically it appeared that using a WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter transmitter of any kind, both computer controlled and stand-alone beacons, was contrary to what was permitted in the rules, since in Australia an "amateur beacon station" means a station in the amateur service that is used principally for the purpose of identifying propagation conditions. The rules go on to say that you must have a specific beacon license and not having one is not permitted. I suggested that it was time to send a letter to the regulator, seeking clarification. Well, let me tell you, that set a cat among the pigeons, not at the regulator, but within the amateur community. Between posting a draft of my proposed email to a local mailing list before sending it to the regulator, and publishing my article, I received responses that ranged from "let sleeping dogs lie", "you are now on their radar", "you will be prosecuted because you admitted to breaking the rules", "carry on and ignore the rules because I am", and plenty more in that same vein. There were two amateurs that indicated curiosity about what the response might be while pointing out that none of this was legally binding since it hadn't been tested in court. I also discussed the matter on my weekly net and I learnt that DMR hotspots come in a duplex version, meaning that what you transmit into the hotspot is also transmitted by the hotspot on RF whilst sending it to the Internet. If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that this fits the definition of an "amateur repeater station", which also requires a specific license. I received a prompt reply from the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the ACMA, the Australian regulator. Here's what the regulator had to say in response to my query: "I can confirm that you can continue to operate your WSPR beacon and Duplex Hotspot as described without requiring an Amateur Beacon or repeater licence." It goes on the say: "Operation of these types of amateur equipment is permitted under the current amateur non assigned arrangements and as such will continue to be permitted under the class licence arrangements." As a result, if you've been listening to WSPR on 10m, you'll have discovered that my 10 dBm beacon went back on the air 45 minutes after receiving this information. The letter confirms that both WSPR and Duplex hotspots have previously been, and will continue to be, allowed under the new rules from the 19th of February 2024 when they come into effect. The final paragraph from the regulator sets out the boundaries of where the rules apply. It says: "The definitions in the Interpretation Determination are broad definitions of amateur repeaters and beacons. For the purposes of amateur licensing the ACMA only considers apparatus assigned licence services, where individual frequency coordination is carried out and specific licences are issued, to be amateur repeaters and beacons." In my opinion this is significant because you only need to apply for a separate amateur beacon or repeater license in very specific circumstances related to frequency coordination. It makes me wonder if the local beacon operators require an ongoing license for all of their beacons or not. What I learnt from this process is that there is a high level of fear in the amateur community towards the regulator. I do not know where this originates, since I've interacted with the regulator on dozens of occasions since obtaining my amateur license in 2010 and in every case the response was courteous and informative. When the response wasn't what I expected I replied asking for extra clarification and received it. This enquiry was no different. Going back through decades of old publications I've previously seen letters between the community and the regulator and I have yet to see anything that warrants the level of fear that appears to permeate our community. So, why are we afraid of the regulator and why do we keep spreading that fear to anyone within propagation range? What have they ever done to you? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I came across an amateur who expressed concern that someone was using a frequency set aside for repeater use with their hotspot. Band plan issues aside, and you are encouraged to send an email to cq@vk6flab.com with the link to the official band plan that applies to your DX entity, in my experience it's not unusual for an amateur who is configuring their so-called hotspot to use such a frequency. While you might be familiar with the concept of a mobile phone hotspot that allows you to connect a computer through your phone to the Internet, in this case we're talking about an amateur radio hotspot. Similar in that it allows you to connect through the device to the Internet, but different in that this is essentially a device that connects radios to the Internet, and yes, if we're being pedantic then computers and mobile phones also have radio, well spotted. Anyway, an amateur radio hotspot is a radio with an Internet connection and in that it's much like a modern repeater. Often they use low transmit power, have limited range within a building or vehicle and because of that are hardly "unattended". That said, if you connect a more effective antenna and an amplifier, you could make such a device into a full blown repeater. In other words, the line between hotspot and repeater is likely in the eye of the beholder. Given that the regulator in many countries requires a license for operating a repeater, or a beacon, I wondered what the official definition of a repeater was, so I went looking. Note that this applies to Australia only, but you'll find the journey illuminating I'm sure. The current "Radiocommunications Licence Conditions (Apparatus Licence) Determination 2015" does not have either the word repeater or beacon. The new "Radiocommunications (Amateur Stations) Class Licence 2023" which comes into effect on the 19th of February 2024 uses both repeater and beacon several times but does not define what they are. It has an interpretation section with a note that lists both "amateur repeater station" and "amateur beacon station" and states that the regulator can define terms under section 64(1) of its own act. The "Australian Communications and Media Authority Act 2005" section 64(1) states that "The ACMA may make a written determination defining 1 or more expressions used in specified instruments, being instruments that are made by the ACMA under 1 or more specified laws of the Commonwealth." It should come as no surprise that neither repeater nor beacon appears in this document. I then thought to go sideways and search the "Register of Radiocommunications Licences" for a repeater license. It reveals a PDF for a license with all manner of detail, frequencies, power levels, location, antenna type, etc. for a license, but no definition of what a repeater is. I then looked at the 481 pages of the "Radiocommunications Act 1992". It uses both beacon and repeater. Unfortunately beacon is in relation to the operation of lighthouses, lightships, beacons or buoys. Repeater is in relation to two or more digital radio multiplex transmitters. I then searched through the "Federal Register of Legislation" for the phrase "amateur beacon station". It returns 27 results of which 9 are in force. I downloaded all 9, including any explanatory text if it was available. In all, 340 pages of legal documents. Finally we have progress. In the "Radiocommunications (Interpretation) Determination 2015" we find the following definitions: "amateur beacon station" means a station in the amateur service that is used principally for the purpose of identifying propagation conditions. "amateur repeater station" means a station established at a fixed location: (a) for the reception of radio signals from amateur stations; and (b) for the automatic retransmission of those signals by radio. So, if your hotspot is in a vehicle it's not a repeater, but if you have it sitting in your shack, it is. Similarly, apparently, my 10 dBm WSPR transmitter, which I use solely for the purpose of identifying propagation conditions, is a beacon. Apparently if you have your computer controlling your radio using WSPR, that's a beacon too. You can apparently apply for a license and pay the regulator for the privilege, the price of which went up by 510% according to their own documentation from $29 to $177, no idea if that's a once off or an annual charge. So, now we have a situation where, apparently, the rules state that I'm not permitted to use WSPR without a beacon license. In fact, the "Explanatory Statement to the amateur class licensing reform instruments" explicitly states that "Subsection 13(2) prohibits the operation of an amateur station for specified purposes, including for the purpose of obtaining a financial gain or reward. The subsection also prohibits the operation of an amateur beacon station or an amateur repeater station under the Amateur Stations Class Licence, and, subject to subsection (3), the transmission of an encoded signal to obscure the meaning of the signal." I've just hit send on a letter to the regulator asking for clarification. Perhaps you should write one too. I've also just switched off my WSPR transmitter and if you're one of the 2,312 amateurs who made a WSPR transmission last year in Australia, perhaps you should too. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I stumbled on a project called Maia SDR by Daniel EA4GPZ. Maia, spelled Mike Alpha India Alpha, is a star in the Pleiades cluster. The Maia SDR project homepage proclaims that it is "An open-source FPGA-based SDR project focusing on the ADALM Pluto". Now, I can completely understand if that collection of words is gibberish to you, but take it from me, it's not, let me explain. PlutoSDR or Pluto is the common name of a piece of hardware which is officially called the ADALM-PLUTO Evaluation Board. It's a sophisticated device made by Analog Devices that provides a radio platform with some very interesting properties. Specifically it's both a radio transmitter and receiver with the ability to use frequencies between 70 MHz and 6 GHz. It runs embedded software you can tinker with because it's all Open Source and it's all very well documented. Many people have used the Pluto as a remote transceiver by controlling the on-board radio with a USB cable. While that's neat, it's not what I have been wanting to do for a number of reasons. The Pluto has the ability to sample data at a rate of 61.44 mega samples per second or MSPS. That translates to a bandwidth of 56 MHz. A typical amateur radio has a bandwidth of 2.5 kHz. This bandwidth comes at a price. For starters, USB on the Pluto isn't fast enough to handle 56 MHz of data, so if you're using it as a remote radio over USB, you need to lower your expectations. However, the hardware itself can process data at that rate, as long as it stays inside the radio. So, if you had a way to process data inside the radio and a way to show what you did with the data across USB, you could use all of the 56 MHz at once. The Maia SDR project does exactly that. It processes the data and presents it to the world as a waterfall image, like the one you might have seen in WSJT-X, fldigi or SDR++. If you've seen the voice version of my podcast on YouTube, you'll also have seen a waterfall. It's an image that scrolls vertically, showing frequencies left to right, and signal strength by colour, traditionally, a rainbow that uses blue for low power and red for high power. Every time period the image scrolls adding another row representing the radio spectrum at that time. It's a very useful way to show massive amounts of radio spectrum data in close to real-time. The waterfall that WSJT-X produces is about 2.5 kHz wide. The waterfall that Maia SDR produces is 56 MHz wide. To give you some context, the entire HF spectrum, between 2200m and 6m easily fits within 56 MHz. Now, there's a wrinkle. As I said, the Pluto frequency range starts at 70 MHz, so that means we can't use it to listen to HF. Well, not without the help of another gadget, called a transverter. Essentially it moves a set of frequencies from one range to another. The gadget I have, a SpyVerter 2 HF Upconverter, translates anything between 1 kHz and 60 MHz and moves it to between 120 MHz and 180 MHz. If you combine the Pluto with Maia SDR and a SpyVerter, you can plug your antenna into the SpyVerter, connect that to the Pluto, connect to the Maia SDR website that's running on your Pluto, tune it to 120 MHz, and see 56 MHz of HF bandwidth scrolling past as fast or slow as you want. You'll find the 10m band at 148 MHz, the 15m band at 141 MHz and the 20m band at 134 MHz. Now if that's not cool enough for you, Maia SDR is as I said Open Source. This means that the project publishes all of the code that makes this happen. The Pluto comes with a number of devices on-board that process information. At the antenna end is an AD9363, essentially a chip that converts RF into digital and back. The digital information is processed by a device called an FPGA, a Field Programmable Gate Array. Field Programmable means that mortals like you and I can change the software that it runs. Essentially an FPGA is a programmable circuit board used for information processing. To scratch the surface of what that means, you could for example program an FPGA to behave like a microprocessor, or you could use it to do accelerated matrix multiplications used for neural networks like you can with a graphics chip, or in this case, a device that does all of the digital signal processing. Finally the Pluto has a dual core ARM processor. You'll find those inside most Android phones and Raspberry Pi's to name a few. It's used to extract data from the FPGA and present it on a web page. Oh, and there's a progressive web app for your phone, so you can see this waterfall on your mobile phone if you want. So, thank you to Daniel EA4GPZ for sharing your project, it's very much appreciated! There are some caveats. The Pluto is easily overwhelmed by strong signals, so you probably need filters. I'm using a wide 2m band pass filter between the SpyVerter and the Pluto, just so that my local WiFi network doesn't overwhelm the whole thing. You're receiving between 0 and 56 MHz, so you'll need an appropriate antenna. The frequency response for the Pluto isn't linear, so the same colour on two bands might not be the same signal strength. You need to update the firmware of the Pluto, so make sure that you have a copy of the official firmware before you start because some of the FPGA functionality has been removed by Maia SDR to make this stuff work, most notably, the ability to use the Pluto across USB as a remote radio which is restored if you re-install the official firmware. It's all documented really well and I'd encourage you to have a go if you're so inclined. If you're a software developer, Maia SDR aims to encourage FPGA development in the radio sphere using Amaranth, the project About page has more details. As random Internet searches go, Maia SDR was a lovely surprise and I can't wait to dig deeper, but that will have to wait until my computer stops processing something like 6 billion WSPR records, which it's been doing for the past two weeks. What have you found worth sharing? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The attraction to amateur radio for me lies in the idea that it provides a framework for experimentation and learning. There's never an end to either. Each time you go on-air is an opportunity to do both and every chance I get, I cannot help being sucked into another adventure. My weekly scribbles are an attempt to both document what I've been up to and to encourage others to take a step on the path that I'm discovering, moment by moment, week by week. One of the more, lets call it, comment inducing, activities I like to explore is low power operation. This is not to the liking of many operators who are happy to run their shack at full legal power. For me, full legal power is 40 dBm, or 10 Watts. That's not to say that I've never experienced the thrill of running a pile-up on a contest station, I have. What's not to like? You speak with people from communities far-and-wide, they're clamouring to talk to you and making contact is pretty easy, almost effortless. The lure towards more power, bigger antennas, more bands and more radio is always there, but it's not all there is to this hobby. My year-long efforts of running a 10 dBm, or 10 mW, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, or WSPR, beacon, is evidence that you can make it 13,945 km from me in VK6 to PA where it was heard by Jaap, PA0O in Zuidwolder, just outside Groningen in the North East of 't kikkerland. In fact, across 2023, my 10 dBm beacon was reported 4,849 times by 58 stations, many inside Australia, but there were reports from Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, Antarctica, Sweden, and as I said, the Netherlands. One of my friends, Charles NK8O, is a mostly mobile operator who loves to set up for both Parks On The Air, also known as POTA, as well as World Wide Flora and Fauna, WWFF. His chosen mode is CW, but you'll find him using digital modes like FT8 and even as a rare DX event you might strike it lucky and hear his voice. Most of his activity uses batteries, so you'll rarely make contact with him when he's using more than 47 dBm or 50 Watts. A couple of weeks ago during the weekly F-troop net he announced that for the duration of 2024, Charles intends to operate using low power, or QRP. Operating QRP isn't for everyone, but I'd hazard a guess that if tried, there's plenty to learn and experience by dialling the power down to play in a low power environment. Think of it like this. If you're into cars, it's the thrill of driving fast. It's not the only way to drive and enjoy yourself. Driving sedately, touring the back roads, will get you to your destination just as well and along the way you'll have the opportunity to look out the window, to even have the window down and to enjoy the environment, rather than spending every second being on a hair trigger. If fishing is more your thing, high power radio is like dynamite fishing. You'll easily catch all the fish in the pond, but once you have, there's nothing left to do. Fly fishing on the other hand gets you a different but perhaps just as satisfying experience. So, if you've never done this QRP thing, what can you expect when you turn the power down? First of all, reception works just the same. So, everyone you heard before will continue to be heard. Transmission is going to be a little different. If you've ever changed over radios you might already have experienced the jolt between what you can hear and what you can work which can differ significantly between two radios. If you're used to high power operation, you'll essentially work most stations you can hear, but when you're using low power, there's going to be stations that you have little or no chance to work. Most of those are obvious so-called alligators, all mouth, no ears. That said, plenty of loud stations have years of honing their skill and station and your QRP call can just as easily be heard as the next station. You'll likely sharpen your calling skills. There's no point in calling when other stations are blotting out your call, so you become adept at dancing around other signals. You'll spend more time considering propagation and the best band to make your signal count. Another side effect you'll likely notice is less wear and tear on your gear. There's also little chance of having RF inside your shack upsetting your computer, or getting complaints from the neighbours who happen to have a crappy TV that stops working as soon as you key up. If you make mistakes, your station is more forgiving and less likely to be damaged when an unexpected fault occurs. Speaking of faults. The other day a coax switch in my shack caused my radio to stop transmitting. Luckily with the power setting at its lowest, there was no permanent damage. After testing with a multimeter I discovered that it shorted the centre pin to shield in one position. When I opened up the switch, I discovered that the blade that gets moved between ports had become slightly twisted, which in turn caused it to ground against the body. A slight turn with some needle-nose pliers fixed the problem, well, at least for now. I have begun searching for alternatives in earnest. I am quite taken by the notion of building my own switch from relays and controlling those via a network connection. More research and experimentation is needed because there's plenty I don't know about this subject. Between you and me, it's never too late for another experiment and I'd encourage you to spend some time testing the QRP experience and given the current state of the solar cycle, there's no better time than right now. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I started a new project. If you know me at all, this is not unusual. Having worked in the IT industry for nearly 40 years it's also not unusual that projects have a way of surprising you and this project was no different. Recently I've been talking about antennas, a topic close to the heart of many amateurs and one that garners a lot of opinion and in my experience, much less in the way of facts, so being a firm believer of facts, I set out to add some of those to the discussion. After having described that the environment is not often discussed in the context of antenna behaviour, coupled with the personal experience that it has by far the biggest influence, I set out to discover if I could use my computing skills to simulate this problem to build a picture that would speak a thousand words. Prompted by a friend who shared with me a link to an opinion that stated that dipole antennas didn't have 2.15 dBi gain, but in fact, apparently, had 8.5 dBi gain, I was energised to find out where this number came from. I figured I'd spin up some antenna modelling software, use a standard model of a dipole, then simulate it at various heights above the ground and see what I could learn. Any good journey starts with a single step, so I started with looking for a generic model of a dipole antenna. I've played in this space before, so I was familiar with the fact that most, but not all, antenna modelling tools use a piece of software called NEC2 to do the actual calculations. Its models are described using text files ending in the .NEC extension. This software goes back to punch card days, so the format for the NEC2 files is essentially a stack of punch cards, so much so that every line in the text file is called a card and any software that uses the underlying NEC2 tool describes it in that way. I won't bore you with the syntax, it's, let's put it this way. If you've been around computers for as long as I have, you're familiar with a tool called "sendmail", which is known to be user-friendly, just very particular with whom it makes friends. The NEC2 card format is much the same. It's not that surprising, and for added nostalgia, NEC2 was written in FORTRAN, originally in 1981 at the Lawrence Livermore Labs by Jerry Burke and Andrew Poggio. It was later released to the public. There's translations to C and C++, but they use the same notion of cards, so no magic progress there. I started learning the syntax, and eventually came across a text-book with an example of cards that describe a dipole. Mind you, there were plenty of disclaimers around how poorly the ground was simulated and wouldn't you know it, the file format uses meters as the dimension, rather than wavelengths, so as far as I can tell, you can't simulate a quarter wave antenna, you have to simulate one of a specific length, so much for using a standard model of a dipole. I found a tool that uses Python to issue NEC2 commands and as a surprise to nobody, it too uses cards. I used it to discover that for a particular type of ground, at some unknown height, the optimum length for a 10m WSPR dipole antenna is 5,225.87 millimetres long, apparently. You know it's true, it says so right there on the screen. I'm skipping over having to compile the software that was supposed to be a ready made Python library, but I digress. There was a tool, written in TCL, that visualised NEC2 output, last updated 18 or so years ago and I unsuccessfully tried to make it work. Then there were those who suggested to fire up some random Windows tool on my Linux box, but as far as I can tell, I'd have to do the height adjustments manually, not ideal if you want to visualise from say, ground to geostationary orbit, one millimetre at a time and output an image at every step. I searched the net for others who would surely have trodden this path long before I came along, only to discover that my search-fu is clearly broken, or any website with promising information has long ago been booted off the Internet, leaving "For Sale" signs on the domain name. I came across one file which simulated a dipole in free space. It had, to use the NEC2 terms, 11 cards. When I run that through "nec2c", it generates a 12 megabyte file with over 104-thousand lines of output. Only takes 650 milliseconds to generate. If only I could visualise it. I also came across a whole range of physics programs, which is not that surprising, since essentially antenna design is physics, but those tools require that I start learning a whole new way of building antennas, apparently from electrons, preferably whilst getting a degree in physics with a specialisation in computational electromagnetics. Then there was the Wolfram Alpha notebook model for a simple dipole, only 3,200 lines of code, so, you know, trivial to use. So, here's the thing. Has nobody in living memory simulated a dipole at more than three heights and documented the process? Am I really the first human on the planet to think of this? Oh, yes, I did find a project that simulated different lengths of dipoles, but I'll leave those for another day. And finally, I also found "xnecview", which does generate images, but it too is very particular whom it makes friends with and I've yet to discover if it can generate what I'm looking for. As for the 8.5 dBi, I'm still looking. My current best guess is that at some specific height a dipole has an ugly spike that has 8.5 dBi gain and that someone used that number without looking at the detail, but, who knows, there's plenty of opinion to go around. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I explained some of the reasons why I've shifted to using dBm to discuss power. You might recall that 1 Watt is defined as 1,000 mW and that's represented by 30 dBm. 10 Watts is 40 dBm, 400 Watts, the maximum power output in Australia is 56 dBm and 1,500 Watts, the maximum in the USA, is just under 62 dBm. My favourite power level, 5 Watts, is 37 dBm. I mentioned that using dBm allows us to create a continuous scale between the transmitted power and the received signal. On HF, an S9 report is defined as -73 dBm. Between each S-point lies 6 dB, so an S8 signal is -79 dBm, S7 is -85 dBm and so-on to S0, which is -127 dBm. Said differently, to increase the received signal by one S-point you need to quadruple the power output. Now, let's consider a contact with a 100 Watt station, 50 dBm. Let's imagine that the receiver reports an S8 signal. That means that between a transmitter output of 50 dBm and the received signal at -79 dBm, there's a loss of 129 dB. If we dial the power down to 5 Watts, our 37 dBm will be received at -92 dBm, and earn a S6 report, which, in my experience, is pretty common. If we instead use the maximum power permitted in Australia, we'd gain 6 dB and end up at -73 dBm, or S9. The maximum power output permitted in the United States, 62 dBm, is only 6 dB higher and not even enough to get you "10 over 9" at the other end. At this point I could say, see, "QRP, when you care to send the very least", and be done with it. While it's true in my not so humble opinion, that's not where I'm going with this. That 129 dB of loss is made up of a bunch of things. For example, there's the coax loss at either end, the antenna gain at either end and a big one, the path loss between the two antennas. Let's assume for a moment that coax loss and antenna gain cancel each other out. You might think that's nuts, but consider that 100 m of RG58 coax on the 10m band has a loss of around 8 dB and a dipole has an isotropic gain of 2.15 dBi. In case you're not sure what that means, a dipole has a gain of 2.15 dB over the ideal radiator, a theoretical isotropic antenna. Now it's unlikely that you are going to connect a dipole to 100 m of RG58, so let's say a quarter, or 25 m instead. The coax loss is also quartered, or about 2 dB, which pretty much means that your dipole gain and your coax loss essentially cancel each other out. So, as a working number, assuming both stations are similar and ignoring SWR mismatch, pre-amplifiers, filters, and all manner of other tweaks in the signal path, 129 dB loss is a good starting point to work with. If you use a free space path loss calculator, that's the equivalent of the loss for a 2,500 km contact on HF on the 10 m band. Now, if you were to replace the RG58 with something like RG213 coax, the loss drops from around 2 dB to 0.9 dB, so your signal just increased in strength by 1.1 dB, or not enough to make any difference in this example. Of course there's a benefit in using lower loss coax, I mean, 1.1 dB gain isn't nothing, but it really only matters when the conditions are marginal. If you're going to run your coax to the other side of a paddock, you might discover that your signal changes by a whole S-point, but realistically, most of the time you're not going to notice. Similarly, and perhaps more importantly, in the scheme of things, your antenna is also just fiddling around the edges when compared to the path loss of 129 dB. For example, if you double your antenna gain, you're only seeing an improvement of half an S-point and most likely you won't actually notice. Before you grab the nearest chicken to pluck feathers to come after me with, I'd like to point out that each element on their own has a minimal impact on the total system, but that doesn't mean that improving your station is useless, far from it. If you use quality coax, have an antenna that is performing well, is a good match to your transmitter and coax, use appropriate filters and pre-amplification, you're likely to make more contacts more often, but the bottom line is that you actually need to be on air to make noise and ultimately that's going to represent the biggest improvement in your station performance. Case in point, the other day my WSPR or Weak Signal Reporter beacon, with 10 dBm output, was reported 7,808 km away by DP0GVN, the club station of the German Antarctic Research Station "Neumayer III" in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, a first for me. WSPR reported that as a signal of -26 dB. Previously I proved that when WSPR reports -31 dB, about 75% of decodes are successful. In other words, we can think of my report as being 5 dB above the minimum decode level. This is interesting for several reasons, least of which is that a report of -26 dB doesn't appear to have a relationship to anything else, something which I've observed before. Looking further, if we use our notional 129 dB loss figure and start at the beacon power of 10 dBm, we end up at -119 dBm, which is between S1 and S2. In reality, the path loss for that contact is more likely to be in the order of 10 dB worse, making the signal at the receiver -129 dBm or around S0. In those kinds of marginal conditions, where there's 5 dB between being heard and not, finding an extra dB or two in better coax or antenna is absolutely worth the investment, but if you're in a contest making points, you're not going to care. Being on the right band, pointing in the right direction and being on-air making contacts is going to be much more important. That said, I'll leave you with a question. Given our obsession with antennas, what might the impact be of adding an 18 dBi Yagi to your station? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The Enchanted Boys are a musical group from Kyle Texas. The roster is extensive with more than 10 members, but today we speak with the founding 4 members. Listen to what they stand for, who their inspirations are and how they make music. Also funny stories, and how they all met each other. This is a really good artist hour. Check out their music below: wspr: https://soundcloud.com/wsprx ounces: https://soundcloud.com/0unc35 potion: https://soundcloud.com/offapotion kden: https://soundcloud.com/4lokokden despair: https://soundcloud.com/totaldespair --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/corruptradio/support

Foundations of Amateur Radio On Thursday the 20th of April, 2023 at 04:17:56 UTC the world was subjected to a rare event, a hybrid solar eclipse. In Perth I experienced a partial eclipse and people lucky enough to be directly in line, places like Ningaloo Reef, Exmouth and Barrow Island, experienced a total eclipse. Timor-Leste had the experience of the peak total eclipse. At the time I went into my shack and refreshed the WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon map I have open and noticed that my beacon wasn't reported. I sagely nodded my head, that makes sense, no Sun, no propagation and I got on with my life. Last week a fellow amateur, Will VK6UU, asked if anyone had any VK6 specific HF propagation reports to make. Being the data geek that I am, I thought to myself, "Aha! I can do some data analytics on the WSPR dataset that I have." So, the die was cast for a few enjoyable hours of importing 2.4 gigabytes of compressed data into a database and constructing a set of SQL queries to see what I could learn. Before getting stuck in, I spent a few hours thinking about the problem. How could I go about doing this? Propagation information is notoriously fickle. You have to consider the obvious things like the Solar Index and the Geomagnetic Index which vary considerably. Then there's the nature of the various reports themselves. Not everyone has their beacon on all the time, not everyone has their receiver on all the time. Weekends are more popular than weekdays and popularity overall is growing exponentially. The solar cycle is on the way to its peak, so there's that variation to consider and if that's not enough, how should you compare the Signal To Noise ratio between weak and strong beacons? With all that in hand I set about constructing a plan. I created a folder to hold my charts and SQL queries, intent on uploading that to GitHub when the work was done. For my very first test I thought I'd count the number of reports per band in a 24 hour window around the eclipse. I imported all the WSPR records that had a VK6 callsign, either as the transmitter or the receiver, given that I was interested in learning if stations transmitting from VK6 could be heard elsewhere and inversely, could VK6 stations hear any other stations? As my first effort, I created a scatter-plot to get a sense of what kind of numbers I was looking at. The initial result was interesting. Around the eclipse itself there was no propagation. This wasn't unexpected, since that's what I'd seen on the day at the time on my own map. I changed my data to use a cumulative count per band to see if any band was particularly different and then discovered that there was no propagation at all, on any band. That seemed ... odd. So, I had a look at the source data and discovered a gap, which accounted for what my chart was showing. I added a fake record for the eclipse time itself, just so I could see where on the chart this gap was. Turns out that for VK6 stations, the gap is just over five hours, but it's not centred around the eclipse. There's a four hour window before the eclipse and a one hour window after it. Then I started looking at all the reports from across the world. To give you a sense of scale, across April 2023 the dataset has nearly 139 million rows. It's 12 gigabytes in size. By contrast, in March of 2008 when the first reports started, there were just over 93 thousand reports in a 7 megabyte file. Charting this shows exponential growth, hitting a million reports in July of 2009, 10 million reports in January 2016 and 100 million reports in October of 2021. So, the eclipse and global propagation. The results came in and the reports are that there was no propagation, on any band at any point during the just under two hours and 12 minutes before the eclipse and the 38 minutes following it. That ... or the WSPRnet.org database was down during the eclipse. So, unfortunately I cannot tell you what propagation was like during the eclipse, since it appears that those records don't exist. Looks like we'll have to wait until 2031 when we can try this again. We'll all be a little older and wiser by that time and perhaps we can come up with a way to ensure that the global central WSPR data server is running without downtime, scaled to match the growing requirements and paid for by a benevolent organisation with deep pockets. I did start considering making lemonade from my lemons and charting the kinds of down time the WSPR server has, but just looking over the various discussion groups showed that this is going to be painful. On the plus side, I learnt about SUM OVER and LAG functions in SQL, so there's that. I must confess that if we're going to seriously use WSPR as a propagation analysis tool we need to fix these kinds of issues. I have no doubt that running WSPRnet.org is a massive enterprise and that it costs real time and money to make that happen. So, who's up for the challenge and will the real owner of WSPRnet.org please raise their hand? Finally, if by chance you were running a WSPR receiver during the 2023 Solar eclipse you might want to consider looking at sharing your logs, since they're potentially the only record still remaining. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Several years ago I participated in a local contest. Over a 24 hour period I activated my mobile station in about 30 different locations. On my car, my vertical antenna screwed into a boot-lip mount connected to an antenna tuner or ATU, and my radio. I used rope to guy the antenna, threaded through the rear windows and held tight by closing the car boot. Setting up consisted of parking the car, triggering the ATU to tune the antenna system and calling CQ. Moving to the next location consisted of driving there and setting up again. Although this worked really well, I'm skipping over what I'm interested in exploring today. The phrase "triggering the ATU to tune the antenna system" hides a lot of complexity. It was a surprise to me that there were several locations where the ATU just wouldn't tune. Despite my best efforts I was unable to get the system to a point where the radio was happy. In some cases I tuned off frequency and put up with a poor SWR. In others I physically had to move the car and park somewhere else. In every case it was completely unknown if a particular location was going to be a problem. I recall for example parking in an empty nondescript car-park and having to drive around to find a location where my set-up would work. Afterwards I considered that the car-park was potentially built on top of an iron ore deposit, an old industrial area, or a pipe-line, all of which were a good possibility. The point of this is that an antenna doesn't exist in isolation, it's called a system for a reason. We talk about the theoretical isotropic antenna and add disclaimers about that it cannot physically exist because it's infinitely small. One often overlooked aspect of an isotropic antenna is that it's in free space. Free space is defined as space that contains no electromagnetic or gravitational fields and used as a reference. It's a theoretical place. On Earth there is no such thing, there's a planet under your feet, but even in outer space there are both gravitational and electromagnetic fields that impact on an antenna and its performance. Staying nearer to home, recently we had a discussion about how close two antennas can be together. A suggested rule of thumb was that they need to be at least one banana or 30 cm away from each other. Similarly when we erect a dipole, there's recommendations around needing to have it mounted more than half a wavelength over the ground. Some sources say higher. I'll ask the first obvious question. Is that dipole completely straight? In other words, should the centre be half a wavelength above the ground, or should the ends, and how far should the ends be from their mounts? My point is that every antenna exists within the context of its environment and together it's a system. Some environments help the performance of your antenna system and some don't. Depending on frequency, this might not be the same for any location, or antenna design. To be clear, an antenna system consists of the antenna, the feed line and the clips that hold it, the tuner, the radio and its power supply, the mount and the space around it, the radials, the tower, the pigeon poop on the wire, all of it. Until recently my process to get any antenna to perform in a reasonable manner was to set it up, connect an antenna analyser, scan the appropriate range, tweak the antenna, scan again, rinse and repeat until it arrived at something approaching useful, or until it was good enough. If you recall, I recently added some loading coils to a telescopic antenna to attempt to make it resonant on 10m, so I could connect my Weak Signal Propagation Reporter or WSPR beacon to it directly and leave it running independently from my main station. I used the antenna analyser method, got it to the point where I had an antenna with a nice dip right at the required frequency and then watched it go completely sideways when I mounted the antenna in the window. Having spent several hours getting to that point, I walked away and left it for another day. Today was that day. I again started on the floor of my shack and got nothing but an infinite SWR and no amount of tweaking could fix it. Right until the coax fell out of the SMA connector I was scratching my head. After removing the faulty coax lead, I again tweaked the antenna and instead of using my antenna analyser, I fired up my NanoVNA, a tiny handheld open-hardware Vector Network Analyser or VNA. If you're not familiar, it's a standalone palm sized device with an LCD display and battery which will allow you to test most of your RF equipment. This little box came to me via a generous gift from a fellow amateur. It can repeatedly scan a range of frequencies and report in near real-time what's going on. Instead of waiting a minute after each adjustment, I could wait less than a second and immediately see the effect. This has been a game changer. I could mount the antenna against a metal surface and immediately see what the impact was. I could see the difference between it being mounted horizontally, where it would sag, to it being vertical where it stayed straight. I could see the steepness of the SWR plot, see how the low point moved around, up and down the band, see what the depth or lowest SWR was at any point. I could see my hand approaching the antenna, how nearby metal objects affect the antenna, what made it better and what made it worse. The reason that I'm talking about this is because it's the very first time that I was able to actually get a feel for what affects an antenna, in what way and by how much. To describe an analogy, it's like watching someone play a theremin and hearing how their hands affect the sound. If you're not familiar, a theremin is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer, named after its inventor, Leon Theremin who patented it in 1928. From the outside it looks like a metal antenna that you bring your hands near to change the field. The changes are converted into sound. The NanoVNA gives you the same level of feedback, but does so visually in a quantitative way, providing you with the insight to adjust your antenna to your liking and taking into account its entire environment. Does this mean that I'm telling you to go out and buy one today? Well, that's not up to me, but I am intensely grateful for it arriving at my doorstep. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio There is a fascination with space that arguably started long before the first time that human spaceflight was proposed by Scottish astronomer William Leitch in 1861. Names like Sputnik, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Columbia speak to millions of people and organisations like NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to name a few, continue to feed that obsession. In amateur radio we have our own names, things like ARISS, or Amateur Radio on the International Space Station, or its predecessor SAREX, the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment. Today, stories about people making contact with the International Space Station continue to make news. We have school programs where amateur radio ground stations schedule a call to speak with an astronaut in space and we've been launching our own amateur satellites for a long time. Launched on the 12th of December 1961, OSCAR1, or Orbiting Satellites Carrying Amateur Radio was built by a group of California based amateur radio operators for 63 dollars. It operated for nearly 20 days, transmitting "Hi" in Morse on 144.983 MHz. The first amateur radio space voice contact was made on the 1st of December 1983, almost forty years ago. It's surprising that in the age of technology such a significant event has been so poorly recorded for posterity. If you go searching for the actual audio, you'll discover several versions of this contact including varying transcripts. I've attempted to reconstruct the wording, but I've yet to hear a complete and unedited version. For example, there's an ARRL movie called "Amateur Radio's Newest Frontier" with out of sync audio. There's also an audio file with a transcript from an archived copy of a website by W7APD. The most recent one is on a video called "HAM - Official Documentary 2022", produced by students from the School of Visual and Media Arts program at the University of Montana and broadcast on Montana PBS on November 24th, 2022. So, what follows is not necessarily complete, but calling from Space Shuttle Columbia it went a little like this: "..U.S. west coast and calling CQ. Calling CQ North America. This is W5LFL in Columbia. In another 30 seconds I'll be standing by. Our spacecraft is in a rotation at the moment and we're just now getting the antenna pointed down somewhat more toward the Earth. So I should be able to pick up your signals a little bit better in the next few minutes. So W5LFL in Columbia is calling CQ and standing by. Go ahead." "This is W5LFL in Colombia, W5LFL in Columbia, orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 135 Nautical Miles. Passing over the US West Coast and calling CQ. So W5LFL in Columbia is calling CQ and, ah, standing by. Go ahead." "W5LFL on STS-9, WA1JXN, WA1 Japan X-Ray Norway, WA1JXN, Frenchtown Montana, WA1JXN standing by." "Hello W1JXN, WA1 Juliet X-Ray November, this is W5LFL, I picked up your signals fairly weakly. I think our attitude is not really the best as yet, but you're our first contact from orbit. WA1 Juliet X-Ray November. How do you read? Over." On board STS-9, Space Shuttle Columbia, was Dr Owen Garriott, W5LFL, now silent key. On the ground was Lance Collister, then WA1JXN, now W7GJ. NASA published an Educational Brief for the Classroom that described Owen's set-up as a battery powered 5 Watt FM transceiver feeding a split-ring on a printed circuit board antenna that will be placed in the upper crew compartment window on the aft flight deck. Others reported that the radio was a Motorola handheld. Logging was done with a tape recorder velcroed to the transceiver. Owen describes the antenna as a "well-designed, hand-held antenna, known as a 'cavity antenna', which could be velcroed to the window. It was about 24 inches in diameter and looked somewhat like a large aluminum (sic) cake pan" There's an edited version of a similarly titled ARRL video called "Amateur Radio's Newest Frontier - ARRL documentary featuring Owen Garriot, W5LFL, on STS-9" showing the antenna as a copper tube, bent into a circle, mounted inside an open aluminium box that was hinged on the window to face outwards. The NASA brief also described a range of frequencies and designated 145.55 MHz as the primary frequency over the United States. It included a whole section about synchronising clocks using WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, odd and even minute transmission schedules and descriptions on how this should work. Operating during time off, when the antenna was facing Earth, and being on air for about four hours during the mission, around 300 contacts were made across the globe. Today we continue to experiment in space. The callsign N1SS is heard on-air regularly from the International Space Station, astronauts are often licensed radio amateurs, there's a permanent repeater on the ISS, we launch research spacecraft called nano-satellites or more popularly CubeSats for amateur radio at every opportunity. So far there's over 160 satellites and the adventure continues. Speaking of experiments, albeit earthbound, the other day, my WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon, using 10 milliwatts was heard 13,455 km away in Sweden, that's 1.3 Million kilometres per Watt. What have you been up to in Amateur Radio lately? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio We describe the relationship between the power of a wanted signal and unwanted noise as the signal to noise ratio or SNR. It's often expressed in decibels or dB which makes it possible to represent really big and really small numbers side-by-side, rather than using lots of leading and trailing zeros. For example one million is the same as 60 on a dB scale and one millionth, or 0.000001 is -60. One of the potentially more perplexing ideas in communication is the notion of a negative signal to noise ratio. Before I dig in how that works and how we can still communicate, I should point out that in general for communication to happen, there needs to be a way to distinguish unwanted noise from a desired signal and how that is achieved is where the magic happens. Let's look at a negative SNR, let's say -20 dB. What that means is that the ratio between the wanted signal and the unwanted noise is equivalent to 0.01, said differently, the signal is 100 times weaker than the noise. In other words, all that a negative SNR means is that the ratio between signal and noise is a fraction, as-in, more than zero, but less than one. It's simpler to say the SNR is -30 dB than saying the noise is 1000 times stronger than the signal. Numbers like this are not unusual. The Weak Signal Propagation Reporter or WSPR is often described as being able to work with an SNR of -29 dB, which indicates that the signal is about 800 times weaker than the noise. To see how this works behind the scenes, let's start with the idea of bandwidth. On a typical SSB amateur radio, voice takes up about 3000 Hz. For better readability, most radios filter out the lower and upper audio frequencies. For example, my Yaesu FT857d has a frequency response of 400 Hz to 2600 Hz for SSB, effectively keeping 2200 Hz of usable signal. Another way to say this is that the bandwidth of my voice is about 2200 Hz, when I'm using single side band. That bandwidth is how much of the radio spectrum is used to transmit a signal. For comparison, a typical RTTY or radio teletype signal has a bandwidth of about 270 Hz. A typical Morse Code signal is about 100 Hz and a WSPR signal is about 6 Hz. Before I continue, I should point out that the standard for measuring in amateur radio is 2500 Hz. This is significant because when you're comparing wide and narrow signals to each other you'll end up with some interesting results like negative signal to noise ratios. This happens because you can filter out the unwanted noise before you even start to decode the signal. That means that the signal stays the same, but the average noise reduces in comparison to the 2500 Hz standard. This adds up quickly. For a Morse Code signal, it means that turning on your 100 Hz filter, will feel like improving the signal to noise ratio by 14 dB, that's a 25 fold increase in your desired signal. Similarly, filtering the WSPR signal before you start decoding will give you roughly a 26 dB improvement before you even start. But there's more, since I started off with claiming that WSPR can operate with an SNR of -29 dB. I'll note that -29 dB is only one of the many figures quoted. I have described testing the WSPR decoder on my system and it finally failed at about -34 dB. Even with a 26 dB gain from filtering we're still deep into negative territory, so our signal is still much weaker than the noise. There are several phenomena that affect the decoding of a signal. To give you a sense, consider using a limited vocabulary, like say the phonetic alphabet, or a Morse character, the higher the chance of figuring out which letter you meant. This is why it's important that everyone uses the same alphabet and why there's a standard for it. To send a message, WSPR uses an alphabet of four characters, that is, four different tones or symbols. Another is how long you send a symbol. A Morse dit sent at 6 words per minute or WPM lasts two tenths of a second, but sent at 25 WPM lasts less than 5 hundredth of a second This is why WSPR uses two minutes, actually 110.6 seconds, to send 162 bits of data, lasting just under one and a half seconds each. If that's not enough, there's a processing gain. One of the fun things about signal processing is that when you combine two noise signals, they don't reinforce each other, but when you combine two actual signals, they do. Said in another way, signal adds coherently and noise adds incoherently. To explain that, imagine that you have an unknown signal and you pretended that it said VK6FLAB. If you combined the unknown signal with your first guess of VK6FLAB and you were right, the unknown signal would be reinforced by your guess. If it was wrong, it wouldn't. If your vocabulary is small, like say four symbols, you could try each in turn to see what was reinforced and what wasn't. There's plenty more, things like adding error correction so you can detect any potentially incorrect words. Think of it as a human understanding Bravo when the person at the other end said Baker. If you knew when to expect a signal, it would make it easier to decode, which is why a WSPR signal starts at one second into each even minute and each symbol contains information about when that signal was sent, which is why it's so important to set your computer clock accurately. Another is to shuffle the bits in your message in such a way that specific types of noise don't obscure your entire message. For example, if you had two symbols side-by-side that when combined represented the power level of your message, a brief burst of noise could obliterate the power level, but if they were stored in different parts of your message, you'd have a better chance of decoding the power level. I've only scratched the surface of this, but behind every seemingly simple WSPR message lies a whole host of signal processing magic that underlies much of the software defined radio world. These same techniques and plenty more are used in Wi-Fi communications, in your mobile phone, across fibre-optic links and the high speed serial cable connected to your computer. Who said that Amateur Radio stopped at the antenna connected to your radio? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Ham Radio Balloons have been in the news lately, with the alleged shooting down of a balloon launched by Amateur Radio Operators. On this livestream we will talk about balloons and some launches that happened yesterday at the Houston Hamfest.News Video with @w5kub - https://youtu.be/5BlIbnQki9gWSPR and APRS Trackershttps://www.zachtek.comhttps://qrp-labs.com

Foundations of Amateur Radio Last week I went outside. I know, it was a shock to me too. The purpose of this adventure was to test an antenna that has been sitting in my garage for nearly a year. Together with a friend we researched our options and at the end of the process the Hustler 6BTV was the answer to our question. Before the commercial interest police come out of the woodwork, I'll point out that I'm not providing a review, good or bad, of this antenna, it was the antenna I purchased and went to test. Between the two of us we have three of these antennas. I have the idea to use one as a portable station antenna and another as my base station antenna. Glynn VK6PAW intends to use his as a base station antenna. To set the scene. The antennas came in quite large boxes, just over six bananas long, or more than 180 cm. When they arrived I opened my boxes and checked their content, then sealed it all up and put the boxes on a shelf. Last week Glynn proposed that we set one up and see what we could learn from the experience. You know that I love a good spreadsheet, so planning went into overdrive, well, I put together a list of the things we'd need, starting with the antenna and ending with sunscreen to protect my pasty skin from the fusion experiment in the sky. In between were things like an antenna analyser, spare batteries, tools, imperial, since apparently there are still parts of the world that haven't gone beyond barley measurements. I jest, they authorised the use of the metric system in 1866. My list also included a magnetic bowl to capture loose nuts and washers, you get the idea, anything you might need to test an antenna in the field. Our setup was on a rural property where we had lovely shady trees and oodles of space to extend out a 25m radial mat. We tested many different set-ups. I won't go through them all, but to give you an idea of scale, in the time we were there, we recorded forty different antenna frequency scans. The 6BTV antenna is suitable for 80m, 40m, 30m, 20m, 15m and 10m. We tested with and without radials, raised and on the ground and several other installations. We learnt several useful things. For starters, sitting on the ground with radials the antenna measurements line up pretty well with the specifications and with a suitable base mount to protect the plastic base the portable station antenna is usable out of the box. Any variation on this will result in change, sometimes subtle, sometimes less so. For example, we came up with one installation where the SWR never dropped below 3:1. That's with the antenna on the ground without any radials in case you're wondering. Other things we learnt were that manually scanning each band is painful. When we do this again we'll have to come up with a better way of measuring. The aim for my base antenna is to install it on my roof, bolted to a clamp on the side of my metal pergola. This means that we're going to have to do some serious tuning to make this work for us. It might turn out that we'll start with installing the antenna at Glynn's QTH first, but we haven't yet made that decision. Other things I learnt are that I had actually put together the base clamp when I checked the boxes a year ago, so that was a bonus. The magnetic bowl saved our hides once when a spring washer fell into the lawn. The hose-clamps that come with the antenna require a spanner, but there are thumb screw variations of those that I'll likely use for my portable setup. Other things we need to do is learn exactly how the traps work and how adjusting them affects things. In case you're unfamiliar with the concept of a trap, think of it as a radio signal switch that lets signals below a certain resonant frequency pass and blocks signals above that frequency. In other words, a 10m trap resonates just below 28 MHz. It lets frequencies below 28 MHz pass, but blocks those above it, essentially reducing the length of the antenna to the point where the trap is installed. One test we did was to only use the base and the 10m trap. We discovered that this doesn't really work and that the metal above the trap, as-in the rest of the antenna, isn't just for show, even though it's on the blocked side of the 10m trap. Given that I intend to use my base antenna as my main WSPR transmission point, I need to adjust things so the antenna works best on WSPR frequencies. I intend to use a tuner for when I want to work outside those frequencies. One unexpected lesson was that the awning that Glynn attached to his vehicle was an absolutely essential item. I don't think I'll ever go portable again without one. Life changing would be an understatement. I'm investigating if I can fit one to my vehicle. Having had some health issues over the past months I was anxious about going outside and being somewhat active. I paced myself, protected my back, took regular breaks, sat down a lot, drank litres of water and slept like a baby that night. No ill effects, very happy. As a bonus, I even transferred our measuring data to a spreadsheet. I can't wait to see the results of our next adventure. Oh, we did connect a radio. Heard a beacon in Israel, heard a QSO in Italy, listened to WWV on 10 MHz and almost missed the bliss of not having to tune or switch when moving from band to band. What have you been up to in the great outdoors? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Getting on air and making noise is a phrase that you've likely heard me repeat often, actually, this will be the 24th time or so. It's an attempt at encouraging you to actually transmit and use the radio spectrum that is available to you. It's a nicer way of saying: Use it or lose it! One of the more frustrating aspects of our hobby is finding other people to interact with. At the beginning of your hobby you have access to all these magic radio frequencies with no idea on how to use them. Often a new amateur will turn on their radio, call CQ a couple of times to see if there's anyone out there, hear nothing and give up. As you get more experience you'll discover that radio frequencies change over time and that some work better at certain times of the day. This is reinforced by others who will talk to you about propagation, the solar cycle and how the ionosphere and its various so-called layers will change and what you can achieve throughout the day, the year and the long term cycle. Armed with all this knowledge you are likely to get to a point where you make noise on a certain band depending on the time of day. For example, experienced amateurs will avoid the 10m band at night because it's a so-called day-time band, in other words, their perception is that you cannot make contact on the 10m band after sunset and for the same reason, it's not suitable for early morning contacts. What if we could test that perception and see if it's true or not? Turns out that we have a perfect dataset to discover what actually happens. If I look at the 10m band WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter data for the past year, a year that had me using a beacon pretty much 24 hours a day, you'd expect that you could see just which times worked and which ones didn't. Turns out that regardless of time of day, my beacon was heard across every hour of the day. Of course the numbers aren't uniform across the day. The peak is at noon local time, the trough is at 5 am local time, 10% of reports are at noon, about 1.5% at 5 am. In other words, the worst time of day for my beacon to be reported is 5 am in the morning and it's not zero. Interestingly the same isn't true for the signal to noise ratio, a measure of just how weak or strong a signal is in comparison to the local noise at the receiver. If you account for differences in transmitter power, meaning that a stronger transmitter is measured in the same way as a weaker one, the 10m band has the best signal to noise ratio at my location at 9 pm local time and the worst at 4 pm local time. Given that I'm only using the 10m band with my beacon I also looked at the local OF78 grid square across all bands. It shows that reports are not directly related to when the average signal to noise is best. It seems to me that people are transmitting when they think it works best, not when it actually works best and I'll mention that the definition of "best" depends on each user. Note that I haven't yet sat down to discover if there are automatic transmitter and receiver pairs that have been reporting 24/7 across a year on the same band to determine if there is more to learn about the relationship between how often something is reported and what the signal report was at the time. I can say that it's likely that your favourite band is more popular when others think it's popular, not when the conditions are better. Consider for example that there are no local reports on the 12m band at 10am, but there are at 9am and 11am, so, was the band magically unusable the whole year at that time, or did people just not use it? The same is true for 160m. No reports at all before 5pm or after 3am, despite the bands around it having contacts throughout the day. I will point out some things I've ignored. For example, what is a useful contact? Is it measured by distance, by quantity, by uniqueness? Is this choice the same for each band? Is it reasonable to compare a whole year, or should it be by some other time period, like month, season or lunar month? What is the signal to noise ratio for a band that's considered closed? I'm mentioning this because each of those will directly affect what it looks like when you create a chart and it's likely to change what works best for you. So, next time you get on air, try a band that shouldn't work according to your knowledge and see what happens. Perhaps you'll get lucky, make a contact and discover something unexpected. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The amateur community is nothing if not entertaining. Look at any discussion about a mode like FT8 and you'll discover people who describe it as the dehumanising end of the hobby. In the same thread you'll find an amateur who's been licensed longer than I have been alive who welcomes it using words like revitalising, more active, and the like. If you're not familiar, FT8 is one of many weak signal digital modes that gained popularity over the past years during the most recent solar minimum when long distance HF propagation was challenging. That example discussion was about the visible end of a mode like FT8, but there's an often overlooked all but invisible aspect of these modes that is much more significant, namely the popularisation of signal processing in software. In many ways amateur radio is more about receiving than transmitting. This might not be obvious, but what's the point of transmitting if you cannot receive? Using software to do the listening makes for an interesting evolution that might be hard to grasp if I start digging into the fundamental algorithms that make this happen, instead let me describe a process that is easier to explain. Imagine that there's a piece of software that knows how to decode digital signals. As the user of that decoding software, or decoder, you send audio into one end and callsigns and grid-squares come out the other end. How it does this isn't important right now. We measure the quality of this decoder by how many times it correctly does this, in other words, how many times a correct callsign and grid-square comes out. The decoder can be improved by changing the way that the decoding process works. If the number of correct callsign and grid-squares that come out increases, the quality of the decoder is improved. Now imagine that the decoder spits out the callsign 7N5EC with the grid-square OF78. This particular combination emerged as a WSPR decode on the 10th of December 2022. It was reported by AA7NM as a 100 Watt signal, 14,882 km away on the 40m band. The signal report was -30 dB. If you know where OF78 is, you'll immediately spot a potential problem, if not, I'll help you out, OF78 is located near Perth in Western Australia. It's unlikely that a transmitted callsign in that part of the world starts with anything other than VK6. Mind you, a weather balloon with an odd callsign could theoretically be overhead in that location, but I've not yet heard of a 100 Watt transmitter on 7 MHz that someone hung from a weather balloon. Another problem is that 7N5EC is a callsign that appears to be Japanese. It starts with 7N which is part of the Japanese callsign block, but the next symbol is the number 5 and at least according to the research I was able to do is not actually a currently valid callsign. The prefix 7N4 is allocated to the Kanto region on Honshu island, the largest island in Japan. 7N5 doesn't seem to be valid as a prefix. Ironically, that callsign will now exist on the Internet as soon as this article is published, but that's a whole other problem. Either way, the chances of the combination of the callsign 7N5EC with the grid-square OF78 is unlikely to be correct. It gets even less likely if you consider that the callsign was reported only once in fifteen years and over 500 million WSPR decodes, I checked. That means that if you updated the software to ignore that particular decode, you'd have improved the decoder by removing an incorrect combination. You could keep doing this by checking callsigns against grid-squares and against allocated callsigns and you'd have made a higher quality decoder. Before you start arguing that this isn't fair, it's exactly the same process as the super check partial list does for people operating in a contest. The idea being that if you only recognise known contesting callsigns, you've got a better chance of making contact. Think of it as a way of filtering out potentially incorrect callsigns. It still leaves the operator having the option to ignore the suggested callsigns and listen to what's actually coming in. I realise that this is not how you would realistically improve a digital signal processing decoder, but it's an example of how changing the software can change the quality of a decoder and that was the point of this example. In reality you'd attempt to discover how this decode happened and what caused it to be wrong. If you want to consider a more signal centric example, consider a decoder that starts with a first attempt at making a decode. With a single decode, it can then remove that known signal from the original audio and start another decoding cycle. You can repeat this as many times as you want until you end up with gibberish. Essentially this is an example of how a modern decoder can improve its performance. This is why signal processing in software is so powerful and important and why FT8 and the rest of the digital firmament are here to stay. I should point out for those wondering, FT8 and WSPR are examples of simple messages, but there's nothing stopping us from using digital messages like this to exchange little bits of audio, or video, or something else. It's how mobile phones work today and at some point amateur radio is going to extend the envelope and come up with the next thing, it always has. So, FT8, it's changing amateur radio, but not because we're glued to a screen having our computer talk to another one, but because it represents digital signal processing in software and it's just the beginning. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Chris and Elecia talk with Mark Smith (aka SmittyHalibut and N6MTS) about amateur radio, interconnect standards, and podcasting. Mark is a host of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast. His company is Halibut Electronics (electronics.halibut.com). He's been working on Open Headset Interconnect Standard and Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio (SOAR). Find Mark as SmittyHalibut on YouTube, github, and Mastodon. Chris talked about getting into WSPR in 197: Smell the Transistor but we first talked about it in 76: Entropy is For Wimps Chris has spec'd out his intended project at QRP Labs, the QCX+ 5W CW Mini. Transcript

PODCAST: This Week in Amateur Radio Edition #1245 Release Date: January 7, 2023 Here is a summary of the news trending This Week in Amateur Radio. This week's edition is anchored by Terry Saunders, N1KIN, Dave Wilson, WA2HOY, Bob Donlon, W3BOO, Rich Lawrence, KB2MOB, Eric Zittel, KD2RJX, Will Rogers, K5WLR, George Bowen, W2XBS, and Jessica Bowen, KC2VWX. Produced and edited by George Bowen, W2XBS. Approximate Running Time: 1:29:33 Podcast Download: https://bit.ly/TWIAR1245 Trending headlines in this week's bulletin service: 1. ARRL Volunteers On the Air Event is Underway - Join The Fun 2. More Amateur Radio Astronauts Head For The International Space Station 3. Bud Kozloff, W1NSK, Appointed as ARRL Connecticut Section Manager 4. Military Service Academies Radio Group Now In Operation 5. Sixth Annual HamSCI Workshop Scheduled 6. Amateur Radio Contesting Great Fred Laun, K3ZO, Silent Key 7. Latest Smartphones Gain Satellite Access For Emergency Calls 8. New Callsigns Are Added To The Upcoming Bouvet Island DXpedition 9. W2RS, Roy Soifer Honored By AMSATs Annual Activity Day On CW 10. Amateurs Are Exempt From New Distracted Driver Law In Ohio 11. Straight Key Century Club Activiates Straight Key Month 12. Amplitude Modulation International Has Elected New Leadership 13. Radio Club of America Opens Nominations For Young Ham Lends A Hand Contest 14. QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo Issues Call For Speakers 15. Radio Society of Great Britain Seeks Position Nominations 16. Internationally Celebrated Antenna Engineer Receives A Lifetime Membership 17. HAARP Facility Experiment Bounces Radio Signals Off Space Object to Help Boost Planetary Defense 18. Challenges in Creating ‘Robot Servants' Pushes Timeline Back at Least a Decade 19. FCC Proposes Additional Spectrum At 5 GigaHertz For Drone Communication 20. Australia Day Contest 2023 Is Announced 21. BBC Plans for Future Without Broadcasting Over The Air 22. Southwest Ohio DX Association Launches New Program 23. Malaysian Commission Introduces Changes To Amateur Radio Structure 24. New Over The Horizon Radar To Be Built In The Republic of Palau 25. New Antenna May Spell The End For Bluetooth 26. Amateurs In Switzerland Gain Access To The Four Meter Band 27. German Amateurs Gain Temporary Band Authorisations In 2023 28. Upcoming conventions and on the air contests Plus these Special Features This Week: * Technology News and Commentary with Leo Laporte, W6TWT, takes a look back at radio when he was a kid, and takes a look at Starlink and how it will avoid, and what is, "The Kessler Effect" * Working Amateur Radio Satellites with Bruce Paige, KK5DO - AMSAT Satellite News * Tower Climbing and Antenna Safety w/Greg Stoddard KF9MP, will answer the question, you have secured a new commercial tower site for your repeater, but the antenna placement requires you to mount your vertical repeater antenna upside down. Now what? * Foundations of Amateur Radio with Onno Benschop VK6FLAB, will answer the question "What is the weakest signal that WSPR can decode properly?" * Weekly Propagation Forecast from the ARRL * Bill Continelli, W2XOY - The History of Amateur Radio. Bill returns to begin his series, The Ancient Amateur Archives, this week, Bill takes us back to May 3, 1963 as the ARRL proposes its own version of Incentive Licensing, then in 1965 the FCC proposes, in its version to demote advance class hams. Revision happen and in 1965 the FCC releases the Incentive Licensing structure we basically still operated under today. *Classic Rain featuring a talk given by the late Wayne Green, W1NSD publisher of 73 magazine, at the 1992 Dayton HamVention. Wayne at his best. ----- Website: https://www.twiar.net Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/twiari/ Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/twiar RSS News: https://twiar.net/?feed=rss2 Automated: https://twiar.net/TWIARHAM.mp3 (Static file, changed weekly) ----- Visit our website at www.twiar.net for program audio, and daily for the latest amateur radio and technology news. Air This Week in Amateur Radio on your repeater! Built in identification breaks every 10 minutes or less. This Week in Amateur Radio is heard on the air on nets and repeaters as a bulletin service all across North America, and all around the world on amateur radio repeater systems, weekends on WA0RCR on 1860 (160 Meters), and more. This Week in Amateur Radio is portable too! The bulletin/news service is available and built for air on local repeaters (check with your local clubs to see if their repeater is carrying the news service) and can be downloaded for air as a weekly podcast to your digital device from just about everywhere. This Week in Amateur Radio is also carried on a number of LPFM stations, so check the low power FM stations in your area. You can also stream the program to your favorite digital device by visiting our web site www.twiar.net. Or, just ask Siri, Alexa, or your Google Nest to play This Week in Amateur Radio! This Week in Amateur Radio is produced by Community Video Associates in upstate New York, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. If you would like to volunteer with us as a news anchor or special segment producer please get in touch with our Executive Producer, George, via email at w2xbs77@gmail.com. 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Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the many questions that new amateurs ask is, "When should I get on-air, and on what band?" The often-heard reply is just to get on-air and make some noise. As time goes by, the importance of this seems to fade in favour of using HF prediction tools. Some amateurs never venture beyond that point, relying almost exclusively on technology to determine if they should turn on their radio or not. If you search the internet for "current HF conditions", you'll end up with dozens of sites boldly claiming to provide precisely that information, some even using the label "Real-Time". You'll find instructions from countless self-proclaimed "experts" on how to read propagation conditions from their favourite site. There's even widgets that you can install on your website displaying propagation data per amateur band with helpful labels like "Band Closed" or showing conditions as "Poor", "Fair" or "Good". Some of these widgets even include an embedded time-stamp to prove just how "current" the information is. If that's how you decide to activate your amateur station, like I once did, I have some questions. Where is this information coming from, is it accurate, and when was it last updated? To give you an idea of just how complex this question is, consider visiting two popular websites, solarham.net from Canada and spaceweatherlive.com from Belgium. On their home-pages, you'll find all manner of numbers, charts, photos, events, notifications, alerts, and warnings, each related in some way to HF propagation and the condition of the Sun. Sounds great, excellent resources, job done. Well, no. Let's start simple. Location. Leaving aside where the site's owner is or where the servers are, both potential sources of confusion, consider where you are and where the remote station is that you're trying to contact. Now compare that with the propagation data location. Do you know where the measurements came from and if they're relevant to you? What about data currency? For example, if you can see the Sun, you can count the number of sunspots since that data comes from physically looking at the Sun. Mind you, can someone count the number of sunspots at night? It's not a trick question. The Sun isn't overhead for everyone all the time, and the data from any particular observer will be out of date at night. When was the count updated? Is it still actually current, let alone real-time? Obviously, not everyone uses the same data source either. In case you're wondering, why are we counting by eye in the space age? It turns out that, since Galileo more than 400 years ago, it's the most long-term, reliable way to keep data consistent between observers and instruments, both of which often last only one or a few solar cycles, and it's also cheap! What about equipment changes and failures in data gathering? Geomagnetic activity isn't global; it's measured using a device called a flux-gate magnetometer. Measurements from specific instruments scattered around the globe are combined into the planetary, or Kp index. You'll discover that locations used change over time, and when instruments are down, the numbers are estimated, but you won't see that unless you actually find and explore the source data. It's not just solarham.net and spaceweatherlive.com; it's pretty much every single site that shows any form of HF propagation or space weather information. Even sites based in a specific country, like the Australian Space Weather Service, have many instruments scattered around Australia. If you happen to be near an actual instrument, where "near" is anything less than 500 km away, how do you know if that instrument was actually online when a measurement was made? Even if the instrument near you is working, is the data relevant to the receiving station on the other side of the planet? If you look closely at the sites giving out current HF conditions, you'll discover that most of these don't even tell you where the data comes from, let alone if any of it was estimated to come up with their current reported values or recommendations. If you start searching for historical information, this problem gets bigger. You'll find many sites that claim to have data, but are invariably underfunded, are rife with broken links, out-of-date servers, and moved, deleted, and abandoned pages. If you unearth a dataset, you'll discover that everyone uses a different standard to record their measurements. How do you even know if combined measurements are coming from the right column? Think I'm kidding? There are documents with warnings about different formats, calculations, and dates on which these changed. Aggregating this data is challenging, at best. So, is there a better way? Yup. You're not going to like it. "Get on-air and make noise!" I can hear you groaning from here. It's not all bad. You can run your own beacon to see the conditions at your location. It's what started me down the path of installing a WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, beacon and leaving it running 24/7. Currently, I'm focused on very weak, 10 mW signals. So far, it's been reported 3,685 km away. If you visit the VOACAP or Voice of America Coverage Analysis Program website, you'll find a visualisation of how FT8 propagation worked between ITU zones between 2017 and 2019. It's not current, but it's an excellent way to see how propagation data can be derived from actual contacts. What we really need are more beacon transmitters and online receivers. I'm Onno VK6FLAB.

Foundations of Amateur Radio In 2016, Daniel EA4GPZ, documented how to discover the weakest signal that could be decoded using several weak signal modes, including WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter. This is an interesting question because as you might recall, I've been experimenting with very weak signals coming from my shack. To date, my 20 milliwatts has been heard over 13 thousand kilometres away. When you tune to a weak station you'll often hear both the station or desired signal as well as interference or background noise. The stronger the signal, the less noise you perceive. The weaker the signal, the more noise. You can express the relationship between the power of these two, the signal and the noise, as a ratio. If the power levels are the same, the so-called signal to noise ratio or SNR is 1:1. A higher ratio, like 2:1, indicates that the power of the signal is higher than the noise and a lower ratio, like 1:2 indicates that the signal is lower than the noise. If you express this ratio in decibels, you'll end up with positive numbers where the signal is stronger than the noise and negative numbers where the signal is weaker than the noise and zero when they're the same. If I tell you that the signal report for my WSPR decode from Denmark was -28 dB, it means that the noise was much stronger than the signal. For today I'm going to leave alone just how WSPR can report a negative signal to noise ratio and still successfully decode the signal, even though the signal appears to be buried in the noise. That said, in this experiment, we're trying to learn something else. Using the technique detailed by Daniel, we test using different, known, signal to noise ratios to discover at what point the WSPR decoding process breaks down. This might help me understand if I can reduce my beacon output power even further and still anticipate a good chance of being decoded successfully. To conduct his experiment, Daniel used the then current version of WSJT-X, version 1.7.0-rc1 and I'm using the current version today, 2.6.0-rc5 to repeat those tests. You might ask why I'm not taking Daniel's word for it and just using his findings. The process to decode a WSPR signal is all software and can be improved with better methodologies and algorithms. It's not unreasonable to think that in the years since Daniel's experiments things have changed, hopefully improved. So, how does this work? If you generate and attempt to decode one hundred different files, you can use the number of times that you count your callsign in the decode list as a percentage of success. If all of your files decode properly, the decode percentage is 100%. If only half of them are decoded successfully, it's 50% and so-on. Similarly, if a different callsign, locator or signal power is decoded, you can count those as a percentage of false decodes. This is important because noise coming from the ionosphere can corrupt any signal. I should point out that because we know in advance what the decoded signal should be, since we created the message, we can actually count the ones that don't match what we sent. In the real world it's very hard, if not impossible, to do this, unless each transmitter also starts recording their efforts so data cleaning can be done after the fact. A false decode happens when the software decodes a message and the result is not what was sent. Due to the way that WSPR works, this is not a case of a single character error and as a result the whole message is corrupt, wrong callsign, wrong grid square and wrong power level. Just how prevalent this issue is, has to my knowledge so far not been discussed. Over the past year I've been working with the entire WSPR data set, nearly 5 billion reports, and mapping the data to explore just what's going on behind the scenes. Based on the raw data every single grid square on the planet has been activated. Of course this is not really the case, since there's plenty of parts on Earth where we haven't yet turned on a WSPR beacon. Back to our experiment. Two tools are used, "wsprsim" to generate an audio file and "wsprd" to decode it. Both come with WSJT-X and when you build the application from source, you get them as part of the process. The generator takes several parameters, one of which is the desired signal to noise ratio. If you ask it for a signal to noise ratio of -20 dB, wsprsim will generate the appropriate noise and the desired signal, combine them and build an audio file. You can then use wsprd to decode that file. If you repeat this many times, you end up with some data. How many times? Well, I probably went a little overboard. I generated a set for each SNR reading between 0 and minus 50 dB in 0.01 dB increments and then generated one hundred for each of those. At the point where the process broke down I doubled the resolution further to get a better idea of what was going on. About three quarters of a million tests. It took a while. What did I learn from this? First of all, false decodes happen at every signal level. I saw the first false decode at a signal to noise ratio of -0.07 dB. This is significant because it means that even at excellent signal levels there is a percentage of incorrect reports which explains why I'm seeing that result in real world data. When you start playing with really big numbers, even if the error rate is low, with enough data, it starts to matter. In my tests I saw an error rate of 0.03%. This means that there's at least 1.5 million false decodes in the current WSPR data set, likely more because wsprsim cannot emulate the real world of ionospheric and local noise. On the flip-side, I also saw an overall success rate of nearly 94%. At -29 dB things start to change. Until then the decode is 100% successful, then it starts to decline to 0 at about -34 dB. Comparing Daniel's results directly, he saw 34% success at -30 dB, I'm seeing 95% at that same noise level. At -31 dB Daniel saw 6%, I'm seeing 75%. I don't see 34% until we get down to -31.6 dB and 6% at -32.4 dB. This indicates that the software has improved over the years. It also means that with a signal report of -28 dB from Denmark, I've got a few dB to play with. I've now reduced my output power by another 3 dB, making it 10 mW. Point your antennas at VK6 and see what you can hear on 10m. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Have you ever asked yourself a question that turned out to be a rabbit hole so deep you could spend a lifetime exploring and likely never come out the other end? I did. Yesterday. What's a Volt? This came about when I started exploring how to measure the power output of my WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon. According to the specifications the output level is 23 dBm or 200 milliwatts. If you read the fine print, you'll discover that the power output actually varies a little depending on which band you're on, for my specific transmitter it says that the output on the 10m band is 22 dBm, or 158 mW. That comes with a disclaimer, that there can be some variation on individual transmitters of about 1 dB. So, on 10m, my output could vary between 21 and 23 dBm, or between 125 and 200 mW. With my attenuator connected, the output could be between 12 and 20 mW, and that's assuming that my attenuator is exactly 10 dB, it's not. Measuring anything means to compare it against something else. To give you a physical example. If you look at a tape measure, the distance between the marks is determined in the factory. The machine that prints the lines is configured to make the lines just so. In the factory there will be a specific master tool that determines how far apart the lines are in that factory. That tool is called "the standard". The process of lining up the standard with the machine making the lines is called "calibration". If you build a house on your own with just that tape measure, everything should work out fine, but if you have a mate help you and they bring their own tape measure, from a different factory, their lines might not quite match yours and the fun begins. If you don't believe me, as I've said previously, pull out all the tape measures and rulers around your house and see just how much variation there is. In my house, well, my CNC, there's a standard that came with my micrometer kit. It specifies physically how long 25mm is. I also have a 50mm and a 75mm standard. When I compare the 75mm with the 50mm and 25mm together, they're the same within one hundredth of a millimetre. It's likely that it's better than that, but I'm still learning how to hold a micrometer and not have it overheat and stretch while I'm measuring. Yes, temperature changes the size of things. The point is, in my CNC world, my current standard sits in my micrometer box. At some time in the future I might want to improve on that, but for now it's fine. The standard that I have was at some point calibrated against another standard. That standard was in turn calibrated against another standard and so-on. Eventually you end up with an SI unit of 1 meter as defined by the International System of Units. In case you're wondering, it's defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during the time interval of one second. One second is defined in terms of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom. I know right, runs right off the tongue. I can't help myself, that frequency is 9,192,631,770 Hz. Oh, this system is also subject to change. In 2019 four of the seven SI base units were redefined in terms of natural physical constants, rather than relying on a human artefact like the standard kilogram. This is an ongoing process. For example, in 1960, the meter was redefined as a certain number of wavelengths instead of a physical bar in a vault in Paris and there was also not just one bar, there were 30. National Prototype Metre Bar no. 27 made in 1889 was given to the United States and served as the standard for defining all units of lengths in the US between 1893 and 1960 - yes, perhaps surprisingly, the USA is metric, really. One inch used to be defined as "three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end lengthwise" but since 1959 is defined as exactly 2.54 centimetres or 0.0254 meters. Back to power output on my beacon transmitter. Assuming for a moment that I had an actual tool available to measure this, I'd still be comparing my tool against another standard. Let's imagine that I could measure the power output of my beacon with an oscilloscope. When the oscilloscope says 1 Volt per division. How do I know that it really is? If you start reading the calibration steps, you'll discover that they state that you need to connect your scope to a reference, another word for standard, and that's if you're lucky. Some documents just wave their hands in the air and say something like "push the auto calibrate button". The Volt is defined as the electric potential between two points of a conducting wire when an electric current of one Ampere dissipates one Watt of power between those points. The Ampere definition involves counting elementary charges moving in a second. It's in the order of a 10 with 19 zeros. Not to mention that there's also a definition of how much an elementary charge is. You get the point, this is a rabbit hole. So, now let's pretend that I have a calibrated oscilloscope. Let's say that our oscilloscope is calibrated within 1 dB. Cool. So I plug in my beacon and measure, what? I'll end up with a reading, that's plus or minus 1 dB of "reality". In my case, perhaps I read 22.5 dBm. That means that it could be as low as 21.5 dBm or as high as 23.5 dBm, or between 141 and 224 mW. So, it's within specifications, great, but I don't actually know what the actual output power is. Another way to look at this is to use a measurement to determine if the power is within specification or not. I'm guessing that Harry already did that test before he put my beacon in the box and shipped it to me. Long story short, I'm no closer to knowing just how much power is coming out of my beacon, but I'm still working on finding a friend with a calibrated tool that might give me something a little more precise than fail or pass. You know that there's a saying about turtles all the way down? I think it's rabbits myself. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Propagation, the art of getting a radio signal from one side of the globe to the other, is a funny thing. As you might know, I've been experimenting with WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter and for about a year running a beacon on 10m. Out of the box my beacon uses 200 mW to make itself heard. I couldn't leave well enough alone and I reduced the output power. Currently a 10 dB attenuator is connected to the beacon, reducing output to a notional 20 mW. I say notional, since I haven't actually measured it, yet. With so little power going out to my vertical antenna, a homebrew 40m helical whip, built by Walter VK6BCP (SK), and tuned to 10m with an SG-237, it's interesting to discover what's possible. Last night my signal was heard in Denmark. Picked up by Jorgen OZ7IT, 13,612 km away. That report broke another personal best for me, achieving 680,600 kilometres per Watt. I was stoked! I shared a screen-shot of my report with friends. One friend, Allen VK6XL, asked a very interesting question. "What makes you think it was short path?" Before I go into exploring that question, I need to explain. If I was to fly from Perth to Sydney, the popular way to travel is across the Australian Bight, over Truro, north of Adelaide, clip the northern tip of Victoria, over the Blue Mountains to Sydney. The distance is about 3,284 km. This route is known as the great circle route, more specifically, the short great circle route. It's not the only way to travel. Instead of heading East out of Perth, if I head West, I'd fly out over the Indian Ocean, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas, the Pacific Ocean and finally arrive at Sydney. That journey would also follow a great circle route, the long great circle route. It's about 37,000 km long. You might notice that I wasn't very specific with either the path or distance. There's a reason for that. None of the tools I've found actually provide that information, other than to point out that the entire circumference of the planet is about 40,000 km and that it's not uniform since Earth isn't a perfect sphere. You might be asking yourself at this point why I'm spending so much energy worrying about taking the long way around and how that relates to my 20 mW WSPR beacon. In amateur radio we refer to these two travel directions as the short-path and the long-path. Radio signals travel along the curvature of Earth bouncing between the Ionosphere and the surface. How that works exactly is a whole different topic, but for the moment it's fine to imagine a radio signal skipping like a stone on water. As a stone skips a couple of things happen. If the angle at which it hits the water is just right, it will continue on its journey, get the angle wrong and you hear "plop". Every skip is slightly lower than the previous because the stone is losing a little bit of energy. Every time the stone touches the water it creates a splash that ripples out in a circle from the place where the rock hit. These ripples also get weaker as they increase in diameter. Consider what happens if you skip a rock across concrete or sand instead of water and if you really want to geek out, there's also wind resistance on the rock. A complex equivalent dance affects a radio signal when it propagates between two stations. For success, enough radio energy needs to reach the receiver for it to be decoded. For our signal to make it to the other side of the globe it must bounce between the Ionosphere and Earth's surface. Every bounce gets it closer to the destination. Each time it loses a little bit of energy. This loss happens at the Ionosphere, at the surface and in between through the atmosphere. To give you a sense of scale, my signal report from Jorgen in Denmark was -28 dB. It started here in Perth as 13 dB, so we lost 41 dB along the way. We're talking microwatts here. I'll note that I'm avoiding how this is exactly calculated, mainly because I'm still attempting to understand how a WSPR signal report actually works since it's based on a 2,5 kHz audio signal. As I said, enough energy needs to make it to the receiver for any of this to work. There's an assumption that less distance means less energy loss. It's logical. A shorter distance requires less hops and as each hop represents a specific loss, less hops means less loss. But is that really true? There's nothing stopping my beacon signal from taking a different route. Instead of travelling the short-path, it can just as easily head out in the opposite direction. Theoretically at least, my vertical antenna radiates equally in all directions. The long-path is mostly across water between Perth and Denmark. What if hops across the ocean were different than hops across a landmass? Turns out that they are in several ways. For example, there's less energy loss in a refraction across the ocean, how much less exactly is still being hotly debated. Much of the data is empirical at the moment. It gets better. What if I told you that the report was near to sunset? At that time there's a so-called grey line phenomenon related to how the sun stops exciting the Ionosphere and how different layers of the Ionosphere start merging. As a result the angles of refraction across the Ionosphere change and longer hops are possible. What if the long-path took less energy to get to Denmark than the short-path did? Would Jorgen's decoder care? If that's the case, my signal didn't travel 13,612 km, it travelled twice that and I'd have well and truly cracked a million kilometres per Watt. So, is there a way we could know for sure? Well, yes and no. For starters we'd need beacons that transmit at a very precise time. Then we'd need synchronised receivers to decode the signal. A signal travels 3,000 km in a millisecond, so we're going to need something more precise than the timing set by NTP or the Network Time Protocol used by your home computer. If we used GPS locked transmitters and receivers we'd be working in the order of 50 nanoseconds and be in the range of 15m accuracy. That would allow us to calculate the physical distance a signal travelled, but that's not the whole story. What happens if your signal travels all the way around the globe, or if some of it reflects back, so called back scatter, like the ripples from a stone coming back towards you, and that signal travelling back past you to the receiver? There's endless variation, since the planet isn't round with a flat surface nor is the Ionosphere. So, do we know if my report was a long-path or a short-path? Not really. Based on the time of day, there's a good chance that it was a long-path report, but only if we actually measure the delay between send and receive will we have data to make a better assurance than "possibly" or "probably". As I started, propagation is an art. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio It's common knowledge that power, as in output power, makes your signal heard in more places. If you've followed my adventures you'll also know that I'm a firm believer in low power or QRP operation. It all started when I was told that my shiny new amateur license was rubbish because I was only allowed to use 10 Watts. Seemingly the whole community around me shared that opinion and slogans like "life's too short for QRP" are still commonly heard. As a direct result of that sentiment I decided to explore and document just how much I could actually do with my so-called introductory license, the Australian Foundation License. I've now held it for over a decade and I'm still exploring and writing. One of my first acts of rebellion was to lower my radio output power to its minimum setting of 5 Watts and half legal power was sufficient to prove my point. Although I'm still regularly being encouraged to upgrade, my second act of defiance is to keep my Foundation License until I decide that I need more. I'll let you know if it ever happens. One more well known so-called "fact" about our hobby is that if you use low power you'll really only get anywhere on the higher bands, 2m, 70cm and above. There's plenty of reports of amateurs using a low power handheld radio to talk to the International Space Station and my own satellite internet used 1 Watt to get to geostationary orbit. On HF on the other hand, 5 Watts is as low as you really want to go. Making contacts is a struggle and often frustrating, but when you do, bliss! About a year ago I took delivery of a WSPR beacon. It's capable of transmitting on all my accessible HF bands using 200 mW. Given my antenna situation I've configured it to transmit on the 10m band, 24 hours a day, thunderstorms excepted. When making the purchase decision I had no insight into how my beacon would perform. 200 mW is stretching even my love of low power, but I hooked it up and turned it on and waited. It came as quite a surprise that my beacon was heard over 15 thousand kilometres away, not once, not a couple of times, but regularly. When I came up with my November challenge to see if I could improve on that I made an almost throw away comment about reducing power to see if I could still make the distance. A couple of weeks ago I hooked up a 6 dB attenuator to my beacon, reducing the power from 200 down to 50 mW. It came as quite a surprise that my signal made it to the same receiver in the Canary Islands. My kilometre per Watt calculation shot up, quadrupling my previous record. Just imagine, 50 mW making its way over a third of the way around the globe, bouncing between the ionosphere and the planet, just like any other HF signal. At that point I realised I had learnt a few things. You don't need stupid power to make a distant contact on HF either. I started wondering just how little power was needed to get out of the shack. Yesterday I hooked up a 10 dB attenuator and within ten hours my now 20 mW beacon broke my own kilometre per Watt record again and based on the signal to noise numbers from previous contacts, I see no reason for that record to stand for very long. Once that happens I've got plenty more attenuators to play with and I'm not afraid to use them. Now I'm on the hunt for an attenuator that will reduce my main radio output from 5 Watts. I'm told I should aim for double the power rating, but I also have to consider how to connect my antenna coupler which needs 10 Watts to tune, but that's a project for another day When was the last time that you used really low power? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Hayden Honeywood, VK7HH, is a Ham Radio YouTuber, with an interest in VHF, UHF, and microwave amateur operations using multiple modes including WSPR.  Hayden operates a remotely controlled station, as well as maintains the repeater network that serves his island State of Tasmania, Australia.  VK7HH shares his knowledge, expertise, and his ham radio story in this QSO Today.

Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the many acronyms that define the world of amateur radio is VFO. It stands for Variable Frequency Oscillator. That doesn't explain much if you're not familiar with the purpose of it and just how special this aspect of amateur radio is. Much of the world of radio beyond our hobby, like broadcast television, WiFi and Citizen Band or CB, to name a few, uses radio spectrum in a particular way. On a television you change channels to switch between stations. Similarly, a WiFi network uses specific channels to make your wireless network a reality and the same goes for CB, different channels to make yourself heard. Looking specifically at CB for a moment, if you look at channel 8 for example, depending on which type of equipment you have, your radio might be using 27.055 MHz, or 476.575 MHz, or 476.6 MHz. Each of those frequencies can be described as CB channel 8. The first is on the 27 MHz or 11m band, the second is if you're using a 40 channel radio, which is now depreciated and the third is if you're using an 80 channel radio. If you look at digital broadcast television, channel 8 is on 191.5 MHz. On WiFi, channel 8 is on 2.447 GHz or 5.040 GHz. You get the point, depending on where you are as a user of radio spectrum, channel 8 might mean a whole host of different things and as I've described with CB radio, that might even change over time. Harry Potter needed magic to reach Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at Kings Cross Station to get to school. In a channelised world, getting to an in-between frequency is not possible if you're using licensed equipment, unless you're a radio amateur, then you can use magic to get into the gaps. That magic is called the VFO. You might recall that our radios use many different frequencies internally to be able to filter out specifically what signal you want to hear. Most of those frequencies are fixed, in fact in the vast majority of cases these are actually tuned and calibrated to work in a very specific way. The one exception is the VFO, it's by nature variable. It's likely calibrated, but it's not fixed and that allows our community to tune our equipment to any frequency we desire. The traditional user interface for this is a big knob on the front of your radio, colloquially referred to as the dial, as-in turn the dial to change frequency. This allows us something quite rare in radio land. We can be frequency agile. It means that if there's interference at a specific frequency, we can tweak our VFO and slightly modify where our radio is tuned. You use this almost subconsciously when you're on HF trying to tune to a particular station. In the world of software radio there's likely no knob. You type in a number and the variable frequency oscillator in the radio is tuned to another frequency and the output signal, or transmit signal if you're making noise on-air, changes to another frequency. Digital modes like WSPR, which generally use a very specific frequency also vary that frequency but in a different way. You set your radio to the appropriate so-called dial frequency, let's say 28.1246 MHz on the 10m band and then the software alters the signal by up to 200 Hz to change within the available audio range of your radio, altering between a low of 1400 Hz and a high of 1600 Hz, making the actual WSPR frequency on 10m between 28.1260 and 28.1262 MHz. I'm mentioning the WSPR example because while we're frequency agile in our hobby, we do use channels as well. There's a specific set of frequencies set aside, channels if you like, for WSPR, FT8 and other modes. We do the same on the 2m and 70cm bands where we have rules for where repeaters are allowed to be. It means that we get the best of both worlds. We have the stability and institutional knowledge where repeaters or some modes go, but we also get to play in any spot we want. For example, there's nothing stopping me and a friend setting our radio to some random frequency within our license allocation and outside pre-allocated space and run a WSPR transmitter there. Only the two of us will know about it, well at least at first, but it allows us to experiment away from any other users who might experience interference from our tests and exploration. The VFO is what makes our hobby so very interesting and it's what makes it possible to do weird and wonderful experiments. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio With the ever increasing pace of innovation, well, change, I'll leave alone if it's actual innovation instead of marketing, we see new software released at an almost alarming rate. There is an urge to stay abreast of this process, to update, upgrade and try new solutions as soon as they are presented to you by well meaning friends and colleagues, not to mention online marketing, uh, reviews and other enticements that make you click the button to install something to avert the fear of missing out. If you've done this for a number of years, actually, who am I kidding, a number of weeks, you'll discover that this comes at a cost. One that the corporate world has attempted to address by using terms like Standard Operating Environment, backups, administrator privileges and other such annoying things that prevent users from trying something new and breaking things. At home and in the shack most of that is not a problem. No corporate IT division around to stop you, but soon you'll discover that something you installed caused you grief, encouraged your logging software to stop talking to your radio, prevented you radio from changing frequency, or blocked the latest digital mode from working as intended. I live in that world too, but with the benefit of an IT background I decided nearly a decade and a half ago that enough was enough. I bit the bullet and bought myself a new computer. I vowed to install only one tool on that laptop, a virtualisation environment, also known as a hypervisor. It allows you to run a virtual computer inside a window. Given enough CPU power you can run multiple virtual computers in multiple windows inside your actual physical hardware. This gives you flexibility. You can run a copy of your favourite operating system in a virtual environment, install the latest and greatest software on it and if it breaks, you delete it and start again. In my case I'm running my daily desktop environment where I'm currently writing this as a virtual Linux machine inside my physical computer which is also running several other virtual machines, including some network monitoring tools, a software defined radio development environment, my accounting software and plenty of other things. Each virtual machine is nothing more than a folder on my physical computer and making a full backup is as simple as making a copy of that folder. Better still, if I want to try a new version of something on a machine that I'm already using, I can duplicate the folder, fire up the copy of the virtual machine, install the new software and test it. If it works, great, if not, throw it away and start again. Changing physical computers is also simple. Buy a new computer. Install the hypervisor, copy the machine folders across and start working. From a security perspective, it also means that I can install a random bit of software recommended by a friend without getting worried about it stealing any of my information, given that my private information isn't on the virtual machine on which I'm installing this unknown piece of software. I also use this to compile new bits of code. If I come across a project on GitHub that I'd like to try, I can fire up a brand new machine and install all the prerequisites without running the risk of breaking something that I rely on. It also means that I can test with different operating systems, from macOS, any flavour of Linux, copies of Windows and play with virtual copies of Android or if I'm feeling frisky, BeOS. There are other ways to achieve some of this. For example, you could get yourself a Raspberry Pi and half a dozen MicroSD cards. Install an operating system onto a card, boot the Pi, install your new application and if you like it, use it. If not, wipe the card, start again. You can have a dedicated WSPR beacon card, a contest logging card, whatever you need, all separate, all easy to backup and change as needed. If that's not enough, some virtualisation environments allow you to emulate different microprocessors, so you could run ARM code on an x86 processor, or vice-versa. If you want more, you can investigate containerisation. A tool that allows you to essentially create a mini virtual machine and run a new environment using a single command, so fast that you essentially don't need to wait for it to start-up, allowing you to mix and match environments as needed. At this point you might ask why I'm even talking about this. What does this have to do with amateur radio? Well, it's how I have my test bench set-up. Sure I have a soldering station, multimeters, a NanoVNA, an antenna analyser and all that kind of great stuff, but my radio world is mostly software and in that space all my tooling is pretty much virtual, put together in such a way that I can pick and choose precisely how I want to test something without killing something I rely on. I'm telling you about it because in my experience much of the amateur community still relies on a desktop computer running Windows and I have to tell you, there is so much more out there for you to explore. What does your virtual workbench look like? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Yesterday I finally discovered the missing piece of information that will allow me to create a project that I've, if not outright spoken about, at least hinted at. In an ideal world by now I'd have built a proof concept and would be telling you that I've published a GitHub repository under my callsign for you to explore. If wishing made it so. Unfortunately, currently sitting at a keyboard for anything longer than ten minutes or so makes it nigh on impossible to stand up, so you'll have to make do with hand waving and gesticulation rather than actual code, but for now, that's all I have. Consider this a design specification if you're so inclined. So, big idea. Imagine that you have a device that can listen to radio frequencies. This device is connected to a network and it shares the data to any number of different listeners which might each do something different with the information. If you were to do this in the way we watch YouTube or listen to streaming audio, each listener would get their own unique copy of the data. If you have ten listeners, you'd have ten streams crossing your network, even if everyone was enjoying the exact same video or audio at the exact same time. Instead I want the data coming from the device to have only one stream on the network and for as many different listeners or clients to access it as required at the same time. Let's get specific here for a moment. I'm talking about using a software defined radio, could be a $25 RTL dongle, could be any SDR, that is tuned to a part of the spectrum, let's say the entire 40m band, and sends that radio information digitally onto the network. This network could be your local network, or it could theoretically be the internet, for now, let's just put it out on our own network. So, you have a copy of the entire 40m band streaming across your network. Great, now what? Well imagine that you want to decode RTTY on 7.040. You fire up your decoder, point it at the network stream and decode RTTY. Then you want to decode a WSPR signal, at 7.0386. You fire up your WSPR decoder, point it at the network stream and decode WSPR. Then you want to decode FT8 on 7.056, same deal, fire up your decoder, point it at the network stream and decode FT8. Now you want to compare two different RTTY decoders. Fire them both up, point them both at the same stream, decode both, simultaneously. Of course you could do this with CW signals, with SSB signals, with any decoder you have lying around, Olivia, Hellschreiber, AM, Packet, whatever. All these decoders could be running independently but together on the same band. You could add a tool that shows a waterfall display of the same data on a web page, or play some of the decoded data to your headphones, or record it to disk, or do spectral analysis, all at the same time. The information that you're processing is on the network once. You don't have to flood your network with multiple copies of the 40m band, the only limit is how much CPU power you can throw at this and to be frank, most computers on the globe today spend much of their time waiting for you to do something, so processing a bit of data like this is not going to tax anything built in the past 20 years or so. The missing ingredient for this was a Linux tool called netcat, or nc. It allows us to distribute the information across the network using a technique called broadcasting. So, RTL dongle, data extracted by a tool called rtl_sdr, distributed across the network using netcat and used by as many clients as you can think of. The proof of concept I'm working on uses Docker to build a bunch of different containers, or clients if you like, that each can do a different task with the same stream. When I've got something to show and tell, you'll find it, predictably, on my GitHub page. Oh, if you want to run the same thing for say the 80m band, you can. Now you have two network streams, one for 40m, one for 80m and as many decoders on your network as you have CPU cycles to play with. If all this sounds like magic, you've seen nothing yet. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio A week ago I unexpectedly had my gallbladder removed. As emergencies go, I was lucky to be in a major metropolitan area with a remarkable hospital, supported by a group of humanity whom I've never much interacted with in my life. The staff at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital were without exception amazing, from the orderlies to the nurses and everyone behind those, I interacted with about fifty people directly during my stay and every single person had a smile to share and an encouraging word to give. As life experiences go it was as uplifting as I've ever had the opportunity to celebrate. Sure it hurt like hell and there were things I'd rather not have to try again, but on the whole it was, if not pleasant, at least memorable. Recovery is going to take a little while and I understand my voice is expected to return to normal in a few weeks having been intubated for most of a day. Half an hour after being discharged from my five days in hospital I was faced with a choice. Produce nothing for my weekly contribution to our hobby and face the risk of an astronomical bill from my hosting provider because the script that I wrote didn't foresee that there might be a time when I was unable to provide content, or produce something that, to be sure, was lacking in every way, but at least know that there wouldn't be a surprise waiting on my bank statement next month. So, my inadequate production saw the light of day. For that I apologise, it should have been silence. During the week I returned to my shack and had a look at my beacon. As you might recall, I've been using Weak Signal Propagation Reports, or WSPR in my shack for a while. According to the logs the very first time was in November of 2017. At the end of last year I took delivery of a ZachTek desktop WSPR transmitter which has been reported on air over 16 thousand times since. I've only been using the 10m band and it's been heard as far away from me in Western Australia as the Canary Islands, the home of Johann EA8/DF4UE and Peter EA8BFK who between them reported my signal nearly 90 times. It's remarkable to note that this is a distance of over 15 thousand kilometres, on the 10m band, using only 200 mW. During the week I made another milestone, a report in the opposite direction, across the Pacific Ocean to mainland USA. While that didn't break any distance records, it was a thrill to see a report from the Maritime Radio Historical Society, logging WSPR signals using KPH. Other things to note about these reports are that its been heard across 81 different grid squares, by 144 different stations from all directions of the compass. During my hospital stay and since, I've come to appreciate setting little goals. Little personal achievements that in and of themselves are not meaningful to anyone but me, and in some cases, my medical support team. It reminded me of a time when I attempted to achieve this in amateur radio, making a contact every day. Looking back over my logs I can tell you that I've not managed to maintain that, though, technically, on average, given that I host a weekly net and there's generally more than seven people who join in, I could claim an average of one QSO per day, but both you and I would know that I was stretching the truth somewhat. It occurred to me that my signal report by KPH could be considered the beginning of my new 10m adventures. Much of my start in this hobby was during the previous solar cycle and the 10m band featured heavily in much of my activities, especially since you can get on that band with the very minimum of antenna, a quarter wave on 10m is a 2.5m whip and that can fit even on my car and it did, for years. When the solar cycle eventually wound its way down, the 10m band was quiet for much of the year with the odd spot to whet your appetite, but rare enough to have little in the way of ongoing contacts. As far as I'm concerned, 10m is back in play and it's my personal special band, so I'm setting myself a little challenge for the month of November and you can join in, open to anyone who wants to play. There's no prize, no scoreboard, no accolades, no nothing, other than the personal satisfaction of achievement. Here's the challenge. How many kilometres per Watt can you achieve during November? To explain, my beacon uses 200 milliwatts, so any distance is multiplied by five to get the km/W number. If you use more than a Watt, you'll need to divide your distance by the number of Watts you use. As I said, this is a personal challenge. I'm not going to adjudicate, there's no rules to break, no one to tell you that you're cheating, it's just between you and your WSPR beacon. For now, my record is 75630 km per Watt. I'm going to take the opportunity to consider what I might do to improve on that. Perhaps if I reduce power I'll still be heard in the Canary Islands, but I'll have more bang for my buck. Time will tell. Feel free to share your own achievement, or keep it to yourself, entirely up to you. In case you're wondering about the capacitor thing, a gallbladder is like a bile capacitor, the analogy came from a story I wrote whilst in hospital, it might even see the light of day... I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio It is in my nature to ask questions. It's been hammered into me from an early age and it often brings me new friends, new ideas and new projects. After spending quite some time mulling over my understanding of radio, I came up with this question: "Is it possible to build a single radio transmitter that is capable of emitting a WSPR signal at the same time on all the HF bands?" Before we look at the hardware, let's contemplate for a moment what this transmission might look like. Imagine a WSPR transmission as a normal audio signal. It sounds like a couple of warbling tones for two minutes. Unpacking it, the audio signal is about 6 Hz wide and sits somewhere between 1400 and 1600 Hz. If you were to draw a power chart of this, displaying the frequencies horizontally and power vertically, you'd see a completely flat chart with a little spike, 6 Hz wide, somewhere between 1400 and 1600 Hz. Using an analogue radio, you can play this sound into the microphone or audio port and the radio takes care of transmitting it on the 10m band as a 28 MHz beacon. Tune the radio to 40m and it appears as a 7 MHz transmission. The two takeaways are that the WSPR signal itself doesn't change between bands or transmissions and the radio does the heavy lifting to make your WSPR transmission come out at the right frequency. Your radio is moving the audio frequencies to the correct amateur band. The electronics in your radio achieve this move by mixing the audio and the tuning frequencies together. If you imagine a 28 MHz WSPR signal coming from your transmitter as a power chart, it's essentially silence, except for a little WSPR peak somewhere just off to the right of 28 MHz. From a mathematical perspective, the frequency mixer in your radio is performing a multiplication and best of all, you don't need a radio to do this. You could use software to multiply frequencies instead and end up with something that represented their product. If you were to create a power chart of this equivalent multiplication, you'd see a completely flat chart with a little spike near 28.1261 MHz. Sound familiar? It gets better. You can store the result of this calculation in a file as a 28 MHz WSPR signal and you could do this as many times as you want. You could create a file with a 3.5 MHz WSPR signal, one with a 7 MHz one and so-on. Since we're talking about shuffling numbers only, you could combine all these calculations, and end up with a single file that had several WSPR signals inside it. The chart picture is again mostly silence, just with little WSPR peaks at frequencies suitable for say transmission on the 80, 40, 15 and 10m bands. Now all you need is to find a device that's capable of transmitting it. Turns out that we have such a device. A PlutoSDR, a software defined radio which I've spoken about before. It's capable of transmitting a 56 MHz wide signal, more than ample for what we're doing. We don't need to use the PlutoSDR to calculate the combined signal either, since we can do all that in advance, because as I said, a WSPR signal doesn't change. So essentially, all we'd need to do is generate a file that has all the WSPR signal information at the right frequencies and send it to the PlutoSDR to transmit. There are a couple of hurdles to overcome. When you multiply two frequencies, you end up with two peaks, one at the sum of both frequencies, and one at the difference between them. One you need, the other you don't, so we're going to need to filter this out, something that your analogue radio circuit also does. Another challenge is around sampling rates. The PlutoSDR needs a specific sampling rate and bit depth, so we're going to have to generate our file just so. I'm going to skip past complex numbers and move on to power output, since all the power from the transmitter will be spread across all of the combined WSPR signals we're attempting to transmit, so we're likely going to need amplification. There's also the matter of testing before we actually connect this contraption to an antenna and I've glossed over one minor but essential point, the PlutoSDR doesn't do HF. So, where does this leave us? We can build a proof of concept using 2m and 70cm. Both those bands are native to the PlutoSDR. I'm currently working on generating the actual WSPR signal file to start the transformation process. A friend has some testing gear that could allow us to see what's coming out of the transmitter without polluting the airwaves and of course, at this point this is all still "What-if". I've not actually made this work, but it's keeping me entertained and that's half the fun. It gets even better. The Pluto has an FPGA on board, so theoretically at least, we might be able to generate this actual file inside the Pluto in real-time, which opens up a whole other avenue of exploration, but we'll start with crawling before running. If you have thoughts on this, or any other aspect of the hobby, please get in touch. You can send email to cq@vk6flab.com or you can find me on Twitter and Reddit with my callsign. In the meantime, you know the drill. Get on air and make some noise. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio The amateur radio community is as varied as humanity across the globe. It represents an endless supply of ideas and experiments that continue to attract people looking for something new and exiting. On the face of it, our hobby is about radio and electronics, about propagation and antennas, about modes and contacts, but if you limit your outlook to those topics you'll miss out on a vast expanse of opportunity that is only just beginning to emerge. Until quite recently, computing in amateur radio was essentially limited to logging and contest scoring. It has evolved to include digital modes like PSK31 and the advent of smaller, faster and cheaper computers in the home has brought the possibility of processing unimaginable amounts of data leading to modes like WSPR and FT8. In the past I've spoken about how amateur radio means different things to different people. Making contact using a digital internet enabled repeater is sacrileges to one and manna from heaven to another. Between those two extremes there is room to move and explore. Similarly where one uses valves, another expects an integrated circuit. One wants low power, the other wants every Watt they can lay their hands on. Contesting versus rag chewing, nets vs contacts, SSB vs. CW, FT8 vs. RTTY. Each of these attracts a different part of the community with different outcomes and expectations. For some it's about antenna building, others going portable, climbing a mountain, or setting up in a park. Those are all traditional amateur activities, but the choice and opportunity don't end there. The longer I play with computers the more I see a convergence in the world, a coming together of technologies and techniques. I've talked about some of this before when in 1994 I produced a competition broadcast promotion for the radio station I was working at, using just a computer in the era of reel-to-reel tape and razor blades. My station manager couldn't quite put his finger on what was different, but with hindsight it represented a landslide change in how radio stations have operated since. Mind you, I'm not saying that I was the first, just the first in that particular radio station. In many ways computing is an abstract effort. When asked, I like to express it as designing something intangible in an imaginary world using an made up language and getting paid real money to make it happen, well, numbers in my bank account at least. Within that context, amateur radio is slowly beginning to reap the rewards that come from the exponential growth in home computing power. While the majority of humanity might use the vast amount of CPU cycles to scroll through cat videos online, that access to processing power allows us to do other things as well. For example, right now I'm playing with the dataset that represents all the WSPR spots since March of 2008. As of now there are around four billion rows of contacts, containing data points like a time-stamp, the transmitter, the receiver, the signal strength, location, direction, and more. As part of that investigation I went looking for documents containing the words "RStudio" and "maidenhead", so I could consider creating a map in my statistical tool that allowed me to represent my dataset. In making that search I discovered a thesis by a mathematician who was using the reverse beacon network in an attempt to predict which station could hear which transmitter at what time. In reading the thesis, which I opened because I was looking for an example on how to convert a maidenhead locator into geo-spacial data types in R, a popular statistics platform, I discovered that the author didn't appear to have much, if any, amateur knowledge or experience, but they approached their task, attempting to predict as a mathematician what we in our community call propagation, based on a public dataset, downloaded straight from the reverse beacon network, created by amateurs like you and I. This interaction between science and the amateur community isn't new. Sometimes it's driven by science, other times it's driven by amateur radio. There's a team exploring the ionospheric prediction models that we've used for decades, popularly referred to as VOACAP or Voice of America Coverage Analysis Program, based on multiple evolutions of empirical models of the ionosphere that were first developed in the 1960's, headed by both a scientist and an amateur, Chris KL3WX. With the advent of WSPR and the associated data collection some experiments have started to compare the reality of propagation as logged by WSPR to the predicted propagation as modelled by VOACAP. One such experiment happened in 2018 where Chris and his team at HAARP, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, set out to make transmissions at specific times and frequencies, using the amateur community logging of WSPR spots to compare their transmissions to the predictions. Interestingly they did not match. Just think about that for a moment. The tool we love and use all across our community, VOACAP, doesn't match the reality of propagation. My own playing with WSPR data is driven by the very same thing that I use to be a better contester, a burning curiosity in all things. My VOACAP prediction experience has been poor to date. Setting up my own WSPR beacon is the first step in attempting to discover what my actual propagation looks like, but in doing so, it's also a possible contribution to the wider challenges of predicting propagation based on a dataset with four billion spots. One such approach might be to create an ionospheric prediction map based on actual data and compare that to the models as well as the published space weather maps and combining these efforts into a machine learning project which might give us the next generation of ionospheric prediction tools, but only time will tell. No doubt I will have to learn more about statistics and machine learning than I expect, but then, that's half the fun. So, next time you think of amateur radio as being limited to valves, transistors, soldering, antennas and rag chewing on HF, consider that there might be other aspects to this hobby that you have not yet considered. What other research are you aware of that relates to amateur radio? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio Antennas and propagation are the two single most discussed topics in our hobby, that and how an FT8 contact isn't real. Not a day goes by without some conversation about what antenna is the best one and by how much? In my opinion it's a futile effort made all the worse by so called experts explaining in undeniable gobbledegook, or sometimes even using science, just how any particular antenna is a compromise. The truth is that most conductive materials radiate to more or lesser degree. Sometimes there is enough of that to make it outside your backyard into the antenna of a fellow hobbyist. To make a point, as is my wont, over the past months I've been conducting an experiment. It's the first in a series all related to antennas and propagation. As has been said, the difference between fiddling and science, is writing it down, so this is me writing it down. I'm using the tools available to me to explore the various attributes of my station and how it affects what's possible. I will observe that this is within the dynamic nature of the environment, so the solar cycle, solar events, thunderstorms and noise are making an impact. No doubt I'll create a visualisation that links some of those extra variables, but for now I'm just noting that these external events affect what I'm doing. You might recall that I took delivery of a WSPR beacon a few months ago. If you're unfamiliar, WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter, is a tool that allows a station to transmit a time synchronised signal on a specific frequency, so other stations can look for, and attempt to decode it. Think of it as a timed Morse code signal and you'll have a pretty close understanding of what it does. The beacon I purchased was a 200 milliwatt, ZachTek 80To10 desktop transmitter, built by Harry, SM7PNV. It can operate on all the HF bands I'm licensed for and can run all day, every day. It's time-synchronised using a supplied GPS antenna and powered by a Micro USB cable. It's currently connected to my vertical antenna. That vertical antenna is a homebrew helically wound whip, tuned for the 40m band, clamped to the side of my metal patio roof. It's fed by an SGC-237 antenna coupler which is held by magnets to the roof. A 75 Ohm, RG6 quad shield coax cable, about 20m long, left over from my satellite dish installation days, is connected via several adaptors and coax switches to the beacon. This is not a fancy set-up by any stretch of the imagination, but it's my station and what I use to get on air to make noise and that's the whole point of this exercise. You might recall that one of the reasons I want to learn Morse is so I can hear an NCDXF beacon and know which one I'm hearing on my own station. In many ways, this is a different way to approach the same problem. Said plainly, "How do I determine what propagation is like for me, right now, on my own gear?" There are countless tools available, from the Voice of America VOACAP propagation prediction, through the graphs and charts on clublog.org to the Space Weather Services run by the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia. All of these tools have one thing in common, they don't use your own gear. Unsurprisingly, you're likely to wonder what it is that I can achieve with a mere 200 milliwatt transmitter and a vertical. Turns out, quite a lot. As of right now, my WSPR beacon has been heard multiple times over the past three months in the Canary Islands, over 15 thousand kilometres away. The Watts per Kilometre calculation puts that at over 76 thousand kilometres per Watt, not bad for a little amateur station located in the middle of a residential suburb. Did I mention that this was on the 10m band? I was asked if I would put a pin in my DXCC map, tracking the countries for each of these WSPR reports and my answer to that is "No". This is not a contact, this is a propagation ping. I suppose that I could, if I really wanted to argue the point, which I don't, use a pin if I had a reciprocal report from the other station within a set period of time, but that's not why I'm doing this. The purpose of this exercise is to discover what my station is capable of, what propagation is like, how it changes over time, how uniform my radiation pattern is and how much of the globe can hear my signal. One observation to make is that much of the West Coast of the United States is a similar distance away from me, but so far there are no reports from that continent. As a quick and dirty test, I'm using my Yaesu radio and 5 Watts for the next day to see if this is an edge case, or if there is something else going on. For example, my house has a peak metal roof, to the West of my antenna. Is it possible that it's affecting the radiation pattern, or is there something else going on, like the neighbour's house that sits to the East? For all I know the noise floor in the Canary Islands is significantly better than anywhere in the USA, but only time will tell. I've recently taken delivery of a multi-band vertical antenna which I'm planning to use to replace my current vertical. The main reason being that my antenna coupler cannot tune with 200 milliwatts and to do band-hopping I'd have to re-tune manually each time, not something that is sustainable 24 hours a day. No doubt that change will bring other discoveries, but then, I'm keeping track. The intent of all of this is that you can experiment with your own station, test ideas, trial a set-up, keep a log and discover new things that your station presents to you. Amateur Radio is never just about one thing, it's always a dozen different things, all at the same time. What are you going to discover next? I'm Onno VK6FLAB