Foundations of Amateur Radio Podcast Por Onno (VK6FLAB) arte de portada

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio

De: Onno (VK6FLAB)
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Starting in the wonderful hobby of Amateur or HAM Radio can be daunting and challenging but can be very rewarding. Every week I look at a different aspect of the hobby, how you might fit in and get the very best from the 1000 hobbies that Amateur Radio represents. Note that this podcast started in 2011 as "What use is an F-call?".℗ & © 2015 - 2025 Onno Benschop Ciencia Física
Episodios
  • Bald Yak 14, choices and software flexibility

    Bald Yak 14, choices and software flexibility
    Dec 6 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio Let's start with an observation, I'm a geek, have been all my life. Since my early teenage years that evolved as a predilection for computing. As you might already know, I became a radio amateur to essentially get away from computing. The reality turned out to be something else entirely. I discovered that the time of combining radio and computing had already begun when I joined the community. Like the evolution from spark-gap, through valves, transistors and integrated circuits, radio has come to encompass software, least of which through SDR, or Software Defined Radio. Why least? Over the years I've attempted to explain some of my fascination and wonder with software, but one aspect I've been unable to convey succinctly is the scope of software. I'm not talking about the fact that you find software inside your microwave oven, your car, your bathroom scales, but that hints at what underlies the phenomenon. If you're not familiar with spreadsheets, imagine a blank piece of paper with a grid drawn on it. Inside each square, or cell, you can put anything you want, a number, a label, a picture, a web address, a formula, a colour, borders, you name it. Your imagination is pretty much the only limiting factor. Now, here's where it gets fun. Once you have filled in the first cell, the next one follows. What this means is that once you've made the first decision, the next one becomes a little easier. Every time you make a decision, the number of options you have open to you become less and less, or to use another word, constrained. So what, you ask? Well, unlike a sheet of paper with a grid, a spreadsheet allows you to add rows and columns, at any point in your document. Doing that reduces the constraints, you have more options open to you. You can also add sheets, or even start a completely separate document. In other words, you have a playground open to you that is infinitely flexible. Writing software is like that, with bells on. Now, I'm not going to tell you to start learning how to write software, though truth be told, there's lots of things to like, and admittedly, frustration, that comes with doing so. Let's talk about that frustration. Once you make the first decision, the next one is more constrained. So, if you start with a blank sheet, you have infinite possibilities. Writing software is exactly like that. Here's the frustration. What's the first thing you should decide, because once you do, your options become reduced. So .. Bald Yak, 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. That little phrase hides a lot of complexity, but it already contains some constraints. GNU Radio is one, distributed is another and so-on. Let me share with you what my semi-blank piece of paper looks like. I've been quietly working on an idea to use my Pluto SDR to listen to amateur radio repeaters. Not just one, all of them, across 2m and 70cm. I came up with this idea as a real-life project that I'd like to implement with whatever Bald Yak is, or becomes. It has all the bits I care about right now, multiple frequencies, something that goes well and truly beyond what my Yaesu FT-857d can do, it taxes my skill set, it gives me something to make tangible and it hopefully moves the needle on the Bald Yak project. So, here's some variables to consider. The Pluto SDR has a computer on-board. There are reports that people have run GNU Radio programs on the Pluto itself. This is attractive since the amount of data involved with monitoring 2m and 70cm simultaneously is likely to exceed that of the USB port on the device. However, what I don't know is how much actual computing resources doing this will take to achieve and if a Pluto could actually do this. To give you an example. Imagine a massive fire-hose of data coming into my software and then processing that. Between memory and CPU constraints, I can't just decode the stream for each repeater, likely duplicating a whole bunch of calculations. While that consideration is on the table, decoding a dozen narrowband FM streams implies a dozen copies of the FM decoder software. Ideally this would be one actual piece of software, used a dozen times, rather than a dozen separate copies that will individually be maintained if something changes. For example, once I've built this, I might realise that I need to implement FM de-emphasis, a technique implemented in FM broadcasting to, among other reasons, manage artefacts associated with transmitting a signal over FM, perhaps a topic for another day. When you write software you do not want to have copies of the same software in multiple places. To use a spreadsheet equivalent, it's like putting a Tax rate in multiple places across your document, rather than storing it in a cell and referring to it in other formulas. That way, you can change it once and all the ...
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    8 m
  • I have a problem .. with logging.

    I have a problem .. with logging.
    Nov 29 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio The first step in solving any problem is recognising that there is one. In my case the name of that problem is "logging". Specifically the storage and collection of my amateur radio contact logs. Just to be clear, the actual process of logging is fraught .. what do you log, as in, which pieces of information are germane to the purpose of logging, do you log your own callsign, or do you only collect that once per session, do you log in UTC, or in local time, if you're logging in local time, do you record where you're logging, do you record what power level, which antenna, what radio, the battery voltage, you get the idea. Then there's .. when do you log? Do you log each and every session on-air, weekly nets, chat sessions on the local repeater, do you log the time when you establish the contact, once you've deciphered their callsign, or once the contact ends, and if you never wear a watch, how do you know what time it is? What do you log with? Is it using pen and paper, pencil and paper, on a sheet of A4, or A5, in a binder, in a scrapbook, in an exercise book, in a journal, a diary, on ruled, grid or on plain paper, or do you log with a computer and if you do that, using which of the seven gazillion logging packages that are available to you? I'm not talking about any of those things, though I suppose you could argue that I'm addressing one of the gazillion options, but stick with me. I have, sitting on my desk, fourteen different logbooks. That's not unreasonable, almost one for each year that I've been licensed. Except that these books are not in any way consistent, they're essentially bound pieces of scrap paper with log entries scribbled in the available space, sometimes I've reversed a spiral notebook, just so I can avoid the spiral with my writing hand, sometimes it's oriented in landscape, other times in portrait. Some are smaller than A5, others are foolscap and intended for accounting purposes. Next to that pile are too many empty logbooks, intended for future use. Why so many, you ask? Well it goes like this. You go to the office supply store to look for a suitable logbook. You buy it and try it. You use it for a bit and decide that you either love or hate it. If you hate it, you go back to the store to try and find another one. If you love it, your problem becomes finding an identical logbook. In a fit of inspiration, I loved the grid layout of my tiny spiral notebooks, and decided that this was the one for me, but they're no longer available, so instead I bought twenty A4 7mm grid exercise books with a soft cover, which I hate, and that was after trying to get a third Account Book Journal with a hard cover. There's also several A5 spiral bound books, but they're too chunky for portable operation and their spiral is annoying for logging. There's also various empty ring binders and paper ready for logging in the garage. Who knew that there are apparently multiple disconnected universes where so-called universal loose-leaf hole punched paper doesn't fit ring binders with more than two rings, I suppose that's like different implementations of the same version of ADIF, but I'll admit that I'm bitter and have digressed well off topic. I will say this, stationery and I clearly have an unhealed relationship. That's not the half of it. My computer has at least 208 ADIF and Cabrillo files on it. I say "at least", since that's the ones I found when looking for ADI, ADIF and CAB files. Removing identical files, nets me 171 text files which I'm pretty sure are all log files, 50-thousand lines, but that's with some having a one line per contact and others having a dozen, depending on which software wrote the file. It's going to take a moment, since those 208 files are scattered among 74 different directories. Then there's the files that "wsjt-x" and "fldigi" create, but right now I'm not sure what the extensions for those are, I think one is called "all.txt", and looking inside, it helpfully does not have a year in the logged data, so that's fun. My computer also has logs in "cqrlog", "xlog" and "VKCL", probably others. Then there's the logs I have online. The log for F-troop is a single spreadsheet, it has nearly 10,000 entries. I know that there's other files online and likely in other places like the various clubs I've operated at .. fortunately or not, most of those were done with the club callsign, so I'm calling those out of scope, at least for now. Then there's the entries in LoTW, Clublog, eQSL, probably QRZ and likely more. It all started out so innocently. I made my first contact in 2011 and forgot to log it. Since then I've been extolling the virtues of making sure that everyone around me logs their first contact. Meanwhile I've been pulling my hair out trying to make sense of the fragmented disaster that is represented by logging in amateur radio. I'll take responsibility for my own mess, but I have to point the finger at my predecessors who still ...
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    9 m
  • How to make our hobby and community resilient?

    How to make our hobby and community resilient?
    Nov 22 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day I was stuck in traffic behind a vehicle proudly proclaiming that it was "electric". I'd seen the model before, just never connected it with being available as an EV. I wondered how many other cars on the road turned out to have added an "electric" option to their line-up and how that evolution had just quietly, inexorably occurred. It started me thinking about the nature of the driving experience and what it would be like for someone who has never seen a petrol, or other fossil fuel burning vehicle, and what driver education might do to incorporate that. In my teens I first sat on a hotted up moped belonging to a friend, I was old enough to be legal, whilst he wasn't, so I got to ride his bike to school with him on the back, win-win for both. Later on, I learned to drive a car with a manual gearbox and as interest took me, I learned to drive a double clutch gearbox and got my heavy rigid truck license. I also learned to fly a plane, but that's besides the point. Stuck in rush-hour traffic, such as it is in Perth, it made me think about amateur radio licensing and education. Specifically, how do we incorporate change? When I was first licensed, my education included consideration for analogue television interference, including pictures of different screen patterns, their causes and remedies. Three years after I got licensed, almost to the day, the last analogue television transmitter in Australia was switched off on 10 December 2013, 57 years after the first transmissions started. While I retain little, if any, of the now, let's call it, esoteric information associated with that, it made me consider a wider picture in relation to the process of amateur radio education. New amateurs today are unlikely to be asked about analogue television interference, let alone be subjected to questions in their exam. Fair enough, information changes, evolves, becomes superseded or expires, and as a side-effect, I have some brain cells dedicated to analogue television, PAL, 625 lines total, 576 visible, horizontal and vertical synchronisation, white noise, you get the idea. As an aside, 78 on a turntable indicates a speed reserved for shellac records until the 1950s, seeing that we're dropping arcane knowledge. Oh, means NOP on a 6502, in case you're wondering. Although I don't have a specific list of what is currently being taught .. more on that in a moment .. I daresay that newly minted amateurs have a curriculum that has evolved with technology and legal requirements over the past 15 years. A tangible example is the fact that the Foundation Class in Australia is now permitted to use digital modes, something that changed after I was licensed, when on 21 September 2019, the regulator amended the Amateur License Conditions Determination, known locally as the LCD, with immediate effect. The point being that over time things change and education changes with it. This is all as expected. Here's my question. What about the rest of the community? What happens to someone who has been licensed for a decade, a generation, or more? Are they expected to gain these skills by osmosis or self-education? Should this process be dictated by the regulator, or should this be a community effort to bring everyone into the same decade? Should we revise how we educate our amateurs and make the education skill-set technology agnostic, should we be less prescriptive with the license, or should it achieve something else? One example in this space is an initiative called the Ham Challenge, which you can discover at hamchallenge.org. In case it sounds vaguely familiar, I've talked about this before. It's a list of 52 activities that you can take on to broaden your horizons and explore different aspects of our hobby. In its first year, I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves. Is this the kind of self-training that we might encourage, or is there another way to achieve this? Is this something that occurs elsewhere in society and if so, how has that been addressed? I know for example in ICT there are endless certification courses, which I have to confess are in my professional opinion absolutely counterproductive, serving only to entrench vendor lock-in, not something that I think benefits the amateur community. I mentioned curriculum a moment ago. Another approach is to attend a licensing course and participate as part of your own self-education. Of course this will require cooperation from the educators, and we'd need to come up with some idea of how this might be useful. Is this something that benefits from attendance every five years, every decade, more, less? As a bonus side-effect, it will introduce new amateurs to old ones, and vice versa, perhaps facilitating a new resurgence of Elmering, or mentorship, that previously has been the hallmark of our community. Over the decade and a half or so that I've been licensed and writing weekly articles about the hobby and our ...
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    7 m
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