Foundations of Amateur Radio 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

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Some life lessons require additional reinforcement from time to time. This week I was strongly encouraged to remember a lesson that can be summarised as: "A place for everything and everything in its place." It was first uttered like that to me a quarter of a century ago by a client who used it frequently around their staff.

It means that all the stuff that fills up the space around you, in this case, physical stuff, needs to have a specific home and if you're not actively using it, that is where it should be. This is useful in a context where you have lots of little things that you need from time-to-time, or if you have several people dependent on the availability of a single thing, like say the labelling machine used to tag equipment.

The other day an incident involving a tiny tablet that went flying across the kitchen bench, bounced over the edge and vanished, not helped by the fact that taking the tablet was time sensitive and the fact that the vacuum cleaner was right there - no the tablet was not inside, I checked. I walked around the bench to the other side and started rolling on the ground with the aid of the torch on my phone. Ten minutes in, still nothing. I remembered that my go-bag has a torch, so I went to get it from its place.

One problem, it wasn't there. I turned the bag upside down and went through it. Nope, no torch. That's two things that vanished. Neither has resurfaced at this point. I went to the chemist to get another tablet and took it 40 minutes late.

The torch however was not so easy to resolve.

My, what I call go-bag, has a bunch of life affirming essentials. It started pretty soon after becoming a radio amateur. It has two jumpers, long-leg underwear, an under shirt, a towel and a microfibre cloth, leather gloves, mosquito net, medication, band-aids, toilet paper, soap and some empty bags. It also has a torch, well, not right now it doesn't.

After failing on my mission to locate the torch, I started stuffing the contents of my go-bag, straight back into its bag, only to realise that I wasn't helping future me. I stopped, pulled everything back out and started folding everything neatly. Then I repacked the bag.

I've put in a stand-by torch, in Dutch they're called a "knijpkat", or a mechanically operated torch. You squeeze it in your hand and in doing so you move a dynamo that charges either a battery or a capacitor. It's called a "pinch cat" because it sounds a little like that. The light is fine for getting around in the dark, but you wouldn't mistake it for a super bright, eyeball burning, LED torch.

In case you're wondering why I'm going into such detail about this, it's because you never know when you need something. It might be urgent, or it might not be. Having your stuff organised in such a way that you can find it, can sometimes be the difference between life and death.

Now I get it. Not everyone works like this. I have for decades had a system on my desk where I know where all the bits of paper are and it's not helpful if someone cleans it up, because at that point I have no reference to anything and I will have to go through the whole box of things to find what I need.

When my partner and I travelled around Australia in an Iveco Daily stuffed to the gunnels with electronics equipment, clothes, food, camping gear, a two metre satellite dish and plenty of other things, I had a system that involved four filing cabinets bolted into the van, combined with a dozen or more crates, metal hooks, straps and a safe. I was forever putting things away in the exact same place, each time.

It's not a process that comes naturally to everyone and so we settled on a process where I would pack the van so I could lay my hands on anything within seconds, from the socket set to the satellite signal finder, from a clean pair of shorts to a raincoat, from a fuel funnel to a water funnel. Pro-tip, don't mix the two. Tools aside, of course this system also applies to the

Foundations of Amateur Radio

In the early 1920's long distance communication using radio was a growing interest. At the time it was thought that communication that we take for granted today, over long-distance HF, was limited to long wave or extremely low frequencies, the lower the better. With that restriction came massive antennas and high power transmitters, available only to commercial and government stations.

Then radio amateurs let the cat out of the bag by discovering that so-called "short wave" radio could be heard all across the globe. As an aside, today, "short wave" seems quaint, because we've discovered that even shorter waves can be used to communicate, right down to nanometre communication as shown by NASA in its XCOM technology demonstration on the 12th of May, 2019. On a daily basis we use 120 mm and 60 mm waves when we use 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi for example.

As a result of the discovery of short wave radio, a gold-rush emerged. There was a hunger in the community for radio, businesses and communities adopted the new medium, there were radio courses being taught in Universities, church services and other forms of entertainment started filling the airwaves. Comedy, talk shows, music, concerts, serials and dramas spread across the electromagnetic spectrum and radio amateurs who had discovered the phenomenon were running the risk of being pushed aside by commercial interests willing to pay for access.

As I've said before, in many countries at the time, amateur radio was actively discouraged, sometimes it was even illegal.

Before we continue, I should quote some statements made about radio before the gold-rush which at the time was seen as "Telegraphy Without Wires".

In 1865 a Boston Post editorial proclaimed: "Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."

Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, said: "Radio has no future." and went on to say: "Wireless is all very well but I'd rather send a message by a boy on a pony", he also said: "Heavier-than-air machines are impossible." and "X-Rays will prove to be a hoax."

Not all statements aged as badly. The New York Times said in 1899: "All the nations of the earth would be put upon terms of intimacy and men would be stunned by the tremendous volume of news and information that would ceaselessly pour in upon them."

Back to the IARU. Before a business trip to Europe, the board of directors of the ARRL asked their President, Hiram Percy Maxim, to encourage international amateur relations, which on 12 March 1924 resulted in a dinner given, at the Hotel Lutetia in Paris according to Hiram, a "certain dining room" by "the most distinguished radio men of Europe."

Hiram goes on to say that: "This A.R.R.L. President has sat in at a good many very impressive radio meetings in the past, ranging from Maine to California, but he has never sat in at a meeting where there was quite as much thrill as at this meeting in Paris where the amateurs of nine different countries sat down together."

The countries were, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Canada and the United States. Hiram remarks that "Denmark was represented by a letter in which regret was expressed at the inability to have a representative present and asked that the amateurs of Denmark be counted in." You should dig up a copy of the May 1924 edition of QST to get a sense of occasion where the ARRL president compares the thrill of the "hamfest" to the atmosphere during that dinner and pities those who have never experienced it.

During the meeting it was decided to form an organisation which was going to be called the International Amateur Radio Union. A temporary committee was formed that appointed Hiram Maxim as the chair and Dr. Pierre Corret as secretary to take charge of the details to create a permanent organisation. The final decision was to call for a general A

Foundations of Amateur Radio

A great deal of energy is expended on the notion of operating portable. I've talked about this plenty of times. Issues like power, antennas, suitable radios, logging, transport and time of day all come to mind. Some activities are framed specifically as portable operations. Things like Summits On The Air, or SOTA, Parks On The Air, or POTA, World Wide Flora and Fauna, or WWFF. There's field days, portable contests and specific activities like the 2014 activation of FT5ZM on Amsterdam Island and the 2016 activation of VK0EK on Heard Island. I mention those last two specifically since I had the distinct pleasure of meeting those teams and had the opportunity to interview each amateur whilst enjoying a typical Aussie BBQ. I'll point out that no shrimps were thrown anywhere. You can find those interviews with FT5ZM and VK0EK on my website at vk6flab.com.

Each of these activities are framed in the context of the activity, as-in, you climb a mountain with a radio and then you make noise.

That's not the only way to go portable. One of my friends checks in to the weekly F-troop as a portable station most weeks. Glynn VK6PAW gets in his car, drives to some random location and participates from wherever he happens to be at the time. In doing so, the radio part of it, is the add-on between leaving home and arriving at a destination for a cup of coffee.

Charles NK8O works all over the United States. When he checks into F-troop, he's rarely in the same place two weeks in a row. In between work and sleep you'll find him activating a nearby park. He's been doing this for quite some time. While this is a POTA activity, he finds parks that fit into his life, rather than point at a park and make a specific trip there to activate it.

Before I continue, I'd like to mention that I'm not dismissing making a specific trip. Far from it. The point I'm making is that making any such trip is extra work. It's an added activity in your life. Whilst entirely enjoyable, there's plenty of times where that's just not possible.

Instead I'd like to look at this from the other side.

Both Glynn and Charles have a radio with them. Perhaps not all the time, but often enough that they can activate their station when they happen to be in a suitable location.

I've similarly put a radio into my luggage when going on a holiday. It might transpire that it stays there, or it might be that I happen to find a picnic table at the side of a water reservoir that happens to be in the shade and just begging to try a radio at.

In other words, if you have a radio handy, you can handily use it when the opportunity comes to pass.

So, what do you bring with you? If you're like Charles, you'll have a QRP radio, a Morse key, a battery and a wire antenna. Glynn has a vertical that lives in his car and the radio is bolted in.

For a while I had my radio permanently mounted in my car and I suspect that will return there in the not too distant future. It was removed for a service that involved the transmission being replaced after it failed after only a 140,000 km on the clock. Thankfully a fellow amateur had a spare car we could use, but I wasn't game to drill holes for an antenna and I'm pretty sure they were pretty happy about that.

The more I look at the activities that others report on, the more I have come to realise that the people who get on-air the most are the ones who have found a way to weave radio into their day-to-day life, rather than rely on specific amateur radio activities and plans.

I confess that I miss sitting by a local lake making noise or finding a random car park with shade that is just begging for someone, anyone, to turn on a radio and have a go.

So, how do you approach radio in your life, and how might you find ways to incorporate it into the gaps?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

As a self-proclaimed radio nerd I'm aware of the various amateur bands. Depending on your license, your familiarity will likely vary. I've never been on 6m for example, but I have a good working relationship with the 10m band.

Amateur bands aside, there's plenty of other activity across the radio spectrum. It occurred to me that I've never actually stopped to take note of what specifically I can hear from my own station. Think of it as a station frequency survey.

Obvious sources are AM and FM radio broadcasters. Then there's the aviation frequencies, the local control tower, arrival and departure frequencies as well as Perth airport ground on occasion. There's the ATIS, the Automatic Terminal Information Service. There was a time when I could hear various aviation non-directional beacons, or NDBs, that are near me, but many of them were switched off in 2016. I haven't yet found a current list of which of the 213 remaining navigation aids that form part of the Backup Navigation Network across Australia are still on the air.

As it happens, there's currently some horrendous noise on HF with several new potential sources that I have not yet identified, a pool pump, a bank of solar panels, plasma TV, you name it.

Staying with aviation, I've briefly played with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, better known as ADS-B, or ADSB, on 1090 MHz. If you have a PlutoSDR, I updated the dump1090 program to use Open Street Map several years ago. You can find it on my VK6FLAB GitHub page. If you want to see some very interesting visualisations for ADSB, have a look at the adsb.exposed website.

Further up the frequencies are things like 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi. In a previous life, before I was an amateur, I played with Ku-band satellite frequencies in the range between 12 to 18 GHz, specifically DVB-S, or Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite.

While that's an impressive list of things, it leaves an awful lot of unexplored territory. For example, the local trains and public transit authority, the fire and emergency services, the volunteer bush fire brigades, water bombers and the like.

I've not even looked at local digital services like DVB-T, that's the terrestrial standard, or the local radio version, DAB+, or Digital Audio Broadcasting.

Then there's pagers, and countless marine services and channels, the ubiquitous CB frequencies and a couple of pirate ones, and global services like GPS, weather satellite and other Earth monitoring services.

Note that I'm specifically highlighting things that I can hear at my station, or more precisely, should be able to hear. I'm in the process of figuring out which particular tools I need to actually have a stab at hearing and decoding things like weather satellite.

I wouldn't be me if I didn't try this with my hands tied behind my back. I'm limiting myself to things I can hear using the antennas that I already have. I don't, well not at this stage, want to start building and installing more antennas, probably because in the not too distant future I plan to finally erect a replacement HF antenna, but that's a story for another day.

As for now, I'm plotting noise levels using a tool called rtl_power. I'm working on figuring out what extra noise has joined my environment. I'm also starting to make a concerted effort to document specifically what I've actually heard. Not so much a continuous log, more of a one-way log if you like, some might call it a shortwave listener log.

What RF sources have you heard in your shack and how many of them did you document?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The other day I had an interesting exchange with a contest manager and it's not the first time I've had this dance. As you might know, pretty much every weekend marks at least one on-air amateur radio contest. Following rules set out by a contest the aim is to make contact or a QSO with stations, taking note of each, in a process called logging.

Using logging software is one way to keep track of who you talked to, a piece of paper is another. If your station is expecting to make less than a dozen contacts per hour, paper is a perfectly valid way of keeping track, but it's likely that most contests expect you to transcribe your scribbles into electronic form. Which electronic form is normally explicitly stated in the rules for that contest.

While I mention rules, you should check the rules for each contest you participate in. Rules change regularly, sometimes significantly, often subtly with little edge cases captured in updated requirements.

On the software side, using electronic logging, even transcribing your paper log, can get you to unexpected results. I participated in a local contest and logged with a tool I've used before, xlog.

Contests often specify that you must submit logs using something like Cabrillo or ADIF. There are contests that provide a web page where you're expected to paste or manually enter your contacts in some specific format.

Using xlog I exported into each of the available formats, Cabrillo, ADIF, Tab Separated Values or TSV and a format I've never heard of, EDI. The format, according to a VHF Handbook I read, Electronic Data Interchange, was recommended by the IARU Region 1 during a meeting of the VHF/UHF/Microwave committee in Vienna in 1998 and later endorsed by the Executive Committee.

The contest I participated in asked for logs in Excel, Word, ASCII text or the output of electronic logging programs. Based on that I opened up the Cabrillo file and noticed that the export was gibberish. It had entries that bore no relation to the actual contest log entries, so I set about fixing them, one line at a time, to ensure that what I was submitting was actually a true reflection of my log.

So, issue number one is that xlog does not appear to export Cabrillo or ADIF properly. The TSV and EDI files appear, at least at first glance, to have the correct information, and the xlog internal file also contains the correct information. Much food for head-scratching. I'm running the latest version, so I'll dig in further when I have a moment.

In any case, I received a lovely email from the contest manager who apologised for not being able to open up my submitted log because they didn't have access to anything that could open up a Cabrillo file. We exchanged a few emails and I eventually sent a Comma Separated Values, or CSV file, and my log was accepted.

What I discovered was that their computer was "helping" in typical unhelpful "Clippy" style, by refusing to open up a Cabrillo file, claiming that it didn't have software installed that could read it.

Which brings me to issue number two.

All these files, Cabrillo, ADIF, TSV, CSV, EDI, even xlog's internal file are all text files. You can open them up in any text editor, on any platform, even Windows, which for reasons only the developers at Microsoft understand, refuses to open a text file if it has the wrong file extension. This "helpful" aspect of the platform is extended into their email service, "Outlook.com" previously called "Hotmail", which refuses to download "unknown" files, like the Cabrillo file with a ".cbr" extension.

With the demise of Windows Notepad, another annoying aspect has been removed, that of line-endings. To signify the end of a line MacOS, Windows and Linux have different ideas on how to indicate that a line of text has come to an end. In Windows-land, and DOS before it, use Carriage Return followed by Linefeed. Unix, including Linux and FreeBSD use Linefeed only; OS X also uses Linefeed, but cla