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

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