The pursuit of amateur radio is a glorious thing. On the face of it you're forgiven if you think of it as a purely technical endeavour. Far be it for me to dissuade you from that notion, but permit me to expand into other areas that rarely get a mention when we discuss this amazing hobby.

It's the place where you go to communicate with other people, who live a different life, doing the things that they enjoy.

It's also the place for finding an excuse to go outside and set-up your station on the side of a mountain, or a park, a museum or a lighthouse.

Then there's the joy of finding new friends who introduce you to other aspects of life, super computing, the medical field, tow truck driving, radio astronomy and electronics, to name a few.

While I was the first person in my school to save up their summer job earnings to buy their own computer, a Commodore VIC-20, I never did come across this.

"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." is a phrase that might mean something to you, or not. To set the stage, it's the 1960's, you're a science fiction author and you need a ravenous predator. With origins in Danish and Norwegian, "grue", from gruesome, seemed to fit the bill for Jack Vance while was writing his Dying Earth series, mind you, Robert Louis Stevenson used it in 1916 in a short story called "The Waif Woman", writing "and a grue took hold upon her flesh", which is more gruesome than predator.

Flash forward to 1977, you're writing an adventure game for a PDP-10 mainframe computer whilst, let's call it studying, at MIT, and you need a way to stop people wandering off the map, and so the text adventure game "Zork" got its famous phrase.

I'm mentioning this because I wondered if anyone had used their love for Zork as an excuse to set-up a server on HF radio that you could play with.

I'll confess that I spent way too many hours looking at this and it appears that you can use the software "direwolf" as a way to get packet radio to work across amateur radio without needing anything more than a radio and a computer with a sound-card.

There's even an article by Rick Osgood titled: "How to Setup a Raspberry Pi Packet Radio Node with Zork", though I will mention that it relies on hardware to connect to a radio, rather than use "direwolf". There's a few moving parts, but it looks like this is totally doable, there's already Docker containers for both Zork and direwolf, even a container called "packet-zork", and a multi-user version called "MultiZork", so how hard can it be? I jest.

As an aside, because I'm a geek and I can, there's a common misconception that a Docker container is equivalent to a virtual machine. For lots of reasons, that's not true. A better way is to think of it as a security wrapper around an untrusted application.

Speaking of untrusted, while we're all essentially bipedal lifeforms with a similar set of attributes, on a daily basis we seem to discover more and more reasons to find fault or demonise differences. Contrast this within the global community of radio amateurs, where we have this "weird" activity that we all seem to share.

I think that the most under-reported, perhaps even undervalued aspect of our hobby is that it's an excuse to talk to someone else. It's like a force of attraction, the glue, the one starting point that you know another amateur has in common with you.

So, next time you venture outside, either in real life, or virtually, consider, at least for a moment, that there are other radio amateurs among us, also having fun.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The other day I came across an article written by programmer, artist, and game designer "blinry" with the intriguing title: "Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio". Documenting a weeks' worth of joyous wandering through the radio spectrum it explains in readily accessible terms how they used an RTL-SDR dongle to explore the myriad radio transmissions that surround us all day and every day.

As you might know, I've been a radio amateur since 2010 and I must confess, even with all the things I've done and documented here, there's plenty in this adventure guide that I've yet to attempt.

For example, when was the last time you decoded the various sub-carriers in an FM broadcast signal, including the pilot tone, the stereo signal, station meta and road traffic information?

Have you ever decoded the 433 MHz sensor signals that your neighbours might have installed, weather, security and other gadgets?

Or decoded shipping data, transmitted using AIS, or Automatic Identification System, and for context, we're only up to item 12 on the list.

One of the biggest takeaways for me was that this is something that is accessible to anyone, and is a family friendly introduction to the world of radio that amateurs already know and love.

The article touches on various applications that you might use to explore the highways and byways of the radio spectrum, including SDR++, SDRangel, WSJT-X, QSSTV, and even mentions GNU Radio.

With enough detail to whet the appetite, I learned that SDRangel, developed by Edouard F4EXB and 70 other contributors, has all manner of interesting decoders built-in, like ADS-B, Stereo FM, RDS, DAB, AIS, weather balloon telemetry, APRS, even VOR.

As it happens, you don't even need to install SDRangel to get going. Head on over to sdrangel.org and click on "websdr" and it'll launch right in your browser. Once you're up and running, you can use your RTL-SDR dongle to start your own small step into the wide world of radio, amateur or not.

Sadly the PlutoSDR does not work on the experimental web version, so I had to install SDRangel locally. That said, I did get it to run and connect to my PlutoSDR which worked out of the box.

The user tutorial is online and the Quick-Start walks you through the process of getting the software installed and running. One thing that eluded me for way too long is the notion of channel decoders.

Essentially you configure the receiver, in my case a PlutoSDR, and start it running. You'll be able to change frequency and see the waterfall display, but nothing else happens, and there's no obvious AM, FM or other mode buttons you'd find on a traditional radio.

Instead, you'll need to add a channel decoder, cunningly disguised as a triangle with circles at the corners with a little plus symbol at the top. You'll find it immediately to the left of your device name. When you click it, you're presented with a list of channel decoders, which you can add to the work space. This will do the work of actually decoding the signal that's coming into the software.

SDRangel also supports M17, FreeDV, RTTY, FT8 and plenty of other amateur modes, and includes the ability to transmit. Oh, did I mention, it can also connect to remote kiwisdr receivers?

I have to say, it's a joy to see software that I've previously looked at and admittedly shied away from, actually doing something with the radio spectrum around me. I will confess that SDRangel has a lot of moving parts and it's like sendmail, user friendly, just picky whom it makes friends with.

So, time to dig in, play around and bring it to the next amateur radio field day "Show and Tell" and share with the general public just how interesting the radio spectrum around us can be.

I'm going to work my way through the 50 items, just for giggles.

What are you waiting for?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The other day I went for a walk, I know, shock-horror, outside, daylight, nature, the whole thing, in a local national park, for the first time in too many years. Almost immediately I noticed that this would be an excellent location for an activation. If you're not familiar, it's an amateur radio excuse to set-up a portable station in a new location, in this case, potentially something called POTA, or Parks On The Air, but you don't need to find a formal activity with rules to get on air and make noise.

I commented on how easily accessible it was, that it had picnic tables, gazebos for shelter, nearby toilets, free BBQs, ample parking, lots of open space, and no overhead power lines. I saw one solar panel on a pole and no evidence of any other electrical noise sources.

It wasn't until later that I realised the act of noticing this, in that way, with those details, is not something I would have done before becoming a radio amateur. I'd have looked at the same location, considered its beauty and serenity and perhaps in passing considered that we could have a family gathering, or a place to come back to when I wanted some peace and quiet, or a place where I might have a BBQ with friends. Not that those things went away, just that I noticed other things, now that I'm an amateur.

It made me consider just how much this hobby has irrevocably changed me.

I know I've mentioned this before, since becoming an amateur I cannot walk down the street without noticing TV antennas pointing in the wrong direction, but this change in me is not limited to that. Now I cannot help discussing the best place to put a Wi-Fi base station in a building, or thinking about and checking on solar activity, wondering about battery capacity, RF interference, trees to potentially use as sky-hooks for wire antennas, power company substations, pole-top transformers, random weird and wonderful antennas and probably more.

The point being that this hobby opens the door to a whole new way of looking at the world and I don't think I've overstated, if I say that amateur radio has literally changed my world view.

In considering this, I suspect that it's related to a cognitive bias known as the Frequency Illusion, where you notice a specific concept, word or product more often after becoming aware of it.

You might for example have experienced this with the brand or model of radio you use and suddenly discovered that there's lots of other amateurs talking about that particular piece of equipment.

I've seen this with recurring topics during the past fourteen years of the weekly F-troop net. For example, every couple of years someone discovers magnetic loop antennas and starts talking about how they've built or bought one. The conversation inevitably goes past variable capacitors, through air variable capacitors, on to vacuum variable capacitors and then the conversation generally stops. While it's happening, multiple people come on the same journey, only to follow the exact same path. Several years later, the cycle repeats.

Don't misunderstand, I welcome the discussion, point people at relevant resources and help them on this journey.

I'm commenting on the recurrence of the journey, not the nature of it because it's easy to take this example and hold it up as "there's nothing new in this hobby", but nothing could be further from the truth.

In my opinion, the level of complexity associated with radio communications is infinite and anyone, including you and I, can contribute to the discovery associated with it.

So .. what things have you noticed that were caused by this somewhat eccentric hobby and perhaps the phenomenon of Frequency Illusion?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB