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Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio

By: 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 - 2026 Onno Benschop Physics Science
Episodes
  • You don't need an excuse to make noise!

    You don't need an excuse to make noise!
    Apr 18 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio

    The other day I came across a post on mastodon.radio by Keith W6KME announcing the resumption of the Micro Field Day, spelled using the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet, Mu.

    This was news to me, since I didn't know they'd stopped, let alone existed at all. Being the curious type, I stopped to investigate and discovered an initiative that could, and in my not so humble opinion, should, be replicated all over the planet.

    Essentially an informal monthly gathering of amateurs with their portable set-up, ranging from hand-held radios through lightweight backpack gear suitable for SOTA or POTA, or Summits or Parks on the Air, to car portable stations where your vehicle acts as the carry mule and perhaps the base of your antenna.

    In other words, it's for anyone who brings along their radio to play or if you're not yet ready to do that, come and participate as you feel inclined.

    So, what of the resumption, you ask. It turns out that the activity became so popular locally that some parks required paid bookings and insurance, which is somewhat challenging if you're not actually an organisation.

    The closest I've ever come to a Micro Field Day is when we celebrated a milestone anniversary for the weekly F-troop net that has now been running for over 15 years.

    The Bored Net Group website has plenty of information about what they get up to during a Micro Field Day, Random Metal Objects On The Air, shared club activities, picnic lunches, and activations at local lakes, landmarks and other places of interest. I'd also like to make a point here about documenting your activities so the rest of the community can learn from your experience and the Micro Field Day isn't the only, or even the first activity that the group organised.

    Special mention to Zak N6PK who started hosting the BORED net four times a day during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in March 2020. You'll find the full story when you check out their site at theborednet.net for that and oodles more inspiration.

    While I'm perfectly happy sitting at home behind a computer reading research on the resource comparison between half a dozen algorithms for calculating a Fast Fourier Transform, that's not the only thing that amateur radio represents.

    When I started running F-troop there was no place for new and returning amateurs to gather and ask questions and share their experiences. Today the log shows at least one new callsign for each week we've been on-air, representing nearly a thousand amateurs who activated their transmitter and shared their experience.

    There is no organisation behind F-troop, it's a couple of amateurs who regularly turn up and participate to act as a welcoming voice into the diverse community that represents amateur radio.

    In other words, it started because I felt like it and it continues because people keep coming back.

    The Micro Field Day is exactly the same in that it was started to scratch an itch. I'm making this explicit because some amateurs appear to be under the impression that they'll need a local club or organisation to organise activities for them. I'm here to tell you that you can start such an activity with your friends. Ultimately, where do you think clubs come from?

    So .. what are you waiting for?

    Get on-air and make some noise!

    I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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    4 mins
  • What's in an S-unit?

    What's in an S-unit?
    Apr 11 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day fellow amateur Randall VK6WR raised an interesting question. Using his HP 8920A RF Communications Test Set, which you might recall from our adventures in measuring radio harmonic power in 2023, that report is on my Github repository, but I digress, Randall wondered if the signal strength he was seeing on several radios were the same and discovered that in fact they were not. It made Randall ask who set the standard and following on from that, what does this look like in the real world? In 2014, episode 149 of the series "What use is an f-call?", I published an article titled "The simple S-unit". In it I referred to a standard for S-units defined in 1981. Unfortunately, I didn't provide any references, so, armed with more than a decade extra experience, Randall encouraged me to investigate. Twenty seconds into my search, I discovered IARU Region 1 Technical Recommendation R.1, which has four statements related to the topic at hand. Under the title "STANDARDISATION OF S-METER READINGS" it states that: 1. One S-unit corresponds to a signal level difference of 6 dB, 2. On the bands below 30 MHz a meter deviation of S-9 corresponds to an available power of -73 dBm from a continuous wave signal generator connected to the receiver input terminals, 3. On the bands above 144 MHz this available power shall be -93 dBm, 4. The metering system shall be based on quasi-peak detection with an attack time of 10 msec +/- 2 msec and a decay time constant of at least 500 msec. So. Job done, right? Yeah, nah, not so much. The web page I quoted from is linked from the Wikipedia S-meter entry and was archived in 2005 and at the time existed on a Swedish domain in the home directory of Kjell SM7GVF. The page has two additional interesting things, the words "Brighton 1981" and "Torremolinos 1990", both of which refer to IARU conferences. The reports for these meetings are online. In searching for any reference to the definition of the S-unit, the 1990 report shows that resolution "83-1" had the status of "Action completed", whatever that means. The 1981 conference document has all manner of interesting references, including "Log Forms and Summaries for International Contest Use", "Meteor Scatter qso procedure" and the definition of the standard way to determine Morse Code speeds using the word "PARIS" followed by a 7 bit word space, to name three. The one we're interested in is called "BM/134 - S-Meter Standards", appearing on page 33 and 34 of the 1981 report. It's a photocopy, so you can see the text from other pages superimposed. I'm making this observation because this is essentially a standards document, intended to be adhered to by industry and the amateur community. It gets better, or rather .. worse. The text that is referenced by Wikipedia uses numbers for the four elements, where BM/134 uses letters. The third item in BM/134 says that it applies for "bands above 30 MHz", but the document I just quoted appears to be unique in saying that it applies to "bands above 144 MHz". The fourth item, dealing with the way that the meter responds has been altered on BM/134. The text "+/- 2 ms and a decay time" are in a different font and at an angle. Worth noting that the change includes "ms" twice, rather than "msec" as the unit for milliseconds used elsewhere. Searching for a phrase within the standard, I discovered the Region 1 HF Manager Handbook v7.01, which appears to include the S-meter standard in chapter 11.1.2, but closer inspection reveals that the fourth item is missing, the one about quasi-peak detection. This is significant because the S-meter standard is based on a CW signal, not an SSB signal, which fluctuates. There's no reference as to where or when this was removed or by whom. These changes are repeated in subsequent versions of the HF Managers Handbook. There's other differences too, instead of using millivolt and microvolt as shown in the original BM/134 standard table, all units have been converted to millivolt for no discernible reason. The new table, including typo, is also copied everywhere. While we're at it, the original standard contains the letters "V", "E", "R", "O", "N" at the top. They don't show in the HF Managers Handbook either. This is curious, since last time I checked, those letters signify an organisation that at least some here will recognise, the "Vereniging voor Experimenteel Radio Onderzoek in Nederland", known to the the people who don't speak fluent Dutch, as the peak body for amateur radio in the Netherlands, VERON. Searching its website does not reveal their contribution to this standards document, which I have to say, is par for the course, much of our amateur radio history is poorly documented or archived, if at all, something which I've spent plenty of my time attempting to remedy over more than a decade, one article at a time. Moving on. The phrase I mentioned earlier bears reading out in its entirety. From BM/...
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    11 mins
  • Where is the spark .. gap?

    Where is the spark .. gap?
    Apr 4 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio The thing I love most about this amazing hobby of amateur radio is the sheer size of the community and the depth of knowledge that comes with it. Case in point, the other day I mentioned the spark gap transmitter at Grimeton in Sweden. A few hours after releasing my comments into the void I received a message from Paul SA7CND who lives, wait for it, 153 km from the transmitter. He's been on-site while it was running, transmitting on 17.2 kHz. Paul pointed out that the Grimeton transmitter is not a spark gap transmitter at all. It's actually an Alexanderson alternator, an entirely different beast, and all the more interesting for it. Invented by Swedish electrical engineer and inventor, Ernst Frederick Werner Alexanderson, he received a patent for it in 1911 whilst working for General Electric. He died in 1975, aged 97 with 345 patents to his name. Before I dig in, because you know I will, the transmitter at Grimeton was officially opened on the 1st of December in 1924. Built to increase Swedish independence after World War I revealed its vulnerability to foreign controlled transatlantic telegraph cables. Serving as a telegraphy station capable of transmitting traffic across the Atlantic ocean the station was in regular service until 1996. Unlike its scrapped brethren, the Grimeton transmitter is currently operated several times a year as a functioning transmitter using the callsign SAQ. Announcements are made on the station mailing list and the website at grimeton.org, but generally on Alexanderson Day in July and Christmas Eve in December. You'll need to tune to 17.2 kHz, something you can do with a sound-card, or with an SDR. Sound-card you say? Yes. Not for audio, but for RF. Connect an antenna to the microphone centre-pin input and have at it. Note that this will likely be highly susceptible to noise, so filtering and experimentation are to be expected. There's several tools around to play with this, GNU Radio, Quisk, SuperSID and SAQrx. Also, there's plenty of other VLF, or Very Low Frequency stations to listen to. I should probably add this as a 51st thing to do with SDR, but I digress. Back to Grimeton. As the last remaining functional Alexanderson alternator transmitter, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004. You can visit and see first hand what radio history looks like. As I said, if you pick your day, you can even watch it working. Failing that, there's plenty of YouTube videos showing the entire process, it's an absolute monster. There's even an amateur radio shack on-site with the callsign SK6SAQ. The website says that it's open sporadically, so I'd recommend you contact them before heading to Grimeton. I'll note that at the time that this station was being commissioned in 1924, it was already being superseded by valve oscillators, which brings me to how it works. Depending on where you live, you're likely familiar with the 50 or 60 Hz alternating current associated with household electricity. In 1891, Irish experimental physicist Frederick Thomas Trouton pointed out that if you could run an alternator at high enough speed it would create an alternating current at radio frequencies, said differently, creating a continuous wave at radio frequencies. Much experimentation followed and many giant shoulders supported this effort. It goes a little like this. Use an electric motor designed to spin at 900 revolutions per minute. Connect it to a gearbox. Connect that to a rotor with multiple poles. Then run the motor with a clutch to vary the speed. If that's not enough, to produce high power, the clearances between rotor and stator have to be kept to a millimetre. Then there is cooling and lubrication to consider, not to mention dealing with thermal expansion and contraction of a fast spinning and closely toleranced disk. At Grimeton, the whole transmitter weighs in at 50 tonnes, pretty much the opposite of portable operation. The rotor at Grimeton is a 1.6 meter diameter disc with a 7.5 cm thick edge with 488 slots milled into it, each filled with brass. The motor at Grimeton runs at just over 711.3 revolutions per minute, the gearbox has a ratio of 2.973 and the whole contraption generates 17,200 Hz. If you get the sense that you're balancing an elephant on top of a needle, you're almost there, but if you consider that keying the transmitter changes the load and currents, it's more like an elephant being shoved by a train, balancing on top of a needle. At Grimeton, the motor is loaded by one of three liquid resistors, which each consist of a two metre high container filled with water and baking soda. The liquid level is controlled by separate pumps, varying the resistance. Whilst transmitting, a second liquid resistor is added, reducing the resistance to regulate the speed of the motor to maintain the overall speed and the associated frequency. The resistors generate heat which is fed through a heat exchange to the station's water ...
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    9 mins
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