Foundations of Amateur Radio Podcast By Onno (VK6FLAB) cover art

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio

By: Onno (VK6FLAB)
Listen for free

Get 3 months for $0.99 a month + $20 Audible credit
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 Physics Science
Episodes
  • 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 ...
    Show more Show less
    7 mins
  • A new year with new services to the public .. in 1905

    A new year with new services to the public .. in 1905
    Nov 15 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I spent some quality time digging into the origins of a word in common use. In doing so, I contacted the Postal Museum in the United Kingdom and received a lovely reply that included a photo of a document in their archive. The document, a Post Office Circular from Friday, December 30, 1904, number 1641, introduces a new service offered by the Post Office. Let me read to you what it says, and I quote: "Telegrams to and from Ships by Wireless Telegraphy. "(To be noted at Telegraph Offices only.) "With the present Circular is enclosed a list showing the wireless telegraph stations in the United Kingdom worked on the Marconi Company's system, and the hours up to which telegrams can be received at those stations for transmission by wireless telegraphy to certain ships fitted with Marconi apparatus. By another notice in this Circular, Postmasters and others concerned are requested to enter the names of the stations in the Code Book with the necessary particulars. Ships will be issued for insertion in the Post Office Guide. "On and from the 1st January, 1905, Telegrams may be accepted from the public on the following conditions:- "Subject to the Inland Regulations with regard to counting, the charge, which must be prepaid in the usual way by means of stamps, will be at the rate of 6 1/2d. [six-and-a-half pence] a word, with a minimum of 6s. 6d. [six-and-a-half shillings] per telegram. "The name of the wireless station will in each case pass as one word in the address. "The word 'Radio,' which is not charged for, should be telegraphed in the Service Instructions." When I read that, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The introduction of a Wireless Telegram service, under the service heading of "Radio", with a photo of the actual document that introduced it into the world. I also learned that there's a dozen pennies in a shilling and over the years before decimalisation in 1971, the composition of coins changed, which made converting this into today's money interesting. As an aside, the Royal Society has a wonderful article: "The science of money: Isaac Newton's mastering of the Mint" Back to radio, this is 1904 bleeding edge technology and it's priced accordingly. The starting price for a radio telegram on new years day 1905: six bob and six; or three florin and sixpence; or a crown, a bob and a tanner; is worth just over 34 Great British Pounds today, that's just on 45 US Dollars, or nearly 69 Australian Dollars. That's the minimum price. The price per word, sixpence and halfpenny [sixpence hayp-ny] is just over 2 Great British Pounds today, nearly 4 US Dollars or almost 6 Australian Dollars. Compare that to the price of SMS, which started at about 21 cents here in Australia, today it's about 3 cents per message of 160 characters. This seems like a lucrative business to be in, but I digress, again. From my current, and ongoing research, it appears that until this point, the early 1900's, the word "radio" was always accompanied by another word, for example in this context, "radio telegraphy", another combination of the day is "radio active", as well as "radio tellurium", which today we know as polonium. Moving on, the response I received from the Postal Museum included other gems, including a reference to the "1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act", from the 15th of August, 1904, where I found something fascinating, from Section 2 paragraph 1: "Where the applicant for a licence proves to the satisfaction of the Postmaster-General that the sole object of obtaining the license is to enable him to conduct experiments in wireless telegraphy, a license for that purpose shall be granted, subject to such special terms, conditions and restrictions as the Postmaster-General may think proper, but shall not be subject to any rent or royalty." I think that's the birth of amateur radio licensing in the United Kingdom, right there. As an aside, because I cannot help myself, the definition for the expression "wireless telegraphy", is pretty interesting too, reminding me of a quote, variations going back to at least 1866, incorrectly attributed to Einstein that goes something like this: You see, wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, and they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. Seems that the drafters of the "1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act" had the same thing in mind when they wrote: "The expression 'wireless telegraphy' means any system of communication by telegraph as defined in the Telegraph Acts, 1863 to 1904, without the aid of any wire connecting the points from and at which the messages or other communications are sent and received" Now, as I said, I'm still working on this, because the word "radio" as a concept had to have been conceived before the Post Office...
    Show more Show less
    7 mins
  • What do you call that .. radio?

    What do you call that .. radio?
    Nov 8 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio If you use a word often enough it starts to lose its meaning. The other day, during breakfast, well, coffee, whilst playing one of our start-the-day with a smile word games, the word "RADIO" turned up. I grinned and pointed out that this was my favourite word, to which my partner mentioned that in Italian, it's referred to as "La Radio", which made us both wonder where it actually came from, did the Italian language import the word, or export it, given that Guglielmo Marconi was Italian? A quick search advised us that it came from Latin, radius, meaning "spoke of a wheel", "beam of light" or "ray". Fully enlightened we finished our coffee and got on with our day .. except I couldn't stop thinking about this. Having recently spent some quality time looking into the history of the RF Circulator, I figured searching the patent records might be a solid way to get some handle on where this word "radio" came from. Initially Google Patent search unearths the oldest as being from 1996, not very helpful. Adding 1900 as the end date filter turns up a radio cabinet patent with a filing date of 1833, except that it was published and granted in 1931, which is confirmed by the patent itself. This level of corruption in the data affects at least a dozen patents, but I daresay that there's plenty more like that. 1857 turns up a patent with the word "broadcasting", in the context of "broadcasting guano", so, nothing much has changed in nearly 170 years, but I digress. Adding quotes to the search term unearths a patent from 1861, apparently iron roads, locomotives, large slopes and small radio curves relates to the other meaning of the word radius, in Spanish. 1863 gives us ruffle stitching, "made upon the radio", but the patent is so corrupt that it's pretty much unreadable. 1871 unearths an electromagnetic engine, but the text has so much gibberish that I suspect that the word "radio" is a happy accident. 1873 shows us a "Wireless signalling system", bingo, the patent shows us transmitter and receiver circuits, antennas, messages and frequencies and a whole bunch of relevant radio information, except that the date on the patent itself is 1919. And you wonder why people argue about who invented what when? I'll spare you the gas apparatus, petrol lamps with cigar cutter, running gear for vehicles and bounce to 1897, "Method of and apparatus for converting x-rays into light for photographic purposes", the first occurrence of "radio", in the form of "radiograph", complete with pictures of the bones of a hand drawn meticulously from presumably an x-ray. I confess I'm not convinced. Using the United States Patent and Trademark Office search for the word radio gives you 54,688 pages with 2.7 million records, ordered in reverse chronological order with no way to skip to the last page. The World Intellectual Property Organisation finds the same Spanish iron paths patents, but unearths "A Differential Arrangement for Radio Controlled Race Cars" from 1900, but inside we discover it's really from 1979. Seems this level of corruption is endemic in the patent field, wonder who's benefiting from this misinformation? Meanwhile, still looking, I discovered the Oxford English Dictionary, which claims that the earliest known use of the word "radio" is in the 1900's, but the earliest evidence is from 1907 in a writing by "L. De Forest", but you are granted the privilege of paying them to actually see that evidence .. really? On 18 July 1907, Lee de Forest, made the first ship-to-shore transmissions by radiotelephone, which adds some credence to the claim, but I have to tell you, I'm not particularly convinced. Taking a different approach, starting at Guglielmo Marconi, his first efforts in 1894 showed the wireless activation of a bell on the other side of the room. Six months later he managed to cross 3 kilometres realising that this could become capable of longer distances. The Italian Ministry of Post and Telegraphs didn't respond to his application for funding, so in 1896, at the age of 21, moving to Great Britain, he arrived in Dover where the customs officer opened his case to find various apparatus, which were destroyed because they could be a bomb. Lodging a patent "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor", was the first patent for a communication system on radio waves. It was granted a year later. One problem. It doesn't have the word "radio" in it, instead it talks about "a Hertz radiator", so close. So, we've narrowed it down to somewhere between 1896 and 1907, that's an 11 year window. Some observations. De Forest founded a company called "the Radio Telephone And Telegraph Company". It's unclear exactly when this happened, it collapsed in 1909 and was founded after disagreement with management of his previous company, apparently on 28 November 1906. A quick aside, apparently in 1881, Alexander Graham Bell used the word ...
    Show more Show less
    8 mins
No reviews yet