Foundations of Amateur Radio Podcast Por Onno (VK6FLAB) arte de portada

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio

De: 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 Ciencia Física
Episodios
  • Building a shack: Part 8 - Will it ever end?

    Building a shack: Part 8 - Will it ever end?
    Jan 31 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio

    Building a shack makes a number of assumptions about your situation and to make it abundantly clear, it's not the only way to enjoy the hobby of amateur radio. Visiting clubs locally and remotely, being a member of a club, visiting other amateurs, setting up your station in a suitcase or a backpack, on a bicycle, in a car, on a bus, or in a boat are some of the many other avenues open to you.

    That said, there is something magical about building your own shack. It has the ability to transform your hobby and if you have the opportunity, I can highly recommend it and I'd like to encourage you to consider the notion.

    As I've said previously, there is plenty of exploration and learning associated with putting one together. After you've spent some time reflecting, planning, designing, sourcing, building and testing the environment where you do amateur radio, you're likely to reach a point where you'll refer to that space as "your shack". You might even come to think of it as your shack, rather than a collection of trade offs that you've constructed in the best way you know how.

    Inevitably, you'll wonder what to do next.

    Several things come to mind. Creature comforts is probably the most obvious, a push to talk foot pedal, or a desk microphone, either on a stand or hanging from a boom, an audio mixer, a couch, a soldering station, a microwave oven, a fan, or air conditioning, in other words, plenty of opportunities for improvement and enhancement.

    Then there's computing, something that might interest you, or not. It offers the ability to explore a whole different side of amateur radio, from logging through to digital modes, from weak signal propagation to tracking satellites, the possibilities are endless.

    Your shack is also potentially a communal place where you can meet with your friends to share the experience.

    It's a place for contemplation, for relaxation, for "being" an amateur. All of it is open to you as possibility, an excuse to improve and enhance.

    The thing is, that too will come to a point of, let's call it "completion", and you're left with more questions.

    Amateur radio is inherently experimental in nature, that's the whole point of the pursuit. Your licence gave you access to the playground, your shack is that playground. Now it's up to you to play.

    Of course what playing looks like is unique to you. Over the past 15 years I've been describing what playing looks like to me, and from the over 3 million downloads last year from my website alone, not to mention the newsletters, rebroadcasts, podcast inclusions, other streaming services, news reports, social media and messages I've received, they've encouraged you to explore and investigate this wondrous activity.

    The point is, the shack you just completed isn't finished and hopefully it never will be. Whichever one it is, the first one, the one after that or the next one, your shack is a place where you can experiment, learn, discover, test, fail, succeed, challenge and enjoy the hobby of amateur radio. It's not the only place where you'll find this hobby, but it's your place.

    So, have at it.

    I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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    4 m
  • Building a shack: Part 7 - Powering your shack

    Building a shack: Part 7 - Powering your shack
    Jan 24 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio On your amateur radio journey, you'll likely discover that many transceivers run on 13.8 volt DC, give or take. For example my FT-857d requires 13.8 volt plus or minus 15 percent, with a negative ground, and a current draw of 22 ampere, more on that later. In other words, the power supply needs to be between about 11.7 and 15.9 volts, the same voltage that runs most vehicles with some wiggle room for fluctuating alternator charging cycles. While some radios will absolutely fit in your car, there's plenty where that just isn't the case, even though they're set-up for a 13.8 volt power supply. You might think of it as an anachronism, a few steps removed from spark gap transmitters, but there's more to the story. Most residential power grids run on AC power, at varying voltages and frequencies between 50 and 60 Hz. Across the world there's eight different AC voltages in use between 100 and 240 volts. Some countries use more than one combination and I haven't even looked at three phase power. Perhaps 13.8 volt DC isn't looking quite as odd. With this revelation comes the need to actually have 13.8 volt available in your shack. Converting your grid power to something you can plug your gear into requires some form of transformation, typically achieved with a power supply. Efficient, cheap and plentiful, the switch mode power supply is the most common. Built to a price, they're also often noisy, not just the fan, but noisy from a radio emissions perspective. Amateur radio has very sensitive receivers and as a result you can often hear, or see if you have a waterfall display, RF birdies, a sound reminiscent of a budgie whistling, every 100 kHz or so across the whole radio spectrum. Not something most other equipment cares about, so you're often left to fend for yourself in figuring out how to deal with this phenomenon. There's plenty of filtering techniques and circuits to be found and some of them even work, but for my money, I'd spend it on a power supply that doesn't make noise in the first place. A regulated power supply maintains a constant output voltage or current, regardless of variations in load or input voltage. An unregulated power supply can wander all over the place. Adjustable power supplies allow you to set the voltage, amperage, or both, sometimes with knobs, sometimes using external controls. At this point you might decide that this is all too hard and you want to do away with all this complexity and use a Sealed Lead Acid, or SLA battery, after all, that's what the 13.8 volt is based on, but then you'll need to charge it. Similarly, picking any battery technology requires some form of charging. Another word for charger is: power supply, often a switch mode one, and likely not filtered in any way that matters to you, since batteries, and for that matter solar power inverters, are unlikely to care about RF birdies. I will make mention of linear power supplies. When I started on this journey, this was the strong recommendation from my peers as the most desirable option. Although they're significantly less efficient than switch mode power supplies, only 30 percent versus better than 80 percent, from an RF perspective, they're extremely quiet. Of course, the lack of efficiency reveals itself in the form of heat, which necessitates the application of cooling, from a fan, often a very noisy fan. One potential source of power supply is a computer power supply unit or PSU. Before you go down that route, consider that they're intended for installation inside a case, often generate various voltages at very specific current draws and are not typically known for being RF quiet. After weighing up all the variables, I chose a laboratory grade switch mode current limiting adjustable power supply. It's set to 13.8 volt and it sits on my desk doing its thing. Rated at 1 to 15 volts at 40 ampere, it's now as old as I am in amateur radio terms, well and truly a teenager, it's also overkill, by quite a margin. Remember when I mentioned that my FT-857d is rated at drawing 22 ampere? As a QRP or low power station I typically use my transmitter set to 5 watt, but even when others use it at full power, I have never ever seen it draw more than 12 ampere. That's not to say that it can't draw 22, I've just never seen it. As a benefit of having such a massive overkill in the specifications of my power supply, I can power more than one radio and not notice. Not that they're all transmitting at the same time, or using more than 5 watt, it just doesn't matter. I previously discussed setting a standard for coax connectors in the shack, the same is true for deciding what to pick for power supply connectors. In my case I chose Anderson Powerpole connectors. Pins come in 15, 30 and 45 ampere ratings, are genderless and housings are available in many different colours. When I say genderless, it means that you can join two identical connectors. Within my shack, I use the RACES or ...
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    8 m
  • Building a shack: Part 6 - Noise

    Building a shack: Part 6 - Noise
    Jan 17 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio Noise la la la la la hinders if I were a rich man effective a noise annoys an oyster communication but a noisy noise annoys an oyster more. Or said differently, when you're trying to communicate, something that the hobby of amateur radio does in spades, you'll need to deal with a phenomenon called noise. This noise comes in different forms, but the effect is the erection of barriers to successful communication. We refer to the impact of noise as a signal to noise ratio or SNR, the signal being the desired information, the noise the undesired interference. Expressed in decibels so you can deal with a massive range using a small number, an SNR greater than 0 dB means that the signal is stronger than the noise. Building a shack requires that you consider noise in many forms. If you've been a radio amateur for a few moments, your mind is likely to head straight for the hiss, crackle and pop you might hear whilst attempting to communicate on HF, but there's a few other things to discuss. There's all sorts of electronic noise received by your radio. In addition, there's audio noise picked up by your ears, and often your microphone. Then there's the noise that you produce, either from your transmitter into the rest of the building, or from your mouth or speakers into the ears of the people you share the space with. Starting with audio, having a space that you can close the door on is a good way to limit the noise coming into and leaving your shack. An alternative is to wear headphones and generate text to speech, or prerecord your voice, ready for a contact, potentially ideal for contesting, not so much for free form discussion. Another consideration is audio from other radios, including those tuned to a local broadcaster, or aviation frequencies. In other words, if you're transmitting with a microphone, make sure that there's no other audio coming through. In some cases it's even illegal to transmit that audio, but in all cases it's noise that makes communication more difficult. This kind of audio noise mitigation is pretty straightforward. In stark contrast, achieving the same with electronic noise is pretty much a balancing act between budget and effectiveness. The impact of noise is inversely proportional to distance. Essentially, the closer it is, the more impact it has. With that in mind, when you start dealing with noise, start nearby and work your way out. As you eliminate the nearby noise, other sources will become apparent. Without turning this into a noise mitigation class, the process is essentially one of elimination. First locate the noise source, then eliminate it. That's easier said than done. For example, if the noise source is a power supply sitting on your bench, you can turn it off, except if that power supply is the one powering your radio, so perhaps I should say: "attempt to eliminate it" instead. There's plenty of ways to have a go at this and volumetric kilotons of content published on the subject, some of it even useful. In many, but not all cases, noise is an electrical phenomenon that enters via any means possible and you'll need to attempt noise mitigation at multiple points of entry. Obvious sources are the power supply, coax and the antenna connection, the speaker cable, the microphone lead, and if you're using a computer, the USB, serial or Ethernet cable and within the computer itself. Each requiring different approaches. The obvious one is to disable the noise, that is, turn off the offending device. As I said, that might not be an option, but you can replace noisy gear, or place it further away. There's isolation, using tools like ferrites and chokes to stop the noise from reaching your radio. Often in the form of a clip-on blob, you'll find these on things like monitor and USB cables. Place the ferrite as close as possible to the input of your radio. If it's loose on the cable, wind it through the ferrite, the tighter the better. There's software solutions with varying levels of effectiveness. You'll find DSP or Digital Signal Processing knobs and buttons on many radios. They're generally helpful for narrowband repeating noises, like the hum of an electric motor or power supply. There's tools that attempt to impose a noise on your signal that cancels out the noise, anti-noise, if you like, by receiving the noise, inverting it and adding it to your signal, thus, at least theoretically, eliminating it, noise minus noise is silence. This can take the form of a device for noise coming in from the antenna, but it also applies to things like noise cancelling speakers. In audio this is called active noise cancelling. There's also a new crop of noise cancelling software, using A.I. or Assumed Intelligence, that captures your signal, attempts to figure out what's noise and what's not, removes the noise and then feeds it back to you. Your Mileage May Vary and if you break it, you get to keep both parts. Consider your privacy and security...
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    8 m
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