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 5 - Antenna Shenanigans

    Building a shack: Part 5 - Antenna Shenanigans
    Jan 10 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio Putting your station together is best described as a juggling act, since you'll discover that everything depends on everything else and the more you plan, the more you learn and the more variables become apparent, none more so than with the selection of an antenna. Antennas are endlessly variable. To give you a taste, imagine a loop of wire, shaped like a circle. As you stretch the circle, it becomes an oval, if you pull on four corners, it's a square, pull it tight between two points and it more or less becomes a single wire. In other words, one piece of wire can essentially make an infinite number of antennas, and we haven't even varied the material, length, thickness or coating. So, to discuss antennas is to embark on a lifelong journey of exploration and me telling you to get one over another is not going to help, instead I'd like to discuss some considerations that you might not have encountered. The obvious issue of space is generally the first consideration. Then there's the neighbours and their sense of aesthetics, or lack thereof. There's local laws to abide by and sometimes permissions and permit requirements, though in many cases it seems that seeking forgiveness is a quicker route to success. Your Mileage May Vary. Talk to your local amateur club. There's the property owner to consider. If that's you, great, drill away, if not, you will need to tailor your antenna selection to the amount of renovations required. If you live in a restricted location where there are all manner of rules about the things that you cannot do, you might need to think carefully about your options. Stealthy antennas are a thing. As I've said previously, inside your roof might be an option, but there are others. Some examples to consider. If there's a TV aerial on your roof, will that look similar to a 70cm Yagi, or could it hide a 2m vertical? Do you have a metal gutter which might act as an antenna, or could you use Christmas light clips to hang a wire antenna from your gutters? Could you hide a vertical in a plastic down-pipe? Could you dangle a ladder-line antenna out a window at night, or use thin wire to hold up your plants while hiding your antenna in the garden, or can you use a beverage antenna that's lying on the ground, or hidden under the fence capping? Could you tune up your fence for that matter? In other ways to make your hobby look invisible in plain sight, could you use an antenna that looks like a roof vent, or if you're into moon bounce, could you repurpose a satellite dish? Could you make your outdoor washing line into an antenna or add a flagpole vertical antenna that also happens to soothe your vexillology sensibilities? While we're talking stealth, you can paint your antenna to match the decor. To get your antenna up in the air, could you use a length of wood, a pool cleaning or painters pole, strapped to your pergola, gazebo, balcony railing, or some other existing structure? Can you use the edging of a shade sail, professionally installed, it comes complete with mounting points. It doesn't stop there, I've heard of several amateurs who managed to park a sailboat, with the mast up, in their driveway without ever once floating it in a nearby body of water. Of course this is not exhaustive, nor is it meant to be, it's really a trigger to think about some options you might not have discovered. In other words, if you need stealth, you can be creative, rather than buy an antenna off the shelf. Speaking of buying off the shelf, there's nothing quite like buying a wonderful antenna, the answer to all your questions, only to discover that it needs tuning and tweaking, to the point where you might spend a year getting familiar with all its quirks. That's not to discourage you from picking that path, just to warn you that there is no such thing as the perfect antenna. If you are less space restricted, building a tower or a mast, the difference being that a tower stands all by itself, like the one in Paris, a mast needs guy-wires to keep it up. You'll likely need to consider failure, engineering standards and concrete, not to mention maintenance. So, how do you go about selecting the perfect antenna to suit your needs? In the same way that a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat. In other words, there's a trick. It's pretty simple, start small. With that I mean, start with a simple wire antenna. It will achieve a number of things that only experience will give you. For starters, it will prove that your shack works. As-in, end-to-end. That might not sound like a big deal, but there are many different moving parts in building a successful shack, making your first contact is going to be a milestone worth logging, more on that another day. While making your first contact is momentous, getting an antenna in the air will also allow you to hear what your neighbourhood sounds like. Is it completely RF quiet, in which case, where do you live and do you have a spare ...
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    6 m
  • Building a shack: Part 4 - coaxial cable alternatives

    Building a shack: Part 4 - coaxial cable alternatives
    Jan 3 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio When you start the process of getting your hobby off the ground, either for the first time, or after a hiatus, you might be left with the impression that the only way to "do amateur radio" is to have a shack, a place where you can set-up your gear, and connected to that gear using coax, one or more antennas. While that's a common scenario, it's not the only one at your disposal. We are after all in the game of communication and over the past few decades options have exploded. Starting closest to the traditional radio, coax and antenna, is to consider indoor antennas. There's many to choose from. You can install one in the same room as your shack, or, you can build your antennas in the roof space, either way, invisible from the outside can sometimes be a requirement. Stealth is a topic all its own, and no doubt we'll get to that another time. A word of caution. If you do have an indoor antenna and associated coax, consider your transmitter power levels, since it's likely that given the close proximity, you'll exceed emissions safety standards, or you'll cause harm to other electronic equipment in the building. QRP or low power is a good way to go if this is something you're considering. If we step away from a traditional radio, coax, antenna configuration, you can build your shack in other ways too. For example, you can use a local repeater which you might trigger from a local handheld radio. Often dismissed as being for local communications only, there are thousands of repeaters across the globe offering a variety of bands, frequencies and modes. Often you can access a local repeater that can be connected to a remote one using a bewildering array of technologies, some using the internet, some using traditional RF. You'll find repeaters on 10m, 6m, 2m, 70cm and 23cm. There's nothing stopping you making your own repeater. You don't even need to go through the effort of making it completely standalone, for example, my Yaesu FT-857d has a detachable face-plate or head, connected to the main body by a short cable. There are plenty of other radios with a similar configuration. Presumably designed for the installation in a vehicle, where the head needs to be near the driver and there's unlikely to be space for the body, you can run a longer cable from the head to the body and install it somewhere more convenient. In my case it was bolted underneath the removable floor into the boot next to the spare tyre. There's several solutions that replace the connecting cable with an internet connection. Now, that internet connection can be across the room, from inside your shack to your garage, or between your shack and a remote hill where you have permission to put up a bit of gear. In fact, the same type of setup can be used to connect to shared radios, and companies like Elecraft, Flex Radio and ICOM make specific remote heads that can operate remote radio equipment, marketed as RF decks, without needing to install and maintain computers at either end, but more often than not, this equipment is brand or model specific. Which raises another option. You can connect to remote equipment across the internet using your computer, which means that your shack might be a computer, a laptop, or a mobile phone and your gear might be in a different country. Many radio clubs have discovered that their often extensive radio shack is virtually unused during the week, and have installed remote equipment to allow you as a member to connect, sometimes as part of your membership, sometimes with an extra fee, since there are costs associated with setting this up and keeping it running. At some point you're going to discuss this with other amateurs and you're potentially going to hear someone tell you that this is not "real radio". Considering over a century of radio evolution, from spark-gap through valves, transistors, integrated circuits and software defined radio, where exactly is the "real radio" line drawn? Is using WSPR, RTTY, FT8, Hellschreiber, Olivia, SSTV, PSK31, Domino, MFSK and thousands of other digital modes "real radio"? If the answer to that is an emphatic "yes", then ask yourself, how do you actually use those modes? The answer looks suspiciously like a computer running digital mode software, either connected to a physical radio in the same room, or connected to one across the internet. In other words, with the proliferation of communication alternatives, amateur radio is evolving. No doubt it will evolve further. So, today, a perfectly viable, and some might say, modern, amateur radio shack might not actually have any traditional RF based radio gear, though perhaps a hand-held might be something to consider when you next treat yourself, not because without it you're not a real amateur, but because it opens your world to other means of communication, something which I think is perhaps even more important than building the perfect shack. In other words, you are not required ...
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    6 m
  • Building a shack: Part 3 - the ingress of coaxial cable

    Building a shack: Part 3 - the ingress of coaxial cable
    Dec 27 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the potentially trickier aspects of putting together your shack is connecting the radio to the antenna. On the face of it, the challenge is limited to making sure that you have mating connectors on both ends, but when you actually start implementing this you'll run into several other considerations. The very first one as I said is the connector. Every amateur I've ever spoken to goes through the same process. You pick a connector, typically the one that your radio comes with, then you adapt the connector on your coaxial cable to suit, then you'll get an SWR meter, a dummy load, some testing gear, a coax switch or two, perhaps another radio, or an amplifier and along the way you'll discover that you now have a growing collection of connectors to choose from, and that's just the connectors inside the shack. After considering connectors, you'll start to contemplate the coax itself. You'll likely weigh price against signal loss, but there are other aspects to the selection of the right coax for the job. For example, how do you get the coax actually into the shack? One of the main challenges associated with solving that problem is surprisingly something that rarely affects our hobby, other than any human factors associated with the phenomenon of "weather". Getting coax into a shack generally involves passing through a weather proof barrier of some sort. In doing so, you're likely to create a place where the weather can make its way into places it's not supposed to. Water can and will travel along your coax. Hopefully on the outside of it, but if you're unlucky, on the inside too, likely destroying it along the way. At first glance you'll think that water only travels down with gravity and in an ideal world you'd be right, but as it happens, water will happily do other things like get blown by the wind, or condensate in temperature gradients, like those found near a hole you just created in your lovely weather proof barrier. If your shack has existing openings, they're generally the easiest to appropriate, things like gaps in the eves, existing vent holes, between roof tiles or sheet iron, plenty of existing places where you can get from inside to outside a shack. Note that this is also the case if your shack is a trestle table tucked away in an office, like mine. Before I continue, I'm about to raise some potential safety issues, but I'm not an occupational health and safety professional, so, do your own due diligence. If you do need to go into your roof space, height aside, consider it a dangerous place. Make sure that there's someone to check on you and consider alternatives to climbing up there. Wearing a face mask and full body clothing is a very good idea. Often you'll find exposed wires, deteriorating or toxic insulation and other nasty things, conductivity of steel roof frames and pipes are also a hazard, so be extremely reluctant to venture there. Avoidance is preferable. Working at heights 101: Don't .. that said, there may be no alternative. You can lift corrugated iron sheets by undoing the roofing screws. If you do, make absolutely sure that you don't make a string of water inlet points when you put it all back together. In lifting a sheet, you can access the roof space and run your coax. Sometimes the gap between the corrugation and the rafters is sufficient to push the coax through, but if you live in a hot climate, make sure that it doesn't touch the sheeting, since coax is likely to distort, if not outright melt, if it's in direct contact with the iron sheet while the sun is belting down on it. Consider the temperature rating of your coax. Similarly, terracotta roof tiles tend to have enough space to allow coax to enter the roof space. Be very careful, since they're often fragile and potentially irreplaceable. Look for openings like existing roof fittings, things like chimneys, vent pipes, roof ridges, etc. for simpler points of entry. If you need to make a hole in your roof and seal it, there's special rubber grommets for this purpose. You cut a little opening in the grommet, too tight for the coax, then force it through. Seal to the roof with UV-stable silicone and you're good to go. Check them every so many years, they deteriorate. Speaking of silicone, if there's an existing hole that you're using, don't just seal it up, it might be there for a reason. Windows often have vent holes or gaps that will fit some types of coax and there's inserts you can use to open a sliding window that will accommodate coax, but consider the security of that window before you commit. There's also special flat coax for running through a window frame or under a door, but check before you buy that they're suitable for the job. Ladder line is also an option, it's much thinner, can travel longer distances, but its performance can be affected by corrugated iron and other conductors. Rarely if ever does the initial acquisition of coaxial cable involve details ...
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    10 m
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