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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 - 2025 Onno Benschop Physics Science
Episodes
  • I have a problem .. with logging.

    I have a problem .. with logging.
    Nov 29 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio The first step in solving any problem is recognising that there is one. In my case the name of that problem is "logging". Specifically the storage and collection of my amateur radio contact logs. Just to be clear, the actual process of logging is fraught .. what do you log, as in, which pieces of information are germane to the purpose of logging, do you log your own callsign, or do you only collect that once per session, do you log in UTC, or in local time, if you're logging in local time, do you record where you're logging, do you record what power level, which antenna, what radio, the battery voltage, you get the idea. Then there's .. when do you log? Do you log each and every session on-air, weekly nets, chat sessions on the local repeater, do you log the time when you establish the contact, once you've deciphered their callsign, or once the contact ends, and if you never wear a watch, how do you know what time it is? What do you log with? Is it using pen and paper, pencil and paper, on a sheet of A4, or A5, in a binder, in a scrapbook, in an exercise book, in a journal, a diary, on ruled, grid or on plain paper, or do you log with a computer and if you do that, using which of the seven gazillion logging packages that are available to you? I'm not talking about any of those things, though I suppose you could argue that I'm addressing one of the gazillion options, but stick with me. I have, sitting on my desk, fourteen different logbooks. That's not unreasonable, almost one for each year that I've been licensed. Except that these books are not in any way consistent, they're essentially bound pieces of scrap paper with log entries scribbled in the available space, sometimes I've reversed a spiral notebook, just so I can avoid the spiral with my writing hand, sometimes it's oriented in landscape, other times in portrait. Some are smaller than A5, others are foolscap and intended for accounting purposes. Next to that pile are too many empty logbooks, intended for future use. Why so many, you ask? Well it goes like this. You go to the office supply store to look for a suitable logbook. You buy it and try it. You use it for a bit and decide that you either love or hate it. If you hate it, you go back to the store to try and find another one. If you love it, your problem becomes finding an identical logbook. In a fit of inspiration, I loved the grid layout of my tiny spiral notebooks, and decided that this was the one for me, but they're no longer available, so instead I bought twenty A4 7mm grid exercise books with a soft cover, which I hate, and that was after trying to get a third Account Book Journal with a hard cover. There's also several A5 spiral bound books, but they're too chunky for portable operation and their spiral is annoying for logging. There's also various empty ring binders and paper ready for logging in the garage. Who knew that there are apparently multiple disconnected universes where so-called universal loose-leaf hole punched paper doesn't fit ring binders with more than two rings, I suppose that's like different implementations of the same version of ADIF, but I'll admit that I'm bitter and have digressed well off topic. I will say this, stationery and I clearly have an unhealed relationship. That's not the half of it. My computer has at least 208 ADIF and Cabrillo files on it. I say "at least", since that's the ones I found when looking for ADI, ADIF and CAB files. Removing identical files, nets me 171 text files which I'm pretty sure are all log files, 50-thousand lines, but that's with some having a one line per contact and others having a dozen, depending on which software wrote the file. It's going to take a moment, since those 208 files are scattered among 74 different directories. Then there's the files that "wsjt-x" and "fldigi" create, but right now I'm not sure what the extensions for those are, I think one is called "all.txt", and looking inside, it helpfully does not have a year in the logged data, so that's fun. My computer also has logs in "cqrlog", "xlog" and "VKCL", probably others. Then there's the logs I have online. The log for F-troop is a single spreadsheet, it has nearly 10,000 entries. I know that there's other files online and likely in other places like the various clubs I've operated at .. fortunately or not, most of those were done with the club callsign, so I'm calling those out of scope, at least for now. Then there's the entries in LoTW, Clublog, eQSL, probably QRZ and likely more. It all started out so innocently. I made my first contact in 2011 and forgot to log it. Since then I've been extolling the virtues of making sure that everyone around me logs their first contact. Meanwhile I've been pulling my hair out trying to make sense of the fragmented disaster that is represented by logging in amateur radio. I'll take responsibility for my own mess, but I have to point the finger at my predecessors who still ...
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    9 mins
  • 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 ...
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    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...
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    7 mins
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