The story goes that the name of our hobby, at least in some parts of the world, ham radio, stems from the notion that we as a community were perceived as being ham-fisted in our ability to operate a Morse key. We apparently claimed that slur and made it our own. I've never actually been able to verify this narrative, but it goes to the heart of what it is to be part of the hobby of amateur radio, as opposed to Professional radio, which is what I once heard someone refer to themselves as.

This notion that we are playing outside our sandbox, that we're doing something less than real, that we're somehow not whole as a result is absurd, especially in the context of how we are an integral part of how spectrum is allocated around the globe. It's fun to remember that playing outside the box, trialling things, exploring, inventing and learning, is the reason we're here.

The whole thing is incremental, much like learning to walk, sometimes you fall flat on your face, yet here you are perambulating like a champ. As an aside, did you know that how you get up off the floor is pretty much how you learnt to do it as a toddler, it might not be the most efficient, but it's how you do it. Speaking of falling down, making mistakes on-air is part and parcel of being an amateur. There's no protocol police, nobody to issue a fine if you make a mistake, just dust yourself off and try again.

The urge to optimise pervades our hobby. We optimise our antennas, our gear, the time and band we choose to communicate on, the modes we use, the places we operate from, even how we participate in contests, all of it is a cycle of optimisation.

During contests I've regularly attempted to flex my imagination to optimise my activities. For example, the VK Shires contest rewards you for combinations of shires, so, I created a map of all the shires, then looked for places to activate, preferably on or near borders, so I could change shire with minimal effort. There are contests that reward different maidenhead locators, so I set about finding spots where you could activate four at once. By the way, a maidenhead locator is an amateur radio geo-locator which I'll dig into some other time. Contesters regularly use multiple radios to optimise their ability to talk to stations that double their points, so-called multipliers.

Over the years I've come across many different excuses for getting on-air and making noise. Popular activities like Parks On The Air, or POTA, Summits On The Air or SOTA, and plenty of others are all programs that aim to get you out of your shack, set up your station at a particular location and make contact with anyone and everyone. On occasion you'll hear a station combining activities, doing both a POTA and a SOTA activation because the summit is inside the boundaries of a national park.

Ian M0TRT took this idea to a whole new level. He wondered if you could qualify for multiple programs simultaneously and if so, how many. Gathering data from Summits, Parks, Islands, Beaches and Bunkers on the Air, together with UK Castle and Lighthouse awards and adding World Wide Flora and Fauna or WWFF, eight programs in all, he set about exploring. For some programs like Castles, Lighthouses and Bunkers you need to be within 1 km of the entity and summits need to be activated within 25 meters altitude from the peak. For other programs, beaches, parks and islands plenty of extra work was needed. Ian's code is available on GitHub, in the "weeaaoa" or "Worked Everything Everywhere All At Once Award" repository.

If you have time to head out to the beach just east of Devil's Point near Plymouth you'll be able to activate 21 different programs at the same time. The Maidenhead locator is IO70WI06.

As with any outdoor amateur radio activity, take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints and kill nothing but time. Be mindful of creating obstacles and trip hazards for your fellow humans and be prepared to have a park ranger turn up as soon as you sit down.

Oh, and if you think that's not in the spirit of amateur radio, you haven't been paying attention.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

One of my recurring, you might call it, regrets, but probably not quite that strong, is that I often find myself discovering that an amateur radio contest came and went, or worse, I found out on the day, preferably at midnight UTC when many contests start, which happens to be 8 am Saturday morning where I live, right when my weekly radio net for new and returning amateurs, F-troop, begins.

Often by that time I already have plans for the weekend and now I know I'm missing out on some or other activity that might encourage me to go outside and get fresh air whilst playing radio.

Don't get me wrong, it's my own responsibility to manage my time, but that doesn't explain what's going on, so I started exploring what might be causing this. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard, there's pretty much a contest on every weekend, so I could sort out my radio and get on-air to make noise at any point of any day. That this doesn't happen can only partially be explained by the state of my shack, which I have yet to get working the way I want, but it doesn't explain everything.

I'm subscribed to several contest calendars. The most prominent of these is one maintained by Bruce WA7BNM. The contestcalendar.com website is a great place to start. Another is the personal site of prolific contester and contest manager, Alan VK4SN. Both sites offer a calendar feed file that you can subscribe to.

So, subscribe to the calendar, job done, right?

Unfortunately not. As it happens, for several years I have in fact subscribed to both those calendars. I even shared these with my partner, which results in a fun exchange at the breakfast table that goes something like this: "Hey, do you need the car on Saturday?" "Why?" "Well there's an amateur contest on."

So, my partner is often more aware of contests than I am and supposedly I'm the amateur in this household.

It occurs to me that I need an alert to point at an upcoming contest. Preferably one that I can configure that's specific to me. I don't tend to look that far into the future, I have plenty of stuff that needs to happen today without worrying about next month.

I started exploring what I might do about this. Be the change you want to see, so I contacted Bruce and asked what views he might hold on the addition of an alarm in the calendar file he publishes. I also asked if there was a way to configure what contests are visible in that file.

Whilst hunting through his site, I discovered that there's plenty of Australian contests not on the site, so I created a list of contests I know about that I thought should be on the calendar.

I might point out that Bruce's job isn't easy. Trying to get information out of contest managers can sometimes be like powering a spark-gap transmitter using a pushbike.

Here's an example of one contest that has an algorithm to determine when the next contest is, I kid you not. There's a Winter, Spring and Summer version of this contest, for Winter, when the June solstice is on a weekday (Monday through Friday), the weekend following shall be the weekend of the event, if not, that weekend shall be the weekend of the event. The Spring and Summer versions are even more involved, counting forwards or backwards four weekends from the December solstice. It helpfully includes a link to the solstice dates for this century, because really, that's how the dates are determined.

If I'm feeling particularly sparky, I might even make a calculator, since the contest manager for that contest hasn't announced the dates for the next contest, though my previous experiences whilst attempting to calculate moon bounce windows using the Python Astropy package was challenging. I did find PyEphym which has several solstice and equinox functions.

So, now all I need to do is make my shack work as I want it, bolt a radio back in my car, win lotto and something else, I forget what.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Over the past week I've been attempting to work out what the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, actually does and how it works. I started looking into this because the IARU is this year celebrating a century since its foundation in 1925. You might think of the IARU as one organisation, but behind the scenes there are actually four, one for each so-called "Region" as well a Global organisation called the International Secretariat, headquartered at the ARRL in Connecticut.

The Regions have been negotiated by members of the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union. As early as 1927 the ITU documented differences in frequency allocations between Europe and Other Regions. In Cairo in 1938 it defined boundaries for Europe. In Atlantic City in 1947, the ITU defined three Regions, with specific boundaries, essentially, Europe and Africa, the Americas and the rest of the world.

As a surprise to nobody, this is purely a political decision, especially since radio waves don't get to have a passport and pass border control. The impact of this continues today, generations later. We still have this patchwork of frequency allocations, we still have exclusions, different band-edges and other anachronisms.

The Regions are further divided into Zones. When you start looking at the ITU zone map in detail it gets weird. For example, Iraq is in Region 1, neighbouring Iran has been specifically excluded from Region 1 and moved to Region 3. In case you're curious, Iran has been represented at the ITU since 1938.

Antarctica is part of seven of the 90 ITU zones and all three Regions, because of course it is.

Zone 90, jammed between zones 35, 45, 61, 64, 65 and 76, almost as an afterthought, contains one landmass, Minamitorishima, an island that sticks 9 m above the water, has a 6 km coastline and is generally off-limits to the general public. The nearest land in any direction is over 1,000 km away. It's got an IOTA, Islands On The Air, designation, OC-073 and despite its isolation, has been activated by radio amateurs using JD1 prefix callsigns.

I live in Australia, ITU zone 58, part of Region 3, together with the two most populous countries on the planet, India and China and the rest of eastern Asia, but not the Former Soviet republics and most, but not all of Oceania, you know, because .. logic. From a population perspective Region 3 is the largest by several orders of magnitude, but you'd never know it if you went looking.

Why am I telling you all this?

Well, that's the international stage on which the IARU is representing amateur radio. In 1927 the underlying assumption was that each service, Amateur Radio included, had a global exclusive allocation. The reality was different. Spectrum was in such short supply that individual exceptions were carved out, which as I've said resulted in splitting up the world into regions, starting in 1938 and codified in 1947.

The IARU in 1925 is a different organisation from what it is today. In 1925 individual amateurs could become members. As soon as enough members from a country joined, they'd be grouped together. When there were enough groups, the IARU became a federation of national associations.

Over time, the IARU as a single body, evolved into the structure we have today. In 1950 in Paris, the IARU Region 1 organisation was formed. In 1964 in Mexico City, IARU Region 2 was created and in 1968 in Sydney, IARU Region 3 came to exist. You can see their online presence at the various iaru.org websites.

How it works is no clearer now than it was when I started. What it has achieved is equally unclear. I'm currently trolling through ITU World Radiocommunications Conference documentation going back to 1903 to discover references to Amateur Radio, but it's hard going. At least it's something. The IARU documentation is not nearly as extensive or up to date.

It appears that many, if not all, of the people working behind the scenes at the various IARU organisations are volunteers. If you feel inclined, there is an ongoing request for assistance, and before you ask, yes, I looked into helping out, but that will have to wait until funds permit.

If you have insights into the functioning of the IARU, don't be shy, get in touch. cq@vk6flab.com is my address.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

So, I have a confession. I don't know everything. Shocking right?

Over the past too many months, actually, come to think of it, years, I have not been on-air with my station on HF using FT8 or Olivia, modes that use tools like "WSJT-X" and "fldigi". This has not always been the case. For a time I used a tiny computer running those tools. It had plenty of issues related to its size and capacity. Overwhelmingly it was slow, unsurprising since it was released in 2009. After one particularly frustrating session where I had to recompile WSJT-X on an older 32-bit operating system using an Atom processor, I decided that this was not helping me, and I put it away.

The idea was to use my main computer that could do all the heavy lifting without cracking a sweat. To make this happen the traditional way, I'd be expected to physically connect the radio to the computer. I'm not a fan of doing that, given the potential damage that RF could do to my computer, not to mention that I have a sit-stand desk on wheels that I move around my office as the mood or the light takes me, if you're interested, I found a mobile lectern that the computer is clamped to. Works great, been using it for years.

RF aside, moving around the office is not conducive to plugging in a radio that comes with power, coax, audio, control, microphone and expects to have some space around it to actually use it. No problem, I have a RemoteRig, a device that comes in two parts. You connect one unit to the radio, the other to the head, that is, the removable faceplate of the radio, and using a network connection, you can have the head in one place and the radio in another. The two units don't have to be in the same room, let alone the same country.

I figured that I could replace the second half of the system, the head and its unit, and instead use software on my computer to get the same functionality and be up and running in minutes. That was several years ago. Interestingly, whilst I'm putting this together I did a search for "RemoteRig protocols" and learnt a few things, so perhaps this path isn't quite as dead as I feared. I've reached out to Mikael SM2O and if that comes to anything I'll let you know.

In the meantime I've been trying to figure out how to operate my radio in software only. I can control the radio if I physically connect a computer like a Raspberry Pi to it and use "rigctld" to interact with it. This gives me access to all the standard CAT, or Computer Assisted Tuning commands. In other words, I can change band, mode, frequency, trigger the transmitter, all the stuff that you need to get on-air to make noise.

There's only one bit missing, the noise, as-in audio, either coming from the radio, or going to it. I suppose I could trigger a carrier and use it to send Morse, but that doesn't give me receive capability. I've tried using network audio using "pulseaudio" - it never worked right. I've made USB hot-plug scripts that allow you to connect a USB device into a computer and access it across the network on another computer - it mostly works for sound, but reliable is not a word I'd use. I've looked at using the USB sound card in the audio mixer on my desk, but it's subject to all manner of funky restrictions and random audio dropouts. I could use a virtual screen and connect to a Raspberry Pi that's physically connected to the radio, but that's leaving all the hard work on the Pi, rather than the computer that I'm currently using with several orders of magnitude more capability.

Whilst we're discussing this, one of the reasons I like the idea of a software defined radio like a PlutoSDR, is that the stuff coming out of the radio, and going into it for that matter, is already digital. It takes away a whole lot of complexity, admittedly replacing it with software, but that's where I feel more comfortable.

Which brings me to you.

As I said, I don't know everything.

What are you doing in this space? Are you actually on-air with your contraption, or is it still in the planning stages? Are you sending audio, or digital data across the network? Does your system have the ability to swap out a radio and replace it with something completely different? Do you rely on functions available on the radio, or could it be used for a 1950's valve radio, a twenty year old one, a current model, or any number of software defined radios without issues? Finally, is it Open Source?

I confess that I'm not holding my breath for an answer, but there is a chance that you're similarly intrigued by this collection of questions that you will poke your head above the fence and make yourself known.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

If you've heard the phrase "shortwave listeners", you might have wondered what on earth that was all about.

It relates to the length of a radio wave used to transmit information. The length of a radio wave is tied to its frequency. The longer the wave, the lower the frequency.

When radio amateurs talk about bands, like for example the 40m band, we're talking about a range of frequencies where the wavelength is around 40m. From a frequency perspective, this is around 7 MHz. The 160m band, at about 1.8 MHz, or 1,800 kHz is considered the beginning of the short wave bands.

This implies that there are longer waves as well. If you've ever seen or owned a mid 1980's transistor radio, you'll have seen the notation MW, which stands for Medium Wave, today it's called the AM band. Older radios might have the notation LW, or Long Wave.

The medium wave band is a broadcast radio band that runs between about 500 and 1,700 kHz. The wave length is between 600 m and 170 m.

When radio was still in its infancy, there was also a popular long wave band, with wavelengths between 800 m and 2,000 m, or 150 to 375 kHz.

Today much of that has gone by the wayside. With the advent of digital radio, in Australia it's called DAB+, Digital Audio Broadcasting, the whole idea of "wave" has pretty much vanished.

Some countries like Japan and the United States are in the process of discussing the phasing out of the AM broadcast band. Much of that appears to be driven by car manufacturers who claim that the AM band is no longer useful or used, but forget to tell anyone that they really want to stop having to put AM radios in their cars because it's difficult to isolate the electrical noise from their modern contraptions in order to make it possible to actually listen to that band.

If you ask me, it's a good incentive to make electronics RF quiet, something which is increasingly important in our wirelessly connected world.

This might lead you to believe that all activity on air is moving to higher and higher frequencies, but that's not the case. The properties that made long wave and medium wave radio possible in the early 1900's are still valid today. For example, there are WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacons on the 2200m band, or at 136 kHz.

Whilst your RTL-SDR dongle might not quite get down that low, most of them start at 500 kHz, you don't need to spend big to start playing. My Yeasu FT-857d is capable of tuning to 100 kHz, plenty of space to start listening to the 2200m band, even if I cannot physically, or legally, transmit there.

If you want to build your own receiver, you can check out the weaksignals.com website by Alberto I2PHD where you'll find a project to build a receiver capable of 8 kHz to 900 kHz using a $50 circuit board.

If that's not enough, there's radio experimentation happening at even lower frequencies. Dedicated to listening to anything below 22 kHz, including natural RF, with a wavelength greater than 13 km, Renato IK1QFK runs the website vlf.it where you'll find receivers and antennas to build.

Given that most sound cards operate up to around 192 kHz, you can start by connecting an antenna to the microphone port of your sound card and use it to receive VLF or Very Low Frequencies. On your Linux computer you can use "Quisk" to tune.

There are VLF transmitters on air. For example, SAQ, the Grimeton Radio Station in Sweden opened on the 1st of December 1924. Capable of 200 kW, today it uses about 80 kW and transmits twice a year on 17.2 kHz.

While we search for higher and higher frequencies, there is still plenty of fun to be had at the other end of the radio spectrum. Consider for example that VLF or Very Low Frequency radio waves, between 3 and 30 kHz can penetrate seawater.

I'll leave you to explore.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB