Foundations of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The other day I heard a thunderclap and as is my Pavlovian response, immediately ran to my shack to disconnect the antennas from their respective transmitter and transceiver. I added a diary entry to my phone to note that I'd disabled my WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon, which generally runs 24/7. A few hours later I remembered that my beacon was off and I returned to put it all back in working order.

That's not always been the case. From time-to-time I've managed to turn off the beacon and forgotten to re-enable it, once for months. Same with my main radio, which at one point was disconnected from its antenna, taking a good half hour of stressful troubleshooting to discover one memorable Saturday morning, when I tried to set-up for my weekly net. Now it's the first step, before I turn on the power supply.

I've mentioned in passing that lightning protection and grounding requirements are not globally uniform and I'm purposefully refraining from advising you how to do this in your shack. When in doubt, talk to your local community and a licensed electrician, mainly because there's plenty of poor advice around that could result in your applicable household electrical regulations being breached.

Back to my shack.

Wouldn't it be cool if I could automate this, something like a remote controlled relay, preferably wireless so stray RF doesn't make it into the wrong circuit. Switching aside, it occurred to me that I'd also need some way of detecting lightning to trigger this system, you know, disconnect the antennas, turn off the beacon, then reverse the process when all is clear.

Speaking of automation, a few years ago I purchased a beautiful electromechanical coax switch. I'm still trying to discover how to drive it and I'm not game to power it with the risk of letting the magic smoke out, so if you have specific details for a K&L 6LMP-28-F-N-I-TTL six position coax switch, a data sheet would be wonderful, get in touch, cq@vk6flab.com is my email address.

Searching for lightning detectors reveals a boatload of circuits and tools. There's websites galore, an active community surrounding "blitzortung.org" with an absolutely mesmerising homepage, and plenty of other projects to play with. One thing I noticed was a distinct lack of SDR, or Software Defined Radio implementations. The number isn't zero, but I didn't find any turn-key solutions.

One recurring theme, other than arguing which frequency to tune to for the best result, was the notion that a simple AM radio receiver could be used. The idea often promulgated is to tune between stations and to listen for clicks and pops. It occurred to me that using an SDR as an AM receiver is pretty much the first thing you do after plugging it in.

Combining these ideas, it seems obvious, of course it's unlikely to be, but you know, why spoil the fun, to do this within the 2.6 MHz bandwidth of an RTL-SDR dongle which might actually detect some wideband RF, the signature of a lightning strike.

That started me down the path of splitting a signal in GNU Radio, routing it to multiple AM decoders, looking for peaks, all that fun, when I realised that I know of a tool that does pretty much all of that, "rtl-airband". With a simple text file to describe the frequencies you want to monitor, decode, apply squelch, mix, position and route, most of the job is done.

When it's running, you might have just created a lightning detector to start your journey on this road, using stuff you already have. I intend to create an example configuration file for exactly this purpose, perhaps even a script to generate it, and I'll publish it on GitHub.

Word of warning, based on the number of tools alone, the rabbit hole is deep.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

During the week I was shown a photograph of a chalkboard standing on the sidewalk with one of those "Thought of the Day" quotes on it. Credit aside, since I've been unable to confirm it, despite multiple reverse image searches and attempts at author attribution, the sentiment stuck with me and the more I think about it, the more it resonates and this being radio, that works on so many levels.

We proudly refer to our community as "amateur radio", hold it up as a badge of honour and tell everyone we know about it. Curiously, when you look in the dictionary, you see a litany of words with less than complementary connotations, like "freak", "dabbler", "crank", "neophyte", "inexpert", "unprofessional", "second-rate" and plenty more.

In essence the word "amateur" is contrasted with the word "professional" and our community comes out looking worse for wear.

I'm pointing this out because the experience is insidious. I've told the story of me attempting to report local radio broadcast interference to the regulator when I came upon an investigator who asked how I knew about interference. I explained that I was a licensed amateur. His response was: "I am a Professional". I can still hear the capital "P", now well over a decade later.

It's also interesting when you talk to people outside the community who don't really get what it is that we do. Often they'll think that you're not serious about this and will unthinkingly dismiss your interest and pursuit, because it has the word "amateur" in it.

So, what of this and the chalkboard?

Here's the quote.

"You say 'amateur' as if it's a dirty word. 'Amateur' comes from the Latin word 'amare' which means 'to love'. To do things for the love of it."

As you might imagine, I went hunting to confirm this sentiment.

It turns out that the word "amateur" comes from French "amateur", meaning, "person who cultivates an art or science for their pleasure", in turn that comes directly from Latin "amator", meaning "lover, one who loves", which stems from "amare", "to love". As an aside, "dilettante" from Italian "dilettare", comes from "to delight".

It appears that once respectable pursuits in arts and science lost ground against professionalism and we ended up with a growing gap between formal and informal which increasingly is understood as dangerous, rather than charming.

I think it's time to reclaim "amateur" and take "to love" to heart in our community.

So .. "radio, for the love of it". That's what we do, what we are. And to be honest, I think that really says everything we need to remember.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Over the past weeks, actually, probably months, the push to talk button on the radio I use for my weekly discussion net has been acting up. In the middle of an over it would sometimes cut-out for no particular reason. Being mindful and pushing harder didn't seem to make a blind bit of difference and no amount of fiddling with the cable helped either.

Today I finally combined the act of remembering that this was a problem, with the availability of a spare moment, a passing level of personal health and no local distractions and as a bonus, you, or more accurately, my weekly article. As you might imagine, this is no mean feat and it doesn't happen very often, months apart, if not more, in this case.

My first effort was to find my radio box. Except for the serial numbers, I have two visually identical boxes. One of them is sitting on a cupboard in my shack. I opened it up and the microphone I was hoping for, wasn't there. As you might gather, I have two radios. One is for my shack, the other for the car and portable operation, though currently that too is in the shack, connected to a separately purchased DTMF microphone. This means that I actually have three microphones, and thus the reason for hunting for the other box.

As it turns out, it's safely stored in the garage where after squeezing between several recycling bins, shuffling between crates and shelving, lifting and moving several boxes, it revealed its, temporary, well several years now, storage location. I retrieved the box, put everything else back where I found it, then brought the box into the shack and promptly started sneezing, because dust and allergies. Opening the box confirmed that my brain is still, at least partially, functioning, since the microphone I remembered being stored there was in fact exactly where I thought it would be.

I swapped out the microphone, turned on the radio, tested it with a repeater kerplunk and called it done. In the process of removing the "faulty" microphone I noticed that the cable appeared to be swapped end-for-end. I don't know if that was the root cause of the issue, but the confluence of factors for this adventure ran out, so that's a project for future me. I did find a sandwich bag to put the microphone into and labelled it as being possibly suspect, noted that I swapped the cable end-for-end, but left it untested. I can remember some stuff, but obviously I'm not as smart as you think I am.

So .. why am I telling you this in so many words? It occurred to me that all too often we look at others asking ourselves "why didn't you fix that, it's so easy", when the reality might be somewhat different. In my case, there's plenty of moving parts, some of which actively get in the way, some passively. In this case a seemingly simple task took well over an hour, rather than the 15 minutes I'd budgeted for.

Next time it's fine to give yourself some slack and take a moment, rather than beat yourself up about something you failed to achieve. You need to keep reminding yourself that amateur radio is a hobby, not a profession and progress can be made one step at a time.

Time will tell if I fixed my microphone issue or just took a step on the troubleshooting path.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Recently I explored the nature of amateur radio emergency response. I received a few replies providing an insight into the on the ground reality and it encouraged me to dig into this a little more.

I'll start with some context.

Early in my amateur adventures I became aware of the Wireless Institute of Australia's efforts in encouraging people to become familiar with emergency procedures. It introduced a course titled "Introduction to Public Safety Training for Radio Amateurs", specifically to achieve a Certificate II in Public Safety.

I dutifully downloaded the materials, went to my local office supply store and had the documents printed out. The bill was hundreds of dollars as I recall, as much as I paid for my new FT-857d, because the dozens of PDF documents had little colour logos scattered throughout, because of course they did.

After getting over the bill shock, I discovered that you could only do this course if you had an advanced amateur license. Not that this requirement makes any sense, since you're not operating on amateur radio frequencies or using amateur radio equipment, but I digress.

To add insult to injury, today I dug up that 2011 manual, well, one of the four volumes sitting on my shelf, and discovered that for example, the module for "Communication in the Workplace" is actually a standard training module offered throughout Australia.

In other words, the Wireless Institute's attempt at linking amateur radio to emergency response was a set of training modules that made you into an Emergency Communications Officer with, I might add, no guarantee of engagement by your local emergency service. As far as I can tell, this is no longer offered but the evidence shows that it continues to shape amateur radio emergency policy a decade and a half later.

I set out to discover if things had improved, starting with a search for "WICEN procedures", WICEN being the Wireless Institute Civil Emergency Network, the equivalent of ARES, the Amateur Radio Emergency Service in the United States, RAYNET, Radio Amateurs Emergency Network in the United Kingdom, DARES, Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service and many others.

I was pleasantly surprised to find many pages with results. Less pleasant was to discover that many, if not most of them, hadn't been updated since 2011, that's if they were dated at all.

As an aside, dating this kind of information is in my opinion crucial. A list of repeater frequencies is absolutely irrelevant if it's more than a year old, but if the information has no date, you have no idea if you're dealing with a current list or one written when Netscape was still in business.

For example, the WICEN Tasmania (South) website has lots of information, but there's absolutely no indication of how old it is, unless you take the "Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported" in the header as a sign that it was last updated before 2017 when Flash was depreciated. Their "Equine Endurance Ride Tracking" has a version number, but no indication of when it was updated. I did find a Voice Procedure Training Module dated 16 June 2011, so that's something.

Lest you think I'm picking on Tasmania, WICEN Victoria has plenty of information, all dated 2011, well, apart from the 1994 and 1998 manuals. WICEN Bundaberg has information, at least some of it dated, but published in August 2012. WICEN WA has a snazzy website which contains the outlines of something, but it's unclear where it's at and their homepage states that it's in a "rebuilding phase".

I'll note that the main wicen.org.au domain links to eight WICEN organisations, but the list is nascent at best and while it serves as the Australian WICEN landing page, it has no other information. Not even the Wireless Institute itself provides a full list of its own WICEN affiliated clubs and associations.

Age and accuracy aside, one thing all these results appear to have in common is the unstated burning desire to become official Emergency Communications Officers, with instructions on pro-words, standard phrases, voice procedures and integration with the rest of the official Emergency Communication community.

While I get that this was the Wireless Institute aim back in 2011, is that still relevant today? Is being a radio amateur the starting point for becoming an operator in an emergency radio bunker, or is that a parallel path that radio amateurs might take?

Let me be explicit here. Are we as radio amateurs best suited to train other radio amateurs to become certified State Emergency Service volunteers, or should we join the local SES and participate in their training?

It goes back to the underlying premise and its current implementation, such as it is, amateur radio's attempt at claiming an emergency communications role in order to justify its use of radio spectrum.

Don't get me wrong. I have no beef with providing emergency communications, but effectiveness is important. Volunteer hours are a strictly limited resource and it seems to me that the path we've been on since at least 2011 is attempting to duplicate an existing system with, I suspect, very limited real world application.

So, what should we do about it?

Although it's incomplete, undated and without version numbers, the WICEN WA website has a list of how emergency communications are activated, who does what and when and in which order. That's the only place I've ever seen such a list. It's a start.

It appears that some parts of WICEN are attempting to roll out a permanent HF data network. The choice of band is curious, 80m, a band not known for local communications, daytime communications, or small and easily deployable antennas, ask any portable operator.

In contrast, the Philippine Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network, PAREDN or DX1PRD, uses 2m and 70cm for most of its network which also has an active status dashboard, something which I have yet to discover anywhere in Australia.

Within the various emergency systems across the globe, two proprietary tools seem to have taken hold, Winlink and VARA. The first providing a mechanism for message exchange with an associated global network of receivers, the latter a way of transmitting it across radio. Together they claim to provide the basics of a parallel Internet for "when the Internet goes down, mobile phone networks fail or natural disasters isolate communities". Frankly, bandwidth considerations alone will reveal that it's the same kind of absurd claim that the ARRL made famous: "When all else fails"

The tools, Winlink and VARA, are claimed to be cross-platform, but all links supplied by WICEN sites I found are for Windows only, closed source, or worse, stuck behind a user account login.

There are efforts underway for open source replacements for both VARA and Winlink, according to GitHub both replacement projects started in 2023, but this software is in active development and I see little evidence of wide adoption of either at this stage, that's not to say it won't be, just that it isn't yet. As soon as the proprietary tools change protocol, these projects will stop working until the new protocol has been reverse engineered. Hardly a recipe for robustness.

In case you think this is a new effort, the WICEN Victoria website has Winlink presentations as recent as 2012.

I'll leave you to contemplate if any of this makes sense.

Unrelated, I'm recovering from a cold and some wondered recently if I was experimenting with voice cloning. It's a question that's been put to me in other forms as well, several people over the years articulating that they thought I was a bot.

Let me point out that the whole point of my contribution here is to learn, document and share it with you. If I used Assumed Intelligence, or AI, and Unsupervised Text Extruders, or LLMs to do that, there's no learning for me and subsequently no reason for spending time with you.

As an aside, I tend to use "my cat" as a phrase to replace any instance of OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Co-pilot and based on the growing list of companies focused on this, I find it helps retain my sanity.

I'll leave you with a question.

While the WIA claims that WICEN is "totally independent from the WIA", even though it obviously has its fingerprints all over it, who is running this show and perhaps more importantly, who is helping?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Previously I've talked about one of the often lauded cornerstones of the amateur radio community, namely Emergency Response, and to be frank, I questioned then, as I do now, the reality of this, at the very least, perceived, foundational aspect of our global hobby.

Before you get out the caps lock key, let me assure you that I'm aware of sporadic examples of heroic efforts made by members of our community to save lives that are held up as examples of amateur radio emergency responses.

What I'm questioning is related to our collective effectiveness. We have global and increasing occurrences of wild or bush fires, we have earthquakes and tsunamis, storms, hurricanes, cyclones or typhoons, whatever you call the vortex of destruction, and global news media ensures that we hear about it within hours if not seconds. Social media provides us with mobile phone footage dubbed with expert audio to explain the latest tragedy to the rest of us.

What we don't see is what happens next, while the power is out, the internet is down, mobile phones aren't working anymore and survivors are fighting tooth and nail for their return to normalcy, or at least what's left of it.

It struck me that one thing I never see discussed and haven't ever discussed in over a decade and a half I've been here, is the amateur radio interface with the rest of the world.

A comment I see often is that Internet connected amateur radio, like Echolink, AllStarLink and IRLP, aren't real radio and that real amateurs use RF.

HF radio for the win right?

What do you think the relevance of HF radio is to a family member living in the next town after a disaster, or a parent looking for their lost child?

How do ordinary people benefit from the radio amateur who lives on their street, or the one who travels into the disaster zone?

Ultimately, if we are to take our claimed emergency response role seriously, we as a community of radio amateurs need to consider just what it is that we can offer to the people around us in the case of an emergency.

Might what we offer look like a Wi-Fi base station that's connected to the rest of the world via an IP link that happens to be running on 2m or 70cm during an emergency?

Or could what we offer be described as an Amateur Radio Short Message Service, what about transmitting a DVB-T dashboard that's being updated over LoRaWAN, or a local voice relay service?

Where's the infrastructure, planning, preparation and training for that? Where's the documentation for it? How are we telling the local community about it? How well do we even do outage notifications within our community, let alone outside it?

The point being that there are amateurs who beat their chest about emergency preparedness and, bluntly, have little or nothing to show for it.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't limited to the amateur radio community. For a few weeks I became an aspirant member of a local emergency response team, right until I discovered that their biggest issue was that their user base, the local volunteer bushfire brigades, didn't really know how to use their radio repeater system and my suggestion to go and visit each one on a rotation basis and train them was met with snorts of derision and laughter.

Do you really want an emergency response to be ad hoc? "Oh, sorry, I'm missing a cable and I can't connect this to that, I'll sort it out for next time."

The increased interest in the various "OTA" or "On The Air" pursuits, Parks, Peaks, Summits, Bunkers, Castles, Waterways, Islands, Lakes, Libraries, Lighthouses and Toilets to name a few, are all helping amateurs practice with the "getting on-air and make noise using a temporary installation" part of an emergency response, but few of those activities interact with the general public in any way.

Ironically, the local Wireless Civil Emergency Network, or WICEN, is at least doing some community outreach by providing radio infrastructure to a few local events. It's a start, but still a very long way from interacting with your next door neighbour in preparation for a massive storm and subsequent power outage.

Here's the thing. There's no end-to-end anything. Is ad hoc sticky tape and baling wire really the way you want our amateur community to respond to an emergency?

Is emergency response a fanciful concept, or are there things we as a community could put together to make it reality?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB