Foundations of Amateur Radio

My first ever interaction with amateur radio was a field day on Boterhuiseiland near Leiden in the Netherlands when I was about twelve. The station was set-up in an army…

Recently a budding new amateur asked the question: "What radio should I buy?"

It's a common question, one I asked a decade ago. Over the years I've made several attempt…

One of the questions you're faced with when you start your amateur journey is around connectors. You quickly discover that every piece of equipment with an RF socket has…

A while ago as part of my ongoing exploration into all things radio I came across a utility called rtlsdr-airband. It's a tool that uses a cheap software defined radio d…

The activity of amateur radio revolves around experimentation. For over a century the amateur community has designed, sourced, scrounged and built experiments. Big or sm…

As you might recall, I took delivery of a device called a PlutoSDR some time ago. If you're not familiar, it's a single-board computer that has the ability to transmit a…

In my day job I work in computing. For many years that consisted of going on-site and fixing stuff. Invariably this involved me fixing servers that were installed into a…

Have you ever taken a moment to consider the available bandwidth on the various amateur bands?

As an entrant into amateur radio in Australia as a Foundation licence hol…

If you've been around radio amateurs for a little while you're likely to have heard about the Solar Cycle and that it affects radio propagation for HF or High Frequency,…

If you have the opportunity to build your shack, it might start off as a table in the corner where you plonk down a radio, plug into nearby power and run coax to. That's…

A little while ago I was gifted a new radio, well, new to me. A Kenwood TS-480HX. It's an all mode HF transceiver with 6m. Does 200 Watts, but you know me, I'm into QRP,…

Last weekend was memorable for all the right reasons. Filled with 24 hours of amateur radio, spent with friends, in a park, making noise and having fun, marking the firs…

The landscape of remotely operated amateur radio is changing by the day. Once the territory of home brew DTMF decoders and remote controlled radio links, now more often …

Amateur radio is an environment for infinite possibilities. I've spoken about the way that contacts can happen, seemingly out of the blue, how propagation has so many va…

Every community has its own language. As a member of that community you learn the words, their meaning and their appropriate use. For example, the combination of words "…

Amateur radio lives and dies with the ionosphere. It's drilled into you when you get your license, it's talked about endlessly, the sun impacts on it, life is bad when t…

One of the things about amateur radio that I find intensely fascinating and to be honest sometimes just as frustrating, is that you don't know what the outcome of an exp…

So, there's nothing on TV, the bands are dead, nobody is answering your CQ, you're bored and it's all too hard. You've run out of things to try, there's only so many dif…

Over the past little while I've been experimenting with various tools that decode radio signals. For some of those tools the signals come from space. Equipment in space …

When you begin your journey as a radio amateur you're introduced to the concept of a mode.

A mode is a catch-all phrase that describes a way of encoding information in…