Foundations of Amateur Radio

If you've been following my amateur radio journey, you'll have likely noticed that I've been straying from the fold. The words I use for power have been changing. I've r…

Between decibels and milliwatts ...

As you might recall, I've been working towards using a cheap $20 RTL-SDR dongle to measure the second and third harmonic of a handhe…

Over the weekend a friend of mine convinced me to help plant some trees. Mind you, I was told that this was going to be a blue tree painting day. The Blue Tree Project i…

Before we start I should give you fair warning. There are many moving parts in what I'm about to discuss and there's lots of numbers coming. Don't stress too much about …

Recently I had the opportunity to use a piece of professional equipment to measure the so-called unwanted or spurious emissions that a transceiver might produce. In desc…

At a recent local HAMfest we set-up a table to measure second and third harmonic emissions from any handheld radio that came our way. The process was fun and we learnt l…

There's nothing quite as satisfying as the click of a well designed piece of equipment. It's something that tickles the brain and done well it makes the hairs stand up o…

If you walk into your radio shack and switch on a light, the result is instantaneous, one moment it's dark, the next it's not. What if I told you that as immediate as it…

The first official telegram to pass between two continents was a letter of congratulations from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom to President of the United States Ja…

Morse code is a way for people to send information across long distances. The code we use today, made from dit and dah elements is nothing like the code demonstrated and…

Thanks to several high profile races we already know that sending Morse is faster than SMS. Recently I started digging into the underpinnings of Morse code to answer the…

If you've ever looked at Morse Code, you might be forgiven if you conclude that it appears to be a less than ideal way of getting information from point A to point B. Th…

Have you ever made an international contact using amateur radio and used that towards tracking an award like for example the DXCC? If you're not familiar, it's an award …

In the earlier days of my career I worked in a computing centre at a university surrounded by people with different interests and experiences in computing. There were pr…

The other weekend there was an amateur radio contest on. Not surprising if you realise that's true for most weekends. For a change, I knew about this contest before it s…

During the week, prompted by a protest on popular social media site Reddit, I rediscovered that there are other places to spend time. It sounds absurd now, but until the…

Our hobby has been around for over a century. The Wireless Institute of Australia, or WIA, is the oldest amateur association on the globe, having just marked 113 years s…

Today I'd like to start with saying thank you to the Wireless Institute of Australia for awarding me the Brenda Edmonds Education Award "in recognition of outstanding se…

As you might know I'm in the process of building a cross-platform, open source, contest logger. Right now that project is at the stage where there is a proof of concept…

A curious thing happens when you become part of the amateur community, you start to talk like an amateur. This phenomenon isn't specific to being a radio amateur, it hap…