What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? This podcast started life in 2011 when I was asked to record a story I shared during the production of the weekly amateur radio news in Western Australia. I'd been a licensed radio amateur, or ham, for a few months and found myself surrounded by people who perceived the basic Australian foundation amateur licence wasn't worth anything. What use is an F-call? is my response to that sentiment. It's produced weekly. In 2015 after long deliberation it was renamed to Foundations of Amateur Radio so people outside Australia might also enjoy the experience. Although most of the items stand alone, I'd recommend that you start at the beginning in 2011 and listen in sequence. Enjoy. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

What use is an F-call? It seems that there is a disease within the amateur radio community. It's spreading and seems to be contagious. There doesn't seem to be a cure and it seems to be pretty virulent. Symptoms include listlessness, deafness, stubbornness and apathy. Community members have aptly named it as L.A.S. or Lead Arse Syndrome. I receive a regular stream of emails and phone calls from fellow amateurs who share with me their latest idea or plan for an activity in the hobby. It's often a group activity, a plan to do something with the wider community, or a group of people with a common interest. It might be an outing, a meeting, a build-day, an activation, a web-site or some or other thing. The conversation often includes the question: "Do you think it's a good idea?" Often I'll say: "Absolutely, great, wonderful." Sometimes I'll suggest alternatives or point at an existing activity that is already underway. After that the response from the other person is often: "Well, I

What use is an F-call? When you make contacts around the world with other amateurs the traditional way of confirming a contact is with a QSL card. It's a postcard-like affair that has the details of the station, and if all is well, the details of the contact between their station and yours. Traditionally if you want a QSL card, you'd go to your local post office and buy an International Reply-paid Coupon or IRC, but increasingly this has become more and more difficult, to the point where many post offices have no idea what you're talking about and will deny any existence of an IRC. Anyway, if you did manage to secure an IRC, you'd put your card and an IRC in an envelope and send it off to the remote station and hope that they'd send you back a card using the IRC as a way to pay for their stamp. In effect you're using the postal service to buy stamps for the other station. There is another hybrid version of confirming a contact using QSL cards, the Online QSL Request Service or OQRS. It's an online mechanis

What use is an F-call? Recently I witnessed a discussion about callsigns. As you know, your amateur callsign is akin to your personal on-air identity. It's the thing that distinguishes your station from all the other stations on the globe. My callsign was assigned to me randomly, it was intended as a temporary stepping stone to a higher license, but over time I was distracted by all the things I could do as a Foundation Class amateur and my callsign now feels like "me". The discussion was about the re-issuing of callsigns. In Australia, if you don't renew your callsign, after a period of time, it becomes available to be re-issued to another amateur. This allows people to obtain that one particular call that they feel represents them. Some amateurs have the same callsign for many years. It's their identity, it's the thing they used in contests, camp-outs, chats and the rest of their amateur life. When an active, well respected amateur relinquishes their call, often when they become a silent key,

What use is an F-call? We are part of an amazing hobby where inventiveness, inquiry and exploration is part and parcel of the thing we do. It's that spirit that got me interested in this hobby and fortunately I have enough friends in the hobby who share that view. Unfortunately, this hobby seems to also attract a group of nay-sayers, people who are always denigrating others, starting from the perspective of saying No, before asking How? Let's call them the whingers. These are the ones who complain about the ineffectiveness of the WIA, the ones who complain that when the license fee goes down, jump up and down for a refund of their five year payment which they made to save money in case the fees went up. These are the ones who want to quarantine callsigns for "deserving amateurs" but have several and want to have a particular callsign and can't wait until the holder becomes a silent key. The ones who say that F-calls should not be allowed on air, or should have their license expired automaticall

What use is an F-call? I'm a child of my time and my perspective is the result of input from fellow amateurs. I'm often in the group of amateurs who would rather buy than build, rather get something done, than do it yourself. The black box brigade if you like. The same is true for the antennas I use. I've been struggling with some verticals on the back of my car for months. I've got it working, mostly, but it was a lot of stuffing around. In the end, I added a black box, in the form of a tuner to make it work, sort of. The radio clubs I associate with have towers and multi-element beams, there are antenna farms, rotators, switch boxes, amplifiers and the like, all far removed from a simple set-up. Most of these are purchased and put together, rather than designed and built. During the week I spent some time with the other side of radio. A simple fishing pole with a string of wire, sitting on a groin pointed into the ocean, picking off signals left and right. Until now I've been approaching this along the

What use is an F-call? When you start in Amateur Radio you'll come across the problem of rolling up coax and rope. If it goes the way it went for me, you'll be doing what you always did, that is, winding up the coax on your arm until someone stops you and tells you that you're doing it wrong. Then you're likely to be told about rolling out the coax into a straight line and when you want to take it home after a field-day, you'll either be rolling it onto a roll, or physically hand-over-hand be rolling the coax into a circle. This is a regular pain in the Alpha. I managed to seek some advice from people who do this for a living. Film crews and audio technicians have to roll up cable on a regular basis and they don't do anything like I was told. Head on over to YouTube and search for "How to Properly Roll Cable". You'll come across a 1 minute 4 second video by Randy Coppinger. He shows you the Over-Under technique and once you've mastered that you'll never twist coax again and your coax won't get

What use is an F-call? I've talked in the past about the community spirit that is embodied by Amateur Radio. Yes, I know there are several not very nice people around, some even brag about it, but by enlarge, that's absolutely not the case. I had the opportunity to use an antenna from a friend over a long weekend recently. He's building a tower at his QTH and had a spare Buddipole available that he handed to me while I was having problems getting my mobile verticals to work. It made me think about all the other things that I've been able to do thanks to friends I've made in Amateur Radio. One went on holidays for several months and wanted to make sure that I felt comfortable warming his antennas in his absence. Another brought along his multi-band yagi and helped me configure my hand-held for satellite operation. Another helped set-up contacts with the International Space Station early on in my Amateur career. I've had countless antennas given to me and loaned to me. I've used people's stations and portab

What use is an F-call? Recently I had the opportunity to participate in a contest that was specifically set-up for QRP. That is, 5 Watts or less. There was an hour for digital modes, including Morse, but I don't yet speak that, so I sat tight for the second hour, for phone. This particular contest was a single band only contest, 80m. When I planned for the contest, I set my watch wrong by an hour, so I almost didn't make it, but fortunately my XYL queried my delayed departure and I was out the door in the nick of time. I headed out to the beach, only to be confronted with S8 noise from the local housing estate, so I retreated rapidly back into the bush and found myself a lovely little nook where I could park the car without causing any disruption and start twiddling the dial. I immediately learned that my vertical was very, very narrow in bandwidth, that is, there was a limited range of frequencies I could use which curtailed the activities somewhat. Undeterred I hunted up and down the workable range, h

What use is an F-call? If you're into contesting, you're likely to have heard of a thing called the Super Check Partial list and if you haven't then you should. It's a simple thing, maintained by Stu, K6TU, it contains a rolling list of the callsigns of all the stations that appeared in a minimum of 6 contest logs as a worked station over the past two years. This means several things. First of all, it means that you need to make contacts. Then each of your contacts needs to submit their log and it has to happen on a regular basis. If all that works, you end up with a text file that has some 43000 callsigns in it. This is a useful tool if you have logging software that can use the list to do partial matches on callsigns. If your callsign is only partially heard, lets say the other station only hears the LAB out of the whole call, VK6FLAB, it might return two or three hits and that might be enough to narrow down your whole callsign. So, instead of the backwards and forwards of exchanging letters, the oth

What use is an F-call? If you're new to Amateur Radio like I am, it's easy to turn on your radio, set it up to key your local repeater and call CQ. After the first time it's a trivial matter that you might take for granted. The repeater just sits there on frequency, making communication possible between you and the rest of the Amateur Community. In many ways it's like turning on your mobile phone and dialling a number and talking to someone. When people ask me what the difference is between Amateur Radio and Community Radio, I often jest that in Community Radio you come into the studio, sit behind the microphone, press the red button and talk. Amateur Radio is exactly the same, but you also need to bring the red button. Repeaters are like that. Unless you've been personally involved, it's just a case of pressing the button. Of course that's not actually what happens. Often a group gets together, spit-balling ideas, coming up with a plan, finding money, equipment, support and the like. Then there is the l

What use is an F-call? Recently I talked about a digital mode that had the ability to give you an estimated gain of 13dB over Analogue FM. It's the equivalent of gaining more than 2 S-points or like turning up your transmitter power from 10 Watts to 200 Watts. Of course, the receiver at the other end doesn't all of a sudden see their S-meter go up and neither does the power draw from your transmitter spike. The actual transmitted power is still the same and the actual received power is also the same. What's going on for this magic to happen? If you've ever listened to Morse code, not to understand it, I'm not there yet either, but just to hear it, you'll notice that you can detect individual dits and dahs at a very low signal level, much lower than it would be possible to hear an SSB signal in the same environment. The reason that happens is because your ear only needs to detect the presence or absence of a tone. Once you can hear the tone, you can work out how long each tone is and then your brain can d

What use is an F-call? Operating from your shack is a different experience from operating in another station. It's a completely different experience again if you operate your station portable. At first glance, what's the problem, you pack your radio into a bag, travel to the destination and start operating. If you spend a little more time, you'll soon realise that you'll need to take many other variables into consideration. Things like power, coax, structures for your antenna, antennas, operating position and the like. Let's start with power. Do you have access to mains power where you'll be operating, or will you need to bring a generator, or do you have batteries? If you have batteries, how will you charge them? Are the batteries going to last for the whole operation? How do you know? Is any of the power system going to generate noise on HF? Did you actually test it? What are you going to do about grounding, what about fuel, fire safety, fuses, etc.? I could spend the next 40 minutes going through a l

What use is an F-call? Recently I spoke about digital voice communications. I made mention of the CODEC2 project being developed by Dave Rowe, VK5DGR. I also made reference of the kinds of things that digital voice improves, battery life, channel separation and bandwidth. One of the things I didn't mention, mainly because I still had to learn what it meant, is that CODEC2 has an estimated 13dB gain over Analogue FM. To explain what that actually means, you might recall that an S-point is 6dB, that means that if you use CODEC2, you gain more than two S-points, that's a little like turning up the transmitter power from 10 Watts to 200 Watts. If you look at it another way, if you have a Yagi and you install the same Yagi next to it, and connect it up properly, you've doubled the power and gained 3dB. If you do that again, you have 4 antennas and 6dB, if you do it again, you have 8 antennas and 9dB, again, 16 antennas or 12dB gain. So, the performance that we're talking about is something that you can either

What use is an F-call? During the week I had the opportunity to hear several people use a radio in day-to-day communications. In this particular instance it was a water taxi speaking to their base. They were using their own frequency and essentially used it to coordinate their activities across their coverage area. Listening with an Amateur ear, if there is such a thing, I noticed that there was a lot of back-and-forth, missed communications and misunderstandings. We take for granted, once we've learned, that there is a sequence in successful radio communications. Consistency, brevity, simple vocabulary, microphone handling, antenna placement, hand-held use and the like. It's not the first time I've noticed that. I wondered if there was a way that we as amateurs can actually extend our wings beyond our hobby and share some procedural skills that we almost take for granted. We often lament that Amateur Radio is declining in it's scope, size and community involvement. Perhaps radio skills are something tha

What use is an F-call? As you might recall, I've been struggling to get an antenna installed on my car. It's been a process that started seven months ago, resulted in the purchase of four single band antennas and finally the purchase of an antenna tuner. I could spend hours discussing the things that were recommended, tried and tested, but I won't. It's a sorry tale that I'll share with you over a beer or six one day. On the first day that everything "worked", and I use the term loosely, since it's not been long enough yet to compare the performance of the antennas to my squid-pole solution and other antennas I've used over the years; on that first day I spoke to about six different stations scattered around me, at varying distance, from less than 5km away to 700km away. During that time I was parked up in front of a friends house and after a contact we'd position the car in a different direction to see what the impact of that change might be. Since this was my first contact with this setup, we

What use is an F-call? Amateur Radio is about communication as much as anything else. The whole idea is to get a message from one place to another. This hobby attracts people from all walks of life, people who are physicists, truck drivers, pastry chefs, accountants and dentists and everything else under the sun. One thing is common among us is, we're all Hams. It's not unusual to see people from completely different walks of life bond over a beer and a soldering iron. With the recipe set, you'd imagine that while people have different outlooks, they'd come back to the single thing that they love, radio. Now that I've been an amateur for a while, the cracks in this potentially idyllic view are beginning to appear. There is bickering, abuse, insults and confrontation. We pitch people against each other, state against state, club against club, brand against brand, license against license, achievement against achievement. While humankind is a warmongering species, I am saddened that this is carried on with

What use is an F-call? Over the years that I've been an amateur I've spent many hours discussing the ins- and outs of being an amateur. I've talked about what you're allowed to do, where the LCD falls short, what things you can build, what activities you can participate in and where to find and learn more about this wonderful hobby called Amateur Radio. I've received emails from many different people, amateurs and non-amateurs alike, each sharing with me their take on what excites them, what mistakes I made, or what things I should investigate next. An increasing theme over the past few years is that I should admonish amateurs for their misbehavior, that I should be telling people off for doing things that fall outside their license condition. A recurring theme is the idea that there are F-calls who are using more than their allocated 10 Watts of power. It's getting to the point where a growing group of amateurs are expecting me to become an amateur radio police officer and that I should be policing the m

What use is an F-call? Last week I spent a little time talking about lightning. I discussed how lightning can affect many different things, not just by being a direct hit, but by having a nearby hit, that is, something that is in some way electrically connected to you or your station. We all know that the ground has some level of conductivity, just like air does - the lightning that you see during a thunderstorm is the visualisation of the conductivity of air. In the earth, you don't really see it that clearly, but the same thing happens. Conductivity is measured in Siemens per Meter. Deionised water has a conductivity of about 5.5 micro Siemens per meter, sea water is about 5 Siemens per meter, so, sea water is approximately a million times more conductive than deionised water. Since Siemens is a measure of conductivity and Ohms a measure of resistance, you can convert one into the other as their inverse. A resistor made of 1 cm of seawater at 20C has a resistance of 2 milli Ohm. Ground conductivity is

What use is an F-call? During the week we were subjected to some unusual lightning activity. There was lots to go around and it raises the issue on what to do when lightning is nearby. The obvious comments about disconnecting your radio from your antenna is pretty common knowledge, but there are other things that might happen that you hadn't thought about. Lightning is an electrostatic discharge, and strangely enough, RF is closely related, in that your antenna system converts electric energy into voltages that you then insert into your radio. So, lightning will just as easily affect your antenna as it does your radio. We have a basic understanding that a lightning strike directly into the radio is a good way to let out the magic smoke and a comment should be made that you don't need lightning for this to happen; just static electricity in the air is enough to build up enough charge for your radio to die. It's not uncommon to see sparks between the center and shield on an antenna connector while thunderst