All the things that aren't amateur radio...

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Recently I illustrated the diversity of our community by highlighting social media posts made to a single community over a 24 hour period. Each reflecting a different aspect of our community.

It occurred to me that although those things are amateur radio, some more obviously than others, there's a whole other side of the community that isn't amateur radio.

Look at radio astronomy for example. One of my friends is an astronomer and we've been having loads of fun learning from each other. I'm getting exposed to concepts like Fourier transforms, interferometry, sampling and plenty of the mathematical concepts that underlie my interest in amateur radio.

Then there's things like physics. While I've always been interested, long before I met my physics teacher in high-school who helped me kick off a career in computing, I've been playing with light bulbs, batteries, disassembling old hardware like the valve radio that I was given when I was about twelve or so.

There's the continued curiosity about audio. I've been making mix-tapes since I was nine, and that has blossomed into an ongoing interest in audio production, some of which is reflected in my weekly podcast and fuelled by my hearing loss.

My interests outside amateur radio have always been wide and varied. I've learnt to fly an aeroplane, learnt to navigate a sailboat, learnt to drive a truck, installed satellite dishes in the bush and built a mobile satellite ground station, built software solutions for piggeries and bakeries, provided logistics for remote outback events, built vehicle mounted GPS tracking and mapping solutions and I continue to read articles as they come my way.

What amateur radio has given me is a context, a framework if you like to bring together these wide ranging fields and make them hang together.

An obvious, though simple example, is learning the phonetic alphabet. In amateur radio it's a given that you'll need to learn that so you can effectively communicate using a poor signal path, but my phonetic learning predates my amateur radio exposure by at least a dozen years. In order to pass my aviation radio certificate, I was required to learn the phonetic alphabet before I was allowed to use the radio.

It's only a small example, but it's illustrative on how, for me at least, amateur radio is the glue that binds it all together.

It happens at other levels too. I've mentioned in the past that looking at a television antenna on the roof of any house before getting a license was a non-event. Today I can't look without thinking about propagation, how the antenna is aligned and if it's installed back-to-front or not. Once you know a thing, it's hard to un-see, or unlearn the background of it.

The same happens when I spot an antenna in the wild, stuck to a lamppost, or bolted to a random roadside cabinet. Previously they would go unremarked, today I wonder what information they're transmitting or receiving, what band they're operating on, who owns the equipment and what interference they might be causing or experiencing in their environment.

I have a growing interest in computer controlled manufacturing like 3D printing, laser engraving and CNC and spend some of the available time in the day learning about how that works, how to improve things and I wonder about how the speed of communications between the various components create an RF field of some sort and what that does to other components and circuits.

As a final experience, recently I had a medical procedure where there was a notice supplied with the logging hardware that specifically called out amateur radio as a source of electromagnetic radiation and that I was required to refrain during the process due to a potential failure of the equipment. If anything, for the first time in a long time, I felt that there was a visible link between my hobby and the rest of the community, since that notice was given to every single person, not just the radio amateurs.

Some links between amateur radio and the rest of the world are visible and some are not. What kinds of interactions between the hobby and society at large have you come across?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB