What use is an F-call?

Experimentation is what amateur radio is all about, for some amateurs more than for others. For me, it's an integral part of what makes this hobby exciting for me. It may not be your particular cup of tea, but then, amateur radio is different things for different people. As one amateur put it, there are many walks of life represented in the collective known as amateur radio.

Back to experimentation.

As you may know, I am part of a team of people who put together the news in Western Australia. Last year during HAMfest we put the news to air live, using a bit of kit from here, some kit from there, and bits from everywhere. This year we're working on making the list a little less broad and making our planning experience a little less hectic.

One of the biggest issues we had was our microphone set-up. We had some hand-held microphones that worked pretty well, but from a logistics perspective, we had some issues to deal with. One is that a hand-held microphone sort of makes it hard to use both hands - unless you have a microphone stand and a spot to actually put it on the limited table space we have available.

So this year we decided that we'd use a headset microphone. You know, the $20 jobs that you plug into your sound-card and use with your computer. We have several of these headsets, but plugging them into our mixing desk gave us no sound. Turns out that these headsets have microphones that expect a voltage, so some research was needed to make a box that did just that. A bit of planning, a few components, some soldering and drilling and we have those.

Now we have working microphones, but now we have a bonus extra sound, we have a 50Hz hum that just wonderfully punctuates any silence we may care to broadcast. More research indicates that this is likely a ground loop and several suggestions are available on how to fix those. We've tried a few and we're working through the options, but hand-held microphones are looking pretty good right now if you get my drift.

My point is this. Finding problems and solving them is what this hobby is all about. We do it with antennas, we do it with power and at the moment I'm doing it with ground-loops in my audio output. All this is learning that I can apply in other aspects of my life. I can walk around the street and see that someone has installed their TV antenna backwards, or that the CB antenna on their car is unlikely to work efficiently.

All this came from learning and experimentation.

You may not like to drill and solder, but that doesn't mean you cannot experiment.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB