Foundations of Amateur Radio

Yak Shaving ...

Not every adventure gives you an outcome. Today started with reading a thank-you email from a listener who shared their activities and wanted to express their gratitude for encouraging them to get on air and make noise.

That in turn prompted the question on the country of origin of that listener and did I know where all my listeners were? For the past few hours I've been attempting to answer that seemingly simple question.

Aside from using the opportunity to make an attempt at mapping the distribution of amateurs in Australia, which on the face of it is a trivial exercise, consisting of extracting the postcode from each registered amateur and then putting those on a map.

Only the postcodes are not actually single points. They're boundaries defined by Australia Post and they're copyrighted. Not only that, they change. To access them, you have to pay the Post Office. If you want to combine a postcode with a population density, so you can see where amateurs are represented and at what level, you go to the Australian Bureau of Statistics for a population density data-set. At that point you realise that the Bureau uses standardised regions. Mesh-blocks at the smallest end of the scale are essentially the size of 30 to 60 households. The Bureau uses these as the fundamental size for all its statistics.

When you attempt to map this onto postcodes you learn that there isn't a one-to-one mapping and even if there was, it would change every time Australia Post changed a postcode boundary.

I will note that this is all by way of a side-street in my investigation. I wondered how amateur radio is distributed across the country and I didn't want to end up with essentially a population density map, more people means more amateurs, I wanted to see where amateur radio had the potential to affect more people because there are more of them in a group.

Anyway, then I attempted to look at the podcast downloads and map those to countries. I use AWS CloudFront to make the podcast available, so it gets to the user, you, quicker. The logs show which data-centre a request is handled by. Then I needed to map a data-centre to an airport code, look that up in a database so I could extract the country, then count how many requests were made per country.

Then I started doing that across time, so you can see how that changes over time.

At this point I still don't actually have a map to show.

While all this was happening, my computer started running low on disk-space, not because I'd just downloaded some data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, but because some rogue process was writing a log somewhere, so I spent an hour looking for what process that was, killing it and removing the superfluous log file.

If this sounds familiar, there's a name for it. Yak shaving. It's originally named after a Ren and Stimpy episode called "Yak Shaving Day". Essentially you do a whole lot of unrelated activities in the pursuit of the actual activity, essentially a string of dependencies that distract you from the end-goal. In my case, trying to answer which countries are represented within my audience.

Why am I not using an amateur radio example?

Two reasons.

This is amateur radio. For me. Doing charts, wrangling data, massaging stats, finding answers and presenting those are an integral part of the hobby, to me. Just like making this podcast, contributing to discussion, reading and learning. All part of the mix.

Second reason is that I wanted to illustrate this with something that wasn't immediately obviously linked to the hobby for most people. A more amateur example might be wanting to go and operate portable, attempting to locate you battery, when you find that it's not charged, so you go looking for the charger which you find has a broken connector, so you drive to the electronics store to get the connector when you run out of petrol, so you pull over, get out of the car and trip over the curb and end up in hospital emergency waiting for a doctor to see you. If you think that's far-fetched, I know an amateur who ended up in hospital from yak-shaving.

We've all had days like that.

The idea is that any day that you are on the right side of the earth, doing something you love is a good day.

Regardless of the end result, this is a hobby after all.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB