Foundations of Amateur Radio

Have you ever taken a moment to consider the available bandwidth on the various amateur bands?

As an entrant into amateur radio in Australia as a Foundation licence holder you have access to six different amateur bands, the 80m band, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm. If you add the bandwidth from each of those bands together, you end up with 26.65 MHz worth of bandwidth to play with in Australia.

I can tell you that's a big chunk of bandwidth, but until I give you some context, 26.65 MHz isn't likely something that you can picture.

You might think of things as being pretty crowded. For example, on the 40m band during a contest it's common to hear wall to wall signals. There's barely enough room to call CQ and not interfere with anyone else. But how crowded is it really?

Let's start with an SSB signal, typically it's 2.4 kHz wide. On the 40m band, with 300 kHz of bandwidth, there's room for about 125 SSB signals side-by-side. On the 10m band, there's space for over 700 SSB signals side-by-side. Across all the available bandwidth for a Foundation license holder in Australia, there's room for over 11-thousand different SSB signals side-by-side.

While we're on the subject of crowding, there's talk about the massive influx of FT8, some call it a scourge. FT8 channels are transmitted within a single SSB channel and each takes up 50 Hz. That means that within an SSB channel of 2.4 kHz, there's room for 48 different FT8 channels, and if you take into account the odd and even time-slots, that doubles to 96 different signals, all within the same single SSB channel. So while FT8 is popular and growing, let's not get too excited about how much space it's taking up. From the perspective of an Australian Foundation license holder, it's taking up exactly six separate SSB slots of those 11-thousand across the six available bands, room for 576 separate FT8 signals, taking up a total of 14.4 kHz, or 0.05% of the available bandwidth.

Let's look at this another way, of the 26.65 MHz available bandwidth, 20 MHz is from the 70cm band alone, that means that all the other bands put together, fit inside the 70cm band three times over.

Let that sink in for a moment, adding the 80m, 40m, 15m, 10m and 2m band together fit inside the 70cm band three times.

You can use the 70cm band alone for 800-thousand FT8 signals, remember that there's two time slots, so you get two for one.

If this makes your mind explode, then consider that a carrier wave signal is considered to be about 25 Hz wide, so on the 70cm band you could have 800-thousand individual CW signals. You could allocate a personal CW frequency to every one of the amateurs in the United States in the 70cm band and still have room for expansion, not that I'm advocating that, just to give you a sense of scale. I should note that the 70cm band in the United States is even larger than it is in Australia, but I don't want to get bogged down into the various band plans across the world at the moment.

You might ask yourself why am I getting so excited about this?

Amateur radio is about experimentation. I've been telling you about HF propagation and using techniques like FT8 to determine just how far your signal goes, but you could use the same techniques to build a 70cm communication network with the amateurs within your city and share information across the city, perhaps even build a mesh network using your 70cm hand-held and an FT8-call network. It could be used to distribute propagation information, or messages in case of an emergency, or form the basis of something completely different.

If that doesn't whet your appetite, consider that the 1mm amateur band, which runs from 241 to 250 GHz is ready for you to experiment when your license permits. The current world distance record is 114 km, set in 2008 by Brian WA1ZMS and Peter W4WWQ, it has 9 GHz bandwidth and has room for 360-million FT8 signals, or 60 exclusive FT8 channels for every amateur on the planet.

My point is that as radio amateurs we have access to a massive chunk of radio bandwidth and it's just sitting there waiting for you to experiment with.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB