Foundations of Amateur Radio

Our hobby has been around for over a century. The Wireless Institute of Australia, or WIA, is the oldest amateur association on the globe, having just marked 113 years since formation. The American Radio Relay League, or ARRL, is four years younger, founded in 1914.

I'm mentioning these two associations because they documented their journey through many of the years since foundation. The ARRL has published QST magazine since 1915 and the WIA has published Amateur Radio Magazine since 1933.

Before the Internet and the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications, magazines like QST and AR Magazine were some ways of documenting and archiving achievements across our community.

If you find my professional biography online, you'll read: Experienced polyglot IT professional, software developer, trouble shooter, researcher, public speaker, educator, writer and publisher, founder and small business owner, podcaster, and licensed radio amateur.

It's fair to say that I've done a great many things across the technology arena. I have been writing software since before I was a teenager. At the time we used words like freeware and shareware, we copied lines of BASIC from the pages of the latest computer magazine, or recorded the TV teletext signal to access a programme. I recall typing pages of hexadecimal codes and running the result. Very satisfying to make sprites running across your screen.

In the decades since, technology has moved on. I've had a front-row seat to see that evolution happen. I've also witnessed one of the victims of the 1980's computer craze, the fundamental obliteration of its history. Much has been lost, either physically by destruction or disposal of boxes of magazines or the deterioration of audio cassette tapes once used to store software. I hold a Guinness World Record of Endurance Computing, set in 1989 during the Hobby Computer Club days, but you'll not find it anywhere other than a copy of the Dutch World Records that might be somewhere in my garage, or not. The twice-daily magazine we published over the three days of the event, Elephant News, was lost to time.

I'm mentioning this because this loss is not limited to the 1980's, it's happening here, today. As our hobby evolves into the software realm, we need to consider just how that legacy continues beyond our own lifetime. For example, we have lost access to the fundamentals of how exactly HAM DRM works, we've lost the source for VK Contest Logger to name another, and the collected designs by so-called antenna guru L.B. Cebik W4RNL (SK) are scattered around the Internet, but as far as I know, none of it is complete.

Fortunately we have tools at our disposal to keep our history. As I mentioned, the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications or DLARC is an Internet Archive project to catalogue and store current and historic amateur media. In the 30 weeks since starting in October 2022, it now has 75,000 items and continues to grow under the expert stewardship of Program Manager, Special Collections, Kay, K6KJN.

The DLARC is not the only tool at our disposal and documentation isn't the only way we share technology in our hobby. More and more of what we do is based around software. We use programs to process signals, to generate and receive different modes, to create logs, to model antennas, to log propagation, and that list grows daily.

One of the most significant changes in software since my childhood is that of the introduction of Open Source Software in 1998. I've spoken about this several times before and I recently pointed at Not1MM as an example of an Open Source contest logger, but that is not the only project available.

If you visit GitHub.com and search for "amateur radio", you'll discover over a thousand projects showing a healthy ecosystem of activity from people like Daniel EA4GPZ who shared gr-satellites, a collection of telemetry decoders that support many different amateur satellites.

You'll find APRSdroid by Georg D01GL, which allows radio amateurs to view and report locations using the APRS network.

There's an Arduino based rotator interface by Anthony K3NG, an advanced ham radio logger called CQRLOG by Petr OK2CQR, a radio modem by Dan KF7IJB, remoteAudio by Tobias DH1TW, and the list goes on.

I must also point out that I'm only naming the person behind the repository because as is the whole point of Open Source software, anyone can contribute in different ways. You can make a copy of the source-code and write your own version, a so-called fork, or you can create trouble-tickets to explain a bug or problem, there's ways of contributing fixes and ideas and all of that can be done by anyone anywhere. Many of the projects I've just shared are a combination of years of effort by many different people.

And that is the point of this conversation. Amateur Radio is a collaborative affair. We learn and share from the experience of others. We document how we built a schematic, or an antenna, or managed to achieve some feat and share that with the rest of the community.

It's not limited to hobbyist projects either. I purchased my Analog Devices ADALM-Pluto SDR hardware specifically because it was Open Source and came with all manner of tools and code that I could tease apart, improve on and change to my own requirements.

As we make more and more use of technology in our hobby, we run the risk of repeating the mistakes of the 1980's if we don't start making our efforts public and accessible to the community at large.

Imagine what our hobby would look like if we stopped sharing our successes and failures.

So, next time you want to look at some software to use, a calculator to build, or a thing you've learnt, consider what a technology appropriate way to share that might be.

What tools do you use today and how many of them are Open Source? How much of what you do is accessible to others and what happens if you stop paying for the hosting fees on your website?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB