Over the weekend I had the opportunity to participate in two completely different community events, one aimed at an amateur radio audience, the other at the general public.

Every year, several of the amateur radio clubs in my area hold their individual swap meet, where the aim of the event is to bring amateurs together and to use it as a social fund raising event.

Some jokingly refer to it as a junk library where one person's junk is the next person's treasure, only for it to turn up on their table the next year.

This particular event is held inside what can best be described as a large high school gymnasium. Mind you, my experience with high school facilities predates my amateur radio birthday by quite some decades, so, a building with a wooden floor, basket ball court and other sports markings on the floor.

Mind you, this building has a canteen, a foyer and a big parking lot, so it only resembles my reminiscing in abstract ways; I grew up with bicycles and snow - from time to time, not cars and sun.

Individuals and organisations can book and pay for one or more tables to display their wares. There's a raffle, growing in scope each year, the universal bloke yelling unintelligibly into a microphone, signal unreadable with an RST of 2 and 9, and there's food for sale with drinks, and tables to sit and chat.

It had been a while since I'd last attended and with it came memories of setting up the local news broadcast team so we could do a live edition of the weekly amateur radio news, hard work, lots of planning and very rewarding, also good practice.

This year the entry price went up, the event was down on numbers and there were half a dozen or so empty tables. I'm guessing these were booked and the participants didn't turn up, but I don't know. For the organising club this must have been heartbreaking. I know for me, it was disappointing.

That said, it offered the opportunity to catch up with plenty of friends and acquaintances, new and old amateurs, people who knew me before I knew them, the typical face to face experience that you might get from accidentally being in the same place at the same time.

If this description leaves you with the sense of longing, you know how I felt when I drove away to travel to the other side of the city to attend the second event.

Organised by a local council as an Open Day, it brings together a bunch of different organisations to a central location, augmented with food vans, sausage sizzle, ice-cream and coffee, the whole thing was outdoors.

One of the organisations represented was a different amateur radio club, based at the site, with a small display and the ability for people to talk, have a sticky beak and mosey on.

Interestingly, the kids attending were given a treasure hunt sheet with questions about each of the organisations there, including two questions about the amateur radio club. Funnily enough, a local community radio station is also on site and it too had questions in the treasure hunt.

This dynamic allowed kids and their parents to approach the club and ask silly questions and the confusion between "amateur" radio and "community" radio allowed for more information to be shared with more laughter to go around for all.

The sausage sizzle, a local Rotary club fundraiser, was a hit with a steady stream of people lining up for a bite.

This is the second time this event has been hosted and both times I spoke with many people who were not radio amateurs, people who had electronics projects in need of guidance, and the odd local politician, some more than others.

Over the years I've attended plenty of amateur radio events and while there's a place and need for each of them, I have to say, talking to an interested kid about a homebrew quadrifilar helix antenna has to my favourite experience.

So, why am I talking about this, you ask?

It's pretty simple. Ask yourself, does a particular amateur or amateur adjacent event spark joy, or does it represent an opportunity for reflection and renewal?

Do we need another swap meet, I think locally we have at least five across the year, or could you do a fundraiser with a bingo night in a pub? What about an exhibition, or an auction? A BBQ or a breakfast? A course or a camp out? Have you considered a shack open day or a school visit show and tell? What about joining forces with other community groups and clubs?

What could the ultimate event bring and who would you like to see there? What would they take away and what resources might you need to pull it off?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The other day I heard a thunderclap and as is my Pavlovian response, immediately ran to my shack to disconnect the antennas from their respective transmitter and transceiver. I added a diary entry to my phone to note that I'd disabled my WSPR, or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon, which generally runs 24/7. A few hours later I remembered that my beacon was off and I returned to put it all back in working order.

That's not always been the case. From time-to-time I've managed to turn off the beacon and forgotten to re-enable it, once for months. Same with my main radio, which at one point was disconnected from its antenna, taking a good half hour of stressful troubleshooting to discover one memorable Saturday morning, when I tried to set-up for my weekly net. Now it's the first step, before I turn on the power supply.

I've mentioned in passing that lightning protection and grounding requirements are not globally uniform and I'm purposefully refraining from advising you how to do this in your shack. When in doubt, talk to your local community and a licensed electrician, mainly because there's plenty of poor advice around that could result in your applicable household electrical regulations being breached.

Back to my shack.

Wouldn't it be cool if I could automate this, something like a remote controlled relay, preferably wireless so stray RF doesn't make it into the wrong circuit. Switching aside, it occurred to me that I'd also need some way of detecting lightning to trigger this system, you know, disconnect the antennas, turn off the beacon, then reverse the process when all is clear.

Speaking of automation, a few years ago I purchased a beautiful electromechanical coax switch. I'm still trying to discover how to drive it and I'm not game to power it with the risk of letting the magic smoke out, so if you have specific details for a K&L 6LMP-28-F-N-I-TTL six position coax switch, a data sheet would be wonderful, get in touch, cq@vk6flab.com is my email address.

Searching for lightning detectors reveals a boatload of circuits and tools. There's websites galore, an active community surrounding "blitzortung.org" with an absolutely mesmerising homepage, and plenty of other projects to play with. One thing I noticed was a distinct lack of SDR, or Software Defined Radio implementations. The number isn't zero, but I didn't find any turn-key solutions.

One recurring theme, other than arguing which frequency to tune to for the best result, was the notion that a simple AM radio receiver could be used. The idea often promulgated is to tune between stations and to listen for clicks and pops. It occurred to me that using an SDR as an AM receiver is pretty much the first thing you do after plugging it in.

Combining these ideas, it seems obvious, of course it's unlikely to be, but you know, why spoil the fun, to do this within the 2.6 MHz bandwidth of an RTL-SDR dongle which might actually detect some wideband RF, the signature of a lightning strike.

That started me down the path of splitting a signal in GNU Radio, routing it to multiple AM decoders, looking for peaks, all that fun, when I realised that I know of a tool that does pretty much all of that, "rtl-airband". With a simple text file to describe the frequencies you want to monitor, decode, apply squelch, mix, position and route, most of the job is done.

When it's running, you might have just created a lightning detector to start your journey on this road, using stuff you already have. I intend to create an example configuration file for exactly this purpose, perhaps even a script to generate it, and I'll publish it on GitHub.

Word of warning, based on the number of tools alone, the rabbit hole is deep.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

During the week I was shown a photograph of a chalkboard standing on the sidewalk with one of those "Thought of the Day" quotes on it. Credit aside, since I've been unable to confirm it, despite multiple reverse image searches and attempts at author attribution, the sentiment stuck with me and the more I think about it, the more it resonates and this being radio, that works on so many levels.

We proudly refer to our community as "amateur radio", hold it up as a badge of honour and tell everyone we know about it. Curiously, when you look in the dictionary, you see a litany of words with less than complementary connotations, like "freak", "dabbler", "crank", "neophyte", "inexpert", "unprofessional", "second-rate" and plenty more.

In essence the word "amateur" is contrasted with the word "professional" and our community comes out looking worse for wear.

I'm pointing this out because the experience is insidious. I've told the story of me attempting to report local radio broadcast interference to the regulator when I came upon an investigator who asked how I knew about interference. I explained that I was a licensed amateur. His response was: "I am a Professional". I can still hear the capital "P", now well over a decade later.

It's also interesting when you talk to people outside the community who don't really get what it is that we do. Often they'll think that you're not serious about this and will unthinkingly dismiss your interest and pursuit, because it has the word "amateur" in it.

So, what of this and the chalkboard?

Here's the quote.

"You say 'amateur' as if it's a dirty word. 'Amateur' comes from the Latin word 'amare' which means 'to love'. To do things for the love of it."

As you might imagine, I went hunting to confirm this sentiment.

It turns out that the word "amateur" comes from French "amateur", meaning, "person who cultivates an art or science for their pleasure", in turn that comes directly from Latin "amator", meaning "lover, one who loves", which stems from "amare", "to love". As an aside, "dilettante" from Italian "dilettare", comes from "to delight".

It appears that once respectable pursuits in arts and science lost ground against professionalism and we ended up with a growing gap between formal and informal which increasingly is understood as dangerous, rather than charming.

I think it's time to reclaim "amateur" and take "to love" to heart in our community.

So .. "radio, for the love of it". That's what we do, what we are. And to be honest, I think that really says everything we need to remember.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Over the past weeks, actually, probably months, the push to talk button on the radio I use for my weekly discussion net has been acting up. In the middle of an over it would sometimes cut-out for no particular reason. Being mindful and pushing harder didn't seem to make a blind bit of difference and no amount of fiddling with the cable helped either.

Today I finally combined the act of remembering that this was a problem, with the availability of a spare moment, a passing level of personal health and no local distractions and as a bonus, you, or more accurately, my weekly article. As you might imagine, this is no mean feat and it doesn't happen very often, months apart, if not more, in this case.

My first effort was to find my radio box. Except for the serial numbers, I have two visually identical boxes. One of them is sitting on a cupboard in my shack. I opened it up and the microphone I was hoping for, wasn't there. As you might gather, I have two radios. One is for my shack, the other for the car and portable operation, though currently that too is in the shack, connected to a separately purchased DTMF microphone. This means that I actually have three microphones, and thus the reason for hunting for the other box.

As it turns out, it's safely stored in the garage where after squeezing between several recycling bins, shuffling between crates and shelving, lifting and moving several boxes, it revealed its, temporary, well several years now, storage location. I retrieved the box, put everything else back where I found it, then brought the box into the shack and promptly started sneezing, because dust and allergies. Opening the box confirmed that my brain is still, at least partially, functioning, since the microphone I remembered being stored there was in fact exactly where I thought it would be.

I swapped out the microphone, turned on the radio, tested it with a repeater kerplunk and called it done. In the process of removing the "faulty" microphone I noticed that the cable appeared to be swapped end-for-end. I don't know if that was the root cause of the issue, but the confluence of factors for this adventure ran out, so that's a project for future me. I did find a sandwich bag to put the microphone into and labelled it as being possibly suspect, noted that I swapped the cable end-for-end, but left it untested. I can remember some stuff, but obviously I'm not as smart as you think I am.

So .. why am I telling you this in so many words? It occurred to me that all too often we look at others asking ourselves "why didn't you fix that, it's so easy", when the reality might be somewhat different. In my case, there's plenty of moving parts, some of which actively get in the way, some passively. In this case a seemingly simple task took well over an hour, rather than the 15 minutes I'd budgeted for.

Next time it's fine to give yourself some slack and take a moment, rather than beat yourself up about something you failed to achieve. You need to keep reminding yourself that amateur radio is a hobby, not a profession and progress can be made one step at a time.

Time will tell if I fixed my microphone issue or just took a step on the troubleshooting path.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Previously I've talked about one of the often lauded cornerstones of the amateur radio community, namely Emergency Response, and to be frank, I questioned then, as I do now, the reality of this, at the very least, perceived, foundational aspect of our global hobby.

Before you get out the caps lock key, let me assure you that I'm aware of sporadic examples of heroic efforts made by members of our community to save lives that are held up as examples of amateur radio emergency responses.

What I'm questioning is related to our collective effectiveness. We have global and increasing occurrences of wild or bush fires, we have earthquakes and tsunamis, storms, hurricanes, cyclones or typhoons, whatever you call the vortex of destruction, and global news media ensures that we hear about it within hours if not seconds. Social media provides us with mobile phone footage dubbed with expert audio to explain the latest tragedy to the rest of us.

What we don't see is what happens next, while the power is out, the internet is down, mobile phones aren't working anymore and survivors are fighting tooth and nail for their return to normalcy, or at least what's left of it.

It struck me that one thing I never see discussed and haven't ever discussed in over a decade and a half I've been here, is the amateur radio interface with the rest of the world.

A comment I see often is that Internet connected amateur radio, like Echolink, AllStarLink and IRLP, aren't real radio and that real amateurs use RF.

HF radio for the win right?

What do you think the relevance of HF radio is to a family member living in the next town after a disaster, or a parent looking for their lost child?

How do ordinary people benefit from the radio amateur who lives on their street, or the one who travels into the disaster zone?

Ultimately, if we are to take our claimed emergency response role seriously, we as a community of radio amateurs need to consider just what it is that we can offer to the people around us in the case of an emergency.

Might what we offer look like a Wi-Fi base station that's connected to the rest of the world via an IP link that happens to be running on 2m or 70cm during an emergency?

Or could what we offer be described as an Amateur Radio Short Message Service, what about transmitting a DVB-T dashboard that's being updated over LoRaWAN, or a local voice relay service?

Where's the infrastructure, planning, preparation and training for that? Where's the documentation for it? How are we telling the local community about it? How well do we even do outage notifications within our community, let alone outside it?

The point being that there are amateurs who beat their chest about emergency preparedness and, bluntly, have little or nothing to show for it.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't limited to the amateur radio community. For a few weeks I became an aspirant member of a local emergency response team, right until I discovered that their biggest issue was that their user base, the local volunteer bushfire brigades, didn't really know how to use their radio repeater system and my suggestion to go and visit each one on a rotation basis and train them was met with snorts of derision and laughter.

Do you really want an emergency response to be ad hoc? "Oh, sorry, I'm missing a cable and I can't connect this to that, I'll sort it out for next time."

The increased interest in the various "OTA" or "On The Air" pursuits, Parks, Peaks, Summits, Bunkers, Castles, Waterways, Islands, Lakes, Libraries, Lighthouses and Toilets to name a few, are all helping amateurs practice with the "getting on-air and make noise using a temporary installation" part of an emergency response, but few of those activities interact with the general public in any way.

Ironically, the local Wireless Civil Emergency Network, or WICEN, is at least doing some community outreach by providing radio infrastructure to a few local events. It's a start, but still a very long way from interacting with your next door neighbour in preparation for a massive storm and subsequent power outage.

Here's the thing. There's no end-to-end anything. Is ad hoc sticky tape and baling wire really the way you want our amateur community to respond to an emergency?

Is emergency response a fanciful concept, or are there things we as a community could put together to make it reality?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

One of the more, let's call it challenging, skills to learn in amateur radio is the pace of the process. For many new amateurs I meet, face-to-face, on-air or online, the excitement to get started, to get on-air, to make a contact, to do something, anything, is contagious. It's absolutely delightful to hear the reports of victory and triumph in the face of adversity, and truth be told, it's worth celebrating, more than we often do in this community.

So, let's start there, if you've made it on-air, congratulations, well-done, very nice! If you feel so inclined, perhaps you'd like to document this achievement. I'll hasten to add, this documentation is for your own records, more on that in a moment. I will point out that you are under absolutely no obligation to create documentation, and even less obligation to make it public, you know, aside from any record keeping requirements set-out by your regulator.

Now that you've made this first on-air contact, your obvious next activity is to do it again, perhaps with a slight variation in frequency, location, antenna or radio. This process will likely continue until at some point making contacts like this is no longer exciting or rewarding. Some amateurs stop here and are never heard of again, and while that's disappointing, that is absolutely your prerogative, since this is a hobby, more precisely, your hobby. I'm mentioning this because it's all too easy to forget this fundamental aspect of our community, especially when you're swept up in the excitement of it all.

Over the years I've experienced the excitement associated with this hobby and the community first hand. I've also witnessed the activities of others, amateurs who come in with their tail wagging, running from here to there, sniffing all the bushes and drooling all over their homework, imagine a puppy exploring their new forever home and you'll get the idea. Just like puppies, these excited amateurs get to a point, about two or so years in, sometimes more, sometimes less, and then basically stop, exhausted, dissatisfied, disillusioned and disheartened they depart the hobby, never to be seen again.

It reminds me a lot of new employees at the computing help-desk where I used to work. After about six months of running around, putting in long hours, pleasing every customer, putting on a smile all day long, dealing with the emotions of being the first point of call for every problem, many succumbed to burn-out and quit.

It occurred to me the other day that the radio puppies are following the same pattern, albeit over a longer time span. And with that insight comes the realisation that we can do something about this.

As I told my new colleagues at the help-desk at the time, to slow down, I can use the very same advice to you and for similar reasons.

The field of computing is bound by imagination, so, essentially it's unlimited. The same is true for amateur radio. The hobby you perhaps unwittingly stepped into turns out to be unlimited as well. The implications of this are that one lifetime is not sufficient to know everything about either computers or amateur radio, and much more than three lifetimes if you choose both, ask me how I know.

With that comes the realisation that patience and persistence pays off. The journey, not the destination, is the reward.

So, if that's the case, what does this mean for you?

For starters, it means that each contribution you make is valuable. It means that finding new stuff is inevitable and it means that you're not alone on this journey.

So, next time you feel that you've done all there is to do in this hobby, think again. Each time you do something, anything, celebrate it.

I did say I'd come back to documentation. Hopefully, by now you'll understand what the meaning of it is. If not, permit me to make an observation.

If you don't know or remember what you did, how will you know that you're on a journey?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB