No Onno, it's not slippery and other lessons ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio

There is a saying in my family, which I'll translate into English for you, "No Onno, it's not slippery."

This came about when I was ten or so and cycling with my grandmother. It was the middle of winter, it was cold, there was the promise of snow in the air, but nothing had actually fallen. On the little plants, twigs is probably a more accurate term, dotted alongside the cycle path you could see little signs of frost. I was cycling on my shiny new bike and my grandmother was following behind. We came up to a corner on the cycle path and from behind my grandmother called out that I should be careful going around the corner because it was slippery.

Being the indestructible ten year old, I called back: "No grandma, it's not slippery." at which point I fell flat on my face.

A few years ago I went on a camping trip with my local club to participate in a contest. One member had a tray-top ute and the idea that we could use that as the base of operation. We planned on putting up a 10m Yagi at the top of a pole. Before we started the process I was asked to test the antenna. I plugged it into my radio, keyed up the PTT and noted that the SWR was as expected, good to go. We then set about attaching the antenna to a telescopic mast. The mast is one of those awkward contraptions. Each segment is about 2.5m tall and standing on a ladder on the back of the ute is just enough height to get to the top of the segment, so you can push up the next and clamp it down.

The segments are made of mild steel, so you need to be careful to keep the whole thing straight, guy-wires everywhere, people scattered all around holding on for dear life and needing a spanner to clamp down on the next segment because the locking pins had long vanished or ceased working.

About 2 or so hours later we finally had this contraption in the air. Using the Armstrong rotator - a rope that you pull the Yagi around with - we could point the antenna and life was good. We had taped down the coax as we went, put in strain relief, got the whole thing just right.

Plugged it in and whoa. What happened? The SWR was through the roof. No match on any band, all over the shop. Head scratching and animated discussion followed. After a little while one of my friends asked me if I'd tested the antenna. I confirmed that I had. They'd even seen me do it. More head scratching, more animated discussion.

I was again asked if I'd really tested the antenna. I confirmed that I had. They asked me how I tested the antenna. I showed them. I plugged in my radio, keyed the mike and showed them the SWR meter. All good. What's the problem?

At that point I was taught about having to actually put a signal out over SSB to test. If I'd used a mode like FM, or PSK on my radio, all would have been revealed. But no sound, means no power, means no standing wave ratio, since there's nothing to bounce.

I am reminded regularly of this event whenever I meet my friends, not as snappy as "No Onno, it's not slippery", but memorable none-the-less.

During the week I went to disconnect my radio. It had been sitting there for a fortnight monitoring WSPR signals on 6m, 2m and 70cm. If you recall, I set it up a couple of months ago to monitor the HF bands. I've not yet done the final analysis on that, but I figured I should see if I could monitor the VHF and UHF bands. I attempted to set my radio up with two antennas, but WSJT-X doesn't seem to like doing both HF and VHF monitoring in the same band plan. It complains with an alert that you have VHF mode turned on when you're monitoring HF and stays quiet when you're monitoring VHF, so in the end I turned off HF monitoring and started listening to 6m, 2m and 70cm.

After two weeks of nothing, I turned it off, no reports, no point.

A couple of amateurs contacted me and asked me if I was still monitoring, so I turned it on again. About a week later, I had to turn it all off overnight with a thunderstorm, but the next morning I turned it all on again and left it running. I got a few more emails from amateurs asking if I was hearing their signals. I even set-up a plan to do some testing this weekend, since we confirmed that I was listening to the correct frequency, but still not able to hear local 6m transmissions.

As I said, during the week I went to disconnect my radio. I turned off the computer, turned off the power supply and went to disconnect the antenna.

At that point I discovered that I'd been monitoring WSPR for the past fortnight or so without an antenna connected. For icing on the cake, this morning I discovered that the squelch was set for my FM use on the local repeater, so unless the WSPR signal was coming in loud and proud, even with an antenna connected, I would not have managed to hear it.

All giggling aside, clearly doing something and failing, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes quietly to yourself, is the way to learn. I wonder what little adventures your life shared with you and what lessons you learned along the way. Feel free to share, I promise I won't laugh, much.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB