Lessons Learnt

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Lessons Learnt

Learning to me is an ongoing process. For some reason that's not a universal experience. I've met people who cram for an exam, pass their test, get the certificate and hang out their shingle. The retained knowledge is spotty and vigorously defended as the final word on the topic.

It's never been like that for me. I tend to walk through life intensely curious about the how and why of a thing.

Take my recent adventures operating a new to me radio with a new to me antenna in a new to me location. It went sideways, fast, with little direct evidence of the experience to show for itself.

I did learn several things.

I expected that having switched on the radio at home, transmitting into a dummy load and receiving was enough to prove that the radio was operating normally.

The fact that I didn't hear anything and didn't know if that was because of my set-up or the radio itself was not helpful.

I expected that bringing a long-wire with a multi-tap un-un would guarantee that I'd be able to operate on any band.

The fact that I got a high SWR everywhere didn't tell me what the cause was and not having access to my testing equipment made troubleshooting much harder.

I expected to plug the radio into the car and brought battery terminal clip adaptors and a cigarette lighter plug adaptor to facilitate this.

I didn't expect to operate separate from the car, hadn't considered that the voltage might drop below acceptable and didn't know how fast that might happen. I sort of expected that the radio would have a voltage display, but so far that's eluded me. I even have an in-line Volt meter back at the shack, would have been more useful than the torrid I packed.

I expected that the length of the power leads would be sufficient to comfortably install the radio into the car and operate without having to be mindful of where to put my feet.

I didn't expect that the power lead was only just long enough to place the radio in the passenger side foot well and didn't offer any flexibility at all.

I expected that I had taken with me enough in the way of connectors and adaptors to connect various antenna options together.

I did. I managed to bring one surplus item which couldn't be connected and didn't need to be either.

I expected that my coax patch lead was sufficient to have the radio inside the car and the antenna outside the car.

It was. Just.

I expected for planning purposes that Google Maps would work the same as it does at home. Satellite and street views pretty much in sync and roads shown on the map actually existed.

It didn't. The satellite view was current, street view was 11 years old for some streets, pre-building boom, pre-cyclone, pre-historic pretty much. There were roads indicated that didn't exist, couldn't exist, had never existed and would never exist. The place I stayed at has been there for more than a decade, but Google Maps shows me surrounded by water. The local board walk has been there for over 30 years, but Google doesn't know it exists.

I expected to be able to get anything missing from my kit with little trouble from local big box stores.

In reality, the local electronics dealer is an authorised stockist of a well known brand, capable of ordering in most stuff, but a full brand store with actual stock was well over 100km away.

I expected that buying a battery locally might cause weight issues for packing luggage.

In reality, shipping batteries across the country is non-trivial and in many ways should be budgeted as a disposable item, since shipping is likely to be either not permitted, or cost as much or more than the original purchase price. It boggles the mind how these batteries actually arrive at the shop where you buy them, but no doubt that's above my pay grade.

I'm sure there's more to learn from my adventures, but I'm happy to have experienced this to add to my skill set as a radio amateur.

What learning have you been exposed to when you least expected to be?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB