About this episode
Foundations of Amateur Radio
When you start the process of getting your hobby off the ground, either for the first time, or after a hiatus, you might be left with the impression that the only way to "do amateur radio" is to have a shack, a place where you can set-up your gear, and connected to that gear using coax, one or more antennas. While that's a common scenario, it's not the only one at your disposal. We are after all in the game of communication and over the past few decades options have exploded.
Starting closest to the traditional radio, coax and antenna, is to consider indoor antennas. There's many to choose from. You can install one in the same room as your shack, or, you can build your antennas in the roof space, either way, invisible from the outside can sometimes be a requirement. Stealth is a topic all its own, and no doubt we'll get to that another time.
A word of caution. If you do have an indoor antenna and associated coax, consider your transmitter power levels, since it's likely that given the close proximity, you'll exceed emissions safety standards, or you'll cause harm to other electronic equipment in the building. QRP or low power is a good way to go if this is something you're considering.
If we step away from a traditional radio, coax, antenna configuration, you can build your shack in other ways too.
For example, you can use a local repeater which you might trigger from a local handheld radio. Often dismissed as being for local communications only, there are thousands of repeaters across the globe offering a variety of bands, frequencies and modes. Often you can access a local repeater that can be connected to a remote one using a bewildering array of technologies, some using the internet, some using traditional RF. You'll find repeaters on 10m, 6m, 2m, 70cm and 23cm.
There's nothing stopping you making your own repeater. You don't even need to go through the effort of making it completely standalone, for example, my Yaesu FT-857d has a detachable face-plate or head, connected to the main body by a short cable. There are plenty of other radios with a similar configuration.
Presumably designed for the installation in a vehicle, where the head needs to be near the driver and there's unlikely to be space for the body, you can run a longer cable from the head to the body and install it somewhere more convenient. In my case it was bolted underneath the removable floor into the boot next to the spare tyre.
There's several solutions that replace the connecting cable with an internet connection.
Now, that internet connection can be across the room, from inside your shack to your garage, or between your shack and a remote hill where you have permission to put up a bit of gear. In fact, the same type of setup can be used to connect to shared radios, and companies like Elecraft, Flex Radio and ICOM make specific remote heads that can operate remote radio equipment, marketed as RF decks, without
