Recently it occurred to me that I haven't been using HF in my shack for much longer than I'd care to admit. Over the years I've spoken about my shack and how it's set-up, more on that shortly. I effectively went off-air when I decommissioned the computer that was running tools like "fldigi" and "WSJT-X". Mainly because it was too slow, for example, taking a good minute to launch a copy of Firefox.

After that I repurposed my HF antenna for use with my ultra low power WSPR beacon experiments and essentially ceased being a functional HF station.

There's other forces at work, which I'll get to, but before I do, in discussion with a fellow amateur we discovered that my desire to get back on-air on HF is essentially the same journey that a new amateur might make and the idea was hatched to document the process and share it with you.

In the past you've heard me say that the answer to most questions associated with amateur radio is: "it depends".

As a new, or returning amateur, this might not be very helpful if you don't know what it depends on, so, I'm going to attempt to describe the process of determining how to get to the answers required to make a station.

Now, before I start I'd like to talk about money. I'm raising this upfront because your access to a budget determines many of the choices that are open to you. You could interpret that to mean that you need money and while that helps, it's not universally true, in fact I'd go so far as to say that you could get on-air and make noise using nothing more than a mobile phone and an internet connection, which truth be told is pretty much the minimum requirement to enjoy my thoughts, so perhaps that's the base requirement.

That said, even if you don't have access to that, there's other options that we'll no doubt explore together, so keep that in mind.

I think that the very first thing to consider is what you think of when you hear the term "amateur radio". I've said it before and I'll say it again. Amateur Radio is a great many things to different people. For some it means a hand-held radio and chatting with mates on the local repeater, for others it means a full blown HF contest station with multiple antennas and radios, with integrated logging in a dedicated building. For others it means logging into a remote WebSDR and listening to the bands, decoding interesting signals, and license permitting, transmitting remotely across the internet.

In other words, the "amateur radio" experience is unique to you. What you get from it is dependent on you and nobody else. As an aside, that's also true for licensing.

If you have a "beginners" license, like my Foundation license, then it's entirely up to you to decide if and when you add extra privileges. "Foundations of Amateur Radio", well, its predecessor, "What use is an F-call?" emerged specifically in response to amateurs around me who continued to, let's be kind and call it "encourage" me to "upgrade" to a "real" license. Fifteen years on, I'm still a Foundation "beginner" and thus far I have yet to run out of things to do or talk about, so keep that in mind.

I think that covers the disclaimers, no doubt more will occur to me as we continue on this journey.

For the first decade or so of having a license, most of my activity was done in my car, a mobile shack of sorts. I didn't have access to a space where I could set-up a radio without running the risk of someone tripping over coax, or a landlord complaining within an hour of me erecting a temporary vertical. In other words, my mobile shack was born from necessity. It was helpful in exploring the limitless variation of operating positions, as-in locations and their impact on propagation, antenna performance, local interference, and plenty of other lessons.

So, even if you don't have a permanent space to operate, there's plenty of amateur radio to go round.

When I finally moved to a place where I had space, I started the process of putting together my shack. Initially it was pretty much integrated with my home-office. This sort of worked, but both the office and the shack suffered from this combination, so my first observation is that, in my experience, setting aside a dedicated space for a shack is a good idea.

Now, right now, as I am telling you that, to the bottom right of my computer screen is the head of my Yaesu FT-857d, connected to a "RemoteRig", a pair of devices that replace the serial cable between the head and the radio with a network connection.

The RemoteRig is connected to a WiFi router, which runs a dedicated wireless connection across the room to the WiFi router that's connected to the radio, sitting on what's left of my shack. It's how I run the weekly F-troop net. It's sitting there because I need to be able to access my computer to make log entries and track who's next in the round-robin discussion, and as I said, I've decommissioned my shack computer.

Which brings me to the second point.

Setting up a shack doesn't happen in isolation. You're likely to have existing infrastructure of some sort. It might be a fixed location for power points, it might be a previously drilled hole for incoming coax, it might be a bolted bench, whatever it is, it's something that you need to take into account.

It's also something that you need to consider in terms of feasibility. Just because something is the way it is today, doesn't mean that it has to stay the same for the next decade. I've previously discussed the evolution of my shack, based on a 35 year old wooden IKEA trestle table, all of 1.2 square meters, complete with holes from taking it around Australia for several years in the back of a van. It's currently got a wire mesh shelving unit on top and a pegboard strapped to the back. The legs are adorned with power boards and as I said, the head of my radio is on the other side of the room.

This all to say that building a shack doesn't happen in isolation. The local environment will determine what's possible and what's not. I'm not here to tell you what to do, I'm here to help you figure out what a shack looks like in your environment.

Note that I've not talked in any way about what equipment to get, what, if any, antenna to install or what else is required. These are all part of the "it depends" and I'll talk about that soon.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

After a century on the AM band, ABC Radio stations in Perth will move to FM in 2026

In short

ABC Radio Perth, Radio National and News Radio will move from the AM to FM band.

The move will greatly improve audio quality for listeners, reduce interference and result in financial savings.

What's next?

The switchover date and new frequencies for the three AM stations will be announced in the new year.

12 December 2025

Australians shopping online for communications equipment will now benefit from stronger protections thanks to a new Equipment Safety Pledge launched by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

The pledge is a set of voluntary commitments made by leading eCommerce platforms to tackle the sale of unsafe and illegal radiocommunications devices.

These devices can include dodgy two-way radios, illegal jammers, mobile phone boosters, unauthorised cellular mobile repeaters and ‘grey market’ mobile phones.

ACMA Deputy Chair Adam Suckling said using this type of equipment risks causing interference with licensed communications services and networks, including emergency service communications, and poses serious risks to public safety.

“Helping keep Australians safe from dodgy devices is a shared responsibility. These devices can interfere with emergency services like police, fire and ambulance, so sellers must step up to prevent these from being sold,” Mr Suckling said.

“This pledge is an important step forward in protecting Australians from harmful communications equipment and ensure online marketplaces are not a gateway for illegal and non-compliant products.”

Current signatories to the Equipment Safety Pledge include eBay, Gumtree, Temu, Shein, Radio Warehouse and Icom Australia, who together account for a significant share of online sales of radiocommunications devices in Australia.

The ACMA will be inviting other platforms to sign the pledge and anticipates more signatories will join in the future. Online marketplaces and retailers are encouraged to join by contacting the ACMA.

“Taking the pledge reflects a strong commitment from industry to work with the ACMA to improve consumer safety. We commend those companies who have signed the pledge and have taken responsibility for harmful devices sold via their platforms. We urge other eCommerce platforms to put their customers’ interests first and sign up to the pledge,” Mr Suckling said.

Signatories commit to take action in four priority areas, including stopping the sale of non-compliant and illegal communications devices through proactive detection and removal of listings, cooperating with the ACMA including by removing flagged listings within two business days of notification from the ACMA, and raising awareness by educating sellers and giving consumers clear ways to report listings of dodgy devices.

While the pledge strengthens consumer protections, shoppers are still encouraged to do their own checks before purchasing. Visit the ACMA’s website to learn how to spot a dodgy device or to report illegal equipment.

MR 39/2025

Let's start with an observation, I'm a geek, have been all my life. Since my early teenage years that evolved as a predilection for computing. As you might already know, I became a radio amateur to essentially get away from computing. The reality turned out to be something else entirely.

I discovered that the time of combining radio and computing had already begun when I joined the community. Like the evolution from spark-gap, through valves, transistors and integrated circuits, radio has come to encompass software, least of which through SDR, or Software Defined Radio.

Why least?

Over the years I've attempted to explain some of my fascination and wonder with software, but one aspect I've been unable to convey succinctly is the scope of software. I'm not talking about the fact that you find software inside your microwave oven, your car, your bathroom scales, but that hints at what underlies the phenomenon.

If you're not familiar with spreadsheets, imagine a blank piece of paper with a grid drawn on it. Inside each square, or cell, you can put anything you want, a number, a label, a picture, a web address, a formula, a colour, borders, you name it. Your imagination is pretty much the only limiting factor.

Now, here's where it gets fun.

Once you have filled in the first cell, the next one follows. What this means is that once you've made the first decision, the next one becomes a little easier. Every time you make a decision, the number of options you have open to you become less and less, or to use another word, constrained.

So what, you ask?

Well, unlike a sheet of paper with a grid, a spreadsheet allows you to add rows and columns, at any point in your document. Doing that reduces the constraints, you have more options open to you. You can also add sheets, or even start a completely separate document.

In other words, you have a playground open to you that is infinitely flexible.

Writing software is like that, with bells on.

Now, I'm not going to tell you to start learning how to write software, though truth be told, there's lots of things to like, and admittedly, frustration, that comes with doing so.

Let's talk about that frustration.

Once you make the first decision, the next one is more constrained. So, if you start with a blank sheet, you have infinite possibilities. Writing software is exactly like that. Here's the frustration. What's the first thing you should decide, because once you do, your options become reduced.

So .. Bald Yak, if you're unfamiliar, the Bald Yak project aims to create a modular, bidirectional and distributed signal processing and control system that leverages GNU Radio.

That little phrase hides a lot of complexity, but it already contains some constraints. GNU Radio is one, distributed is another and so-on.

Let me share with you what my semi-blank piece of paper looks like.

I've been quietly working on an idea to use my Pluto SDR to listen to amateur radio repeaters. Not just one, all of them, across 2m and 70cm. I came up with this idea as a real-life project that I'd like to implement with whatever Bald Yak is, or becomes. It has all the bits I care about right now, multiple frequencies, something that goes well and truly beyond what my Yaesu FT-857d can do, it taxes my skill set, it gives me something to make tangible and it hopefully moves the needle on the Bald Yak project.

So, here's some variables to consider.

The Pluto SDR has a computer on-board. There are reports that people have run GNU Radio programs on the Pluto itself. This is attractive since the amount of data involved with monitoring 2m and 70cm simultaneously is likely to exceed that of the USB port on the device.

However, what I don't know is how much actual computing resources doing this will take to achieve and if a Pluto could actually do this.

To give you an example. Imagine a massive fire-hose of data coming into my software and then processing that. Between memory and CPU constraints, I can't just decode the stream for each repeater, likely duplicating a whole bunch of calculations.

While that consideration is on the table, decoding a dozen narrowband FM streams implies a dozen copies of the FM decoder software. Ideally this would be one actual piece of software, used a dozen times, rather than a dozen separate copies that will individually be maintained if something changes. For example, once I've built this, I might realise that I need to implement FM de-emphasis, a technique implemented in FM broadcasting to, among other reasons, manage artefacts associated with transmitting a signal over FM, perhaps a topic for another day.

When you write software you do not want to have copies of the same software in multiple places. To use a spreadsheet equivalent, it's like putting a Tax rate in multiple places across your document, rather than storing it in a cell and referring to it in other formulas. That way, you can change it once and all the calculations will automatically be correct. Same deal with writing software, especially if that software is intended to be used for more than a once off.

While that's going on, let me introduce another variable. I have a Pluto SDR, but the whole point of Bald Yak is that I cannot assume that you have one. It's one of the reasons I chose GNU Radio as the basis of this project.

While it's unreasonable to expect that a traditional amateur radio transceiver can decode more than one repeater, the same system could potentially be used to decode multiple Morse code signals, something that should be more than possible, essentially replacing the FM decoder with a Morse decoder.

Which brings up an example of another variable.

How wide do you make the channels? How do you define them? How do you make it possible to modify these without having to update the software, so an end-user can modify something on their screen and see the result?

At this point you might notice a couple of things.

I have not got any answers, I also don't have all the questions. It's unlikely I'll ever have all the questions, let alone answers, since the nature of this software thing is flexibility.

Now, to bring this in full circle, when I say that SDR, or Software Defined Radio isn't just the box that you connect to an antenna, it's the possibilities that this brings, the sheer volume of options that this opens you up to.

Now it's your turn. What questions does this bring for you? What sense of wonder can you bring to the table and what opportunities does this expose you to?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The first step in solving any problem is recognising that there is one. In my case the name of that problem is "logging". Specifically the storage and collection of my amateur radio contact logs.

Just to be clear, the actual process of logging is fraught .. what do you log, as in, which pieces of information are germane to the purpose of logging, do you log your own callsign, or do you only collect that once per session, do you log in UTC, or in local time, if you're logging in local time, do you record where you're logging, do you record what power level, which antenna, what radio, the battery voltage, you get the idea.

Then there's .. when do you log? Do you log each and every session on-air, weekly nets, chat sessions on the local repeater, do you log the time when you establish the contact, once you've deciphered their callsign, or once the contact ends, and if you never wear a watch, how do you know what time it is?

What do you log with? Is it using pen and paper, pencil and paper, on a sheet of A4, or A5, in a binder, in a scrapbook, in an exercise book, in a journal, a diary, on ruled, grid or on plain paper, or do you log with a computer and if you do that, using which of the seven gazillion logging packages that are available to you?

I'm not talking about any of those things, though I suppose you could argue that I'm addressing one of the gazillion options, but stick with me.

I have, sitting on my desk, fourteen different logbooks. That's not unreasonable, almost one for each year that I've been licensed. Except that these books are not in any way consistent, they're essentially bound pieces of scrap paper with log entries scribbled in the available space, sometimes I've reversed a spiral notebook, just so I can avoid the spiral with my writing hand, sometimes it's oriented in landscape, other times in portrait. Some are smaller than A5, others are foolscap and intended for accounting purposes.

Next to that pile are too many empty logbooks, intended for future use. Why so many, you ask? Well it goes like this. You go to the office supply store to look for a suitable logbook. You buy it and try it. You use it for a bit and decide that you either love or hate it. If you hate it, you go back to the store to try and find another one. If you love it, your problem becomes finding an identical logbook. In a fit of inspiration, I loved the grid layout of my tiny spiral notebooks, and decided that this was the one for me, but they're no longer available, so instead I bought twenty A4 7mm grid exercise books with a soft cover, which I hate, and that was after trying to get a third Account Book Journal with a hard cover. There's also several A5 spiral bound books, but they're too chunky for portable operation and their spiral is annoying for logging.

There's also various empty ring binders and paper ready for logging in the garage. Who knew that there are apparently multiple disconnected universes where so-called universal loose-leaf hole punched paper doesn't fit ring binders with more than two rings, I suppose that's like different implementations of the same version of ADIF, but I'll admit that I'm bitter and have digressed well off topic. I will say this, stationery and I clearly have an unhealed relationship.

That's not the half of it.

My computer has at least 208 ADIF and Cabrillo files on it. I say "at least", since that's the ones I found when looking for ADI, ADIF and CAB files. Removing identical files, nets me 171 text files which I'm pretty sure are all log files, 50-thousand lines, but that's with some having a one line per contact and others having a dozen, depending on which software wrote the file.

It's going to take a moment, since those 208 files are scattered among 74 different directories. Then there's the files that "wsjt-x" and "fldigi" create, but right now I'm not sure what the extensions for those are, I think one is called "all.txt", and looking inside, it helpfully does not have a year in the logged data, so that's fun. My computer also has logs in "cqrlog", "xlog" and "VKCL", probably others.

Then there's the logs I have online. The log for F-troop is a single spreadsheet, it has nearly 10,000 entries. I know that there's other files online and likely in other places like the various clubs I've operated at .. fortunately or not, most of those were done with the club callsign, so I'm calling those out of scope, at least for now.

Then there's the entries in LoTW, Clublog, eQSL, probably QRZ and likely more.

It all started out so innocently. I made my first contact in 2011 and forgot to log it. Since then I've been extolling the virtues of making sure that everyone around me logs their first contact.

Meanwhile I've been pulling my hair out trying to make sense of the fragmented disaster that is represented by logging in amateur radio. I'll take responsibility for my own mess, but I have to point the finger at my predecessors who still cannot agree on what to log, how to log and how to store or convert it, despite a century of logging.

It's not for the want of trying. It's that the nature of logging in this hobby is less than consistent, to say the least. Each contest wants their log in some special format, logging tools pick their own format that's incompatible with that of another tool, if you're lucky that incompatibility is obvious, but more likely than not it's subtle.

Among all those sources of log entries that I've mentioned are undoubtedly going to be duplicate contacts. There's going to be incorrect transcriptions, inaccurate record keeping, wrong times, missing years and all the other things that come to mind when you describe a data entry problem.

Fortunately I have some experience with data entry.

It was the transcribing of a recent POTA, or Parks On The Air, log that triggered an insight for me. Faced with the reality of entering contacts into something electronic, based on a bound notebook with log entries scribbled all over it, basically a pretty piece of scrap paper, I needed to solve a specific problem. Namely, the fact that I was entering this data for another amateur, who would be uploading it into the relevant POTA system. I had no idea what the field requirements were, didn't know where they'd be uploaded to, nor what format they needed, so I improvised, figuring that getting both the logged and inferred data into some table would be a good start, so I used a spreadsheet.

After completing the task, I had my epiphany.

What if I logged ALL my contacts in a spreadsheet?

I can sort it by whichever column I want, I can have as many columns as I need, a squillion rows if I make that many contacts, I can convert it to whatever format the next contest manager desires and I can back it up like any other spreadsheet. Better still, it's software agnostic. If I suddenly discover the next best logging tool since toasted sliced bread with creamed honey, I can convert my sheet into something that's required. Better yet, I can extract the data from that tool and put it back into the spreadsheet after discovering the author has a propensity of making random changes that are incompatible with my worldview.

So, spreadsheet.

Oh, yeah, I won't be using Excel, it has a, let's call it, nasty habit of converting anything that remotely resembles a date into one, even when you don't want it to. Clippy lives on .. apparently.

I'll likely photograph each page and to keep track of which logs I've entered, I'll put a coloured dot on a page when I've entered it into my spreadsheet. Once a logbook is entered, I'll mark it in some way too. Then I'll have to massage the existing electronic data. I can't wait.

How have you solved your contact logging problem?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

The other day I was stuck in traffic behind a vehicle proudly proclaiming that it was "electric". I'd seen the model before, just never connected it with being available as an EV. I wondered how many other cars on the road turned out to have added an "electric" option to their line-up and how that evolution had just quietly, inexorably occurred.

It started me thinking about the nature of the driving experience and what it would be like for someone who has never seen a petrol, or other fossil fuel burning vehicle, and what driver education might do to incorporate that.

In my teens I first sat on a hotted up moped belonging to a friend, I was old enough to be legal, whilst he wasn't, so I got to ride his bike to school with him on the back, win-win for both. Later on, I learned to drive a car with a manual gearbox and as interest took me, I learned to drive a double clutch gearbox and got my heavy rigid truck license. I also learned to fly a plane, but that's besides the point.

Stuck in rush-hour traffic, such as it is in Perth, it made me think about amateur radio licensing and education.

Specifically, how do we incorporate change? When I was first licensed, my education included consideration for analogue television interference, including pictures of different screen patterns, their causes and remedies.

Three years after I got licensed, almost to the day, the last analogue television transmitter in Australia was switched off on 10 December 2013, 57 years after the first transmissions started.

While I retain little, if any, of the now, let's call it, esoteric information associated with that, it made me consider a wider picture in relation to the process of amateur radio education.

New amateurs today are unlikely to be asked about analogue television interference, let alone be subjected to questions in their exam. Fair enough, information changes, evolves, becomes superseded or expires, and as a side-effect, I have some brain cells dedicated to analogue television, PAL, 625 lines total, 576 visible, horizontal and vertical synchronisation, white noise, you get the idea. As an aside, 78 on a turntable indicates a speed reserved for shellac records until the 1950s, seeing that we're dropping arcane knowledge. Oh, means NOP on a 6502, in case you're wondering.

Although I don't have a specific list of what is currently being taught .. more on that in a moment .. I daresay that newly minted amateurs have a curriculum that has evolved with technology and legal requirements over the past 15 years.

A tangible example is the fact that the Foundation Class in Australia is now permitted to use digital modes, something that changed after I was licensed, when on 21 September 2019, the regulator amended the Amateur License Conditions Determination, known locally as the LCD, with immediate effect.

The point being that over time things change and education changes with it.

This is all as expected.

Here's my question.

What about the rest of the community? What happens to someone who has been licensed for a decade, a generation, or more?

Are they expected to gain these skills by osmosis or self-education?

Should this process be dictated by the regulator, or should this be a community effort to bring everyone into the same decade?

Should we revise how we educate our amateurs and make the education skill-set technology agnostic, should we be less prescriptive with the license, or should it achieve something else?

One example in this space is an initiative called the Ham Challenge, which you can discover at hamchallenge.org. In case it sounds vaguely familiar, I've talked about this before. It's a list of 52 activities that you can take on to broaden your horizons and explore different aspects of our hobby. In its first year, I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

Is this the kind of self-training that we might encourage, or is there another way to achieve this? Is this something that occurs elsewhere in society and if so, how has that been addressed? I know for example in ICT there are endless certification courses, which I have to confess are in my professional opinion absolutely counterproductive, serving only to entrench vendor lock-in, not something that I think benefits the amateur community.

I mentioned curriculum a moment ago. Another approach is to attend a licensing course and participate as part of your own self-education. Of course this will require cooperation from the educators, and we'd need to come up with some idea of how this might be useful. Is this something that benefits from attendance every five years, every decade, more, less? As a bonus side-effect, it will introduce new amateurs to old ones, and vice versa, perhaps facilitating a new resurgence of Elmering, or mentorship, that previously has been the hallmark of our community.

Over the decade and a half or so that I've been licensed and writing weekly articles about the hobby and our community, I've made a conscious effort to keep up to date, to learn new skills, to share what I've learnt, to actively explore what I need to learn more about and to share that journey with you.

I realise that this is not a universal experience. For some their amateur license sits in a drawer gathering dust together with their first aid certificate and their first runner-up prize for something that for a minute and a half caught their attention years ago.

For most of us the reality lies somewhere in between. For many, the amateur experience is one of playing on air and getting delight from the doing and participating.

There are those who go out and become teachers, those who sit on boards, those who run clubs and those who get on the local repeater once a week. It takes all of us to make this community and my thoughts are not intended to stop that enjoyment and experience.

I'm trying to discover how we build a resilient community, one that is sustainable in a world of continuous and rapid change.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Recently I spent some quality time digging into the origins of a word in common use. In doing so, I contacted the Postal Museum in the United Kingdom and received a lovely reply that included a photo of a document in their archive.

The document, a Post Office Circular from Friday, December 30, 1904, number 1641, introduces a new service offered by the Post Office.

Let me read to you what it says, and I quote:

"Telegrams to and from Ships by Wireless Telegraphy.

"(To be noted at Telegraph Offices only.)

"With the present Circular is enclosed a list showing the wireless telegraph stations in the United Kingdom worked on the Marconi Company's system, and the hours up to which telegrams can be received at those stations for transmission by wireless telegraphy to certain ships fitted with Marconi apparatus. By another notice in this Circular, Postmasters and others concerned are requested to enter the names of the stations in the Code Book with the necessary particulars. Ships will be issued for insertion in the Post Office Guide.

"On and from the 1st January, 1905, Telegrams may be accepted from the public on the following conditions:-

"Subject to the Inland Regulations with regard to counting, the charge, which must be prepaid in the usual way by means of stamps, will be at the rate of 6 1/2d. [six-and-a-half pence] a word, with a minimum of 6s. 6d. [six-and-a-half shillings] per telegram.

"The name of the wireless station will in each case pass as one word in the address.

"The word 'Radio,' which is not charged for, should be telegraphed in the Service Instructions."

When I read that, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The introduction of a Wireless Telegram service, under the service heading of "Radio", with a photo of the actual document that introduced it into the world.

I also learned that there's a dozen pennies in a shilling and over the years before decimalisation in 1971, the composition of coins changed, which made converting this into today's money interesting. As an aside, the Royal Society has a wonderful article: "The science of money: Isaac Newton's mastering of the Mint"

Back to radio, this is 1904 bleeding edge technology and it's priced accordingly. The starting price for a radio telegram on new years day 1905: six bob and six; or three florin and sixpence; or a crown, a bob and a tanner; is worth just over 34 Great British Pounds today, that's just on 45 US Dollars, or nearly 69 Australian Dollars. That's the minimum price.

The price per word, sixpence and halfpenny [sixpence hayp-ny] is just over 2 Great British Pounds today, nearly 4 US Dollars or almost 6 Australian Dollars.

Compare that to the price of SMS, which started at about 21 cents here in Australia, today it's about 3 cents per message of 160 characters.

This seems like a lucrative business to be in, but I digress, again.

From my current, and ongoing research, it appears that until this point, the early 1900's, the word "radio" was always accompanied by another word, for example in this context, "radio telegraphy", another combination of the day is "radio active", as well as "radio tellurium", which today we know as polonium.

Moving on, the response I received from the Postal Museum included other gems, including a reference to the "1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act", from the 15th of August, 1904, where I found something fascinating, from Section 2 paragraph 1:

"Where the applicant for a licence proves to the satisfaction of the Postmaster-General that the sole object of obtaining the license is to enable him to conduct experiments in wireless telegraphy, a license for that purpose shall be granted, subject to such special terms, conditions and restrictions as the Postmaster-General may think proper, but shall not be subject to any rent or royalty."

I think that's the birth of amateur radio licensing in the United Kingdom, right there.

As an aside, because I cannot help myself, the definition for the expression "wireless telegraphy", is pretty interesting too, reminding me of a quote, variations going back to at least 1866, incorrectly attributed to Einstein that goes something like this:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, and they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

Seems that the drafters of the "1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act" had the same thing in mind when they wrote:

"The expression 'wireless telegraphy' means any system of communication by telegraph as defined in the Telegraph Acts, 1863 to 1904, without the aid of any wire connecting the points from and at which the messages or other communications are sent and received"

Now, as I said, I'm still working on this, because the word "radio" as a concept had to have been conceived before the Post Office Circular was written, printed and published. It might transpire that this was the brainchild of a single individual, or it might be that this was a term whose time had arrived, or this might not be the first occurrence of the word "radio" as a concept.

Today we think nothing of it when we use it to turn on the radio, listen to, or talk on the radio, radio for help, break radio silence, and plenty of other uses of this now ubiquitous word.

Thanks again to the Postal Museum for finding and photographing the Post Office Circular for the 30th of December 1904, which at this stage appears to be the first occurrence of the word "radio" on its own, and for referring me to the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy act which appears to be the birth of "amateur radio" in the United Kingdom.

You can find both documents on my project site at vk6flab.com.

I should also mention the brave individuals who took the time to share with me how to refer to Old British Money, any mistakes are all mine.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB

I know that "s." refers to "shillings" and "d." to "pennies", and I believe that "6d." is "sixpence".

Anyone?

If you have a source, all the better!

Edit: Thank you all for your amazing assistance. Here's what it was for.

https://lemmy.radio/post/10377731

If you use a word often enough it starts to lose its meaning. The other day, during breakfast, well, coffee, whilst playing one of our start-the-day with a smile word games, the word "RADIO" turned up. I grinned and pointed out that this was my favourite word, to which my partner mentioned that in Italian, it's referred to as "La Radio", which made us both wonder where it actually came from, did the Italian language import the word, or export it, given that Guglielmo Marconi was Italian?

A quick search advised us that it came from Latin, radius, meaning "spoke of a wheel", "beam of light" or "ray".

Fully enlightened we finished our coffee and got on with our day .. except I couldn't stop thinking about this.

Having recently spent some quality time looking into the history of the RF Circulator, I figured searching the patent records might be a solid way to get some handle on where this word "radio" came from.

Initially Google Patent search unearths the oldest as being from 1996, not very helpful. Adding 1900 as the end date filter turns up a radio cabinet patent with a filing date of 1833, except that it was published and granted in 1931, which is confirmed by the patent itself.

This level of corruption in the data affects at least a dozen patents, but I daresay that there's plenty more like that.

1857 turns up a patent with the word "broadcasting", in the context of "broadcasting guano", so, nothing much has changed in nearly 170 years, but I digress.

Adding quotes to the search term unearths a patent from 1861, apparently iron roads, locomotives, large slopes and small radio curves relates to the other meaning of the word radius, in Spanish.

1863 gives us ruffle stitching, "made upon the radio", but the patent is so corrupt that it's pretty much unreadable.

1871 unearths an electromagnetic engine, but the text has so much gibberish that I suspect that the word "radio" is a happy accident.

1873 shows us a "Wireless signalling system", bingo, the patent shows us transmitter and receiver circuits, antennas, messages and frequencies and a whole bunch of relevant radio information, except that the date on the patent itself is 1919.

And you wonder why people argue about who invented what when?

I'll spare you the gas apparatus, petrol lamps with cigar cutter, running gear for vehicles and bounce to 1897, "Method of and apparatus for converting x-rays into light for photographic purposes", the first occurrence of "radio", in the form of "radiograph", complete with pictures of the bones of a hand drawn meticulously from presumably an x-ray.

I confess I'm not convinced.

Using the United States Patent and Trademark Office search for the word radio gives you 54,688 pages with 2.7 million records, ordered in reverse chronological order with no way to skip to the last page.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation finds the same Spanish iron paths patents, but unearths "A Differential Arrangement for Radio Controlled Race Cars" from 1900, but inside we discover it's really from 1979.

Seems this level of corruption is endemic in the patent field, wonder who's benefiting from this misinformation?

Meanwhile, still looking, I discovered the Oxford English Dictionary, which claims that the earliest known use of the word "radio" is in the 1900's, but the earliest evidence is from 1907 in a writing by "L. De Forest", but you are granted the privilege of paying them to actually see that evidence .. really?

On 18 July 1907, Lee de Forest, made the first ship-to-shore transmissions by radiotelephone, which adds some credence to the claim, but I have to tell you, I'm not particularly convinced.

Taking a different approach, starting at Guglielmo Marconi, his first efforts in 1894 showed the wireless activation of a bell on the other side of the room. Six months later he managed to cross 3 kilometres realising that this could become capable of longer distances. The Italian Ministry of Post and Telegraphs didn't respond to his application for funding, so in 1896, at the age of 21, moving to Great Britain, he arrived in Dover where the customs officer opened his case to find various apparatus, which were destroyed because they could be a bomb.

Lodging a patent "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus therefor", was the first patent for a communication system on radio waves. It was granted a year later.

One problem.

It doesn't have the word "radio" in it, instead it talks about "a Hertz radiator", so close.

So, we've narrowed it down to somewhere between 1896 and 1907, that's an 11 year window.

Some observations.

De Forest founded a company called "the Radio Telephone And Telegraph Company". It's unclear exactly when this happened, it collapsed in 1909 and was founded after disagreement with management of his previous company, apparently on 28 November 1906.

A quick aside, apparently in 1881, Alexander Graham Bell used the word radiophone for the first time, which he used to refer to a system that used light to transmit wirelessly, he also referred to it as a photophone.

You could argue that because light and radio are the same thing, this is the first legitimate use of the word "radio" in the context of communication, but I'm not buying it.

I'll leave you with the discovery that on 30 December 1904, the British Post Office published a "Post Office Circular" with the instructions to use the word "Radio" in the service instructions, think of it as the metadata associated with a telegram. This information has been repeated often without evidence.

If you're keen, the Postal Museum is located in Phoenix Place, London. I've contacted them to see if that particular Circular is in their possession.

Amazingly the "Post Office Circulars" have been digitised between 1666 and 1899. So close, but no cigar, that said, I looked for the elusive Volume 7 of the set to see if there were any straggling references to "radio", but couldn't confirm this.

The Postal Museum Catalogue returns plenty of early references to radio, but it's hard to tell what's real and what's written after the fact. Anyone know of any research grants that will allow me to dig into this on-site, feel free to get in touch, oh, a bed would be good too .. I think this might take a while.

At the moment, the best I have is an uncorroborated "30 December 1904" for the origin of the word "Radio", in English, in other words, it was imported into Italian. No sign of Marconi, Bell, or De Forest.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB