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What's really happening at the IARU?
Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a report in "Amateur Radio Daily" caught my eye. Under the heading "IARU Considers Consolidation", I read that the International Amateur Radio Union, celebrating 100 years of representing our hobby, is considering significant change. Links in the report reveal a PDF document titled "IARU Consultation on Proposed Restructuring March 2025". The document, dated 21 March, outlines the structure of the IARU, four organisations, one for each ITU Region, and one global organisation, the International Secretariat. It provides some insights on how the funding arrangements between these organisations exist and goes on to talk about how the IARU operates, including incorporation, or not, currencies, committees, priorities and other background and historic information. All excellent. Stuff that should be public knowledge, but having spent the better part of a year reading IARU documents, this one brought several new eye opening things to the table. The document attributes no authors but is at least spell-checked in US English, and appears to be part of a discussion started long before I became an amateur. In 2005, the IARU started the "IARU 2025 Committee" to look into the future of the organisation. It concluded its work in 2012. In 2020 a new committee was started, the "Future Committee", consisting of representation from each of the regions. The introductory wording is curious and includes these words: "We can no longer afford not to move the process forward" - at least implying that this document is a foregone conclusion. Searching for the document on the IARU sites will give you no results. Searching for "Future Committee", gives you two results, neither actually having the words "Future Committee". The only reference which makes any sense in either of those two results, and only after the fact, is a paragraph, published on 12 October 2020, that refers to the Administrative Council, or AC, and states: "The AC received and discussed an in-depth report from its Working Group on the Future of IARU and agreed to steps for evolving toward a more flexible organization and strengthened relationships with all stakeholders in the global amateur radio community and telecommunications ecosystem." For a process that started 20 years ago, this is the first I've heard of it. Curious wouldn't you say, in an organisation that claims to represent both you and I? It's almost like the IARU wants to keep this whole thing a secret. There's more. The thrust of the document is to explore the notion of simplifying the operation of the IARU by consolidating the four organisations into one incorporated body based in Switzerland, where the IARU Region 1 organisation is currently incorporated. It goes on to discuss how this is great for the hobby, how it will save on resources and how it will allow the mostly volunteer run organisation to operate more democratically. It outlines the process for adoption, including a 60 day consultation period for the 167 Member Societies, as-in peak bodies in your country. I'll save you the suspense, the consultation period ended before I saw the document. There's a 30 day "Detailed Draft Proposal phase" and a "Final Proposal and Voting stage", neither of which are on any specific time-line that I could find. You might say, well, Onno, you're not a member society, it's none of your business. That's true. Here's the thing. Let me quote from Section 5, on page 11: "In many cases the IARU Member-Society does not represent the majority of the national amateur community." So .. not to belabour the point, the IARU, who is proud to represent Amateur Radio on the International Stage, writes in its own documentation that the organisation doesn't represent the majority of amateurs while claiming its intention to make the organisation more flexible and democratic. Gotta say, feeling all warm and fuzzy. In Section 6, the document goes into great detail about finance. I'm kidding, it has one sub-sub section about money, section 6.1.3, less than 10% of the document, no less explosive for its brevity. It states that each region contributes to the overall IARU budget, but that this contribution remains insufficient to cover the many critical representation efforts required. It goes on to say that "Historically, the ARRL has played a key role in bridging this financial gap". For its contribution, the ARRL currently nominates the President and Vice President which the member societies get to vote on. I wonder what happens if they don't vote for the nominated candidate and what happens when the ARRL is no longer first among equals, will it continue to fund the IARU? While pointing out that all direct representation of the IARU at the ITU are made by volunteers, as well as "nearly all" other activities, I wonder which activities are paid and how much? There's also discussion about a "not ideal" "compromise", namely that we'll have to be virtual attendees to save money. Really? In 2025, after a century of representing amateur radio, we're still attending meetings in person? Has nobody at the IARU heard of this new technology, you know, the one it claims to promote, radio? Or the more modern version, teleconference? You'd think that a bunch of volunteer radio amateurs would jump at the chance to debate things over radio. Moving on. The finance section includes an interesting statement. "Many regions have accumulated cash reserves" and "where these reserves are substantial and have resulted from a specific region's activities, they may need to be held in trust and designated exclusively for initiatives related to that former region". Let's unpack this. There's three regions. "Many regions" means more than one, but not all, so, two. In other words, one region has no money. Which one? Moreover, "substantial" reserves from "a specific region", means one of the other two, so, one. So, it made money, it's substantial, it's intended to be designated exclusively for that one region. Which one? The Wireless Institute of Australia, which claims to have existed longer than the IARU and the ARRL before it, was a federation. In 2004 the regulator indicated that it should consolidate its efforts because apparently the various state WIA organisations "could never agree on a single outcome". This organisation was incorporated in VK3 where it continues to exist as a first among equals. Curiously the Victorian, Tasmanian and South Australia with Northern Territory Divisions of the Wireless Institute of Australia are each still incorporated and active. Today if you're in VK6, like I am, your experience of the WIA is completely different from that if you're in VK3 and to a lesser extent VK2. Remind you of anything? The document mentions that "only fully paid up member-societies in good standing have the right to vote" and "The current fee structure will need to be harmonized across all three regions, which may lead to increased dues for some Member-Societies". That tells us that some member societies will have to pay more money and if they don't they won't be able to vote. I wonder if these are members of the region with all the money, or from the region without money? I'll remind you that member societies have already been acknowledged by the IARU as being underfunded, offering reduced services with some member societies being disbanded. The point being that we're finding out behind the scenes, after the fact, of a process that has been in play for 20 years, that aims to create a single harmonised body whilst exacerbating existing inequities, and doing so in secret. Is that the kind of body that you want to represent you on the world stage? Is this something that your member society knows about, is it actively participating, does it share that information with you or hide it? Are you informed, or did you learn more today from me than you have in the past 20 years? Before I leave you to your thoughts, credit to Cale K4HCK for publishing the story and thanks to their source for sharing the document. I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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9:49
What do you think you're doing?
Foundations of Amateur Radio Right off the bat, let me start with a question. "What do you think you're doing?" To give you some context, it should come as no surprise that I'm talking about amateur radio and what it is that we do, you and I, when we "do amateur radio". Of course the answer is different for every person you ask, and it's likely to change over time. So, let's explore and fair warning, if you know me at all, you'll realise that I'll be asking more questions, so here goes. Is this an activity that you do, for yourself, or for others? Is it a hobby, or a vocation, or something else? Do you use this as part of your life outside this community and if you do, how? At this point I hope you're getting a sense of Deja-Vu all over again, in that I'm asking you to explore your own place in the community. I'm asking because it occurs to me that we spend an awful lot of time looking in the other direction. How do we compare skills and knowledge against other amateurs, how does our shack compare with another, how does our antenna stack up, which modes have you used, what things have you activated, how much power do you use? All things that might form part of the activity of amateur radio, but fail to look at you as a person and your role in this. For example, have you considered if you're interested in helping new amateurs, or would you rather just do your own thing? What about how you gain skills? Would you rather read a book, watch a YouTube video, attend a class or play with others? If you're considering upgrading your license to gain more responsibilities, are you doing that for yourself, or are you doing it because of peer pressure? If you've been part of the hobby for a little while you'll have discovered that radio amateurs are everywhere, often in unexpected places. With that comes the realisation that this implies that we have members who represent all of humanity in all its many-splendored complexity. Where in that spectrum are you and what is your role in participating in that wider community, and is your role what you want it to be? One of the themes I've discovered over the years is insecurity. A recurring perception is that amateurs who've attained the highest license level are somehow "more" amateur than those who are on another journey. Where do you fit in that? How do you perceive amateurs with differing license classes? Do you apply the same metric to moped, car and truck licenses? How do you compare yourself against those who are not amateurs and how did you step into your license? I'm going to stop with the questions now and leave you with a thought. The hobby of amateur radio is a playground where you have the freedom to explore radio and all that it offers, but nobody said that you need to limit yourself to radio. I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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3:03
How does your member society represent itself?
Foundations of Amateur Radio Around the world are thousands of associations, groups of people, clubs if you like, that represent radio amateurs. Some of those associations are anointed with a special status, that of "member society" or "peak body", which allows them to represent their country with their own governments and on the international stage to the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, through a global organisation, the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union. Some of these are known across our whole community, the ARRL in the USA, the RSGB in the UK, and the WIA in Australia. Some much less so, the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, or the ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, for example. In an attempt to get a deeper understanding of what distinguishes these organisations, I visited a dozen member society websites. Cultural sensibilities and aesthetics aside, the variety and sense of priority is both pleasing and astounding. Starting close to home, the WIA, the Wireless Institute of Australia, shows news as the most important and the top story is a radio contact between the International Space Station and a school, held about two weeks ago. The ERAU, the Estonian Radio Amateurs Association, features an article about the 2025 General Meeting outlining who was there, what was discussed and thanking the participants for their contributions. When I visited, the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League, top news item, was the renewed defence of the 902-928 MHz Amateur Radio Band, from a few days ago. The most important issue for the ARRL is that you read the latest edition of QST magazine, but only if you're a member. The RSGB, the Radio Society of Great Britain, has an odd landing page that links to the main site, which features much of the same content. The latest news is "Mental Health Awareness Week" and encourages us to celebrate kindness in our community. The DARC, the German Amateur Radio Club, has a page full of announcements and the top one was an article about current solar activity including a coronal hole and various solar flares. The ERASD, the Egyptian Radio Amateurs Society for Development, uses qsl.net as its main website. It features many images with text, presumably in Arabic, that unfortunately I was not able to translate. Curiously the landing page features some English text that welcomes all interested to join. I confess that I love the juxtaposition between a Yaesu FT-2000 transceiver and the images of Tutankhamun and the pyramids. The RAC, the Radio Amateurs of Canada, use their homepage to promote its purpose, and features many pictures of their bi-monthly magazine, which you can only read if you're a member, which is where many of the homepage links seem to go. The RCA, the Radio Club of Argentina, is promoting the 2024-2025 Railway Marathon, including links to descriptions of what constitutes a Railway Activation, how to reserve your station, and upcoming and past activations. There's also a reminder to renew your license. The ARSI, the Amateur Radio Society of India, has a very sparse landing page showing their mission and not much else. Clicking around gives you lots of information about the history, activities, awards and the like. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find out how to become licensed in India. There's hardly any images. In contrast, the URA, the Union of Radio Amateurs of Andorra, lands you on a page with contact details and not much else. Clicking through the site gives you lots of pictures of happy people and maps, lots of maps. The KARL, the Korean Amateur Radio League, features an announcement with a link to the 24th Amateur Radio Direction Finding, from a week ago, but it requires a login to actually read it. The JARL, the Japan Amateur Radio League, features an announcement to a form you can complete to join the "List of stations from which you do not wish to receive QSL cards." The NZART, the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters, features a big button to latest news and clicking on it shows the "Jock White Field Day", which was held several months ago. I wasn't able to see the CRAC, the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club, since the page didn't load for me. The "Wayback machine", also known as archive.org, from a capture a few days ago, showed a news item announcing the intent to organise the 1st Class C Amateur Radio Technical "something", I say "something" because I cannot actually load the article and see what it has to say. The event was scheduled for a month ago, the announcement was from several months ago. Content aside, finding sites was interesting too, mind you, there's plenty of member associations that don't have any web presence at all. Is that by choice, or necessity? The IARU list of member societies conflicts with the list of national organisations shown on Wikipedia. The IARU has about 160 entries, I say about, since the list isn't really formatted as much as it's congealed. Let's just say, perhaps a table for tabular data might be a novel approach. Wikipedia is slightly better formatted, it lists 93 national organisations. As it happens, both include a link to the national organisation for China, which is either the Chinese Radio Sports Association, with apparently two different acronyms, either CRSAOA, or CRSA, or if you believe the IARU as a source, it's the one I mentioned earlier, the CRAC. I don't know which one is right, but at least we can assume that the IARU page was updated formally, rather than edited by someone on the internet. Regardless of which one is the "real" Chinese national amateur radio organisation, none of the websites loaded for me. Let's move on. It's interesting that several non-English sites like Korea, Japan and Germany feature a button that allows their site to be translated into English. What's even more interesting is that the English version of the site is not in any way the same content. In many cases it appears to be information relevant to English visitors rather than a translation. One notable exception is Estonia, which allows a visitor to read their site in Estonian or English right out of the box. Unsurprisingly, the ARRL website has no buttons for Spanish, even though that represents about 13 percent of the USA population, let alone any other language. I'd encourage you to visit a few and see what you can learn about the other members of our community around the world. My visits leave me with questions. What do these organisations stand for? What do they do? Are they there for amateurs, for aspirant members, the general public, for regulators, for their members, for fund raising and advertising, or international visitors and tourism? It seems to me that looking at just a few of these organisations reveals a great many things about how they understand their own role and how they deliver service and just how much money they have to play with to make that happen. I'll leave you to ponder how effective they might be and what your role is in that endeavour. I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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8:28
A brief introduction to the HamSCI community
Foundations of Amateur Radio Since becoming a licensed amateur in 2010, I have spent a good amount of time putting together my thoughts on a weekly basis about the hobby and the community surrounding amateur radio. As you might know, my interest is eclectic, some might say random, but by enlarge, I go where the unicorns appear. Over a year ago I mentioned in passing a community called HamSCI. The label on the box is "Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation", which gives you a sense of what this is all about. It was started by amateur radio scientists who study upper atmospheric and space physics. More formally, the HamSCI mission is the "Continuation and extension of the amateur's proven ability to contribute to the advancement of the radio art." If you visit the hamsci.org website, and you should, you'll discover dozens of universities and around 1,300 people, many of whom are licensed radio amateurs, who are asking questions and discovering answers that matter to more than just our amateur community. For the eighth time the HamSCI community held an annual "workshop", really, an opportunity to get together and share ideas, in person and across the internet, a conference by any other name. Under the banner theme of "HamSCI's Big Year", over two days, 56 people representing 27 different organisations across 61 sessions, tutorials, discussions, tours, posters and demonstrations, explored topics all over our hobby, from the Personal Space Weather Network, capable of making ground based measurements of the space environment, to the Whistler Catcher Pi, a project to record the VLF spectrum to 48 kHz using a Raspberry Pi. You'll find research into HF antennas for the DASI or Distributed Array of Small Instruments project and associated NSF grants, exploring measurements of HF and VLF, combined with GPS and magnetometer across 20 to 30 stations. There's discussions on how to explore Geospace Data, such as information coming from the Personal Space Weather Station network, or PSWS, using the OpenSpace project and dealing with the challenges of visualising across a wide scale, all the way up to the entire known universe. Did I mention that there's work underway to add PSWS compatible receivers to Antarctica? There reports on observations and modelling of the ionospheric effects of the April 2024 solar eclipse QSO party, including Doppler radio, HF time differences, and Medium Wave signal enhancements, not to mention planning and promoting future meteor scatter QSO parties. There's, post-sunset sporadic-F propagation, large scale travelling ionospheric disturbances, GPS disciplined beacons, the physical nature of sporadic-E propagation and plenty more. As you might have heard me say at one time or another, the difference between fiddling and science is writing it down. It means that you'll find every session has accompanying documentation, charts, graphics and scientific papers. Remember, there's eight years of reading to catch up with, or learn from, or play with. The publications and presentations section on the hamsci.org website currently has 526 different entries. You might not be interested in the impact of radio wave and GPS scintillation, or rapid fluctuation in strength, caused during the G5 geomagnetic storm that occurred on the 10th of May 2024, or a statistical study of ion temperature anistropy using AMISR, or Advanced Modular Incoherent Scatter Radar data .. or you might. In case you're curious, "anistropy" is the property of being directionally dependent, in other words, it matters in which direction you measure, which might have some relevance to you if you consider that we think of the ionosphere and radio paths being reciprocal. If it reminds you of isotropy, that's because they're opposites. The point being, that amateur radio is a great many things to different people. If you're a scientist, budding, graduate or tenured, there's a home for you within this amazing hobby. I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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4:59
Can we figure out how much the Sun really affects propagation?
Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I saw a social media post featuring a screenshot of some random website with pretty charts and indicators describing "current HF propagation". Aside from lacking a date, it helpfully included notations like "Solar Storm Imminent" and "Band Closed". It made me wonder, not for the first time, what the reliability of this type of notification is. Does it actually indicate what you might expect when you get on air to make noise, is it globally relevant, is the data valid or real-time? You get the idea. How do you determine the relationship between this pretty display and reality? Immediately the WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter database came to mind. It's a massive collection of signal reports capturing time, band, station and other parameters, one of which is the Signal To Noise ratio or SNR. If the number of sun spots, or a geomagnetic index change affected propagation, can we see an effect on the SNR? Although there's close on a million records per day, I'll note in advance that my current approach of taking a daily average across all reports on a specific band, completely ignores the number of reports, the types and direction of antennas, the distance between stations, transmitter power, local noise or any number of other variables. Using the online "wspr.live" database, looking only at 2024, I linked the daily recorded WSPR SNR average per band to the Sun Spot Numbers and Geomagnetic Index and immediately ran into problems. For starters the daily Sun Spot Number or SSN, from the Royal Observatory in Belgium does not appear to be complete. I'm not yet sure why. For example, there's only 288 days of SSN data in 2024. Does this mean that the observers were on holiday on the other 78 days, or was the SSN zero? Curiously there's 60 days where there's more than one recording and as a bonus, on New Years Eve 2024, there's three recordings, all with the same time stamp, midnight, with 181, 194 and 194 sun spots, so I took the daily average. Also, I ignored the timezone, since that's not apparent. Similarly the Geomagnetic Index data from the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany has several weird artefacts around 1970's data, but fortunately not within 2024 that I saw. The data is collected every three hours, so I averaged that, too. After excluding days where the SSN was missing, I ran into the next issue, my database query was too big, understandable, since there are many reports in this database, 2 billion, give or take, for 2024 alone. Normally I'd be running this type of query on my own hardware, but you might know that I lost my main research computer last year, well, I didn't lose it as such, I can see it from where I am right now, but it won't power up. Money aside, I've been working on it, but being unceremoniously moved from Intel to ARM is not something I'd recommend. I created a script that extracted the data, one day at a time, with 30 seconds between each query. Three hours later I had preliminary numbers. The result was 6,239 records across 116 bands, which of course should immediately spark interest, since we don't really have that many bands. I sorted the output by the number of reports per band and discovered that the maximum number of days per band was 276. This in turn should surprise you, since there's 365 days in a year, well technically a smidge more, but for now, 365 is fine, not to mention that 2024 was a leap-year. So, what happened to the other 90 days? We know that 78 are missing because the SSN wasn't in the database but the other 12 days? I'm going to ignore that too. I removed all the bands that had less than 276 reports per day, leaving 17 bands, including the well known 13 MHz band, the what, yeah, there's a few others like that. I removed the obvious weird band, but what's the 430 MHz band, when the 70cm band in WSPR is defined as 432 MHz? I manually created 15 charts plotting dates against SNR, SSN, Kp and ap indices. Remember, this is a daily average of each of these, just to get a handle on what I'm looking at. Immediately several things become apparent. There are plenty of bands where the relationship between the average SNR and the other influences appear to be negligible. We can see the average SNR move up and down across the year, following the seasons - which raises a specific question. If the SNR is averaged across the whole planet from all WSPR stations, why are we seeing seasonal variation, given that while it's Winter here in VK, it's Summer on the other side of the equator? If you compare the maximum average SNR of a band against the minimum average SNR of the same band, you can get a sense of how much the sun spots and geomagnetic index influences the planet as a whole on that band. The band with the least amount of variation is the 30m band. Said differently, with all the changes going on around propagation, the 30m band appears to be the most stable, followed by the 12m and 15m bands. The SNR across all of HF varies, on average, no more than 5 dB. The higher the band, the more variation there is. Of course it's also possible that there's less reports there, so we might be seeing the impact of individual station variables more keenly. It's too early for conclusions, but I can tell you that this gives us plenty of new questions to ask. I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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6:37