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Foundations of Amateur Radio When you explore the landscape of amateur radio you'll discover an endless array of innovation. There's websites with photos and descriptions of activities, places discovered and lessons learnt. If you watch the growing collection of YouTube channels you'll discover videos describing what people have been up to, commenting on videos they've seen and you'll start to notice that people all over the community are pinging off each other. Social media does the same. If you read an amateur magazine, or a book, you'll unearth references and counter-references, links and credits, descriptions gleaned and tests made, all of them interlinking and adding to the knowledge base that underpins the amateur radio community and society beyond it. The same is true for on-air activity. Look at contesting for example, you'll hear descriptions from other contesters, sharing their lessons learnt which potentially influence how you do your next contesting activity. The same is true for working DX, operating any digital mode, running an on-air net, running a SOTA activation, anything. The point being that you are influenced by others and everything you do influences somebody somewhere else who in turn influences the next person who might then influence you. On and on the chain grows. This chain of knowledge goes back to the early science in our hobby, the works of James Clerk Maxwell who for the first time brought electricity, magnetism, and light together as different manifestations of the same phenomenon in 1864. The reason we know this is because he published his work and without needing to leave home to see the original, anyone can read it today from the comfort of their living room thanks to the PDF that's on the Royal Society web-site. The point being that Maxwell documented his work and shared it with the world. In our hobby we've gone through the process of making our equipment from unobtainium, requiring that the actual components were constructed before you could actually put them together and use them for their intended purpose. We then went on the scrounge for parts from other equipment, acquiring surplus gear and through a phase where you could buy new components off the shelf and attach them to an etched circuit board. That evolved into being able to design a board, ordering it online, having it built for cents and shipped to our door. Today an increasing component of our hobby evolves around software with its unique property of transience. Unlike physical components, software is intangible. You imagine how something might work, you describe it in an imaginary language, convert it into something that can be run inside a computer, and if you did it right, the outcome gives you the basis for your next experiment. When software reaches a certain level of complexity it becomes impossible to remember. You tweak something over here and something over there changes and unless you can keep all that together inside your brain as a cohesive imaginary model, you quickly run into a brick wall. If you're a software developer you've likely heard of tools like CVS, SVN and git. They are examples of revision control. They're used extensively in software development, but increasingly they're being used to track changes in documents, legislation and places where change is constant. As an aside, if you load the various versions of legal requirements of your license into revision control, you'll quickly discover that your license is slowly evolving over time, for better or worse. From personal experience, I know doing that for the Radiocommunications Licence Conditions in Australia was very interesting indeed. Each of these tools gives you the ability to tweak something, track it and if it doesn't work out, revert to where you started your experiment. It's a little like using a soldering iron and a soldering wick, physical undo for experiments. When I talk about Open Source software, I'm not only talking about the ability to look inside and add functionality, I'm also talking about accessing the history that goes with that. Open Source software generally only works if it comes with a revision history, a trail of discovery outlined right there on your screen showing what worked, why and how it came about. There's often options for showing who made what change, which changes happened at the same time and the ability to extract that particular change. All essential ingredients for experimentation. Closed Source software does all those things, but privately. It too likely uses revision control tools, even the same ones as Open Source, but the discoveries are held in-house, behind closed doors, used by a select few. The software evolves inside the organisation, but there's no insight for or from the outside world. Of course, everyone is entitled to keep their stuff secret, but if you want to make a contribution to society outside the life of your walled garden, the only way forward is to publish and share your work like scientists have been doing well before the Royal Society held its first meeting on the 28th of November 1660. Share if you care... I'm Onno VK6FLAB