WA Radio Scanner Users' Group

Hi all
With a few new members joining our ranks I thought I would post this handy guide.

http://www.aesham.com/fundamentals/frequencies.html

Thanks for that VK6ZMS - interesting read and good starting guide on what and where to find things!

That's quite a well written article and puts the different bands into perspective.

Of course it's not a perfect fit, since it's written for US amateurs so the bands they're allowed don't exactly match ours, but as Meg says, a good starting point to see what's what and where's where

The reason I ended up on WARSUG was that I was making a spectrum plan for my own use, sort of like that link but for scanning in general. One problem I had was how I was going to present it. I tried spreadsheets and even HTML pages, but I eventually went with a mindmap after a contractor we use put me onto FreeMind. One of the factors was that it had to be fairly portable, which FreeMind is. After deciding to get my callsign again I wanted to do the same sort of thing but just for the ham spectrum.

So... I've got two projects that are sort of half done. I like it. Some people might not like it presented this way but it works for me. I did a couple of screen captures of each one. The first two images are of the spectrum and the second two are of the ham spectrum. If you aren't familiar with FreeMind or mindmapping, you can present what's on your mind in a visual way. It manages thoughts using a hierarchy (or 'tree' view) where you have a base concept and branching from that are sub-concepts and so on. The images should make it a bit clearer.

In the case of what I'm doing, you start of with 'the spectrum' which then branches out into the different bands such as HF, VHF etc. They branch out further to the different uses of the band. With freemind you click on each of these nodes to show or hide what they branch to, allowing you to see what you want to see and hide what you don't want to see. Eventually you end at a band or specific frequency. My intentions are mostly for bands and frequencies that are of interest to anybody living in Perth, although I stray from that idea a lot. Nodes can link to other nodes so you can link related items. Nodes can also link to web sites so you can click a node (eg ACARS) and open a web page (eg the ACARS wikipedia entry) Quite a bit of the information I added is from WARSUG. A lot is still missing and some of it is inaccurate. Once I get it fairly close to usable, I'll post it for anyone who wants to check it out for comments, corrections, bands or frequencies people want to add etc. Freemind is an open source project at sourceforge for Linux, Mac and windows









In the images, any node that has that little circle on the right-hand side means the node has more nodes attached (child nodes) but are currently hidden. You can also change things like font style and size, colour, the 'bubble' of the node. In my case I'm using background colour to signify what the band or frequency is used for, eg Light blue for ham, cyan for community radio, red for emergency etc. Icons also mean something.

Wow that's a heck of a project!

Yeah, the spectrum is a lot. Who new infinity was so big? I can send a copy to anyone that has FreeMind if they want to see what I've done so far.

The other thing I forgot to mention is the Ham map has branches for the difference licence classes, so if you click on "VHF/6m" there will be one branch for Advanced and another for Advance & Standard and obviously nothing for foundation. Also where a band (or part of a band) is a secondary service, it will be marked as such