OVMRC Amateur Radio Course

It has been my honour and privilege to assist in teaching an Amateur Radio course which Ernie (VE3EJJ, the lead instructor) and the Ottawa Valley Mobile Radio Club offer each year.

The lecture slides which I have developed and present as lectures are available below (by chapter):

Please note that although the material is reasonably well explained in the Power-Point presentation, there is no substitute for in-person discussion of the material. I have spend tens of hours distilling the course material into these lecture slides, and so if you chose to use the material for your own personal enjoyment or as part of a course, please let me know that they have been helpful – it helps the morale to know that these are valuable to someone out there.

For a brief synopsis of each lecture, I have included a small discussion below:

The first lecture of the year which I am responsible for discusses Chapter 03.4-8: Current & Ohm’s Law. This is a fundamental concept in all of electronics, so it is vital that a good grasp of this material is had before moving on to more complicated topics.

My second lecture deals with how to use scientific / engineering notation, converting between metric prefixes, and a brief review of exponent math. The material covered in this session comes from Chapter 04: Metric Prefixes & Powers of Ten.

The third lecture component covers Chapter 09: Magnetism & Inductance which is a subject which lies at the foundation of electronics, and more specifically radio frequency (RF) applications.

On occasion, I will give the lecture which deals with Chapter 10.4-10.8: Vectors, AC & L/C Behaviour. I am not terribly fond of this material as I find it challenging to present the rotating vectors material which I have found to be so enlightening once you actually understand them.

My fourth lecture covers Chapter 12: Parallel LC & Harmonics which looks at how parallel inductor / capacitor circuits operate, and how we deal with the concept of harmonics in amateur radio.

Chapter 14.3: Oscillators and Amplifiers is quite a challenge to present – it deals with some really technical material. Oscillators are in many ways the heart of radio, and so this material is pretty fundamental to the emission and selective reception of radio frequency intelligence. It is frequently not sufficient to simply drive an oscillator to “get your signal out” beyond a few meters, one also requires signal amplification which I attempt to touch on in this section.

I’ve recently taken on presenting Chapter 19: Antennas which is a substantial topic to say the least! Antenna theory and design is absolutely critical for the hobby, so a solid understanding of the material will go a very long way to making a better operator!

The final lecture I give deals with Chapter 25: VHF/UHF Operation. This material is written to help people understand some of the operating opportunities and challenges associated with VHF/UHF.

All lecture slides are works-in-progress, and if you happen to notice any errors or omissions, by all means contact me and I will be pleased to make the appropriate changes. The slides have been updated on Oct 7 2013 to include page numbers.

A collection of videos that I have found explain some of the material extremely well can be found by following this link: Educational Videos

3 Responses to OVMRC Amateur Radio Course

  1. Gary M. Bazdell says:
    2012-10-17 at 19:33

    I am a student in this years radio course…..in your slide “Resistors: Identifying Values”, the 4 band resistor is marked as 25K……I read it as 15K….which is correct?

    Reply
    • James says:
      2012-10-18 at 10:50

      You are correct. That image I borrowed from the web is incorrect – the value of the resistor should be 15k since: brown = 1, green = 5, orange = 1k giving a value of 15kΩ

      I’ll try to edit the image in my presentation to correct the error. Good catch!!

      Reply

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