About

Onno VK6FLAB during the 2015 John Moyle Memorial Field Day operating portable

About Onno Benschop

As a presenter and producer in community radio stations during the 1990's Onno gained much experience in interviewing people, presenting information and relating to the audience. Starting in 1990 at 6UVSfm, then 92.1 RTR-FM, 990 Information Radio and Curtin Radio 927 6NR, Onno produced many hours of on-air content, including some 1600 radio interviews. Many of those were conducted live for "Online Computing Radio", a nationally syndicated show originating at 6NR and distributed live via the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) satellite network.

In December 2010 Onno was licensed as a radio amateur with callsign VK6FLAB. This lead to broadcasting the local news and contributing content. This in turn lead to creating this site which holds some of the on-air content created for various projects.

Onno is a professional technologist (geek) who is able to speak about a topic in such a way that the audience can follow what is going on. If you'd like to get in touch, please feel free: cq@vk6flab.com.

Awards

About these Podcasts

The spark that ignites a podcast episode arrives in many different ways. Sometimes it's an off-hand comment in a discussion, or a question via email, or a suggestion via an on-air conversation. Sometimes it's a random link that someone passes on that creates a rabbit-hole that I find myself exploring.

What ever it may be, thank you for sharing, for discussion, for questions and for feedback.

Podcast Origins

These podcasts are created by Onno Benschop. After becoming licensed as a Radio Amateur in December 2010, Onno rekindled his broadcasting spirit when he started to contribute to the VK6WIA weekly amateur radio news in Western Australia. Heard every Sunday across a range of stations, a recurring segment "What use is an F-call?" documented the journey of a fledgling radio ham. Eventually this weekly segment was rebroadcast on the VK1WIA National Wireless Institute of Australia news. The text-edition of that news also contains a transcript of the segment.

At the beginning of 2014 the Linux Conference Australia, LCA was hosted locally in Perth and Onno managed to interview about 50 attendees, both presenters and participants. These interviews were distributed daily across social media and cover topics as far ranging as Disaster Recovery and Rockets, Software Defined Radio, Women in Technology, KVM on PowerPC, TDM, Astronomy and many others.

The Amateur Radio DXpedition team for Amsterdam Island, FT5ZM was in Perth during January 2014 and Onno interviewed most of the team members before the trip as well as on their return. Topics include the planning of such an expedition, the thrill experienced by team members, antenna plans, weather and logistics as well as many personal stories from the team.

In 2015, "What use is an F-call?" was renamed to "Foundations of Amateur Radio" in preparation for distribution to a wider audience, both beyond Amateur Radio and beyond Australia.

In 2016, a group of amateurs went to the remote Heard Island. Penguins, Seals, Glaciers and Gales made for a once in a lifetime adventure. Onno was fortunate enough to interview all 14 members of the team.

In 2017, six volumes of the eBook "Foundations of Amateur Radio" were produced and are now available for sale on the Amazon Kindle store. In 2018 the seventh volume in the series was published.

Usage Permission

These podcasts are copyright by Onno Benschop. You are most welcome to reproduce podcast episodes, with only one caveat, they must be reproduced in their entirety as supplied - though if you find a spelling error, you're welcome to fix it ;-) (Warning, I'm in Australia, we spell stuff differently south of the equator.)

You are permitted to include individual podcast episodes in a larger work, such as a weekly news broadcast, podcast, club newsletter or website, but you may not in any way claim authorship.

If you'd be so kind as to email me a copy of any edition in which my work appears, I'd be most grateful, the address is cq@vk6flab.com.

Broadcasting Permission

The audio content is broadcast-ready, the levels have been set, the bit-rate is suitable for use on FM broadcast and you are welcome to transmit these audio podcasts as supplied. Again, you may not modify the content in any way and you may not in any way claim authorship.

The content is "clean", and contains no swearing or illegal content.

If you do broadcast this material, please advise me via email: cq@vk6flab.com.

Standard phrases

If you do choose to publish one of my articles on my site, you are subject to the Usage Permissions outlined above. You may include one or more of these "standard" phrases in full or in part - or not, the choice is yours.

Offer of Recording

If you'd like Onno to record a stinger, promotion or station identification for your broadcast or podcast, please get in touch via email: cq@vk6flab.com.