Amateur Radio, Contesting, HomeBrew, Circuits, Expeditions

  QRV between Jan 28 - Feb 4. QSL via CE6AMN. *Website above       

ARRL Headquarters will be closed November 27 and 28 in observance of Thanksgiving. There will be no W1AW bulletins or code practice transmissions those days. The ARRL Letter will be published on Wednesday, November 26, but there will be no ARRL Audio News on Friday, November 28. ARRL Headquarters will reopen Monday, December 1 at 8 AM Eastern Standard Time. We wish everyone a safe and bountiful Thanksgiving holiday.

The Global ALE High Frequency Network (HFN) -- an international Amateur Radio Service organization of ham operators dedicated to emergency/relief radio communications -- has become the first network to operate continuously for more than 500 days on all international Amateur Radio shortwave bands simultaneously. According to HFN International ALE Coordinator Bonnie Crystal, KQ6XA, the main purpose of the Network is to provide efficient emergency and disaster relief communications to remote areas of the world. "Beginning with a core group of six North American radio operators in June 2007, HFN rapidly expanded to cover large areas of the planet with 24/7 digital communications," she said."HFN was designed to be an open framework for global Amateur Radio emergency services to interoperate on HF using the Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) system." Relying on ionospheric radio communications, interconnected HFN base stations scan the radio bands every 10 seconds, from 3.5 MHz-28.0 MHz. Through this Net, Crystal said, ham operators stay connected with each other at all hours of the day or night in any mode of operation, and can send Internet e-mail or cell phone mobile text messages from the field."

There were nine Section Manager races this fall, four of which saw no opposition. Election ballots were counted and verified on Tuesday, November 18 at ARRL Headquarters for the remaining five races. Terms of office for these new Section Managers will begin on January 1, 2009.

More info at www.MMMonVHF.de

EA8/G4RGK will be QRV from Canary islands

Ernie, W1MRQ, is back now on 144 MHz as ZD8B from Ascension Island (II22TB)

VK and PY seem to have been back in contention with Big Dave top on Monday and V51AS (Namibia) and Z29KM (Zimbabwe) top at the weekend

The UK regulator Ofcom has supplied the figures for the total number of Amateur Radio Licences issued as at 31st October

The Gadget Show, broadcast on the UK TV station Channel 5, recently compared two PMR446 walkie talkies, the Icom Digital F4029SDR and the Motorola FM TLKR-T7

107 in the log. I’ve no idea what my score was since I used N1MM’s DX Serial Contest template to do the logging and the miscellaneous field for logging random text did a hopeless job of being able to edit long club names efficiently. The last time I entered this contest, my log was called into [...]

I’ve been lucky enough to purchase 100 meters of Ecoflex 15 recently and the solderless connectors are awesome. Available for Aircell 7 (RG213 replacement) and Ecoflex 10 (Westflex replacement) and this giant 15mm diameter stuff, once fitted they are completely waterproof. My experience with all these products started with me laying down a few runs for my [...]

2008 will go down as a wet year. Both VHF NFD and SSB FD was a soaking experience. Luckily, as with most close knit teams, we laughed it off and worked through it, however a tough act all the same. I didn’t take too many photos due to the extreme wet weather however I managed to [...]

Few days ago I have published quick how-to about how to configure postfix as backup MX. I am starting to like postfix more and more, it is very easy to configure and to deal with. One of the problems you will find out when you use backup MX, that it can be put down on its knees [...]

Lately I have been playing with Postfix, which I needed to use as backup MX for some of my domains. Initially, I was using Zimbra, but I would have to have quite powerfull server to run Zimbra for just forwarding emails / setting it up as backup MX server. Postfix is in this case much [...]

In the last few years I have attended Special Even Station - GB0SH with a group of my friends in West Wales. This year it would be our 4th time visiting Strumble Head Lighthouse on the West cost of Wales, by Fishguard. This year there will be just 5 of us. Here is the information we [...]