Posts from — January 2008

Local ham (for me) AD7AF is off on a personal DXpedition to South Cook as E51WWA. There are two time frames:

January 27th through February 7th, Richard will operate from Rarotonga, OC-013, 80-10 meters CW and SSB. Then, moving to Mauke, OC-083, from about February 10th through February 21st.

He specifically notes that he will participate in the ARRL International DX CW contest. QSL’s will be handled by AD7AF.

This is great news — and should be a blast!

Scot, K9JY

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How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along this late in the month? If you are like most people, the resolutions have come and gone. In another month or two, we’ll casually laugh the resolutions off as not meaning much. And that’s too bad.

One of the great New Year resolutions is to get physically fit. After the holidays, it makes a great amount of sense. Whether it is diet, exercise, or both, getting the pounds down and the muscles toned is a good thing to do.

It’s also a great thing to do for contesting.

Contesting, if you look at all those You Tube videos and see pictures of people sitting in the shack doing the contesting work, looks pretty simple physically. You just sit there and talk into a microphone or press a function key or two and go right along.

Yet, contesting is one of the more difficult events from both the physical and mental viewpoints — especially if you want to participate for the entire time in the contest with minimal sleep.

This is where your physical fitness comes into play. Well rested and physically fit allow your muscles to spend less effort sitting down all that time while fighting off being tired. Physically fit means that you typically will need less sleep and get better sleep than less physically fit people.

This combination of mental fatigue from concentrating on the calls and the signals combined with a lack of sleep quickly translates into mental toughness. And we all know that mental toughness is a lot easier to do if the rest of your body is ready to go.

Take a look at those exercise and physical fitness resolutions one more time. And pick them up again. It will help your contesting too.

Scot, K9JY

There are new Rover Rules out for ARRL contests and seeing the words along about the rules changes has some confused as to what the changes actually mean.

N2SLN provides the changes in a table format, making it easy to see the differences between being a “Rover”, “Limited Rover”, and “Unlimited Rover.”

The most interesting table listing was whether the Rover “must transport all equipment” and the Unlimited Rover category having an answer of “no”. I wonder how many caches of radio equipment rovers can set up along a route for a contest?

Check out N2SLN’s rover rules page.

Hat tip: Contest Rate Sheet; Photo Credit Beige Alert on Flickr.

Scot, K9JY

One of the continuing challenges with the hobby of Ham Radio is adding licenses — and active Amateurs — to what we do here. Attracting members, if you will, is the continuing focus of all great groups.

Much of the past Amateur Radio focus on marketing has been:

• the continued discussion about what things in the hobby prevent people from entering the hobby (think of No Code)
• the need for “standards” for people entering the hobby (mostly because of the Citizen’s Band debacle from quite long ago and some of the activity on current bands)
• Looking down on “appliance” operators compared to those that “build their own.”
• the need for “young people” to come into the hobby.
• And others

While interesting to those of us in the hobby, none of those issues mean a thing to those outside of the hobby looking in to see what we do here.

Where’s our focus?

What is lacking is focus on our potential customers. What we do now is focus internally on our different factions of the hobby, point to how great or poor that faction is and whine about what would be so much better if this or that changed or went away.

What’s cool about our hobby

One of the great attractions to me when I first joined Amateur Radio was the great diversity within the hobby that would allow me not to get bored with what I was doing.

As most do, I first came into ham radio and simply chatted with other hams on the air, whether through Morse Code or through voice.

My first great love was chasing DX and confirming those 300+ “entities” out there. DXing required a certain set of skills in using the radio.

Then I got actively involved in a general purpose club of some 150 amateurs, working both as a member, then as a member of the board, then as an officer, and finally President of the club for two years. It was one of the most rewarding times of my life.

After DX came a whole effort to work Packet by running one of the first DX PacketCluster nodes in Wisconsin. I learned about packet, networking, radio signals over different terrain and how diverse the people in our hobby are when working in their little groups.

Then DX got boring and I started doing contesting. A whole new set of skills needed to be learned.

Then came multi-contesting. Another set of skills and team work needed to be figured out.

Then I became actively involved in RTTY and digital work, including contesting.

Now I’m doing a bit of DXpedition work and writing this blog. It’s still part of the hobby of Amateur Radio.

What runs through all of those activities — with tens more aspects of the hobby not even mentioned?

The chase, competition, team work, service to others, and traveling to other countries — all while communicating to others in a way that, in spite of all of our efforts to explain, still creates wonder through the ether.

Ham radio can market to all sorts of people: builders (stations, radios, antennas), experimenters, code writers, communicators, people looking for minimalist challenges (QRP and 100-pound DXpeditions), people who love to travel, those devoted to public service and people who want to achieve awards and goals. And more.

Ham radio isn’t about what to get rid of in our hobby to attract people. It’s about all the great things our hobby has and marketing to people based upon what fulfills human needs for connection and achievement.

Scot, K9JY

I’m a bit late getting to this, but the successful Contesting University held last year at the Dayton Hamvention now has open registration for the 2008 session.

The biggest twist to this year’s session is that there will be Graduate level sessions for those — and only those — that attended the 2007 session.

Feedback on the sessions from 2007 was very good. If you will be at Dayton this year, consider taking these sessions.

Registration

Registration is now open. Registration costs $75.00 until January 31st, 2008, then moves to $80.00 from February 1st to February 28th, 2008.

Registration page.

Scholarships Available

Scholarships for those under 25 years old or younger are available. You need to contact the sponsors for information.

Logistics

• Held Thursday, May 15, 2008, from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM
• Held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Dayton, Ohio
• Breakfast and lunch included

All of the sessions are taught by veteran contesters. I’ve seen some of the information provided from the 2007 contest and it would be worth your time and dollars to attend.

And, at no charge, you get to meet some really great people.

Scot, K9JY

HamLinks, a toolbar for your Internet browser devoted to Ham Radio, has been updated with a couple of really cool features.

From the release:

There is now direct access to the great AmateurLogic.TV ham radio TV show. If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s a fun look at ham radio and techy topics (WiFi hacking, etc.).

In the HamLinks forum, a request was made to allow users to add their own RSS feeds. I did a bit of coding to allow for that. If you have a Conduit toolbar and want to add a blog or RSS feed, now end users can do it with my form.

I’ve installed the toolbar on my browser and it is a good addition. Solar numbers, ham radio blog feeds without a feed reader (including this site!), local WX, UTC clock, and WWV’s current HF propagation forecast are all easily accessible from the toolbar.

N0HR has done a nice job with this toolbar. Take a look and decide for yourself!

Scot, K9JY