AmateurRadio.com

Archive for March 1st, 2010

East of Mississippi.

• N4OGW | 64 Qs | 45 Mults | 2,880 Points [ACG].
• W9RE | 58 Qs | 40 Mults | 2,320 Points [SMC].
• N8EA | 55 Qs | 39 Mults | 2,145 Points [Thumb Area Contester].

n = 24 scores submitted in this division.

West of Mississippi.

• N3BB | 55 Qs | 40 Mults | 2,200 Points [CTDXCC].
• W0BH | 51 Qs | 38 Mults | 1,938 Points.
• WD0T (@KD0S) | 48 Qs | 39 Mults | 1,872 Points.

n = 14 scores submitted in this division.

NCCC Member (CA/NV).

• N6RO | 52 Qs | 32 Mults | 1,664 Points.
• N6ZFO | 47 Qs | 30 Mults | 1,410 Points.
• K6VVA | 45 Qs | 28 Mults | 1,260 Points.

n = 5 scores submitted in this division.

A shout out from the shackadelic on the beach to Tor, N4OGW and his great effort while leading the Alabama Contest Group to its banner position until next winter! The fastest 30-minutes in RadioSport experimented with its winter version of NS Sprint and scored a resounding success.

Now, if my work schedule permits, I want to join the fun this summer at least on one band before bedtime.

Contest on.

Kevin, GW0KIG, has just written in his blog about struggling to brush up his Morse. He first learnt the code at the age of 19 and has "memories of a Morse code tutor program on a borrowed ZX81 computer (remember those?)"

I remember the ZX81 and its wobbly 16KB RAM pack very well. In fact, a Morse tutor was one of the first programs I wrote for it. I wrote an article for Short Wave Magazine which described the program, together with a Morse keyboard with programmable memory and a high-speed Morse sender for meteor-scatter work. It is amusing today to read my conclusion that "it is possible to program the ZX81 to create sophisticated memory keyers." These primitive programs would hardly seem sophisticated today.

The article was published in the August 1982 issue of Short Wave Magazine. I kept a copy and you can see it here. I wonder if my program was the one Kevin used to learn Morse when he was 19? One of these days I might try downloading a ZX81 emulator and see if these old programs will run on it.

I have been browsing for information about various circuits recently. Two books that are often recommended are "Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur" (which is now quite old) and its successor "Experimental Methods in RF Design". I decided to get a copy of the latter and was gobsmacked to find on Amazon.co.uk that only used copies are available, priced from £557.14. No, that's not a misprint, it's about 800 bucks in real money.

I clicked over to Amazon.com and found the same book listed as available new for a slightly more reasonable (joke) $600.00, or I could buy a used one for a whisker under $500.00. Who are these sellers kidding? Do people really pay $600 for a book that was published by the ARRL in 2003 with a cover price of about $40? I wish I'd invested in a pile of them - they would have been a better return on my investment than my shareholdings (sick joke.)

I browsed down the Amazon.com page to see the usual stuff Amazon tells you about a book and found that 37% of people (rich or insane people, presumably) buy the item featured on the page, while 36% buy "Experimental Mathods (sic - not a joke) in RF Design" for a mere $42.70. That's 36% who can't spell, I guess, but I can live with a misprint in the title if it saves me $550.

But seriously, what's going on here? Is "Experimental Mathods" a pirate copy using a mis-spelt title to avoid copyright infringement? Is a joke being played on somebody? If I buy it will I receive something other than what I expected, like searching for "mammaries" instead of "memories" on Google? I'm off to confused.com.