AmateurRadio.com

• WE'RE BACK!
• Michigan gets its own PRB One antenna law
• A launch date for the Fox 1 hamsat is announced
• ARES called out in Ohio to assist after phone outage
• The flight of the V-K around-the-world floater balloon falls short of its round-the-world trip
• The K-one-N Nevassa Island DXpedition will be on the S-Oh 50 ham radio satellite
• And old Sol is at it again!

THIS WEEK'S NEWSCAST

Script

Audio

Special event, “K3Y,” the Straight Key Century Club’s annual January celebration, commemorates the Straight Key Century Club’s founding in 2006 following the American Radio Relay League’s “Straight Key Night” (SKN). A small group of participants wanted to extend the fun of SKN throughout the year. The Straight Key Century Club (SKCC) is the result.

For the first three years, the club’s founders used the special event callsigns of K1Y, K2A, and K3Y as the celebration’s special-event calls. But, someone cleverly noticed that a ‘3’ is nothing more than a backwards, curvaceous ‘E’. This “KEY” event has operated under the special event callsign of ‘K3Y’, ever since.

The on-air party is open to members and non-members alike. It runs from 0000 UTC Jan. 2 through 2359 UTC Jan. 31. It’s a great time to introduce others to the joys of hand-crafted Morse code using straight keys, bugs, and side swipers.

In this video, you can “sit in” with NW7US, the control operator of the regional activation of special event station, “K3Y/0”, during one of the many shifts during January (2015).

+ The SKCC website is at http://skccgroup.com

+ The K3Y special event page is http://www.skccgroup.com/k3y/index.php

+ The NW7US website is at http://NW7US.us

+ Some more CW/Morse code resources can be found at http://cw.hfradio.org

2014 was a stellar year for amateur radio. The year-long celebration of the ARRL Centennial was nothing short of fantastic. The QSO Party and the summer convention were major successes. Our hobby has never received so much attention by popular media. For one entire year, ham radio became the ‘Kardashian’s’ of the hobby world. The ARRL deserves most of the credit for their hard work and vision in promoting our hobby while working tirelessly to foster future growth and protect the valuable resources we enjoy.

Amateur Radio and electronics are woven tightly together and 2014 was without doubt the Year of the Raspberry Pi and everyone jumped on the bandwagon, including radio enthusiasts. It wasn’t difficult to find numerous ways to put these credit-card sized, $35 computers to work in the shack — replacing desktop computers employed for dedicated functions. The trajectory of this trend is nearly vertical and we can expect to see even more interesting uses from it in the coming New Year.

The HF bands cooperated with the major DX operations in 2014. In fact, what appears to be a double-peak in this current solar cycle created some real excitement — about the same time the experts declared us to be on the backside of decent and headed toward minimum. I’m amazed by the courage of operations like FT5ZM that moved forward with their plans despite predictions of less than great band conditions, and brought joy (and QSL’s!) to DXers everywhere.

Logbook of the World adoption picked up steam in 2014. The online service has now crossed 100 million confirmations and the number of users could cross 100,000 in the New Year.

Operators on the International Space Station delighted the world with SSTV transmissions in late 2014 reminding the entire planet that amateur radio still has a shack in space!

Amateur Radio really took to social media in 2014. Facebook and Twitter being the primary beneficiaries of Maxim’s progeny. The ARRL Facebook page has nearly 50K “likes” while its main Twitter account has over 20K followers. Yes, we’ve been tweeting up a storm and the @CallSign label appears on almost everything #HamRadio these days. This won’t last forever, Internet time moves fast and things change in a heartbeat online. Still, these forms of social media are continuing to expand and amateur radio seems firmly affixed for the ride.

Every year it seems we lose more of the old guard, passings that leave us feeling a little off-balance in our mission. 2014 was no different in that regard. Though many of our giants have left us, their work and inspiration continues — in us. That’s the point. The tasks that we undertake and share today, are passed along to tomorrow.

It’s been that way with our passion since the basement experimenters first began to decode the secrets of radio, and passed them along to the next generation of basement experimenters in order to perfect the art and science of radio.

And that work continues into another new year — a new century — a new millennium for amateur radio.

Nostalgia is a wonderful place of retreat to warm and nourish your soul but those are chapters in a book already read. RIGHT NOW is infinitely more exciting because we don’t know what will come next, but we get to write the next chapter!

Filed under: Ham Radio, Syndicate Tagged: history

It’s always interesting to see which of my blog posts are getting the most attention. According to my website stats, these posts got the most views in 2014. It turns out that most of these were written before 2014 but they are still getting lots of hits.

The top post was 2012 Jeep Wrangler Radio Install. When it comes to doing mobile radio installations, I’ve often found it helpful to search the web for information. There’s nothing like seeing how someone else did their radio install to get some help and guidance. With this post, I tried to repay the favor and it seems that lots of people have gotten use out of it.

The second most popular post is Can I Use My Ham Radio on Public Safety Frequencies?  I wrote this one back in 2012 but always seems to get a lot of hits. It is getting a bit out of date, so I should probably update it.

Next up is Solving the Baofeng Cable Problem. This article explains how to solve one of the biggest challenges of programming those low cost HTs from China. Also on the subject of low cost HTs is this popular post: Yet Another HT From China (Baofeng UV-B5).

Another popular post is my list of favorite ham radio iPhone apps: The Incomplete List of Ham Radio iPhone Apps.  This post from 2011 is definitely out of date but keeps getting lots of hits. I’ve updated this list a couple of times now and the most recent post is here: The Completely Updated Incomplete List of Ham Radio iPhone Apps. For some reason, the obsolete post still gets viewed the most.

Well, that is the top five posts but I am including a sixth bonus post at no extra charge. The FM/VHF Operating Guide is arguably one of the best time-tested articles I’ve written, originating way back in the twentieth century. It has taken many forms and revisions over the years and is now a static page on k0nr.com.

Thanks for stopping by k0nr.com and have a Happy New Year.

73, Bob K0NR

The post Top Five K0NR Blog Posts from 2014 appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

The ARRL Board of Directors has signed off on a plan to create the ARRL Library, an online repository of instructional and educational material — including submissions from members. The intent is to create shared resources for ARRL members and clubs, in support of their mission to “promote and advance the art, science, and enjoyment of Amateur Radio”.

Initially, curators will be looking for PowerPoint presentations on a wide variety of topics. According to their announcement, “if there’s a topic related to Amateur Radio that you feel would make a good club presentation — technical, instructional, historical, operating — you name it, you are welcome to create the presentation and submit it for consideration”.

Audio and video will be added at a later date.

In addition to these, the ARRL will also be accepting oral histories. Recording the stories for all time of the adventures of amateur radio enthusiasts.

It seems an ambitious project that’s loaded with potential. The new library is slated to go live online sometime in January 2K15 at this URL: http://arrl.org/library

Read all about the project on page 80 in the January edition of QST Magazine.

Filed under: Ham Radio, Syndicate Tagged: arrl

I keep getting asked about the Baofeng radios. Especially the new hams seem to be attracted to the low price. Even though I own several of them and make good use of them, I have been a little reluctant to recommend them. I put together my thoughts on these radios and a few tips to get started. Read the full story here on HamRadioSchool.com.

73, Bob K0NR

The post Hey, Should I Buy the Baofeng Radio? appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

In HamRadioNow Episode 178 (Radio Games, embedded below), my partner Jeff AC4ZO and I banter about the concept of “rebranding” ham radio contests to make them more attractive to young people. My suggestion is to call them Radio Games, an allusion to Video Games, of course, which attract young people like crazy.

About this point in this article, I’d be disappointed if a few of you readers didn’t go nonlinear, considering this idea to be:

1. fully baked, and
2. the end of Amateur Radio as we know it

So if you actually watch the show, you realize that the idea isn’t even half-baked. It hasn’t even hit the oven. It’s fodder for a TV show conversation (makes a good radio show if you just want to listen to it) listen to it

And you’ll notice we wander around the point so much that you may think we’ll never actually make it. But we do. Then it’s off to other stuff. Some of you will like it, some of you will hate it, and that’s show biz.

But while the idea is far from mature, I’m serious about it in some fashion.

I think there’s little argument that we need to attract many more young people to ham radio, people in their teens, twenties and thirties. And I think what what attracted us old farts (I’m 65, and in a couple weeks I’ll hit my 50th year of hamming) isn’t attracting young people today. Not many, anyway. Something about ham radio has to change.

I don’t know what that is. Nobody knows for sure, or we’d be doing it (and once again leading us all to the End of Amateur Radio As We Know It). But for sure it’s not One Thing. It’ll be a lot of things, some little and some big.

One of those things might be figuring out how to make ham radio interesting to some of the people who love video games. They’re mostly young. Many have an interest in technology. And if we got just a small fraction of them, we’re still talking about thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Our contests are a starting point. Just changing the name to (or adding the name) Radio Games isn’t going to fool anyone. But it seems to me that integrating the elements of radio that we know – the vagaries of propagation, the competition for contacts, the reality of having to make something work with your own hardware and skill – to the aspects of video games that they know, might be an interesting mix.

For me, this is just fodder for my TV show and a column here on AmateurRadio.com. I’m sure not going to be the one doing it. I’m not a contester beyond making a few random contacts now and then, and I’m not a gamer. Which just may mean I don’t know what I’m talking about, and that wouldn’t be front page news, either.

But it is something to think about, maybe to talk about. First-class video games are multi-hundred-million dollar epics. The biggest probably involve more money than all of ham radio worldwide. They blow Hollywood out of the water. But a Ham Radio themed game doesn’t have to be the biggest and best. I guess I’d just hope that if someone develops one, it isn’t lame. But everybody’s a critic, and no matter how good it is, someone will call it lame. So I’m not going to worry about it.

Here’s the show. The most perceptive (or maybe just cynical) among you will recognize this column as just an excuse to get people to watch the show. You’d be right. And… sorry about the distorted audio. I did figure out what was happening.*

73, Gary KN4AQ

*What was happening to the audio? Google’s Chrome browser was grabbing the Windows Record Level setting and cranking it up so it could hear me say “OK Google” to initiate a voice search. That happened ever time I opened a tab with Google’s search page in it (and that’s where new tabs defaulted, so if it happened a lot). Later, I found a setting to turn “OK Google” off, but not one to tell Google to leave my audio alone, period. If I initiate a Google Hangout,  Google grabs it again. Grrr.