AmateurRadio.com

This morning I received an email to warn me my subscription to eQSL.cc will run out next month. Forgetful as I am becoming, I thought that this time I’d better get on and renew it right away before I forget.

The amount asked for Bronze membership is $20.00 US. But if you think that’s too much you can pay any amount, even as little as $5. You could probably get away with $1 but surely nobody is that cheap?

Bronze membership is really worth it because it allows you to use your own QSL design. Free members only get a plain text card which is pretty boring.

I’m glad eQSL allows free membership because it’s better to have as many hams as possible registered with the system (and hopefully take the steps needed to become Authenticity Guaranteed) even if they don’t pay a cent.  According to eQSL nearly 90% of members never donate any money. I’m not very good at mental arithmetic but if every user paid something then the minimum membership fee would be about $2 a year I think.

It’s always tempting to freeload, to put off donating until another day, but I think everyone should donate to help keep running the sites they use most.

Here’s my list of sites I use most every day and would really miss:

• eQSL
• APRS.fi
• WSPRnet
• Propagation Reporter
• DX Maps

There are a couple of omissions that may surprise you. But those big sites you’re thinking of must make enough from advertising to get along without my help. I probably visit them less than once a week, so I wouldn’t miss them as much as the sites in my list.

Which ham radio sites would you really miss if they closed tomorrow?

Ed, PE5ED and Wijn are developing a project called the IARL. They are trying to collect as much data as they can on repeaters and beacons. This will be freely available via the website and also through an app for smartphones.

They already have quite a lot of information for western Europe though I have already spotted a couple of errors relating to local repeaters. If you can help with corrections or sources of data they would like to hear from you.

For more years than I care to remember I’ve always used qrz.com to look up calls I’ve worked or heard on the bands. Recently I’ve noticed that the site wants me to log in every time I try to access the details of a call. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I’m sure that you didn’t used to have to log in to see the basic details, and the site remembered your login for at least a week.  Now it seems you have to log in every day if you aren’t a subscriber. This isn’t very convenient, even though I understand the reason for it (presumably to encourage more people to subscribe.) I now hardly ever visit qrz.com.

The G4ILO page at QRZCQ.com

Using Google to search for a call I found that one of the first results returned was from a site called qrzcq.com. I didn’t at first notice the different URL. QRZCQ has a callsign lookup similar to QRZ.com – it even uses the same URL format – but doesn’t require a login to access the details. The site’s database already holds quite a bit of information about me – all of it already in the public domain but I won’t ask where it came from! I have just registered with the site so as to edit and add to the information shown on the G4ILO page.

I don’t know who is behind the new site but they seem to have done a good job on it. The pages look a lot more attractive than qrz.com and they aren’t stuffed with ads – though it is early days yet and I suppose the desire to “monetize” the site will come eventually. But right now qrzcq.com looks like a venture that is well worth supporting, visiting and updating your own page.

DX Sherlock, the website that has the very useful real-time propagation maps derived from DX Cluster and WSPR spots, has moved to a new site.

The addresses vhfdx.net, vhfdx.info and dxsherlock.com will now redirect to dxmaps.com. If you have bookmarked the site you will need to update your bookmarks.

Ever since I began writing articles about my hobby of choice–amateur or “ham” radio–for my ham radio web site and several others, people have been asking me when I was going to do an amateur radio book.  The truth is, I have just been too darn busy to even think of such a thing. And I also knew, in my heart of hearts, that it be would difficult indeed to get any kind of decent book contract for such a niche book.  I presented my idea of a half-fiction/half-nonfiction book to the ARRL and they passed, so that confirmed my feelings. If they had no interest, I doubted anyone else who published books would either.

Fast-forward to July 2012.  Things have changed, both in my personal life and in the wild and woolly world of big-time book publishing.

Don Keith N4KC has just published his new book of short stories, articles, advice, and more about ham radio.

First, I retired from my 60-hour-a-week day job back in May.  And as I shuffled through the articles I had in the can, several more I was working on, and a few still in my head, I realized I was closer to a book than I had thought.  And I truly believed I had something that would be different and could find a readership.

Secondly, as I investigated Kindle Direct Publishing at Amazon.com for the re-issue of a couple of my previous now-out-of-print books, I realized that I should absolutely pull the ham radio book together for that outlet–Kindle and some other e-book readers–at least.  Amazon has become a real threat to traditional publishing companies–especially when it comes to e-books–as the old-line publishing houses struggle to figure this newfangled thing out.  At the very least, it gives me the opportunity to make my book available at a very reasonable price to those interested in amateur radio.  No, I don’t make much money at the price I set, even if I actually sell some downloads of the book, but that is not really the object anyway.  As I have said many times, and not totally facetiously, if I wanted to make a fortune writing books, I would write pornography (See FIFTY SHADES OF GREY).

Then, as I considered other options, I realized that Amazon offers a truly unique opportunity for works like this one that allows me to offer the book in a traditional paperback format with minimal investment up front.  Remember, I’m retired, on a fixed income these days!  Amazon’s is a print-on-demand deal, but they seem to have it down to a science.  I ordered some copies as soon as I got the book and cover uploaded and accepted for publication.  The very next day I got the email that they were being shipped that day. Wow!

Again, this was with very little upfront cost and minimal hassle.  Now, the paperback will be available not only via Amazon.com, but through major distributors, for order by libraries, and even in many European markets. We will see how good the print job is, but believe me on this: the major houses don’t necessarily produce the highest quality book any more either.  They have to cut where they can to make a profit and printing, binding, and warehousing is a big drain on them.

Talk about rapid technological change and its effect on society and the media!  Broadcast radio, TV, the Internet and telephone communications are not the only things evolving at a dizzying pace.  Include the anachronistic business of book publishing in that mix, too!

Realistically, will tons of booksellers and all the Barnes & Noble stores order a box full of the books each?  Or will hundreds of thousands of libraries order up a couple dozen copies each?  Of course not.  The big publishers do have sales staff to encourage that sort of thing. But a) no big publishing house was going to do a contract for RIDING THE SHORTWAVES: EXPLORING THE MAGIC OF AMATEUR RADIO and b) even if they did, it would be somewhere near the bottom of the sales staff’s sample case, so c) Amazon’s various self-publishing options are perfect for this kind of book.

By the way, if you have any interest in the dynamic and rapidly growing hobby of ham radio–believe me, it ain’t your weird uncle’s past-time any more!–then you may want to stop by Amazon.com and take a look “Inside the Book,” read the description, and maybe buy a copy or two…for yourself or someone you know and want to spark the interest in our amazing hobby.

See, right there in that last sentence, I did more publicity for RIDING THE SHORTWAVES than the big publishers do for most of the books they print up and ship out!

73,

Don Keith N4KC
www.donkeith.com    www.n4kc.com 

For the last few months I have been getting more and more irritated by the captcha word verification required to comment on certain blogs. The captchas Blogger used to use were perfectly adequate, in my opinion. But Blogger insists on “improving” its user interface. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it I say.

The latest two-part captchas Blogger uses seem designed to keep out the good guys and allow in the bad. The statement “Please prove you’re not a robot” seems ironic, as only a robot could decipher the letters. This morning, on a blog I won’t mention, I had to refresh the captcha three times before getting one that contained only recognizable letters.

Of course if Blogger’s captchas were annoying me they were also annoying you, my readers. So I decided to disable word verification on both G4ILO’s Blog and One Foot in the Grave. At the same time, I have enabled moderation for comments to posts more than 2 days old. Most of the valid comments are made within that time period anyway. If a comment is made later than that then a further small delay until I approve it will hardly be noticed. Hopefully this will result in an increase in valid comments and fewer spammy ones. But if I find too many spammers are taking advantage of the two day window of opportunity I’ll turn moderation on for all comments. If any internet lowlifes are reading this, don’t even think about it.

For the benefit of anyone who arrives here looking for a way to turn off word verification, here’s how. First, make sure you are using the old Blogger interface (I’d switched back to it already as I could never find anything in the new one.) Then, under Manage Blogs, click on Settings for your blog. Then click on Comments in the row of tabs along the top. The settings you need are on that page.

In case you didn’t know about it already, check out this new map of recent WSPR spots. (Editor’s note: please be advised that we have had a report of this link freezing a computer and requiring a reboot. I do not believe that it’s a malicious link, but it may be very resource intensive to load…)

It’s much faster than the ‘official’ one, which could bring Firefox to its knees on a slow computer. And it remembers allyour preferences including zoom level. A must-bookmark, if you’re a WSPR fan.