AmateurRadio.com

There are numerous awards available in the Summits on the Air (SOTA) program. There are awards for activators and chasers alike, and just about any way you want to slice and dice the data, there is probably an award for it. There are certificates and trophies and you can pick the increments (in steps of 100) on the certificates. There are however two benchmark awards, the SOTA Sloth Award for working summits totalling 1,000 points and the SOTA Goat award for activating summits totalling 1,000 points. The "Goat" is obviously much tougher but both qualify you for a very nice glass trophy depicted below.

Today I qualified for the SOTA Sloth award, working W6UB on 40m from Black Balsam Knob in North Carolina to put me over the 1,000 point level. It has been a lot of fun to get to this point and honestly the program is quite addicting. A synonym for the award is SOTAholic, which is very appropriate. Since peaks can be worked once each day for points there is no worrying if you need it or not and you always have something to work.

The SOTA community are usually well versed not only in QRP operation, but also in hiking and backpacking. There is a Yahoo group (nasota) that has many knowledgeable members on the best way to get to the top of the mountain and put out a good signal. So if you are inclined toward such things, you would enjoy the program.

So I suppose my slothfulness has be officially certified and I can no longer deny it. I can't wait go get the award.

More information on SOTA can be found at http://www.sota.org.uk/



Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

When I first got the G4ZLP interface, I bought leads to connect both the FT847 and the FT1000MP to the computer. I hadn’t really got the FT1000MP connected up, and had used the FT847 for pretty much all my digimodes activity on both HF and VHF.

Given that the receiver on the FT1000MP is a bit nicer, particularly on LF, this seemed a bit of a waste, and particularly now the Es season is upon us, the FT847 is pretty much continuously busy on 50 and 70MHz. That meant no JT9 on HF.

So yesterday, I hooked up the FT1000MP. No problem at all with the interface. However, I did notice that I needed to crank the input volume control on the computer much further up. Not a problem on WSJT-X but actually on JT65-HF there was barely enough audio output for proper decoding.

Reading around the net, it seems that a number of people have found the Audio Out jack to be quite low level on the MP. Obviously, there are options – the speaker socket would offer more audio – but at the expense of losing the ability to listen. Or even a small audio amp to increase the audio level a bit.

Either way, it is working now and it’s nice to be able to play JT9 on HF and keep an eye on 50/70MHz simultaneously.

Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].

Today was a strange day.  It was my last day at my current job at Goldman Sachs. I’ve been there just over six years, managing all the Technology Department inventory (servers and networking and storage equipment) for the offices of the NY/NJ Campus.  I was the manager of the department responsible for receiving, inventorying, warehousing, and prepping for install a multi-billion dollar cache of equipment. I was also responsible for shipping re-purposed equipment both domestically and internationally. Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve been tasked with shipping millions of dollars of used equipment to places like Seoul, Sao Paolo, and Kuala Lumpur, and you were told it had to arrived undamaged (even though the original shipping containers had since long been discarded) and it had to arrive “yesterday”. I can proudly attest that in the six years that I was there, my department oversaw that inventory with a shrinkage percentage (loss due to theft, damage or mis-shipping) of less than 0.001%.

Last summer, Goldman felt that they had too many vendors, so they decided to downsize the number that they have on board. Our contract was farmed out to another vendor, and while my team was RIF’ed (reduction in force) I stayed on for six months to basically teach my replacements how to do the job.  My actual employer is Pitney Bowes Management Services, and through them, I will be starting at a new, non-management (actually glad for that, for a change) position with IBM next week.

My co-workers, the other outside vendors (IPC, Scholes, EMC, CBRE) who also serve Goldman Sachs are the best.  Totally unexpected, I walked into work this morning to find this waiting for me on my desk.

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Some time on the afternoon of 21 May WebProp stopped updating. The first person to notice it (actually the only person to notice it) was Mirek, OK1DUB, who sent me an email.

This is a screenshot not a live instance of the program

I SFTP’d into the web server to check and sure enough the files containing the propagation information extracted from the WWV 3-hourly bulletins had not been updated. They were updated when I ran the script manually so my script was OK. The likely explanation was that cron, the Linux job scheduler, had stopped running. I filed a ticket with Hawk Host‘s support department.

They claimed that cron was still running, though the evidence of my own eyes showed that it wasn’t. It took me a while to convince them that there really was a problem but we got there in the end. This morning when I logged on to my computer the latest propagation information was being displayed again. Hopefully my cron jobs will now stay running.

Julian Moss, G4ILO, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, England. Contact him at [email protected].

It was a nice night for DX.  I guess there are a lot of folks out there getting their stations ready for the CQ WPX contest this weekend.  They seem to be swinging their beams to and fro, checking out their Amps, and burning the dust off their finals.  Good times for a QRP DXer, good times!

I started off the evening with a brandy new one.  7X4AN, Mohammed in Algeria on 15 Meters  And with QRP, to boot!  So it was a deuce – new DXCC entity worked with QRP.  That was followed by another QSO on 15 Meters with KP2M down in the US Virgin Islands – and was he ever loud!  10 over 9 at least!

From there I went down to the 20 Meter QRP watering hole and called CQ. I was answered by Cliff W9ZI in Wisconsin.  Cliff and I chewed the fat for about 20 minutes until the band started changing and we cut things short before we both QSBed into oblivion.

That was followed by two quickie DX/Contest style QSOs, both on 20 Meters.  I am in the log of Zygi SP5ELA from Warsaw, Poland. Dziekuje, Zygi!  Then over to the Azores to get into CT8/OM7GJ’s log.  He had to be 20 over 9 here in NJ.

Lastly, I went to 17 Meters and worked OM3SX. Mike in the Slovak Republic. Mike was about a 579 here and I received a 559 in return.

In addition to the WPX this weekend, don’t forget that Saturday night, from 8:00 PM until Midnight – local time is QRP ARCI’s annual Hoot Owl Sprint.  That’s always a fun one.  There are bonus points given to anyone who operates portable.  I don’t know if I am intrepid enough to venture out at 8:00 PM this Saturday evening.  I’ll probably sit in the shack in order to just give out points, as usual.

Then come Monday evening, the MI QRP Club will be holding their annual Memorial Day Sprint from 2300 UTC to 0300 UTC..  That’s always a fun event.  Two good QRP events to keep in mind this upcoming long holiday weekend.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

Larry Makoski, W2LJ, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from New Jersey, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Greetings, listeners! May we entice you with another episode of Linux in the Ham Shack? We sure hope so. In this installment, we have a special guest, Peter64, ubiquitous podcaster of Kernel Panic Oggcast fame. He gives us a decidedly downunda perspective on our topics for the evening. Speaking of topics, we have several: new releases, including Debian "Wheezy" and KDE, updates on previous topics including the Tucnak logging application and the Hamux live distro, based on CentOS. Finally, we take a look at a clever and addictive airplane tracker that uses FAA and ADS-B transponders to let you know where your loved ones are when they're at 35,000 feet. G'day from the team. We'll keep a shrimp on the barbie for ya.

73 de The LHS Guys

Russ Woodman, K5TUX, co-hosts the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast which is available for download in both MP3 and OGG audio format. Contact him at [email protected].

After I posted my picture of bicycle portable yesterday, my pal from Cheltenham, Simon, G4SGI asked if I’d seen his bicycle mobile video. I had seen it but I watched it again last night.

It’s well filmed and I think inspiring! I’m sure some of you will enjoy it too. Quite apart from the well thought out mechanics of Simon’s bicycle mobile station – I am very impressed about how he is able to speak clearly whilst travelling at a good speed!

Well done, Simon and thank you for the inspiration

Tim Kirby, G4VXE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Oxfordshire, England. Contact him at [email protected].