AmateurRadio.com

It's been a busy couple of weeks for me, full of different activities. It's hunting season in Texas and that is something that I enjoy a lot. The weather, while cold, has been perfect for hunting and has resulted in a couple of successful hunts. So there is meat in the freezer and with that a certain satisfaction of providing. We will not discuss price per pound:-)

As I have mentioned before, I am a guitarist for The No Refund Band, www.norefundband.com, and we had a great show on Saturday night. It was one of my better performances, landing all the notes and licks in front of a nice crowd, very satisfying. Check us out on iTunes, Amazon or most any digital outlet.

That brings me to radio. I guess I've been spoiled with the last few expeditions as I have documented here, getting nice band counters from S21 and XZ on the high bands. With higher sunspot numbers long path to Asia has been fantastic here in Texas, with loud signals and relatively easy QSO's. With the VU7AG expedition I expected nothing less than to make contacts on 10m and 12m. However, this chase was very different. Texas and VU7 just don't have the same path as the aforementioned countries. I listened and listened and listened. The long path was working to the US east coast, but stopped somewhere in the mid west. Kudos to the operators who tried to make this path work, but it just wasn't, until Sunday morning. I was in front of the radio, antenna turned to long path, nothing but static. Then I see some spots from W5 stations, still nothing, what gives? I turned my antenna to short path and there he was, a decent signal with a touch of artic flutter, but otherwise a great signal for short path 10m at 8:30 am from India to Texas. Unashamedly, I cranked up the amp, found the station he was working and started calling, expecting a QSO at any minute. After all, I am destined to salvage this expedition on 10m, aren't I? I called for 30 minutes when the signal began to fade and soon there was no signal and no QSO. The expedition is now QRT. Unlike the hunt and the gig, not very satifying.

However, as I said, I am spoiled. I did manage two new bands, 17m and 30m and a new mode, RTTY. As satisfying as those QSO's were, the lack of success on 10m seems to have dulled the accomplishment. But I'm over it. I still have some excitement waiting for me in the future. If we don't have hope, what do we have?
Mike Crownover, AD5A, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Texas, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

Still seeing plenty of transatlantic stations on 10m WSPR. I wonder how long it will last?

WSPR spots on 10m band at G4ILO

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

I was excited to see that Ken Reitz, KS4ZR, managing editor of MT, will continue to publish an e-magazine called The Spectrum Monitor. As most of you know, Monitoring Times has ceased publication with the December, 2013 edition.

The lineup looks fantastic:

Keith Baker KB1SF/VA3KSF, “Amateur Radio Satellites”

Kevin O’Hern Carey WB2QMY, “The Longwave Zone”

Mike Chace-Ortiz AB1TZ/G6DHU “Digital HF: Intercept and Analyze”

Marc Ellis N9EWJ, “Adventures in Radio Restoration”

Dan Farber ACØLW, “Antenna Connections”

Tomas Hood NW7US, “Understanding Propagation”

Kirk Kleinschmidt NTØZ, “Amateur Radio Insight”

Cory Koral K2WV, “Aeronautical Monitoring”

Stan Nelson KB5VL, “Amateur Radio Astronomy”

Chris Parris, “Federal Wavelengths”

Doug Smith W9WI, “The Broadcast Tower”

Hugh Stegman NV6H, “Utility Planet”

Dan Veeneman, “Scanning America”

Ron Walsh VE3GO, “Maritime Monitoring”

Fred Waterer, “The Shortwave Listener”

Thomas Witherspoon K4SWL, “World of Shortwave Listening”

A charter subscription is available for the very affordable price of $20 and includes 12 issues available in a variety of digital formats.

Matt Thomas, W1MST, is the managing editor of AmateurRadio.com. Contact him at [email protected].

After losing Rooster, the alleged brains of the WG0AT SOTA team, we have great news from Steve, WGØAT.

Two new goats have joined the herd, getting trained up for more Summits On The Air (SOTA) action.

Meet Acorn and Barley, or is it Barley and Acorn? Watch out, Peanut, you’ve got company.

Bob Witte, KØNR, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. Contact him at [email protected].

1. A clicking noise from a hard disk doesn’t mean anything good.

2. This stack of part finished or finished bu not boxed up projects needs to be dealt with over the Christmas break if not beforehand or the XYL will go bananas.

3. Must not buy any more bits and pieces off Hans Summers, G0UPL (http://www.hanssummers.com/index.php) until I’ve completed all of number 2. Oh apart from the gps and replacement pa’s for my QRSS transmitter.

4. The UKAC contest series is short, enjoyable and keeping me close to a mic but isn’t helping with getting on HF.

5. No matter how much I think they’ve started, there are no builders in the back garden working on the extension. This is all very well as its not costing me anything but it means there is no tower up.

Alex Hill, G7KSE, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Cumbria, UK. Contact him at [email protected].

Messages decoded from the FUNcube-1 satellite

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

A few weeks back, I had a Too Much Information meltdown, because I was being overrun with information spewing forth from various sources. To be specific, I regularly get communications from these feeds: email, SMS text, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. The amount of “stuff” that was coming in was getting out of hand so I sprang into action.

First, I asked myself, how did I get into this mess? The general trend I see is that when I first start using a particular communications tool, my goal is to connect up with as many interesting feeds as possible. For old school email, this usually means subscribing to email lists, mostly via Yahoo Groups. For Twitter, this means Following other people that have interesting tweets. As more people engage in these media, the available stuff grows rapidly. Then Google Plus comes along, which tries to improve on Twitter but is somewhat redundant with the other social media. That is, I get Google Plus postings that are the same as ones from Twitter and Facebook.

The big trap I fell into is the fear of missing something. There’s so much interesting stuff out there, I wanted to grab it all. In reality, I was still missing stuff because I was being overrun with superfluous information. Ah! This is really the classic communication problem of signal-to-noise ratio. Some of these feeds have too much noise in them so I was losing the signal!

What constitutes noise? Lots of things: Foursquare check ins, Fitbit updates,  off topic posts in email lists, etc., etc. Of course, noise is in the eye of the beholder, so what is noise to me may be valuable information to you. Also, a few “noise bursts” are OK but lots of noise degrades the signal-to-noise ratio.

With signal-to-noise ratio as the primary measure, I ruthlessly slashed my collection of information sources. I dropped out of many of the Yahoo Groups (actually, I moved them to web only), I reduced the number of SMS text alerts, I pulled back on the number of Facebook friends, deleted less interesting RSS feeds. On Twitter, I started to pay attention to noisy tweets…if someone has a tendency to send noise and not so much signal, they are gone.

If I dropped you from Twitter or the other social media, please don’t take it personally. It’s just me unclogging my digital life.

Those are my thoughts…what are you doing to manage your digital life?

73, Bob K0NR

 

Bob Witte, KØNR, is a regular contributor to AmateurRadio.com and writes from Colorado, USA. Contact him at [email protected].