AmateurRadio.com

The Ukrainian government has confirmed new rules for its radio amateurs. Since 11th March 2011 Ukrainian amateurs may no longer use the following frequencies: 10100-10150kHz, 14250-14350kHz, 1240-1300MHz, 2300-2450MHz, 5670-5850MHz, 10-10,1 GHz, 10,15-10,5GHZ, 24,05-24,25GHz,76-77,5 GHz , 78-81GHz, 122.25-123.0 GHz, 134-136 GHz, 136-141GHz, 241-248GHz, 248-250GHz. Note the first two – that is all of 30m and half of the phone portion of 20m the Ukrainians can no longer use!

This is very sad for a country whose amateurs are among the most active on the HF bands. What is the point of denying the use of frequencies that will still be used throughout the world including by Ukraine’s neighbours? If it is intended to give these frequencies to other services (in defiance of ITU frequency allocations) then these services will find them unusable because of activity from elsewhere.

It is crazy. As my Ukrainian-born wife Olga would agree, surely the Ukrainian government has more important things it could be doing than meddling with amateur frequency allocations?

I’m hoping that this is just an April Fool that has got out of hand. I cannot find any information confirming this other than a few forum posts. Certainly someone in Ukraine kept enough of a sense of humour to make this little video about it in English. Hopefully some comments to this post will provide more details.

It’s come to our attention several times over the last few months that listeners who use gPodder to download the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast have had a problem with missing episodes. After a very lengthy investigation we have traced the problem to a bug in one of the plugins that we use for our WordPress site. That problem was leading to a <lastBuildDate> tag in our RSS feed that was far into the future. This meant that gPodder wouldn’t update its feed information until that date arrived, causing new episodes not to show up.

We have taken care of the feed building issue, but those who use gPodder must still delete and re-add the Linux in the Ham Shack feed to their podcatcher in order to fix this problem. That will ensure that your version of gPodder has the correct RSS feed build date and you will receive new episodes as they are released.

Thank you for your attention, and if you have any further questions make sure to send them our way!

73 de The LHS Guys

Due to extenuating circumstances, we will have to move the recording of Episode #050 to November 16th at 8:15pm CST. We hope to see everyone then.

73 de The LHS Guys

Today French radio amateurs have finally been granted permission to operate in the region 7.1 to 7.2MHz. Vive la France!