AmateurRadio.com

Propagation is really poor at the moment. Never has my WebProp propagation widget been quite so accurate. On 10m WSPR I am hearing nothing and no-one is hearing me. On 30m APRS it’s just as bad. I’m not picking up a single packet.

I opened WebProp’s page in Google Chrome and noticed that the small format widget had a vertical scrollbar on the right hand side. I thought I could remove it by adding a few pixels to the iframe height attribute but it didn’t seem to make any difference. I think a bug in Chrome might be causing this. The presence of the scrollbar reduces the width of the table causing several lines to wrap and making the table taller.

I found that the scrollbar was eliminated by adding the attribute scrolling=”no” to the iframe definition. If you are using WebProp on your website I recommend you do the same. If you aren’t sure exactly what to do then go to the WebProp web page. The code examples have all been updated with this extra attribute.

I recommend you to do this even if you don’t see the scrollbar in Google Chrome. That will prevent it from appearing in any web browser.

My website G4ILO’s Shack is currently down. It appears to be down for everyone, not just me.

Sometimes a site appears to be down when it’s really a problem at your end. There’s a really useful site you can use to check if the server is down or not. It goes by the memorable name downforeveryoneorjustme.com. It’s worth bookmarking, especially if you have a website of your own.

I’ve opened a support ticket with the hosting service. Hopefully my site will be back up by the time you read this.

I’ve just spent half a day when I could have been working 10m DX updating the website and blog templates. The main difference is that I have made all the text about 10% larger, which should help those – including myself – who find small print increasingly hard to read.

I have also made the main content section wider so it makes better use of the screen. Most people have bigger monitors than when I first started G4ILO’s Shack, from which the blog inherited its template. I dare say there will be a few using older, smaller screens who will find this change annoying. Sorry.

I have taken advantage of this change to include larger pictures and screenshots. Another benefit – though some may question that – is that I can use a wider ad format, which Google has been pestering me to do recently. I’m sure that some of my readers would have liked me to get rid of the ads altogether. However, they make far too much money to simply forgo it – not enough to live on but certainly enough to pay for my hobby and G4ILO’s Shack’s web hosting.

I wouldn’t advise anyone on the basis of this to start publishing Google ads on their own ham radio sites or blogs – not unless you have G4ILO’s Shack’s level of visitor traffic. The ClustrMaps widget at the bottom of the left hand column will give you an idea how much that is, if you’re interested.

For more years than I care to remember my website G4ILO’s Shack has been a member of the QRP Web Ring. Web rings are a tool dating from long before search engines came on the scene and were set up to help web surfers locate sites of similar interest.

In order to be a member of the QRP Web Ring I include some links to other web ring sites on my home page, plus a banner.

Clicking some of the web ring links from G4ILO’s Shack and other linked sites today I found that many of the links were broken and most of the rest were pages of extremely poor quality. So I am considering removing the QRP Web Ring code from my site.

Whether you still use the QRP Web Ring to find other QRP-related sites, or if you have never used it and have no intention of using it now that you know about it, I would appreciate your comments.

Due to the eventual closure of our website business the server on which my website g4ilo.com runs will be unavailable before long. I am now in the process of moving the site to a standard shared hosting account. It is possible that the site and even my blog may become unreachable or seem to be down during the transition. If this happens, don’t worry!

For information, my sites are hosted and g4ilo.com will continue to be hosted by HawkHost which I have found to be an absolutely first class hosting service with support staff who really know what they are doing. If you are looking for high quality hosting for your own website I can wholeheartedly recommend them.

I have just noticed that this blog now has 100 followers. I’d just like to say thanks for reading my ramblings and I hope you continue to find them interesting.

Yesterday I heard about a new web service called about.me. It’s a site that lets you build a personal profile page with links to all your online content: websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Your profile has a URL like: about.me/your.name so in order to grab my name before someone else does I set up my own profile page at http://about.me/julian.moss. It only takes a few minutes to do so if you are interested in making it easier for people to find you on the web it’s worth the effort.

There aren’t a lot of links on my profile as I’m still not into social networks. I can’t see the point of Facebook, though I guess that’s just me as I know it is very popular. And I don’t know that people would be interested in my tweeting what I’m doing any more often than I do in my blogs already.

Earlier in the year I was hunting through some folders on my hard drive and discovered an unreleased version of my Morse training program MorseGen. I had no memory at all of having updated it so I had no idea whether I had finished or tested the update. The main changes from the last released version 1.4 appeared to be that there was now a batch mode for creating recordings to play on an MP3 player and a “Common words” mode. This jogged my memory as to the reason for updating the program. A couple of years ago in QST there was an article which suggested that in order to be able to copy Morse at high speed you should learn to recognize the sounds of complete words not just individual letters. So I had added the ability to play random selections from a list of some of the most common words and CW abbreviations.

Today I placed this new version of MorseGen on the G4ILO’s Shack website. The previous version is still available to be downloaded in case the new one has problems. My interest in programming has now fallen to absolute zero and I no longer even have the development tools used to compile MorseGen so this is definitely, without argument the last ever version.

This is actually a bit of a nuisance as the new version seems to have a small bug. Occasionally, in Random QSO mode the program will halt with an error message “List index out of bounds.” You have to close the error message and continue. I’m guessing that I added some QSO templates and the random number generator sometimes generates a number that is more than the number of templates. If so, this would be easy to fix if I still had the development tools. But I don’t, so I can’t, so tough luck! But no-one has any grounds for complaint because MorseGen is free!

Despite the bug, I still think MorseGen is a useful program. I often use  it whenever I get the urge to try to improve my Morse reading skills. Admittedly it hasn’t done me any good, but I think that is more due to something peculiar to my brain that is just incapable of mastering the code. Over the years since I wrote the first version of MorseGen I’ve had many emails thanking me for it so it appears that it does work for people less Morse-resistant than me!