Author Archives: Bob K0NR

It has been a few days since I left Hamcon Colorado at Estes Park, but the glow hasn’t worn off yet! What a great event!

Joyce K0JJW and I drove up to Estes on Thursday night so we could help with the final setup on Friday morning. Brian N5ZGT (ARRL Rocky Mountain Division Director) gave a fine keynote address on Friday night. This was followed by Harold Kramer WJ1B, COO of the ARRL. Harold gave a Powerpoint tour of ARRL headquarters, which I found interesting.

The real show started on Saturday with tons of excellent technical and operating forums. I admit to some bias here as I did a presentation on Test Equipment for Amateur Radio and did a team presentation on the Colorado 14er Event. I attended a presentation by Mike Higgins K6AER on Lightning Safety. Mike did a great job of explaining proper grounding of an amateur station based on his commercial experience. Virgil Leenerts W0INK talked about switching power supplies, also an interesting presentation. Mike Gruber W1MG (EMC Engineer at ARRL HQ) covered powerline noise…a topic that has gotten quite a bit of my attention lately. Mike (W1MG) and I (plus a handful Technical Specialists in the section) staffed the Doctor is IN booth, answering any and all questions from the convention attendees.  There were plenty of other forums that I could not attend based on other obligations but the feedback I heard was all positive. The only negative comment received was that we should have had a forum or two on contesting (valid feedback).

In between activities, I managed to chat with a number of hams I had not seen in quite a while. It is always good to connect up with old friends. W1AW/0 Special Event station was active…I did not get a chance to operate the station but I did make it a point to work them on 2 Meters with my HT.

We attended the banquet on Saturday night, also a great affair. Yes, it did go a little long but don’t they always? The breakfast on Sunday morning featured Gordon Harman W0RUN speaking about the Desecheo Island DXpedition. Gordon did a fine job mixing in a few tales from Peter I Island.

The attendance of Hamcon was 499, so the size pales in comparison to Dayton (duh). But I think the quality of the venue, the program and the people involved is far superior.

73, Bob

This item was in the ARRL Rocky Mountain Division Update (email newsletter):

===== 2009 Rocky Mountain Division Convention =====

About ONE month remains til the 2009 Rocky Mountain Division Convention
(May 29-31). Have you made plans to join close to 250 hams (and
growing) in beautiful Estes Park, Colorado...gateway to Rocky Mountain
National Park? Registration online and by mail is happening right now,
and special hotel rates have been negotiated for convention attendees.

Among the guest speakers: Harold Kraemer WJ1B (ARRL Chief Operating
Officer), Gordon Hardman W0RUN (2009 Desecheo Island DXpedition
participant and chief engineer of Alpha Radio Products), Mike Gruber
W1MG (ARRL EMC Engineer and contributor to "The Doctor Is IN" QST
column), Cheryl Muhr, N0WBV, YL columnist for WorldRadio Online
(formerly WorldRadio Magazine), Editor for YL-Harmonics the Young
Ladies' Radio League's (YLRL) Bi-monthly magazine, and Brian Mileshosky
N5ZGT (Director, ARRL Rocky Mountain Division).

Nearly 30 technical and non-technical forums, great meals, transmitter
hunts, special event station W1AW/0, and much more await you.  Not to
mention one heck of a time meeting and greeting hams from all over the
Division and country.  It'll be a great event with a very fitting
theme: "Amateur Radio: Resilient, Relevant, Ready"

The hotel, where the Convention is being held, is almost at
full-capacity, so reserve your room soon!

Please mark your calendars and visit the Division convention's website
at http://www.hamconcolorado.org for more details, including
registration information.  Join us for a great time at an awesome
venue!

The ARRL Field Day is one of the more popular and fun ham radio events during the year. You or your club can make Field Day whatever you want: a real contest, some time out in the woods, a public service event, drinking beer with your buddies …. whatever.

Field Day this year is June 27-28.

The ARRL promotional materials for Field Day are now available on their web site.

Here is the Public Service Announcement video:

By the way, the ARRL logo for Field Day looks good. Nice work by the ARRL graphics department!

73, Bob K0NR

Added on April 12th: Noticed a good Field Day post by K3NG

In the past few years, I have noticed that it is easy for me to miss paying my membership dues for the various amateur radio clubs I’ve joined. Despite the trend towards electronic mail, there is a huge pile of paper mail that ends up on our kitchen table. Somewhere in there is a little postcard or letter reminding me to pay my dues. It often gets swept into the junk mail pile and into the trash can. Worse yet, many clubs just put out the blanket message that “all dues are due” in the club newsletter or an email message.

I did a little inventory last night of my membership status with the various clubs and sure enough, I am delinquent with several of them. Some of these organizations are repeater groups that only meet once per year, so there is no natural reminder built in. It is interesting that none of the clubs have followed up with me and asked “did you really intend to drop your membership?”  Many clubs are seeing a flat to declining roster due to the demographics of the ham community, so you’d think they would focus on retention.

Based on my experience, I reached these conclusions:

• With some clubs struggling, I will pay more attention to this renewal issue so that I am supporting the local ham community.
• Even though I operate my own UHF repeater and tend to hang out there, I’ve decided to increase my support to several of the local repeater groups. I’ve focused on the ones that actively support ARES and RACES activities, an important part of the amateur radio service.
• Radio clubs can really benefit from monitoring their rosters and being a little more assertive on retaining members. I bet they could bump their rolls by 10 to 20% with just a little follow up.

What do you think?

73, Bob K0NR

While we wait for the official announcement that Julius Genachowski will be the head of the FCC, I have been pondering how the FCC management seems to be mostly lawyers by training. Last night I had this strange dream:

In a surprise move, President Obama announced that Fred Technofarble will head the Federal Communications Commission. Technofarble is uniquely qualified for this role due to his strong educational background in both engineering and law. His undergraduate degree in electrical engineering is from MIT and his law degree is from Harvard. His main area of study has been the use of government policy and regulation to encourage technological innovation. Most recently, he has been employed as the Chief Technology Officer for a Fortune 500 electronics company.

Technofarble is well-known as a computer and ham radio geek, spending his precious free time tinkering with electronic projects in his basement. He told the press that his first action will be to institute a mandatory testing policy for all FCC employees in professional positions.

“We’ll give them a very basic test that covers electromagnetics, communications and electronics. You can’t be making up regulations for something that you don’t understand, so we’ll insist on a basic level of technical knowledge for all FCC staff. This will be an easy test…the typical engineer or technician will be able to pass without studying but I expect about half of the lawyers to fail. Anyone that fails will be given 3 months to study and successfully retake the test, otherwise they will be terminated.”

Technofarble also indicated that anyone holding a valid Amateur Radio License would be given full credit for the required test.

Then I woke up.

73, Bob K0NR

There have been quite a few news items, blog posts and tweets flying across the net lately. Here’s what I have been reading:

It looks like the FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is out and Julius Genachowski is in. I’ve only found “Julius is a good guy” articles without much detail behind them, so I guess we wait and see.

A company called CellAntenna wants to be able to sell cellphone jammers. I am totally in favor of it as long as I am the only one that gets one. I’d keep it in the car and jam all of the people driving while cellphoning (except for me, of course).

Check out this new cellphone from “Sumsing”, pretty funny video.

Interesting post from Kelly AB9RF about Why the Hell Would You Want a Ham Radio?

Jeff KE9V wants his QST electronically. I think he has a point.

Bruce Vaughan, NR5Q, from Springdale, Arkansas survived WWII with a few stories to tell. He loves to build radios and got an email from a musician that said he was in a band called The Eagles. Bruce invites him over to the house….turns out it is Joe Walsh.

Obama thinks we need to delay the shutoff of analog TV. He is wrong….time to go through the transition and deal with it. Rip the band-aid off quickly. (Did you notice that watching television is now a right guaranteed by the US Constitution?)

CQ Magazine embraces eQSL for their awards program. Jeff KE9V questions whether we are headed done the wrong path with electronic QSLs.

K3NG gives us a list of things to test Whether We Are Part of the Problem.  Close call for me, as I do think saying 73s is dumb….but I don’t correct people on the air.

Good reading and 73,  Bob K0NR

As the storage capacity and cost of computer hard drives continue to improve, it just amazes me how many bytes you can store for a reasonable cost. For example, you can purchase an external 1 terabyte drive for less than $150….which is probably a good thing, since downloading a few videos and your daily email will fill that up in no time.

This got me thinking about how megabyte and gigabyte have made it into everyday language. Even Grandma knows that you want lots of gigabytes in your hard drive. Expect terabyte to make it into dinner conversation shortly. These prefixes that help us handle humongoid numbers come from the International System of Units (SI).

When I first started out messing around with electronics as a kid, I had to get used to these units. Back then it was mostly kilohertz and megahertz, along with kilohm and megohm. Not too bad. Capacitance was in microfarads and picofarads. (There was this strange usage of micro-microfarad, which I eventually figured out was the same as picofarad.) I didn’t know a tera from a giga.

There are twenty SI prefixes listed on the NIST web page, including:

When we get to 1000 terabytes, that will equal a petabyte. I don’t think I’ve ever used peta to refer to any numerical value, and certainly not exa, zetta and yotta. I kind of like the sound of yotta, as I can hear myself saying “there’s a yotta bytes on that 5 yottabyte hard drive.”

On the low end, we some other prefixes to deal with:

I have often used the prefixes up to femto and might have said atto once or twice in my career, but never zepto or yocto. Isn’t zepto the name of one of the Marx brothers? 🙂 I’ve noticed that nano has worked its way into dinner conversation, via terminology such as nanotechnology. I’ve even heard a few non-technical people say something like “that will last about a nanosecond.”

It seems that things are getting more numerous (bytes on hard drives) and smaller (width of a transistor element) at the same time. This stretches out the dynamic range that we end up dealing with, and not just related to technical fields.

We just seem to have a lot of stuff.

73, Bob K0NR

Apple is legendary for avoiding unnecessary distractions in its elegant designs (e.g., a Right Click Button on a mouse). Always trying to push the limits, they have introduced a new computer that doesn’t require or even have a keyboard. Wow, no buttons!

Warning: satire here

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard