Amateur Radio on its edge
Last weekend I was invited to speak at the Contest Universtity in Friedrichshafen, Germany. This year I tried to visualize a rather abstract topic, the influence of technologies on the art of contesting.
Mainly two topics are discussed: Information Management and Software Defined Radios.
Do you like this presentation? Please leave a comment and share your opinion with us!
The Contest Community has voted. Almost 500 contesters particpated in the survey on ARRL’s recent decisions. As promised, I’m providing the results one day after the survey’s end for further discussion. Some of the answers are very clear, other’s should be refined. However here are the results without any interpretation or censorship. Take them, build your opinion and share your thoughts with us!
Yesterday I received an overwhelming amount of replies on my personal opinion about ARRL’s IARU Contest decisions. Fellow contester agreed, disagreed and expressed their own opinions. The amount of replies is a proof that our contest community takes this discussion serious. However, it is unclear if these personal opinions are representative for our whole contest community. Now, I would like to take this Question on another level. I just created an Online-Survey / Poll. It takes less than two minutes to answer all Questions! Please participate and spread the word! Your vote counts!
The Survey can be accessed through this link:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/312520/ARRL-IARU-Contest-Decisions
The Survey will be online for three days until Tuesday, 15th of June 2010 – 23:59 UTC. I will publish the results the day after on Wednesday 16th of June.
Yesterday ARRL oficially published their answer on the Spanish Request to disqualify the German Headquater station DA0HQ in IARU Contest 2009. Read in this blogpost why I fundamentally disagree with ARRLs consequences!
On my ongoing search for SDR appliances, I discovered a couple of weeks ago an SDR (Softrock & Linux) based Beacon Monitoring System. The system is making use of the NCDXF Internation Beacon Project (IBP) which consists of 18 timely synchronized automated transmitters, located around the world. It monitors the signals on the various bands and generates in real-time a graphical chart showing the signal’s strength. The chart is uploaded to a webserver and accessible for everyone through the Internet. Lately I had the possibility to interview the author of the system, Atsushi (JN1SDD). In this interview he revealed with great deepness how the system is build up. I hope you will enjoy this interview as much as I did!
If you are using Ubuntu Linux you might have problems to open the Dutch WebSDR page. The problems appears in both, Firefox and Chrome. Canonical does not ship the Sun’s Java Runtime Environment anymore with Ubuntu. Instead they included OpenJDK and IcedTea, a Java Web browser plugin. Unfortunately, IcedTea does not work with the WebSDR Java Applet. However, there exists a solution. Read how I fixed the problem.
Lately a fellow Ham in New Zealand was convicted by court to pay a $1750 fine because he massively exceeded the legal power limitations. He posted a video on Youtube showing him transmitting with more than 3000 Watts. This was considered as a sufficient prove by the New Zealand judge. On top of the fine he has to pay $130 trail costs and he was requested by New Zealand Radio Spectrum Management Organisation to forfeilt his radio equipment.
