ARRL New England Div. Cabinet Meeting

Tom Frenaye, K1KI, convened a meeting of ARRL Club officers and ARRL field appointees on Saturday, June 21, 2008, in Leominster, Massachusetts.


A fine day, a fine location, and lots of discussion.

Devoted Entirely to Amateur Radio

QST's slogan since its earliest days tells us that the magazine is 100% for ham radio. In the early years, there were many radio and electronics experimenters' magazines, and it may have been necessary for QST to make this special claim to set itself apart.

For newer hams, it may be hard to imagine what the “radio” world was like in those days. Radio was a new and very exciting development. Not only hams were involved in radio. There were many radio enthusiasts who built and tinkered, but only licensed hams were organized around two-way communications. I was recently reminded of the broad appeal of early radio when I was browsing a 1920's copy of a New Haven newspaper. I came across an article with a schematic of a vacuum tube receiver you could build yourself. Radio and electronics were so new and interesting that an ordinary newspaper would run an experimenter's column.

So ham operators, who were newly recognized by the Federal Government, needed a QST that was “devoted entirely” as the special place where technical developments for ham communications could be nurtured along with operating activities. It was important to set that boundary.

In the 21st century, what should QST's focus be? Conditions are very different, we hardly need to say. Electronics technology is vastly richer. (Think digital television, Internet, cell phones, and computers in general.) Amateur Radio technology has developed greatly, and we have many new operating specialties, too.

But despite the incredible possibilities for today's hams, maybe 90% of what we do now would be perfectly understandable to a ham operator of the 1930's. There is voice (now SSB and FM, mostly) and there is CW. There is DXing, ragchewing, and message handling. Our gear is much more capable and cheaper, but most of us are doing what our fathers and grandfathers in the hobby were doing.

Except...

Except that ham radio (as most of us practice it) is not so much a new and coming thing, as it was in the 1920's. New things are happening, of course, but for the most part we are applying technologies that are primarily aimed at consumer electronics. The largest impact is from digital technology, especially computers and signal processing, and there is also the Internet. Current rigs are fully solid state, but your cell phone, TV, or PC has much more advanced technology than we have on our radio desks.

Except that young technical wizards have a lot of options beyond ham radio. Our kids are captivated by the Internet, iPods, and all. They are immersed in gaming and computer social networking. Those who are especially talented in a do-it-yourself way often find their way into computer programming. Not many tinkerers are working with radios and antennas the way they might have 80 years ago.

Yet there are non-hams who do fiddle with technology in the way hams have always done. How about the folks who are breaking distance records with unlicensed technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth? How about the people who “hacked” the iPhone (a radio!) to allow exotic software to be installed? How about the developers of the Linux operating system and other major open source software efforts? Some of them are hams, but many are not. They share a common attitude with us toward technology work -- improvising, tinkering, and sharing ways to advance the state of the art.

So why are we “devoted entirely” these days? Yes, there are many things hams do that no one else does -- particularly in the operating sphere. But in technology (the newly discovered “fifth pillar” of ARRL!), we are not so unique. We shouldn't want to exclude non-ham content -- as a matter of fact, we should really want to draw in new potential hams. Why isn't there a journal (paper or online) that emphasizes Amateur Radio, but also includes interesting practical and theoretical articles for the experimenter -- whether about digital TV, cell phone hacking, programming languages, DSP, or a host of other technical areas. It would help bring non-hams into our hobby, and it would be an enjoyable and educational read for hams as well.

I admit I have the old Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics magazines in mind. They were very influential for me at a certain age, but they are long out of business. (Still, they are worth a Google search.) Currently, Nuts & Volts (www.nutsvolts.com) and Make Magazine (www.makezine.com) come close. Should the ARRL be in this space, too? It would be a recruiting tool, and it would be perfectly in line with our goals for technology development, education, and public service.

Martin Ewing AA6E

[This is the "before" copy of a letter that will appear in abbreviated form in a future issue of QST. Check back to see what survives the editing process. "All that fits, we print."]

Zero Sunspots?

From Ian O'Neill at universetoday.com this cheerful thought:

So what's up with our Sun? Is it going through a depression? It seems as if our closest star is experiencing a surprisingly uneventful couple of years. Solar minimum has supposedly passed and we should be seeing a lot more magnetic activity, and we certainly should be observing lots more sunspots. Space weather forecasts have been putting Solar Cycle 24 as a historically active cycle… but so far, nothing. So what's the problem? Is it a ticking bomb, waiting to shock us with a huge jump in solar activity, flares and CMEs over a few months? Or could this lack of activity a prelude to a very boring few years, possibly leading the Earth toward another Ice Age?

Dayton Debate

Interesting discussion about the Dayton Hamvention -- the awful state of the facilities vs the heroic work of the Dayton Area Club who put it on, etc. -- over at K9ZW's blog.

I went through the "shame how shabby the facilities are" phase last year, I think. This year, I was feeling more mellow. I enjoyed the whole experience.

There would be a lot to be said for moving to a "professional" conference center, as I understand they have at Friedrichshaven show. I was speaking with a German ham at Dayton, and asked him to compare with the German show. He said the physical side of things was much better, but that they did not have nearly the same attendance from vendors. And, of course it would be a lot more expensive to attend.

So maybe we need to hop over to DL-land next year.

Security on Debian & Ubuntu

Thanks to Ben N1WBV for a reminder to update SSH keys for Debian (and Ubuntu) Linux systems. This is a nasty bug, because lots of systems will be slow to get the word. It's not just a matter of updating files, as most bug fixes are. As I understand it, you have to regenerate your keys and even worry about keys stored in known_hosts files on destination systems.

For various reasons, I'm now running Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora systems (all flavors of Linux) at my location, along with a couple of instances of Windows XP. Some day (when I really retire), I think I should dump it all in favor of Mac OS...

Fedora-Debian-iMac QSOs

Finally! My mother's old iMac has found a new life on my operating desk. After a number of false starts with Ubuntu and Fedora, I installed extra RAM and Debian's PowerPC Linux, which is now running as an X Terminal against my Fedora-based main computer. This allows me to see my logs and digimode displays on the same desk with the radio, making things a lot more convenient. As a Macintosh, the computer only ran MacOS 8.6, which was nearly unusable for modern Internet work.

I celebrated on 20 meters, working 3D2A (my first Fiji) and then K9QS/0 (the latter with 3.4 Watts output).

Dayton, 2008

Lots of people report on the Dayton Hamvention. Why should I be different? I have a set of photos over on my Flickr area. That new SteppIR "Dream Beam" really dominated the Hamvention skyline!

Each year (this was my fourth), the experience has been different. Still the same masses of people, indoor vendors, flea market people, and seminars. People say that vendors and attendees have shrunk a bit. It wasn't obvious to me.

I like to "shop around" at different dinners and social occasions. This year, the ARRL reception was very good (for Diamond Club "gold" donors -- take the plunge!). I tried out the QCWA dinner -- good film about the Wright brothers, but not much amateur radio content. The food was disappointing. The next day was the Contest Dinner, which was something else again. I have stayed away from contesting activity, preferring the quieter type of QSO (I'm keen on SKN), but these folks were very interesting. I sat at a random table, full of folks who go to exotic places for the big contests. Lots of energy, spirited discussion. The food was a couple of notches better than the previous night, but it was definitely still for the steak & potatoes crowd. And I won a nice door prize. Maybe I'll check out some contests!

Photo troubles!

Some photos from earlier postings seem to have vanished. I hope I can sort this out quickly.

Update: Some photos from before 2007 got lost in a server shuffle. I think I've restored them all now. Blogger's photo archive is a lot easier to use than what I had in those old days -- having to put photos on a private server.

So no one reported this...?