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Now we know what the FCC didn’t want us to know, back in 2004, about its staff studies of interference to radio services from Broadband over Power Line (BPL) systems.
I have published an application on the Android Market which will allow operators like me who can't understand the Morse code generated by the HF propagation beacon network well enough to know which beacon is expected to transmit on any given band at the present time. The application's name is HFBeacon and I hope it is useful to others.
I posted the long tale of how the application was created here for the curious. Thanks!
After reading the August 2005 QST article by Chris Ormsby, K0CAO, and Bob Witte, K0NR, I thought what fun a HF low power (QRP) operation from a Colorado 14er (A mountain over 14,000 feet high.) would be. The “carrot” would be that an out-of-state 14er to 14er HF contact had yet to be made.1 After the N7UN and WG0AT fun-packed hike through the Canyonlands National Park in April 2008, Steve and I made plans to participate in this unique Colorado operating event. 2 It was after we heard that Brian Boschma, N6IZ, was planning to HF QRP activate Mt Whitney (14,491 feet) the same weekend as the Colorado 14er event that our mutual plans solidified. We would take a crack at making the first out-of-state summit HF QRP contact between a Colorado 14er and Mt Whitney in California.
On Friday, July 24, the Senate confirmed the nominations of Meredith Attwell Baker and Mignon Clyburn as FCC Commissioners. Both nominees appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on July 15 to be vetted by the 25 members of the committee. Baker and Attwell were nominated by President Barack Obama on June 25; no date has been set for their swearing in.
When you live on a remote island with numerous mountains and valleys, communications can be tricky. Add interference that blocks the main communications frequency used by the local emergency rescue squad and you've got a disaster waiting to happen. That's what responders and residents on St John in the US Virgin Islands recently found themselves facing.
AMSAT-UK has announced a new amateur satellite project -- FUNcube -- an educational single cubesat project that features a 435-145 MHz linear transponder for SSB/CW operation. According to AMSAT-UK, FUNcube will "enthuse and educate" young people about radio, space, physics and electronics. "The idea of FUNcube is to combine an educational project to excite young people with a simple linear transponder for radio amateurs to use with either legacy modes like CW and SSB, or, still to come, digital ones," said IARU Region 1 Satellite Coordinator Graham Shirville, G3VZV. Shirville is also affiliated with AMSAT-UK and ARISS-Europe.
The space shuttle Endeavour is due to land Friday, July 31, but before it leaves orbit it will deploy four student-built satellites, all with telemetry downlinks in the 2 meter, or 70 cm, amateur bands.
On July 28, the FCC approved a modification that expands the ARRL's 500 kHz experimental license WD2XSH. According to Experiment Coordinator Fritz Raab, W1FR, the expansion allows for more frequencies, more stations and portable operations.
No sunspot activity this week, and if no sunspot appears today, July 31, the average sunspot number for July will be 5.1; this is down from June's average of 6.6. The monthly average of the daily sunspot number, January-July 2009, is 2.8, 2.5, 0.8, 1.3, 4, 6.6 and 5.1. The three-month averages for October 2008-June 2009 were 4.5, 4.4, 3.6, 2.2, 2, 1.5, 2, 4.2 and 5.2. This takes into account all the daily sunspot numbers for September 2008-July 2009, and those numbers are for the center months of each of those three month moving average periods.
This week, Surfin' further explores the possibilities and practicalities of getting electricity from your own resources.