Aurora Contest Team LA8W - LN8W

Early in October, I received an e-mail from our ARRL Section that announced an antenna seminar at a convenient location. The subjects of the antenna seminar were:

• Antennas 101 — all about the basics of antennas
• Portable Antennas for EmComm — antennas that you can carry easily and work in a variety of circumstances
• Round Table Discussion on Antennas — answer questions from the audience

The reason this was interesting to me was because the seminar was not held in conjunction with a swapfest or any other radio event; it was just held in a convenient meeting location and hams (others?) were invited.

This is an interesting approach to reaching out to hams and others.

Why don’t we do more of these? Or do more seminars at swapfests?

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The iPhone has taken the “smart phone” market by storm with something like a 25% market share in a minute. Now, my rule on technology is that I’m into purchasing version 1.1 after the bugs have been worked out. (Example: I am on XP, not Vista, and would wait another year before moving there. Except Microsoft just announced Windows 7 or something…).

In any case, after Apple released the iPhone 3G, I got into the act after watching the YL work with hers for about a month. I can tell you that the phone is truly revolutionary from a use perspective. It is simple to use for just about anything. But what really differentiated the 3G for me was the ability, finally, of getting applications from third parties. There are a ton of applications out there.

Except ham radio.

Now, over on the ARRL Web Site, Surfin’ is up with an article called “I Phone, Therefore I Ham,” a good look at the ability of the iPhone to use applications.

WA1LOU gives a good review of what is out there. But the truth is, what is out there is really just an access to another web site to do your stuff. Sure, you can use an “application” to go look up callsigns — but you can use the imbedded browser on the iPhone to do the exact same thing. Sure, you can use the map and GPS function on the iPhone to find QTH’s, but you can do that in native mode as well.

If you carefully look at what are “applications” for ham radio, most of them are simply portals to information you can find on the web already.

But, a suggestion, however, for all those web sites: build your site for mobile use. Most sites will benefit from signing up for a service to do this and almost all services build the site for a mobile phone and specifically for an iPhone.

Want to see? Access K9JY.com on your mobile phone. What you see is targeted for the mobile screen. And if you have a iPhone, you will get an iPhone version. While this site will automatically detect your mobile or iPhone if you access it that way, you can also bookmark the mobile version of K9JY.com as http://m.k9jy.com and get your stuff a little bit faster.

It is Sweepstakes this weekend. Go rock on some radio.

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This is the first CQ WW SSB Contest I have listened to from this location. And the comparison to my previous location is striking.

This location is much worse for ham radio than the one I had about four miles from here — it is lower, on the side of a hill, with another hill due west from me. Signals arriving from the northeast and east have to go through a pile of dirt into a vertical antenna. Not pretty.

It showed, too, during the weekend. DX was few and far between — and, for that matter, so were signals of any sort. Where I expected tons of signals on 20-meters, I instead heard few. Nothing on 15 meters. Nothing on 10 meters. Forty was OK Friday night and Saturday morning, but not spectacular. I heard Europe, Japan, and other stations in the Pacific in my short time on the bands.

So the net of this location: for ham radio, I’ll need lots of sunspots and good openings to work a decent number of stations in a contest. A true “little pistol” in a geographically challenged contesting area.

I didn’t move here for ham radio. But I sure wish it was better.

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This weekend, my host’s server suffered a “Distributed Denial of Service” attack. As a result, my sites were down for about 36-hours this weekend, including my e-mail. Fortunately, it happened Saturday morning local time and that should have gotten most of you through the set-up in WriteLog for the CQWW SSB Contest.

You would have received a “Network Timeout” error or an “Error 500 — Internal Server Error” message if you attempted to access the sites.

In any case, all is well now. My pacing has finally stopped. My checking status every two hours has stopped. But this was not fun.

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