Aurora Contest Team LA8W - LN8W

I really love the hams from OH. They think big, think tall, and look for the most out of their antennas. Since they get hit too often with all that aurora stuff, they try and compensate with bigger, stronger, and better antennas.

If you are in a low point of the solar cycle, build bigger and better antennas for the lowbands.

Like this announcement from OH8X:

It’s well known that the bigger and higher the antenna, the better results you’ll get. The new 3-element 160m antenna at OH8X must be about as big as you can get. Look out for a strong signal from them during 2009.The new antenna for the 160m Amateur Radio band was completed just in time for Christmas on 24th December after OH8SR and OH6RM had spent three weeks installing it.The Arcala Extremes station OH8X is located at Arkala 65.18N, 26.24E.

The specs? 100 meter tall tower (not feet, but meters). 60 meter booms for both 80 and 160 meters. and five 80-meter full size elements.

You can see the picture on the Facebook site.

Would your local government provide you permits to put up this antenna support structure?

Me neither. But it sure looks nice!

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Outside of taking a break from writing as much during the holidays, I have given the posting a break because of a problem: my previous hosting company has become steadily unreliable.

This unreliable service translates to readers as “500 Internal Server Error” messages, long load times, “Hello, World” postings, and — my favorite — presenting an “install WordPress” option as the home page. This allows anyone on the planet to not only overwrite my version of the software on the system, it gives them access to the entire site! Wonderful!

And clearly unacceptable. While fixing issues on the phone with them went quickly, there were no answers as to causes nor steps that needed to take to prevent problems going forward.When your hosting company’s phone number is on your “favorites” list on your iPhone, your hosting company is a problem.

I had already complained about the reliability and they had moved my sites to a different, not as populated, server. For a time, conditions improved, but then steadily declined as more traffic came online. The server, in a reverse IP search, had almost 1900 sites on it, including K9JY.com.

So last week was a lot of research into hosting companies. My criteria was for reliability of the sites being presented to users, phone support (e-mail support and forum support suck when all your sites are down — like on Christmas Day when all of mine were), and a commitment to not stuff your server with every Tom, Dick and Harry on the planet and call it good.

I think I found a good company to work with that meet this criteria. They are more expensive, but not that much more considering a business is being run here. I moved all of the sites this past Monday. There were the usual couple of hiccups with permissions and a couple minor issues that were resolved by Tuesday morning. Really smooth, by most standards.

You should see some return to normalcy in access. Plus, so far, the site has been operating much faster.

Infrastructure, for all you tech types out there, should be a seamless service that is up and running 100% of the time (save maintenance windows). When you run a global company as Cube Rules, LLC, is, even if it is a small company, we need the reliability so when someone logs in from the United States or Singapore (and they do), the infrastructure will be there to serve them.

We’ll see how this hosting company does. So far, so good. But just like most services, your record is renewed every day so the service needs to work every day.

Sounds just like a job, doesn’t it?

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

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Engineering can only take us so far. Mother Nature knows all about engineering and creates havoc with the best sites and the most careful owners.

Take out the power and one is left with generators and a mess.

K1TTT’s great site is an example of excellent engineering meeting the power of Mother Nature. David’s documented it on his web site. Well worth the look.

David — best to you in getting it all back together. What a ton of work.

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While the rest of the country gets slammed with ice and snow, Seattle-land has gotten a foot of snow over the last five days - and it is all still here. Highly unusual.

Since Seattle doesn’t use salt for the roads and sidewalks, when the snow sticks, all sorts of bad things happen to travel. Including walking and shoveling snow.

In short…you slip and slide and ice is everywhere.

While this is a ham radio blog, I wanted to pass along this very cool accessory (no financial interest in the company) that helps give you stability and traction in the snow and ice. What I call “snow chains for pedestrians.”

Just like the chains and cables  for your car or truck required for most mountain pass roads here in the Northwest, Yaktrax give you great stability when shoveling or snow blowing your driveway, walking on snow and ice-covered sidewalks, or going into malls where the ice gets thick in the parking lots.

This week has been the first big test for the Yaktrax and they have come through with flying colors. I’ve been able to go out on the deck and refill bird feeders on solid ice as well as shovel my driveway (three times now…) with no issues of falling on my behind from the slippery conditions.

So I’m recommending them. And, at $20, you’ll find them one of the best values money can buy.

I don’t know their availability around the country, but you can order them online from REI here in Seattle-land and they will come to you in the mail.

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In creating a Cabrillo file for the OK DX RTTY contest, some are receiving a “toggle QSL” message dialog box when clicking on the reporting tab and selecting the Cabrillo file option.

There is a workaround published on AA5AU’s RTTY Contesting site. The fix used the export function and ADI files and is not too complicated to work well for most hams.

Hope you had fun in the contest!

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When you develop content for a site (like the K9JY WriteLog User Site), you go through some hoops trying to figure out how to organize the information, how to present it, and how to keep it updated. As you do updates, the site becomes unwieldy and more difficult to use.

So it is with the ARRL contesting rules area where there are “general rules” for all contests and rules for specific contests. I could never tell when a “general” rule applied and when a specific contest rule applied. Not that it was tough, but it could be confusing.

On the contesting reflector, Sean, KX9X, notes that the ARRL (i.e., Sean) will be updating the ARRL Contest Rules for easier reading. He notes:

This will include posting ALL rules for any given contest together, and eliminate the need to bounce back and forth between contest-specific rules and general rules.

With the development of the new arrl.org website (underway as I type this), more information such as a contest-specific FAQ will be included, with specific examples of what is allowed and what is not. This will take some time, but it is in the works.

Obviously, this includes the contesting area, but it was nice to see that the ARRL is looking to update the entire web site. It needs to be updated and I’m happy to see they are working on it. Updating websites is no small task as I can attest.

While I would never call the ARRL technology leading edge, in just the past year they have added Twitter accounts, are updating the web site, changed the formatting of the Contest newsletter, and started some blogs (though I don’t define them the same way they do…).

This is an encouraging sign from the League; part of their technology initiative. The fact that they are doing these on-line tasks means they will learn from what has been done and then continuous improvement can take place to make them better.

Maybe we’ll kick the ham community out of the technological Stone Age yet. I sure hope so.

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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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This past weekend, I had limited time to get on the radio for CQ WW RTTY, one of my favorite contests of the year.

Getting on at sunset, I fired up the radio and amplifier and all was well. Until I sent out some messages via the computer. The PTT line would fire, then drop before the message would end. People could tell that I was calling them, but no one could copy what was sending out.

The trouble ended up being the update to the MicroHam software that I use to run the radio. One USB port for radio control, sending CW, and receiving all done with great hardware and software.

The problem was that I simply updated the software and then went on my merry way months ago. Then, in crunch time, the software didn’t work. When I went in and looked at the configuration, there were more fields then there were before.

Going to the latest install documents, there were several (minor) changes. Once I installed the changes, everything worked fine again.

Except the bands. Where I am, I need the band to be fully open to work stations; I have a hill behind me that blocks all sorts of signals. When I was ready to go back operating, the bands here were dead. And my time was up.

Morale: when you download software, check the updates for new installation instructions. You’ll be glad you did.

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