Slashdot Mirror
2003 Amateur Radio Field Day
plcurechax writes "The 2003 ARRL Field Day is this weekend, June 28-29. Beginning 1800 UTC Saturday and ending at 2100 UTC Sunday.
Originally started in 1933 as a test of portable amateur radio operating, it has become an annual event that is a mix of contest, emergency prepareness, and a public relations activity.
Any geeks interested in learning more about amateur (ham) radio, should find out if there is a local club (in Canada)that will be particulating. Most clubs in USA and Canada will have a station on the air.
Visitors welcome."
dit dit daw dit,
dit dit,
dit daw dit,
dit dit dit,
daw,
daw dit dit dit daw,
dit daw dit,
dit daw,
daw dit dit,
dit dit,
daw daw daw,
daw dit dit dit daw,
dit daw daw dit,
daw daw daw,
dit dit dit,
daw,
daw dit dit dit daw!
(And now, here is some filler text to avoid the lameness filter. You really don't need to read this as this means nothing at all.)
"Particulating?" Another perfectly cromulent word, is it?
Amateur == anyone-thats-not-clearchannel
Anybody interested in amateur radio of field day in the Grand Haven/Spring Lake/Muskegon (Michigan) area can come visit the North Ottawa ARC field day site. It is located at Robbins township park (take 120th 1 mile north of M-45)
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
Over the past few years the FCC has changed some of the rules and have simplified the code requirements. Check it out at http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/amateur/.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
Sound familiar?
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I'll be operating from K2VOA in Piscataway, NJ (usually on 20 meter phone) all weekend. If you happen to make a contact with us, ask if KC2AEI is the operator.
Rob Carlson
It's only a hobby, really there's no need to go falling to pieces!
EGG, the Electronic Gamers Guild
First radio post!
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
I wonder how long before we see someone modify the *BSD is dying troll for Ham radio... I can see it know "Not OT: *HAM radio is dying..."
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
As translated
"FIRSTRADIOPOST"
Quite clever PigHogger.
-Tim
Ham Radio is actually one of the origional
forms of electronics hacking. It is a great
way for geeks to get involved in the community
and use some of their own expertice in a great
service. All you have to do to get a license
is pass a 35 question test, and you will get a
callsign from the FCC. If you are not already
involved, take a look!
73, DE KG4QXK
Not only that. They are notorious to have bad attitudes. Have ever tried to have a dialog with a ham operator? They will talk, talk, and talk and will never listen to anything you say.
Ham radio can be a good time. I will be using my ICOM 28H this weekend in Youngstown, OH. If you are in the area my call sign is KC8UFF. I can always find a nearby repeater when my cell phone can't reach a tower!
Many people have also used their ham radio's to contact the police when a tornado or other disaster wipes out other means of communication.
http://tomgould.com/
Press release
Members of the Phil-Mont Mobile Radio Club will put their emergency communication skills to the test when they participate in "Field Day" June 28 and 29. The annual preparedness exercise brings together Amateur Radio operators from throughout North and South America who are committed to assisting their communities in the event of a natural or man-made disaster. Field Day is sponsored by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association for Amateur Radio.
"Amateur Radio is a lot of fun, but the serious side can't be stressed enough," says Maggie Leber, editor of the PMRC newsletter "The Blurb" and webmistress of the club website at www.phil-mont.org.
"We can play a vital communications role during emergencies, and events such as Field Day ensure that we're ready to handle any type of disaster. We will provide our own electrical power and operate all kinds of radio communications, everything from Morse code to amateur television and amateur satellite radio. We'll be in direct digital communications with the Montgomerty County Emergency Operations center, and will be able to transmit e-mail and other text message through facilities located there."
Field Day is designed to test operators' abilities to set up and operate stations in the field under emergency conditions, such as the loss of commercial electricity. During the weekend, radio operators try to contact as many other Field Day stations as possible, simulating the fast on-air skills needed to assist town officials and served agencies during an emergency. Approximately 35,000 Amateur Radio operators across the country participated in last year's event. The first Field Day was held in 1933.
Ham radio operators typically help with communication during weather-related emergencies such as the devastating tornadoes in the Midwest earlier this spring. But, the need for their services doesn't stop there. A federal grant awarded for emergency communications training in 2002 emphasizes support for ham radio's role in homeland defense.
PMRC will set up its Field Day stations in Lot #4 at Fort Washington State Park, and will be operating from 2pm Staurday until 2pm Sunday. "We hope that the public will come out and see firsthand what this event--and Amateur Radio--is all about," says Ms. Leber, whose amateur callsign is K3XS.
Today there are nearly 700,000 Amateur Radio operators in the United States and more than 2.5 million worldwide. Information on how to become involved in Amateur Radio is available from ARRL -- the national association for Amateur Radio, 225 Main Street, Newington, CT 06111 or by calling 1-800-32-NEW HAM. Visit ARRL on the Web at www.arrl.org.
-=Maggie Leber=-
The Clay County club is doing field day near Liberty. Great location, lots of fun.
Field day is a hoot. If you've got any interest at all in radio, find a local club. You may find a few other linux geeks there also. It's a fun technical hobby. Just ask, maybe GW4PTS sometime.
You actually called your radio club PMRC? That's hilarious.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
..-. F .. i .-. r ...s .-. r .-a ..s .--.p ---o ...s -t
-t -...-
-..d
---o -...-
-...-
What is the -...-? I can't remember it and googling doesnt help
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
CQiNet - Open Source implementation of Voice over IP (VoIP) software specifically for Ham Radio. Currently there are three popular VoIP packages used by Ham Radio operators, IRLP, ILink and EchoLink. Since none of these packages are open source it is difficult to contribute to the their development and learn from them by studying their source code. Let's face it for many of us Ham Radio is more about playing with technology than it is about yacking on the radio or Internet. (Hmmm... maybe some folks on Slashdot could learn something....)
Hamsoft - A great HAM/Linux database. (not to be confused with GNU/Linux)
TAPR! - These geeks will whoop yer ass in a second! A lot of them are commited to open source. They actually help fund HARDWARE projects (we could learn something). Check out their LINUX sig.
Flex-Radio - An open source software defined radio!
GnuRadio - Signal Processing in oepn source software
Heil Sig! -Rob
First we had hams living in Mom's basement; then the real estate industry invented restrictive covenants that ban ham antennas; and now the same demographic is doing Linux downstairs...
rj
That's the truth! My girlfriend's grandfather is a ham op, and he tells me the same stories over and over again each time we visit. Can't get a word in edgewise. He's still a cool guy though.
.
. ht m
For those who would like to expand their technical horizons, here is a high-performance shortwave receiver that is defined almost entirely in software!
http://www.nitehawk.com/sm5bsz/linuxdsp/linroot
No kidding, it runs under Linux, and it will outperform some of the most expensive shortwave receivers ever built, and it's FREE!
...just have a field day with this stuff.
... a chance to learn how to push more buttons and operate more neat-looking equipment full of blinkenlights. A chance to learn how a lot of electronic circuits work. A chance to digitally communicate over thousands of miles with just 4 watts (which you're aware you could do with wires, but that would require the use of a lot more than 4 watts on a complex, expensive carrier network to accomplish the same result). Oh, and you also meet a lot of nice people (and the occaisional troll), and assist others, when you're not talking to people in the space station, sending television signals, or whatever it is you end up doing with ham radio.
I'm a 26-year-old Extra, which I'll admit is somewhat young for the hobby, but the older folks like me (despite the nose ring) because I posess two very important traits: When I do not know, I say so, and shut up and observe. When I do know, I help. If this sounds like you, you'll make a brilliant amateur radio operator, and you should pursue this license, because after only 35 multiple-choice questions, you are rewarded with a federal license to screw with more stuff.
For the interested, those 35 questions are divided into 10 objectives, only a few questions on each. And those questions come completely from this question pool (July, 2003 edition), which if you look at for a second, probably doesn't strike you as particularly difficult. The resulting Technician-class license lets you use up to 1500 watts on all amateur bands (VHF, UHF, and beyond) over 50MHz, or more simply, everything but shortwave (HF). That includes talking to astronauts, long-distance 802.11b, packet radio, and a bunch of other things I don't know about, aside from the usual voice communications.
So, come see us tomorrow, ask a lot of questions, and bring your own station next year instead of just watching.
Hopefully in a few months there will be no morse code test at all for ham radio in America. Sadly Morse Code has hampered ham radio growth, almost 33% of todays USA ham radio operators are no code technicians that are restricted to VHF 50 MHz or higher frequencies. With the aboltion of morse code for HF radio tests there could be a increase of ham radio operators of up to 2 million.
Ham radio isn't just about morse code and voice there are many interesting modes and sadly the FCC and ARRL have discouraged the ham radio hobby by requiring silly morse code tests.
Not anymore, anyway. According to most interpretations, the letters don't stand for anything so don't write it in all caps! The actual origin of the term 'ham' has been lost to history.
/. eds don't like me, since I posted the same topic three days ago and was rejected.
And true, ham radio is not dying. (It could be, though, without younger people getting interested and bringing in the new technology.) This weekend should be a fine example.
-- Me, still wondering why the
the University of Minnesota Ham club will be runing our field day on a 3000W generator we're borrowing from an ISP... we've got a 1500W amplifier for our HF rig, now all we need to do is find a nice big tent to tx from because weather reports say it's supposed to thunderstorm in the morning.. bleh!
if you're in minnesota, check out our web page, http://w0yc.umn.edu
-KC0NBY
Apparently you ain't been to Dayton. I never encountered any bad attitudes there... not even at 4AM on a beer crawl. FUBAR!
I am so looking forward to this years feild day, I will be going to the feild day of my old collage ham club, W3YI. we are going up to the mountins of western PA for it, that should give us some good propigation. I probably see if I can get some 2m FM contacts. I know what some of the others hams are saying 2M? well I like 2m and 70cm alot, and I feel that I can try it, there is no rules against it, I know I will not get my club many points, but we are not doing it just for the points, we are just doing it for the fun of it. I be leaving Oakland (just out side of Pittsburgh) after I get off work and head up (that will be around 8am) Well 73 to all the hams here.
The reason I am doing it with my old friends from pitt, is because last year I did it with my current club (w3wkh) and all they cared about was the contacts and points, I want to have fun, is that not part of what feild day is about, a day where we can have some fun while practising emergancy comunications.
Emergency coordinators may take an interest in one thing we've done. We use a single generator to power our entire site. Using experience from the construction industry, some of our members knew that most equipment rental shops have large generators and transformers that can be used to step down to 120AC. So we use a transformer near each cluster of station tents to build our own little power grid for the site.
And something just for the Silicon Valley touch, I guess I should mention how I'm on the web from my station tent. We have a data network across the site with a fiber backbone. Yes, we've implemented "fiber to the tent" for a weekend event, for the third year in a row. Though it's easy to just say a member picked up the fiber hubs at a dot-com surplus, there's more to it. When we first started experimenting with networking the site, we discovered that Cat5 ethernet cables longer than 6 feet interferes with and accepts interference from 10m amateur radios. So fiber was the only way to do a site-wide network, Come and take a look!
Question is packet ever used much any more, I live in pittsburgh, I have done some packet work, but I never seam to get any one.
Anybody interested in amateur radio field day is welcome to join the Santa Clarita ARC in Valencia near Magic Mountain. It is located at the Castaic Lake Water District on Bouquet Cyn. For directions go to www.w6jw.org
CUL OM de KC6WGR
Ah, ham radio. It hasn't been the same since the old guys retired their Vibroplexes.
The FCC exists because there is limited spectrum. And they must protect it for every one. How would you like it if some one near where you lived decided to flood the air waves on every band with so much noise that none of your wireless devices would be able to connect. No the FCC needs to be in place. They are not there to prevent free speech, but there to facilitate it, how would you like it if some one you really like was on TV, and some who did not like them went to the stations location and start flooding the air on the stations freq with noise, so you could not hear what the person on the air had to say.
and these "covenants" are considered illegal by the FCC, if you own a home, you can put antennas up, or an antenna tower. check out this page from the arrl http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulations/anten na-restrictions.html
Move your detector to 144.3900 MHz. You might have to enable Linux emulation on your FreeBSD boxen to get your feet wet. Plenty of software to sling your packets around town on the APRS network.
Most of the FreeBSD users are on 2.4 GHz using 802.11b on channel 6 forming mesh networks.
k1ooo lotsa dahs
Bob is at home in the Northeast Kingdom.
thanks for the info, but I don't us BSD. But I will have to take a look at that freq.
Just look at the number of comments on this thread. Nobody cares.
The Internet killed amateur radio, it's that simple. You can more easily (no skill needed) talk to more people than were ever on the radio.
Yes, I'm a ham (extra for more than 10 years) and I think the no-code technician license should give you full privileges (same as extra). In other words, I think there should only be one ham license class. That might save the hobby.
And shut up all you old whiners about the degradation from n00bs, you'll be dead soon anyway. The quality of the operators won't matter one lick when there's no one on the air anyway.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Just look at the number of comments on this thread. Nobody cares.
:-)
The Internet killed amateur radio, it's that simple. You can more easily (no skill needed) talk to more people than were ever on the radio
Killed amateur radio? Not hardly. New licensees are are increasing at a greater rate than SK's and non-renewals combined. At least that's what the FCC's numbers say, as well as Industry Canada and from what I saw in an RSGB item last year, the same in the U.K.
Take a listen across those few HF bands that have propagation this weekend and see just how "dead" ham radio has become. Take a listen during any of the big contests -- and just *try* to hold a QSO on the top fringe of 20 Meters during CQWW.
Tune PSK-31 on 14.070 some evening and try to find a little sliver of the band to get in on. Listen to most big-city 2M/450 repeaters during rush hours.
Go have a listen to 75 at night. Sure, it's the GallBladder Network most of the time, but still...it's a pretty full spectrum most evenings.
Next time (if only) a P5, KP1, KP5 or VU7 shows up on HF take a spin across the band and see how "dead" the hobby is. I *still* can't bust the Iraq or Afghanistan pileups when those entities show up.
Go to Dayton next year and tell me how dead the hobby is. Granted, attendance is down a bit, but still, 25,000 hams at one show ain't a bad gathering.
The hobby is what you make it. I've just finished DXCC on three bands in the last 2 years with 100W and a dipole. I'm now getting back into VHF, since the solar cycle is on the wain, and I'll try 40 and 80M DXing this coming winter. I just got hooked on PSK and RTTY, and can't wait to play with SSTV a bit more. Oh, but wait...I don't like CW so I can't be a real ham. Sorry, never mind.
If you're in NYC and want to have some fun this weekend, check out the Hall of Scinece club's fun field-day station in the hall's back parking lot. If you hear us on the air, please listen for WB2JSM and say hi -- and ask if W2IRT's at the mic! 5-9 NLI!
Cheers, Peter, W2IRT
If you are in central Iowa, we are having Field Day at the Red Cross in downtown Ames, IA as a 3F station. This is a joint operation between the ISU radio club (CARC) and the Story county radio club (SCARC).
Good luck!
73's
Yes it is a GWBism. If it ain't, it ought to be ;-)
On to FD (which I'll be heading out to in about an hour) The idea is to set up using emergency power and contact as many places as you can. The attempt is to simulate/self-train for emergency operations.
It turns out to be GREAT fun while getting people to improvise. Murphy tends to come to field day alot. So you get to use your noodle in figuring out how to radiate when Murphy is conspiring against you - kinda like REAL emergencies.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Ah but did you do it BEFORE or AFTER KA9Q? (Who reads /. I believe.. ;-) If you are a ham involved in the digital world at all - the answer to the above is obvious ;-)
73 de KA6S
Have you compiled your kernel today??
The FCC preempted ZONING restrictions, not covenants. Covenants are a contractual issue over which the FCC has no control. If you bought a house with a no-antenna covenant, you signed a contract not to erect an antenna.
Congress preempted covenants against TV and DBS antennas in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but it ignored amateur radio because the same voters who want TV antennas don't want ham antennas next door. The ARRL campaigns for relief, but good luck.
rj NY0F
The Plano Texas Amateur Radio club is having field day this weekend at Hoblitzelle park in Plano.
There will be lots of interesting equipment and modes, including packet radio.
There will also be barbeque. Come check it out. Details available at the PARK website.
I have heard of people takeing it to court and winning.
If anyone on Slashdot is in the Lafayette/Rayne, Louisiana area, AARA (Lafayette amature radio club) will be celebrating field day in Rayne, at the Civic center. Directions can be found on www.w5ddl.org
Myself, I'm going to work as many PSK31 contacts as possible, our mobile opperations van and 100 foot trailer tower will do just fine...although, i could get extra points for opperating QRP, 20 meters will be probably be pretty crowded...
Happy Field day to all!
Mike
KD5UTQ
I don't know about everyone else, but the local repeaters here are getting more and more active, rather than less, though the nets don't get much turn out. I've had my license since I was 12, and am 17 now, a Tech. I would have loved to have joined the SARA/Nanticoke(SP?) clubs for their field day this year, as I have done for serveral years, but I just have too much work to do. I'm not the most active ham, but once I get off my ass and learn code, I plan on getting on HF a lot (I passed the general writen, now just need to learn code and pass the code test).
Seven Three
N3WAU *starts to drool again from thinking about the new QSL.net setup
The Bay Area's NBC11 (KNTV) News is here planning to do a live shot from our Field Day site during the 5PM newscast.
I heard that NBC took some of the video for national distribution. But they have no way to know which local affiliates will choose to air it.
I recently bought a house and since there weren't many houses available without restrictive covenents I did a lot of research about this. There is movement in congress to apply PRB-1 to restrictive covenents (which, again, would not allow everything, but rather make homeowners associations reasonably accomodate and not outright ban), but nothing has passed yet.
If you had actually read the URL you posted you would have realized this.
Pictures from my day at feild day http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze3sxhy/FD2003/f ield_day_2003_for_w3yi.htm
this is only the second year that we have done a field day. It was alot of fun, I wish I was still there but I had to work tonight so, I had to leave early.
And the other (harder and more geeky) contests/events are ignored.
0 -ghz.htm l [10 GHz and up contest] - try doing THAT with your Pringles Can antenna (hint: Leave the pringles can at home in the garbage and get a real dish.)
f .h tml [June VHF QSO Party] - put a whole crapload of directional antennas up on bands that are supposed to be "local" communications bands and then talk hundreds of miles away on them.
Here's a good one...
http://www.arrl.org/contests/rules/2003/1
Or maybe a little more realistic...
http://www.arrl.org/contests/rules/2003/june-vh
The highly technical contests are in need of more geeks in most areas of the country. Field Day is fun, but not nearly as challenging (unless you keep spilling your beer) as the VHF and up contests that never make Slashdot.
Satellites, super-low-power repetitive digital modes (Amateurs are confirming moon-bounce "satellite" contacts with minimal gear on UHF and EXCELLENT DSP processing in PC's now), and the highly technical stuff never gets the accolades or the press -- but it's all WAY better than Field Day.
73 DE WY0X
+++OK ATH