VA3QV - While bored and surfing you tube I found a few examples of how Amateur Radio Operators could work in their hobby…  The first few will be the obivious ones…. Now although this one and the first one are “Pro Canadian Forces” and a few more will be as well I am not trying to get you to sign up and I am not a “Hawk” or a “Dove” but I am a radio/technical enthuaist…  If your hobby is radio and electronics why not get a job where you get to play with the best electronic toys Canada has to offer. It gives you a choice especially if you get seasick…. Keep your  political views to yourself and look at the radio side of things… 73bob

KE9V - It seems my work days are increasingly filled with meetings and conference calls and so a day without either has become a rare and cherished event. I had one of those all lined up yesterday until my boss asked me if I could meet with a vendor who was coming in from out of town and wanted to discuss some work that he would be performing here soon. The vendor arrived on time and we sat down in a conference room. Business long ago became the most powerful and important of all the religions on the planet and it includes its own peculiar rites, passages and ablutions, one of them being the time honored swapping of the cards. I’ve been in meetings with as many as thirty people trading cards with each other in a bizarre looking ritual that sometimes takes longer than the actual meeting. Oddly enough, there’s an application for iPhone and Android that allows two phones to be "bumped" together which triggers the automatic exchange of business card data electronically but I doubt that will catch on, its much too progressive. Congregants of the Church of Business are mostly orthodox and insist on paper cards – King James if they can get them.  I know enough not to mess with folks strongly held beliefs and superstitions so we traded business cards. And right about then his cell phone sounded a now familiar call: "DROID" He quickly moved to silence it but having recently become the owner of a new Droid X I asked him about his phone and we proceeded to spend a pleasant twenty minutes talking all things Android. His office had adopted the platform in a big way. The phones were company issue and made extensive use of sipdroid, a VoIP application that allows calls to his office extension to be routed directly to his phone, wherever he happens to be. Then he showed me his laptop. It was running Gentoo with the KDE desktop so of course we needed another half hour to talk about Linux and Open Source and how his company had integrated it into their everyday operations. That ended up being one of the more interesting meetings that I’ve attended in some time, of course, something like that is bound to happen when you encounter a real geek in the wild.

DX World of Ham Radio - By Mehdi, F5PFP, FT5YJ, LU/FT5YJ, VP8DLM, CE9XX: Members of the 2011 expedition to Antarctica have met with the skipper. Authorisation has been received and the yacht is officially allowed to sail in Antarctic waters. Date has also been scheduled from February 15th through March 31st, 2011. Amateur radio activity is not the only goal of the 2011 expedition as [...]

VU2SGW - This free operating system provides your PC with all of the usual features, including lots of ham radio applications. The ham radio applications include programs for Morse code training, APRS and packet programs, rig control, CW and digital mode terminal applications, satellite tracking, Smith Charts, logging, DX clusters and more. In most cases there are multiple programs available for each of these applications and there is also a logging program that interfaces with LoTW. http://www.arrl.org/ubuntu-linux-for-hams Courtesy : VU2HVK, OM Harsha

KE9V - The reliability of the service that I pay to host this site has been downright miserable these last few days. I have noted at least three periods of extended downtime in the last six days. If you’re reading this then we are obviously back up but who knows for how long? I’ve been using the same hosting provider for this site since 2000 with generally good results so I’m not anxious to pull the plug on them, though for awhile yesterday I was beginning to wonder if they had gone out of business and just pulled the plug on me, so to speak. I want to see how things go over the next few days before making any sudden moves.

G3XBM - I'm trying to optimise an IRF510 MOSFET PA for use in the 136kHz beacon and later transverter design. Alan Melia G3NYK has a very useful page on practical approaches to class E designs for 136kHz at his page http://www.alan.melia.btinternet.co.uk/classepa.htm together with a useful Excel worksheet to come up with practical values for the output network. Class E using square wave drive on the input can produce very good efficiencies, thereby reducing heatsink requirements.

VK2TPM - A great application for Android is WarDrive. It records the GPS location of wireless networks it sees and exports the data as KML which can be viewed in Google Earth.That's part of my bus ride home.If you zoom in there's almost a 1:1 ratio of homes to networks.Green dots are open networks, yellow are WEP and red are WPA2. I love some of the names, there's lots of Netgear and linksys but a few

K3NG - The six meter calling frequency and perhaps other calling frequencies on other bands are a bit of a paradox.  Six meters is often dead and will magically open up between areas due to Sporadic E propagation.  You won't know the band is open unless you continually scan the lower end of six meters hunting beacons or someone happens to be calling on the calling frequency. We have an amateur in the area who likes camp out on the six meter calling frequency and have his voice keyer automatically call CQ for a few hours some evenings.  It's logical to do such a thing as no one will know the band is open unless someone is transmitting and someone receives the transmissions.  But it's terribly annoying to listen to and I find myself getting frustrated when people do this.  I know others feel the same way as well.  Despite being a calling frequency it's impolite to use it for calling for long periods of time. Perhaps what we should really have are multiple calling frequencies based on areas such as grid square fields, the first two characters of the Maidenhead Locator System (i.e. "FN", "EM", "CN", etc.).  You could camp out on the frequency for your grid square field and call CQ all you like, but if you just wanted to listen for an opening, you could leave your receiver on one of the other grid square field frequencies and not have to worry about a local station clogging the frequency for long periods of time.

AE5X - A year and a half ago my LoTW confirmations were at 14%. Either more and more people are starting to use it or contesters are more apt to use LoTW than non-contesters. Most of my QSOs as a function of percentage in the last 18 months have been made during various contests and sprints. . .

W2LJ - I have no idea what caused that horrendous QRN on 20 Meters the other night; but I have been hanging around and listening to 20 Meters tonight; and so far there is no sign of it. The weather here is the same as it was Tuesday night - hot and humid, no rain. I am sure that it will probably not rear its ugly head again until the next time I am scheduled to be the 20 Meter Fox in a few weeks. Sigh. However, I did manage a very quick QSO on 30 Meters with HP3DX. K2 and the Butternut got me a 449. Bill was about 569 here. 72 de Larry W2LJ

DX World of Ham Radio - QSL’s received. QSL info. QSL issues. Mention anything to do with QSL’s – perhaps other ops can assist you.

G3XBM - Today I started to modify my 136kHz QRP beacon to increase the power from 250mW to around 5W using an IRF510 MOSFET PA. I've still work to do to optimise the design but hope to complete this tomorrow.

G3XBM - A rather long, but fascinating article on the possibilities and issues with time travel is on Wikipedia.

K4SAC - The eagerly anticipated 2010 WRTC is finally done and in the can and the results have been announced. In a very close competition, Vladimir Askenov RW1AC and Alexey Mikhailov RA1AIP using the call R32F won a very narrow victory over Team Estonia, R33A operated by ES5TV/ES2RR in the 2010 World Radiosport Team Championship. In a demonstration of how close the competition was, Team Estonia garnered 4,084,889 points, 99.675% of the winning Russian score. The R32F team won with a total score of 4,098,162. Even though R33A came in 2nd place overall they did win the award for most SSB contacts and multipliers. Operating as R33M, Dan Craig N6MJ and Chris Hurlbut KL9A came in 3rd place with a total score of 3,942,904. Dan and Chris managed to make 3,549 contacts and lost no multipliers during log checking.  The competition was so close, had Dan and Chris made just 16 more mults, they would have won overall. For fourth place S50A/S57AW, they had too many log errors and ended up losing 8.5% of their QSO’s – 323 in all, dropping them from second to fourth. In fifth place, K5ZD/W2SC had the same problem as N6MJ/KL9A – not enough multipliers. Final Scores of WRTC 2010 Teams 1 – R32F   RW1AC/RA1AIP 4,098,162 2 – R33A   ES5TV/ES2RR 4,084,889 3 – R33M   N6MJ/KL9A 3,942,904 4 – R39D   S50A/S57AW 3,907,540 5 – R34P   K5ZD/W2SC 3,889,908 6 – R32K   RV3BA/RA3CO 3,776,544 7 – R32R   LY9A/LY6A 3,615,024 8 – R31X   UA3DPX/UA4FER 3,594,820 9 – R37M   G4PIQ/G4BUO 3,558,636 10 – R36C   LY9Y/LY7Z 3,502,044 By all accounts, the competition was a success and fair. You can read more at Radio-sport.net (credit: Radio-sport.net) 73, Jack K4SAC

ARA of Nebraska - Saturday Training in August & September! A Technician license class is scheduled for 1900-2200 local time on the Saturday evenings of August 7, 14 & 21, followed by an open, walk-in ARRL/ VE exam session at 1900 local time on Satur...

G3XBM - Researchers at MIT may have come up with a way of travelling through time (and space) using quantum closed timeline curves or CTCs. It has always fascinated me that in quantum mechanics one can describe things as wave functions that have existed in all space and all time, past present and future. It takes a leap of imagination to consider the possibilities. For an explanation see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7904712/Quantum-time-machine-allows-paradox-free-time-travel.html This is the abstract of the original MIT paper: "This paper discusses the quantum mechanics of closed timelike curves (CTC) and of other potential methods for time travel. We analyze a specific proposal for such quantum time travel, the quantum description of CTCs based on post-selected teleportation (P-CTCs). We compare the theory of P-CTCs to previously proposed quantum theories of time travel: the theory is physically inequivalent to Deutsch's theory of CTCs, but it is consistent with path-integral approaches (which are the best suited for analyzing quantum field theory in curved spacetime). We derive the dynamical equations that a chronology-respecting system interacting with a CTC will experience. We discuss the possibility of time travel in the absence of general relativistic closed timelike curves, and investigate the implications of P-CTCs for enhancing the power of computation."Simple ??? See http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2615

NG3K-ADXO - Aug 27-Sep 2, 2010 -- Vanuatu -- YJ0VK -- QSL: LotW -- Source: OPDX (Jun 21, 2010) -- By VK3QB VK2CA VK3HJ VK3CB fm Efate I; 2 HF stns; 100w; verts + dipoles; QSL also OK via VK2CA, Buro or direct: VK2CA, Buro or direct: A Meredith, PO Box 890, Mudgee, NSW 2850, Australia

9W2PJU - Android is popular linux based operating system for most of smart phones and also tablet PCs. Some said that android based phones is an iPhone killer. Can we run an android on your x86 pc ? yes we can! Steps Get android x86 iso here at http://android-x86.googlecode.com/files/android-x86-1.6-r2.isoyou need UNetbootin to make bootable USB drive or just burn the iso if you got cd/dvd drive ( you can also run this iso in your virtual environment, vmware, virtualpc, virtualbox )reboot your pc to your USB drive or burned cd/dvd Screensnap

MyHamShack.com - I'm not sure how Heathkits are regarded these days, but I'll always have a great fondness for them. I started with the SB400 and SB401. The transmitter never did work, so I took it all apart and carefully put it all back. It just wouldn't transmit and ...

MyHamShack.com - Just returned from my annual summer trip to my European QTH in Bratislava, Slovakia. OM9ACA was QRV from June 3 - July 27, 2010, with a record 648 contacts on bands from 40m to 70cm. Highlights of this year's trip included EME and meteor scatter conta...