The MacAlba

Another golden oldie. While reminiscing through my old logs, I note that the first contact I had on 2m via an aurora was on September 15, 1974. I made 47 QSO’s across 6 countries in the 12 hours between 3pm and 3am local time. All on SSB, all using 10 watts!

At that time I was living in Aberdeen, Scotland, and using the callsign GM8IKT. Aberdeen being over 57 degrees north of the equator was a great site for aurora – unlike my present QTH which is 30 degrees south of the equator. I’ve never heard anything auroral from here.

I was looking back through some old log books, as you do, when I realised that it’s been quite some time since I worked anybody through an amateur radio satellite. My current excuse is that I don’t have any suitable antenna – but that excuse will disappear once I get some new antennas up (after the new tower goes up, etc).

According to the log book, I made 8 contacts on December 15, 1974 through OSCARs 6 and 7. I didn’t record which contact was through which satellite, so I can’t say which satellite was used to give me my first satellite contact. OSCAR-6 had been operational for a couple of years by then, but OSCAR-7 had only been recently launched a month before. I remember transcribing the telemetry which was being sent in CW, and, I think, sending it off to AMSAT-UK.

In my case I was using the 2m uplink, 10m downlink transponder. My 2m antenna would have been a 10-ele yagi, with a longwire being used on 10m. The memory gets a bit hazy here, but I think that at that point in time I was using a borrowed Belcom “Liner 2″ transceiver, with 10 watts output on SSB.

The Southgate Amateur Radio Club does a great job of running a radio-related news site. They publish a full-text RSS feed for those of us who read such news with aggregator software. My only criticism would be that the news page index on the web site is too long and that users have to click through to a separate web page to actually read each article (perhaps, in time, that section of the overall website would benefit from running “blog” software like WordPress or similar). The SARC news-site content, however, is excellent, timely and topical.

The ARRL, on the other hand, only publishes a partial news feed (as far as I can find). This means that you have to go to visit their website if an article is of interest (and if you only have a dial-up link like I do, living in rural Australia, then that’s a pain as all the additional website “eye candy” has to be downloaded too).

Both Dan/KB6NU and Ramakrishnan/VU3RDD publish full-text RSS feeds on their blogs. This means that I can quickly read their blog contents without having to wait for a web page to load in its entirety in a browser. I appreciate it … and, likewise, all my blogs publish full-text feeds.

[The BBC does a great job of explaining what "RSS" and "news readers (aggregators)" are.]

Last time I looked, there were only about 12,000 licenced amateur radio operators in Australia. The Internet has been blamed for the near-zero number of young people being introduced into the hobby. By this I assume that those people who use the Internet as a reason for falling numbers, are suggesting that younger people find communication via the ‘net more interesting or convenient or whatever.

While I don’t really have an answer or explanation myself, and I can’t agree or disagree that the ‘net is to blame, I do believe that the RSGB and Ofcom, the British licencing authority, have worked hard to come up with a means of reversing the trend. From half the globe away, which means that I don’t by any means know every detail of the scheme, I’m impressed by the introduction of the “Foundation Licence” available in the UK. A short course, which includes the basics of radio, propagation, electronics and operating procedures, is all the introduction that’s required to get a beginner on the air (after successfully passing an exam, of course). My limited understand of the Foundation Licence is that it’s easier to undertake than a Novice Licence course in some other countries. Once that initial Licence hurdle has been overcome, the newcomer can upgrade their knowledge and skills at their own pace.

I look forward to the day that such a scheme is available in Australia – it is being worked on, but not quite there yet.

The sun plays an important part in assisting, of defeating, our attempts to communicate over long distances, on different frequencies. The 11-year solar cycle (or is it really a 22 year cycle?) dictates whether the 50 Mhz band, for example, will provide global DX, or just white noise coming from our receivers.

A website that provides useful information about the state of the sun, sunspots and flares, and other space phenomena is spaceweather.com. There are usually some spectacular photographs in there too.

I don’t understand the physics behind the means by which concrete “cures”, because I’ve never taken the time or, if the truth be told, had the interest to find out, but I do know that the recent cold, and slightly wet, weather is not a bad thing.

Concrete in this part of the world is deemed to be strong enough to work on after 3 weeks. The current weather, so I’m told, means that the concrete cure time will be about 4 weeks – but on the plus side, the cured concrete will be stronger than if the work had been done in summer.

So be it.

After all these years (over 30) of operating on VHF, I still enjoy those too few days when VHF signals are enhanced for one reason or another. At the moment, being mid-winter, things are pretty quiet. I keep an eye on William Hepburn’s Tropospheric Ducting Forecast web pages at http://home.cogeco.ca/~dxinfo/tropo_oce.html just to see what might be coming up. It can be an extremely good indicator of promising conditions.

I look forward to operating on UHF too once I get some antennas operational on the new tower!

I must have been 12 or 13 years old at the time. I was sitting in the school’s morning assembly at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen, when various notices were being read out. The one that caught my ears was about a school radio club.

The notice asked that anybody interested in a radio club meet, I think, in the art teacher’s room. The art teacher was the late Charlie Forret (GM3RHK), but the person mentioned in that notice, and who is responsible for my interest in Amateur Radio all those year’s ago was Stewart Cooper, GM4AFF.

Stewart is the keenest contester I know; he has a presence on the web at http://www.gm4aff.net/.

Stewart has an impressive antenna farm which makes setup look positively amateurish!