Ars Telegraphia

Incidentally, I wasn’t at all suggesting that Ten-Tec or Elecraft might be in trouble in my last post. However, I’m sure there are going to be some mighty good sales, especially online, from some of the manufacturers and dealers. I see West Mountain Radio have gone this route and T-T had a sale on the Orion II. It may well pay to keep visiting the web sites of your next most likely toy and see if it has come “on special”. Which reminds me. Why hasn’t anybody suggested a massive fire sale on all that GM inventory? They don’t seem to exactly be trying to sweep the slate clean!

I fear that we are about to see GM and Chrysler disappear in the next 24 to 72 hours. This is due mainly to GMAC (which is owned by GM and Cerebus [Chrysler]) not being able to become a bank.

Let’s put this out into “Hamville”. Can Ten-Tec and Elecraft survive the crash in USA businesses? I certainly hope so. It’s clear that the K3 and Omni VII are at the top of the market. I just hope they survive the bleak outlook. They are way ahead of the rest of the rig manufacturers. This is one time when I say “buy USA!”. My experience in vehicles is that I wouldn’t touch a GM, Ford or Chrysler product of any sort. What has this to do with CW? The K3 and Omni VII lead the pack. Don’t buy the Kenwood/Yaesu/Icom “leaders”. They ain’t much good, as they say over here.

Insider view… I wouldn’t be too surprised to see K/Y/I merge their operations in some way in JA in an effort to come out fighting stronger….. especially in their main RF design departments. RF design engineers are small in numbers (I was one once). We already saw Yaesu/Standard[Philips] and Vortex become “as one”. Then they became a piece of Motorola. They are doomed… if Motorola is anything to go by.

An interesting post, along with the links given to other blogs. Most, if not all, ham clubs would do well to read this and look at themselves in the mirror. As for “mode diversity”, that’s where I stumble these days, because CW is just my “thing”. I know I can run an SSB pile-up, or SSB contest, or do RTTY or PacTOR, etc. I just don’t find it much fun. However, that doesn’t make me negative about those that want to do it - more power to them [as long as they don’t come into the CW segments of bands and “take over”].

The point about a single class licence is very valid and especially one of the comments from a G about how much more difficult it has become to get through the licence process in the UK. To add to that, I think it’s high time we set a standard International licence and made it easier to operate from other places and for all of us who emigrate to get a local call. There are too many of us being forced to sign / this and / that when it shouldn’t be necessary. Especially when individual licences go back 30+ years. No, many potential hams are being scared off by the officialdom of the way licensing is done and all those steps in the process.

Now that a good chunk of larger countries have dropped the CW requirement, it makes sense to rationalise the process.

Yes, yes, yes! JE1TRV hits the nail on the head. I’ve been almost nuts about using the ISO standard for some time now. It’s used in all programming and a bunch of other stuff, yet the world goes around talking in MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY dates and am/pm times. Let’s set an example by “making the move”. I see that maybe 15% of QSL cards I get now are using YYYY-MM-DD. As for the rest, most of the dates make no sense at all and make award checking a nightmare. However, we should see the bigger view and encourage everybody to get beyond date and time confusion and all talk the same way (how about Metric vs Imperial measure, while we’re at it, eh????????). Meanwhile, that card with 07/04/08 on it has me really confused! Yes, they did mean 2008-07-04

Well, we got back safely from Orlando. What a nice weekend. I don’t intentionally want to use the blog to force FOC down anybody’s throat, but once again the “specialness” of the Club shined through. Great venue, super friends and a good dinner. Down side: fighting Microsoft Media Player and XP when trying to play a DVD(!) at the presentations. The club is going through a hard time (relatively speaking) because of the high age profile and there are currently 16 vacancies. FOC is NOT for snobs and superiority (nor is it a secret society with funny handshakes), it’s about friends and a family with a common cause. So, if you “do CW” pretty well, take a look at the public web site and think about listening around and working members. 99% of the members I know would never give up their membership for anything and really depend on it being there for them.

Hope on the horizon? I’m not talking about Obama…. Ten-Tec has comments on their site about a model 610 USB keyer. Not much more than the parts order is out and the Omni VII code will be changed for it. IT HAD BETTER BE BETTER THAN THE K1EL Winkeyer USB!!! If so, it would clinch the deal, along with making remote base work smoothly. More details, please, T-T………….

It might be the approaching Orlando Weekend for FOC, but my interest is suddenly fired up a bit more. Working on the talk I’ll be giving is one spur. The other was looking at some of the negative reports on the Elecraft K3 on eHam. Pretty mixed bunch of reviews. It really makes me wonder about the Ten-Tec Omni VII. They have a really impressive video on their web site (except it did require downloading a DiVx plug-in for Firefox, which might be beyond most visitors to their site!). Hmmm. I have a big BC problem here that the K2 was useless at handling. On day one, I knew the K2 was not going to stay and I lost $500 between buying it in, making it and finding it was no good to me. The Omni with it’s 30 day back policy looks very attractive. The comments on it are also much more positive, ergonomically speaking, and that remote base capability is another bonus. Certainly beats fooling with a K3, interfacing, another PC, software (HRD?), etc., etc. Keeping that lot up under Windoze would be a nightmare. Well, lots to talk about at the weekend……

Harrump! It’s that weekend again. Conditions are not that good. G5W and F5VHY are only mediocre signals here, when they should be 599+. In fact, most of EU is hearable but not workable. Maybe a couple of more hours and 14MHz might be better from here. Activity doesn’t seem to be down any more, so maybe we are holding our own on CW. Sadly, without GW8GT or K4OJ to operate at, this is another year when I sit on the sidelines. It’s now 8 years (at a guess) since I did anything much in a contest team, although my shoulder is hurting so much today that I wouldn’t be able to stand operating for very long……
Argh! We have a very nasty line of storms coming in fast from the NW. Time to go QRT!!!!

The licence issued by “authorities” define your callsign - it’s always a good idea to read it!

1) If you are running low power you can’t sign AA1AA/QRP
2) If you are 14 years old you can’t sign AA1AA/14
3) If your reciprocal licence says to sign after your call you can’t use VP9/AA1AA

All this extra glorification/gratification adds to confusion, slows down pile-ups and isn’t LEGAL.

Note: This post was accidentally truncated by a weirdity between my Nokia Internet Tablet and Wordpress. I used the callsign above as a “generic” callsign and NOT to indicate rules that might apply specifically to licences issued by the FCC in the USA. I thought that was clear by the choice of “callsign”. Each administration has its own rules for licensing and my point was to check. This means that /M, /P, /MM, /MA and /AM may all be legitimate, but only under some administrations. The cases shown in points 1, 2 and 3 above are not. Take case 3. The licence issued by Bermuda clearly gives the indicated call to be used as AA1AA/VP9 and NOT VP9/AA1AA. This is true of many of the islands and I know that Grenada also issues licences as AA1AA/J3.

There’s a theory that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. I think CW might be like that too. Check this article about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract