After reading that, I’m thinking, are the hams a lot younger in Saipan that they are  in better shape than us hams on the mainland? And, even if they are, how do they get so many to turn out that they can form a league?

I e-mailed the author, and here’s what she said:

Thanks for your email. The members/officials of the radio club organized the league and there are some (not all) members who also played. The rest of the players are youth and B league ranked players.

Mystery solved. While I was on the site, I surfed around a bit and discovered that they play a lot of basketball on Saipan. At least the paper had quite a few stories about games played in a variety of leagues.

Tworse Key:  a tweeting Morse key. An open design exercise in interface archaeology, that decodes the input from a classic Morse key to send twitter messages. The source code and hardware schematics are available online http://modin.yuri.at/tworsekey/

Design analog chips. According to the website, this freely downloadable book is “a comprehensive introduction to CMOS and bipolar analog IC design. The book presumes no prior knowledge of linear design, making it comprehensible to engineers with a non-analog background. The emphasis is on practical design, covering the entire field with hundreds of examples to explain the choices. Concepts are presented following the history of their discovery.”

DashToons.Com. Jeff, K1Nss presents the illustrated adventures of Dash!, the dog-faced ham.

Those who say it’s not point out that years ago we had magazines, such as Popular Electronics and Electronics Illustrated, companies like Heathkit. They also point out that it was possible to disassemble TVs and radios for the parts and use them for your own projects.

Schweber, however, thinks that it is easier today for hackers and experimenters. He writes that  those magazines may be out of business, but we now have access to “countless user groups, informal forums, and blogs” on the Internet.

One thing he failed to mention was the hacker/maker groups that have sprouted up around the country. Here in Ann Arbor, for example, we have a group called Go Tech that provides support for hackers and makers of all stripes. You’ll find groups like this all around the U.S.

I tend to agree with Schweber that while the environment has certainly changed for experimenters, it is definitely better. What do you think?

Me making a point (apparently about SWR) at Saturday's One-Day Tech Class

Last weekend was pretty busy for me, ham radio-wise. It started bright and early Saturday morning with the latest One-Day Tech Class. There were twelve students in the class, and all twelve passed!

This class was a bit odd in that most of them signed up during the week before the class. So few had signed up by Saturday, January 7th, that I was even thinking that I might cancel the class.

On Sunday, January 8, I sent out a reminder to my mailing list, and after that, the class quickly filled up. Many of them were engineering students from the University of Michigan, who are part of a project that sends up weather balloons. They use amateur radio to track the balloons and to find the payloads once they’ve returned to Earth.

Hamfest not so festive
Sunday morning, I was up even earlier to attend the Hazel Park ARC hamfest. Since I was selling some junk, errrrr good stuff, I wanted to get there by 8 am. So, I was up and out of the house by 6:45 am. I needn’t have rushed, though.

Attendance was way down, and while I did sell a little over $100 worth of books and other stuff, I was hoping that I’d sell more. In particular, I thought I’d sell a few of my new “Hams Obey Ohm’s Law” stickers. I didn’t sell a single one, however. One friend of mine offered to purchase one, but I just gave him one.

I think clubs have to think twice about when they schedule these things. Holding them so early on Sunday mornings almost guarantee that only the old farts will show up for these things. And the old farts are a dwindling audience.

No propagation, no glory
Sunday night, I tried to participate in the monthly Run for the Bacon (RTFB). This low-pressure QRP contest, run by the Flying Pigs is usually a fun event. Sunday night, however, the band had gone way long by 9 pm EST, when the contest started. I managed one contact with a station in Idaho, but no one else could hear me.

To be honest, I don’t really know how much power I was running. Instead of hooking up the KX-1, I just cranked down the power on the IC-746PRO until the power out meter was showing just a single bar. I really gotta get that wattmeter kit finished.

Ooops. I hadn’t noticed that. My bad.

We swapped a few tweets about this, and he noted that not only was this old news, “Within a week, he did a followup that reversed his stance.” Now, I felt really bad about this, especially as other hams had already begun to “re-tweet” my original message.

I suggested that we both contact the EMA Section Manager, Phil Temples, K9HI, and we did. I told K9HI that I thought that leaving this post online was unfair without also posting Romney’s reply. Here’s how K9HI replied:

I can appreciate your point of view. Nevertheless I don’t believe the story should be removed. Romney did say those damning things, and it wasn’t until his office was confronted by the Eastern MA ARES leadership that one of his representatives apologized on Romney’s behalf.

We went though this retraction business with Alan Pitts, W1AGP at ARRL Hq. during the last presidential election/primary. Alan said he was fielding lots of phone calls and inquiries about it. I pointed out to Alan that even *if* I were to remove the story it’s been archived by all of the major search engines like Google and Yahoo and reprinted by many other non-Amateur Radio web sites already.

73,

Phil, K9HI

p.s. — There was a very long reply comment/discussion thread that accompanied the original story. It probably *did* mention the “retraction” by his staffer. But the rhetoric was so heated that a decision was made to remove the entire discussion thread.

In my opinion, that’s really not a very satisfactory answer. I am not a Romney supporter by any stretch, but it’s really not fair to leave that story up on the EMA website without also printing the retraction/apology.

That’s the story from my point of view. My apologies again for being so quick to tweet old news. I will certainly be a lot more cautious about this next time. This was certainly  a lesson for me on how Tweets can take on a life of their own.

Another interesting thing to consider is what impact this flap will really have on the campaign. It did generate a little controversy in the ham radio community, but did it really hurt Romney at all? My guess is no. Those that jumped on this story would probably not have voted for Romney anyway. Even so, I do feel bad about making this mistake, and promise not to do it again.

I’ve had a donation box on my blog (www.kb6nu.com) for a year or so now.  Every once in a while, I actually do get a donation. Yesterday, for example, someone sent me $20 via PayPal.

This got me thinking that I should find some way to thank these donors. Now, I’m a big NPR fan, so my first thought was to give them a tote bag or a coffee mug. Tote bags and coffee mugs are expensive, though. That’s why you only get them for something like a $100 donation to an NPR station.

Instead, I’m going to send this sticker to anyone who donates $5 or more. They measure 4.25-in. high and 5.75-in. wide and would be perfect for the bumper next to your ham radio license plate or the bulletin board in your shack.

This is the new logo for Yaesu Musen.

In a letter dated 12/27/11, Jun Hasegawa, president and CEO of Vertex Standard, has announced that the company is ending its four-year-old joint venture with Motorola. The letter states,

…we have decided to transfer the Vertex Standard LMR business to Motorola and focus on Amateur, Marine and Air-band business. The effective date for this reorganization will be January 1, 2012.

Other details include:

• The name of the company will revert to Yaesu Musen.
• The company will be wholly-owned by the founder’s family.
• The name of the operation in the U.S. will be Yaesu USA, and there will be no change in management or in address and phone numbers.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!

And, here’s a recent recitation of the classic “Ham’s Night Before Christmas.”

• an Icom IC-208H so that I can have a “real” mobile rig in the car;
• a new toolbox that I intend to fill with electronics stuff;
• if I believed in Santa, I’d ask for a Kenwood TS-590S;
• an Icom IC-7200;
• a new power supply;
• an FT-857 (but it’s not gonna happen);
• books and things for my 897, maybe antenna stuff too.