Geocities is closing on October 26 2009, and with it many ham radio related web sites will be lost.

Currently Google index has 31,300,000 pages hosted on Geocieties.com and in particular, 6000+ pages related to Amateur Radio and 4000+ pages related to the ham radio keyword.

This will mean that a large quantity of knowledge and documentation about projects, modifications, antennas and technical tips  will be lost.

Yahoo! that owns Geocities since 1999 has decided to shut down the world wide famous free hosting service born in 1995, recommending owners to move web sites elsewhere.

So if you have bookmarked any interesting sites hosted under Geocities, you have still a couple of days to cache them into your PC before they will get lost.

At 01.39 GMT of 6 April 2009 a big earthquake has destroyed many villages around L’Aquila not too far from Rome.

At time writing, over 150 deads and 1500 injured are reported by medias, along to tens thousands of people that will have to spend many night without coming back to their houses.

ham radio operators have been the firsts to announce the disaster to the world, and to support communications locally,  permitting the rescue machine system to start and coordinate Italian govern from Rome.

Italian public TV Service has recognized to “Radioamatori” a tribute with an interview on their activity and preparedness in case of similar events.

Here a short transcript of DX Cluster announcements during the first moments and hours of “Terremoto” (heartquake)

I0DJV earthquake in central Italy …..help … 0322 06 Apr
IK0BZY —> ARAC disattivate l’R1 del guadagnolo interferisce con 0320 06 Apr
K6ASK ioknq Magnitude 6.3 CENTRAL ITALY 0243 06 Apr
IV3UHL poi monitoro …. 0235 06 Apr
IV3UHL I0TER anche se non il tuo call…Forse…ma forse hai detto0228 06 Apr
IV3UHL LOOCK NEWS ON WEB ..IF DIFFICULT WILL ALERT THE TEAM 0206 06 Apr
I0KNQ x iv3uhl penso di si non ho altre info il sisma e’ stato av0204 06 Apr
IV3UHL knq ok provo contatto PC DAMMI ….CONFERMA DANNI 0202 06 Apr
K6ASK I0KNQ check http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/last_event/world_ital0201 06 Apr
I0KNQ x ik0fta sergio c 6? 0201 06 Apr
I0KNQ x iv3uhl prova a contattare qualcuno della zona 6 l’epicent0200 06 Apr
IK0FTA earthquake in central ItALY seems some damages near l’Aquil0158 06 Apr
IV3UHL KNQ se possiamo 328 2547409 + protezione civile 0157 06 Apr
IV3UHL I0KNQ..STESSO MAGNITUDO 6/05/76 IN Friuli tienici aggiornat0155 06 Apr
I0KNQ e’ dal tempo del friuli del 77 che non sentivo qua’ una cos0153 06 Apr
I0KNQ scusa iv3uhl appena so’ qualche altra notizia te la dico .0152 06 Apr
IV3UHL 6,7 mi sembra un po’ forte… 0152 06 Apr
I0KNQ to iv3uhl sry i not have other info… 0151 06 Apr
IV3UHL ik0hnq:danni??? 0150 06 Apr
I0KNQ hearth quake listen to roma vy strong! 0149 06 Apr
I0KNQ heartquake to abruzzo magnitudo 6.7 scala richter 0148 06 Apr
IV3UHL ik0fta grado??? danni? 0147 06 Apr
IK0FTA earthquake in central Italy any info? 0145 06 Apr

Currently HF frequencies used for RAE are:

40 M – 7.045 Mhz and 7.052Mhz (7.057 Mhz)
80 M – 3.640 Mhz and 3613 Mhz

Of course, clearing that frequencies, and those immediatey above, will be important.

The K3TKJ world wide famous free web hosting service, QSL.NET and QTH.NET is going to be relocated elsewhere.

Started in late 1996 by Alan Waller, the domain, host thousands of radio related informations, from personal home pages, to club sites, technical articles, and lot’s of valuable ham radio related documentation.

The new owner will be KA9FOX Scott, owner of QTH.com that is currently in the process to move servers to his own network facilities. Estimated time for moving of web sites is 3 days.
In the mean time all sites hosted at QSL.net are down.

QSL.net has been a great service for our community but has become a single point of failure for our knowledge.

I would suggest all those who are using K3TKJ services to donate and support QSL.net, or move their web sites somewhere else. There are many free hosting service now. Google for free web hosting, it will be easy to find one, or write me I can address you.

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After more than 30 days of 0 sunspots, 12 sunspots where observed yesterday according to latest NOAA report.

Here is the yesterday sun picture from nasa.

Someone erroneously reported that the last month of August was the first 0 sunspots month after 100 years, and this particular event has been correlated to the particular climate changes our earth is suffering.

From what I know, this is not the first month with 0 sunspots in this century, but I’m almost diffident that could be a direct relation with global warming.
More sunspots links

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After 26 years “Megahertz Magazine” one of the oldest printed magazine an amateur radio in France, close.

At the home page, the editor explain reasons of QRT, and one of main causes, along to the increasing costs of productiond and postage is the influce of Internet on the world wide business of amateur radio.

According to the editor, the possibility to buy equipment abroad, has decreased the volume of business in France, and therefore, incomings based on advertising has decreased as well.

Till the website will be up and running, the editorial, edited by the magazine co-founder Sylvio Faurez Feem can be read, translated in english.

That’s become a funny game during our last local net on 2 meters.
The screenshot you can see here behind is an online tunable radio working on 80 40 and 20 meters band from Holland.
We did enjoy comparing the delay beetween our receivers and the live feed coming form this web radio, and it was nice to discover that the difference was just half a second or less.

We did also test transmitting and getting heard by the remote station, and was interesting to see the waterfall differences on incrementing the output power.

But the most interesting thing was understanding what is behind this web page….

First of all this is not a common remotely tunable radio as you may have had the opportunity to play, there are many remote radios on the net but rather this is a Software Defined Radio. Let’s call it a Virtual Radio.

A Software Defined Radio, is a computer program, that emulate a complete radio, where tipical components like filters, mixers, amplifiers, demodulators, detectors etc have been reproduced by software programmed libraries. Input Output is demanded to commom sound cards, and a minimal RF frontend is provieded.

The University of Twente in Holland has published an SDR web interface that allow you to tune the radio, along to other concurrent users, by simulating a virtual receiver. It means that what you tune, is not heard by others, but only from your pc.

Like other virtualization technologies, a shared host platform is supplied (here is a common old-fashion pentium III PC running linux), and from this host you can load your own virtual exclusive radio and tune the waves via the supplied W3DZZ trap-dipole for the 80 and 40 meters

To load this sdr radio, requirements are Java Browser Plugin installed and access through TCP port 8901.

We can just say Bravo! to the hams that promoted this experiment.

Link to WebSDR on 20m, 40m and 80m

more Software Defined Radio Links, SDR Programs and products

Starting from 13th May Italian Minister of Telecomunications announced that the frequencies between 7100 Khz and 7200 khz have been assigned to the amateur radio service in secondary status with a power limit of 24dBW (251 W EIRP!).

Italian hams were expecting the extension of the 40 meters band starting from 29th March 2009, but an unexpected notice of the Minister announced that in order to support and promote amateur radio in italy, decided to assign starting from now to the scheduled date the secondary status, allowing therefore Italians to operate also on the range 7100-7200 spectrum.I expect many Italian hams will have to put hands on their antennas in order to extend their resonating frequency !

Need more ideas ? Some plans for 40 meter antennas

I’m currently evaluating these two handheld transceivers and before to buy one I’ve tried to understand pros and cons of both rtx.
I will summarize here the work of my last two days, since I’ve not found any usefull review that could compare these two portable transceivers. Following comparison is the result of third party opinions i’ve collected on the net, so use this article with caution.

Dimensione and weight
They are pratically the same, Icom first introduced in the marked this model that many other have followed. Kenwood looks lighter.

Audio sound quality
Concerning the onboard audio speaker, Kenwood quality is amazing for clearness, really excellent.

Keyboard
Here ICOM works better, since Kenwood keys are very small and people with large fingers may find problems. Back lighting is good in both transceivers.

Ease of use
The Kenwood is extremely user friendly and easy-to-use. The icom is difficult to setup expecially for newbies

Battery
Both will output 5 Watts. Icom offer also 0.500W but the Kenwood offers also the 1.5 W ! Batteries have same amperage, but kenwood outperform for battery duration and recharging time, only 6 hours vs 12 hours of the ICOM

Antennas
Both comes with their antenna, tuned for the bands they need to operate.

Transmission coverage
ICOM is much better here, since cover 50/144/430, while TH-F7E is limited to 144/430

Reception coverage
Kenwood, outperforms Icom since allow 0,500/ 1300 Mhz while Icom cover only 0,500/999.
Kenwood TH-F7T allow you to listen in both frequencies simultaneously ( dual watch ) Both works in FM/AM/FM-W but Kenwood allow also LSB/USB/CW !

Price
Here in europe price is almost comparable for both transceivers, at the moment of writing this article, flows from 250-350 euros, depending on special prices and offers.

An interesting article on Iraqui amateur radio operators condition has been published on the Los Angeles Times.

Many Iraqui hams have dismissed their stations because initially either US troops and Iraqui police were supicous that their transmissions are a tool of the insurgency. During the Saddam period however looks like things were not so much better.

It seems things has changed now, and in an interview to YI1AK YI1EYT and YI1FLY, express the desire that other operators could go back to their radio shacks.

According to the Iraqui amateur radio society many more callsigns has been issued to foreign people in the last years.

Article worth reading

Iraqui Amateur Radio Society

Surfing the net this evening, I jumped into the AMSAT UK site looking for satellite informations. The site reuslts hacked as you can see in above picture.
A quick jump to archive.org revealed that the amsat site has been implemented using Joomla a popular open source content management system that too very often release security fixes that needs to be applied as soon as they are availble.