Ya gotta wonder, sometimes

I'm banging away on FT8 10 m this morning and I see a CQ SOTA coming from an N3 call. It usually takes a second for my system to resolve new calls as they come up. And this one resolved to Erie Pennsylvania.

Well, you can imagine the look on my face wondering how in the heck he managed to get up a mountain in the weather they've got down there, today, as evidenced by this pic I've included that was taken at Erie this morning.

Turns out he was out in California, as revealed by the SOTA website. That made a lot more sense on two levels. The band would have to be running awfully short to get 12 DB over the noise level from Erie from rochster, and Erie is up to their pips in snow and the West Coast was coming in pretty strong anyway.

But man....
it had me going for a minute.

The hole in the pattern

 What you see above, is where my signals have been heard, in the last 24 hours.
Not too bad. A litle disappointing, though, that there's such a large hole over China and India, etc.
More power, apprently, won'

t t solve the problem, because I'm not hearing any operators from these areas, despite there beinga  fair number of Ham operators in that area, particularly in India. Oh, well. You do what you can.

My FT* operations

I'll give you a quickie overview of my FT*  operations, in response to several questions on the topic.

My big shack computer is being rebuilt, so at the moment, I'm running a mini-PC, running Windows 10 with 2 screens.  This is the PC I have connected to my Yaesu FT991a.  Understand that the graphic below is actually a capture of both screens at once. This is the normal digital config I've been running for quite a while now. It's been quite effective for me.

On the far left, is the main screen for WSJT-X. To it's immediate right is  WIN4YEASU, which controls the radio itself via CAT.  It also makes available com port repeaters, so as to allow both WIN4YAESU and several other packages to run simultaneously.  As you can see, all the controls normally hidden on the 991's main screen are right up front on WIN4YAESU.... which is why I speak so highly of it.

Immediately below that, is the waterfall from WSJT-X.  That should be self explanatory to anyone who has run FT*.

Then we move to the right hand screen.

The biggest window is GridTracker's main screen.  This keeps updating with what the system is hearing and where you're being heard in real time.

Upper right is the current roster of active stations that you've not contacted yet.  The system uses a local copy of my QRZ logs to determine what is on that list,
 

 Below that is the station I'm currently working.

My bigger computer, once it's rebuild process is completed, will maintain 4 screens in pretty much the same basic config.
.

A new vertical for the house: Xiegu VG4

 Been a busy few weeks which is why I've not posted much here.
First, we had a bit of an accident.... my older boy ran over my VHF/UHF coax feed with a lawnmower. Expensive ouch. So I'm waiting to get the coax replaced for the short stuff. More on that in another post.

As some of you will know, I started a new job just recently and as a consequence of that, I'm now driving a new rig. Been having some problems with getting an antenna to work on the thing. If anyone has experience installing VHF/UHF antennas on a Volvo, drop me a line, please. I'll post more on that in another post as well.

The good news on the home front, and the subject of this post is the new VG4 antenna I have waiting to go up.

It showed up several days early.

It's a multi-band trapper, some 25-26ft tall (just about the same height at my IMAX2000, and it is resonant on 40,20,15 and 10m.... though many reports suggest it's quite good on 6m as well... and the other bands in between it's stated coverages... 30m17, and 12 can be turned with just about any tuner.

Cool beans!

The attraction for me was the lack of ground radials needed, since the whole thing is elevated.  Being elevated, it will have a performance advantage over ground-mounted verticals with buried radials, amounting to about 4db or so, vs a 1/4 wave vertical on a given band.  (Rudy, N6LF gets into this aspect of the general performance of elevated vs buried radials Here, if you're interested. (PDF)

 I'm hoping that it's top loaded design will allow it to perform within shooting distance of the IMAX2000 I currently use. As most of you know, that's a tall order.... the IMAX is tough to beat on the short end of HF.  Being top-loaded, the VG4 will not suffer from lower elevation on the shorter bands, such as 10m for example.   (I'm still running the ROC City 10m net these days, and obviously want the best signal I can get for that band. )

 On the other hand, since the IMAX only works well on 15-10m without the external tuner... And down to 20m and up to 6m with it, with some serious signal losses below 15m  for efficiency reasons, it's a little constricting. I've been really looking forward to getting live on 40 again and to better signal on 20, so, this may end up being a hard choice. 

I may end up setting up both verticals if the top-loaded VG4 doesn't perform as well as the collinear design of the IMAX.

If, on the other hand they're fairly close, I may end up taking the IMAX down. That thing is a signal monster and I'll hate to lose it.  We'll see.  Because of some space  and hardware limits I'm dealing with, I'll have to take the IMAX down anyway, at least initially.
 
I gatherthe VG4 is going to be a handful to put up, and get tuned. Tuning it will require a number of ups and downs, and that doesn't appear to be a one man job. Have a look at the dimensions to see why. It weighs around 15lbs, too, and that's without the weight of the mast and the coax and so on.

As for tuning it, I've seen reports that only a couple of cm adjustment per band, give around a 500kc shift in center tuning on 40, with the remaining bands being somewhat more forgiving. The Q on 40m is a bit high, as you might expect from a trapper of only 26 feet or so.

Once up however, it looks like it'll be pretty much bullet- proof. the Radio Oddity site suggests:

The VG4 is rated for high wind environments. After a normal installation, it can resist a category one hurricane with no guying required.

I do have high hopes for this stick. we'll see if that mans out over the next couple weeks.

Of course I'll be posting results here.

UPDATE: 

I've decided due to time and work factors to put off the install until Thanksgiving weekend. I'll be taking thanksgiving off as well as black Friday.   In looking at the thing I suspect I'm going to need most of a day to get it up and tuned.

Current events prove it again, when all else fails ham radio works

FT8 is a lot more than just pushing buttons

 I run a fair amount of FTx.
Indeed, it amounts to a bit over half of the QSO's in my log. I've had a fair amount of derision sent my way over it, most suggesting that it's effortless and thereby worthless.

Let's set the record straight:

I designed the station. I selected and in a few cases built the antennas I'm using. I erected the antenna field, in my case in the smallest backyard I could have imagined. I selected one smaller computer and rebuilt from the ground up, the computers that are doing my heavy lifting. I generally have 6 screens running as follows.

1:Cat control via WIN4YAESU, along with the waterfall and transmit audio screens.
2 WSJT-X

3: PSK Reporter

4: Another browser, generally running QRZ's log page
 

 On the Second computer:

5: and 6 Grid Tracker.

Oh... and a tablet running HAMCLOCK. So, 7 screens.

With this system running, I have all 50 states and 161 countries confirmed in about four years time.

The systems I have running to accomplish all of this are (and I'm sorry to have tos ay this) beyond the skill sets of most folks who are complaining about FT8.... they couldn't operate the thing, much less build it.

Yes there are folks who are using the mode with little to no skill, and getting fair results. So be it.
I'm getting fabulous results and I built and I maintain the thing myself. To do that you need both radio and computer skills.

New radios

We've been getting loads of info on new raios coming out next Q1.
For starters, there's Yaesu's new FTX-1F. I'll let  Peter explain this one:

Plus side: There's a lot to like in this one. I love the display, for starters.It really is a nice looking unit.,

The interfaces on this thing are mostly USB. About time they caught up with this trend.

They designed this thing for field duty. The folks at Yaesu observed the rise of POTA, SOTA and so on and put together a design that will shine in that environment. ... a huge battery inside which means you can run for quite a while without external power.  Just get to your POTA site, string up your end fed or what have you, hook up, and go.... for hours.

Personally I wouldn't look twice at the thing, because I don't do QRP, (it only does 6w on the battery and 10 if you've got an external supply) nor do I do anything much outside the shack, on HF.  I'll work POTA stations all day long, and help them get their contacts, but I don't actually DO POTA. To each his own. 

Still, I can't deny I like the look of the thing. I will tell you what, though.... Get the power to 100 w or better, and all mode and put it into this package with this display, and I'll be standing in line, with a kilobuck plus in my hand,  to replace my beloved 991a. Truthfully, there's not much that would cause me to give up the 991a.  And I have to admit if I was to do POTA for whatever, I'd be looking seriously at this one.... it is specifically designed for that kind of work.

Downside: QRP. Not my brand of beer.
Downside.... the multi-layered menu structure. No, I've not seen it in action, (who has, at this point?) but it's got to be that way given he dearth of controls as you can see in the pic. I got around this issue with WIN4YAESU some time back. Puts all the controls out front. But in a small package designed for field duty, you're going to need to make some compromises.

Downside: No internal tuner. This one is a bit edgy... most folks will be running EFHW's or similar and won't need the tuner.  Some folks will, or simply feel uncomfortable running that way.Yeah, they could have put one in but only at the expense of the better size, and therefore the amount of available operating hours  per charge.  (mitigating factor.... the tuner is available as a tack on along with a cooing fan, for those will run higher density modes such as FT8.  Yaesu apparently figures if you're running in those modes you're going to be packing a laptop or perhaps a Arduino or something, so the added external size won't be much of an issue. They're probably right.

Conclusions: It'll be popular with the field day/POTA/SOTA crowd, no doubt.


-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

The other new box is the ICOM 7760.
Well, as you can see, it's actually Boxes, plural, with a control head you can separate
from the RF deck.



Indeed, at Icom says:

The IC-7760 offers a new “innovative Shack Style” consisting a full control head with separate RF deck, connected through a control cable for greater installation flexibility. The supplied control cable is 3 m, 9.8 ft long, and by using a commercially available LAN cable, the RF deck can be installed in a more remote location. Furthermore, the control head and RF deck can be connected through a wired home LAN connection for remote operation. This simple configuration does not require a PC, and can be easily operated from nearly anywhere in the home as long as a LAN connection is available.

Here's a post Tokyo rundown on the unit:

Impressive.  It just doesn't have 2m/70cm, as the 991 and the FTX-1F do. I personally find the addition of VHF/UHF in new rigs attractive... and for a premium rig like this cannot understand the thinking behind not including them. 

(Although I personally am annoyed that nobody seems to want to include 220MHz, we all know why... it's only available in ITU region 2. As a result, the market isn't large enough to support it's inclusion. I suspect the 4m band in Europe will suffer the same fate as the 1.25m band here in the states..... But, I digress)

For a lot of folks, the Flex radio is  their dream rig. This has enough similar features, and if the build quality is up to Icom's usual standards this thing is going to turn some heads. 

I'm not sure on the availability of either of these boxes short term, but estimate they'll have them out by Q1 2025.

The Joy of Linked Repeaters

A short while back I posted a bit called Why are repeaters more quiet than they used to be? In that post, I mentioned....

The wide area networks that I mentioned earlier will also aid in getting traffic going. I'm afraid that the RF only purists aren't going to like it much, but WANs like EchoLink,  AllStar, and so on are going to be more than any other Factor responsible for making repeaters active again, particularly amongst younger hams who are just getting into the hobby.

"You mean I can get on my little 5 watt walkie-talkie that I paid $30 for and talk to somebody across the country?"

Yeah it's going to be like that.

Being a truck driver who travels all over the northeast and occasionally, outside that area, I have begun to find the attractions  of wider area linked repeater systems.  An example would be the East Coast Reflector. Another would be the one I've been playing with for the last several days.... the N3KZ system. 

For those unfamiliar with the concept, what we have in both cases is a number of repeaters in various localities, which are linked together. What one repeater hears, the rest repeat.... often in huge distances, which are unavailable by other means on the VHF and UHF bands.

Now there are many systems that are regional in nature. for example, my friend Bob, N2HJD here in my hometown of Rochester, runs a lined system that is focused on the Genesee Valley around Rochester.  As he says,

The repeater system consists of 13 Amateur repeaters cross linked on 6 different Amateur bands. There are 11 sites all radio linked in two counties around the Rochester,NY area.
The system also contains a translator, remote receiver, 2-meter remote base, an internet interface, and a  DIGITAL VOICE RECORDER
The N2HJD repeater system is all home brew with 17 CONTROLLERS, 26 receivers, and 21 transmitters, and has evolved from May of 1988 to it's current state.

The N3KZ system is a bit larger and is mostly focused on Pennsylvania though it has repeaters on the fringes of the state.... for example, New Jersey and Southern New York state. The result is I can keep track of the system and the folks active on it from anywhere in the state, and often outside of it. (Here's a list.)

The East Coast Reflector, is much larger than either of those two.  The founder of that whole deal , Dick WB2JPQ lives just down the road from me, in Buffalo, NY. I had the happy chance to meet him at Dayton this year. The thing is flat out huge, and there's no way for me to list all of the ways to connect to that net in this smallish blog post. I suggest looking at the link above to start your journey.  However, here's a graphical taste:

Practical examples? Many, but the most recent on the N3KZ system is a good one. For the last few days, I've been chatting at 4am with a fellow driver based out of the Harrisburg/York area.  One day I caught up with him from Borderntown, NJ on the Philly machine while driving down I295. On another, I spoke with him from farm country in Delaware, out on the Delmarva Peninsula, and finally, the next day from the PA Pike near Breezewood, and again later that day in Pittsburgh. All I could do at each instance was shake my head and smile. This is stuff that someone figuring on the shorter ranges that UHF and VHF usually offer, wouldn't expect. I mean, yeah, as a logical thing I certainly understand the process, but it's still a bit staggering in some ways.

Mind you, my radio is not a huge power monster. Then again, it doesn't need to be. The expense on tying into such nets can be as small as $150, even in today's messed up economy. The 779UV cost me $105. It is about the size of a pack of smokes. The pic on he right isn't my own, but I can vouch for it's accuracy. This thing is TINY.  The antenna coax and mount around another $60 though of course what you use for an antenna can be ajusted for your situation and will of course affect the total cost.
 

The 779UV offers 5,10,and 20w output, which I normally keep at 10w. (Gets a bit warm, running full power for extended  QSO's, and really there's no point to running high power most of the time since I'm making it just fine with the lesser power levels.... often I even cut the 10w to 5w.) I'm running a half-wave stick on my truck's mirror at the moment. Works just fine.  One advantage of this particular radio is that it has some 200 memories available, so plugging entire networks into this tiny box is a breeze.  The other advantage is that  with it's smaller power demands, it's powered by a cigar lighter plug. Which means no permanent wiring to the truck. Makes the boss happy.

Anyway, back to the linked systems. There is a consistency of feel, contacts, and community on these systems that I find attractive to say nothing of the ability to work the usual crowd from just about wherever I happen to be at the time. All on a radio that is smaller than a lot of HT's.  

HF in the truck is a bit more than I want to get into at this point, but tying onto linked systems is more than enough to keep my Ham radio addiction growing properly. Perhaps yours, as well?

As an aside, let's consider the normal repeater system and explaining such things to the non-ham. It can be done fairly easily... I've done it often enough, myself. Now explain however many repeaters linked together to that same person.

Smoke will be coning out their ears.

Why are repeaters more quiet than they used to be?

 

I'm seeing a LOT of folks asking where the traffic for Repeaters has gone. 

First let me say that, yes, the traffic is down some from the 70s to the early 90's but there's still traffic out there.

I had a 2/70 rig in my truck but took it out for a few months, but took it out for a while for a couple reasons not having anything to do with Ham Radio. More recently, I re-installed my little 779 UV into the truck again because of the fact that I was headed for Dayton Ohio for. Hamvention. Being the lazy slug that I am I just never bothered taking it out. Rather I started programming repeaters for the areas that I go into across five different states.

I'm glad I didn't take it back out because I have begun to discover the joys of hitting some of the local repeaters in the places that I normally go to. New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware.

Some of these repeaters are what I will call single Spike machines. In other words, they only have one signal, or perhaps they're a UHF and VHF combination from the same Hill.  Those are usually fun, although sometimes you're going to find that there really isn't that much traffic on them. Other days you will find the there's a network going on and you get a taste for some of the local people and that's usually worthwhile. You can usually jump in after the net is over and get some nice ragchew.

I have begun to develop a serious appreciation for the linked repeaters, configured in wide area networks, however. These are kind of like the well-known East Coast Reflector. I happened to cross one going through Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania yesterday that I initially thought was a single spike. Turns out it was anything but, having (I was told)  something like 80 different repeaters spread across the country, all tied together. I was fascinated to learn that,and I enjoyed a conversation between one individual in San Francisco and the other in Washington DC, and myself. All with my little 20 watt radio in the middle of Pennsylvania.

My recent exposure to FM repeaters from around the northeast leads to a few conclusions on the question of why we are seeing less traffic these days. I've seen the blame being put on PL tones (of all things!) claims of "distracted driving", the fact that cars are getting harder to find a place to mount antennas...(I've had problems with that, myself the last couple cars) I've seen folks blaming Chinese radios...(though getting them to describe just why is a bit of a challenge). I've seen folks mention that it's the users who often simply aren't very welcoming.... but that's also true on HF in places. I've seen folks blame cell phones... but let's face it, most people on cell phones aren't hams anyway. Frankly, I don't put much stock in these explanations.

As a result of my being an SWL who spent a fair amount of time monitoring local machines in my youth... and the more recent experience as well, I have a few observations to offer to explain the complaints.

 1: The butter is being spread over too much bread:

Back in the real heyday of the repeaters, early '60s and through the 70s up to say, 1990 or so, the number of repeaters active was relatively small and as a result a lot of the traffic was concentrated on to a relatively small number of active "channels". I would compare that to about 10 or 15 years ago on CB where a lot of the traffic on that bad graduated to channel 19. Ostensibly, 19 was supposed to be a trucker's channel but in eventually developed into some place where there was always some kind of traffic. Repeaters of the 70s through the 90s saw the same phenom, where traffic generates traffic. If you know that there is going to be people someplace speak with, you're going there.  Its the place to be. While it's true that there are less people overall that are active on repeaters it's also true that the numbers that remain are spread out amongst a much larger number of machines thus increasing the chances that when you land on one of them you're not going to hear anything going on and eventually you're going to turn the knob.

Part of the problem too, is the number of different modes that one can work on repeaters these days. When everybody was on analog it was a lot easier to find traffic. Add a half dozen incompatible digital voice modes and the number of people in active conversation dwindles.

2: Sunspots:

No, I'm serious. We're in the middle of a very good sunspot cycle and the HF bands have for the most part been cooking. I can tell you that I personally have been spending a good deal of time on HF, chasing root squares and DXCC. This takes away from the repeater traffic, too.... and it's natural that this happens. In fact it's been going on for Decades... Sunspots come in, and all the cool kids move to HF. And who can blame them?

 

3: Rudeness:

KC8VWM rightly says that people complain when there's too much activity occurring on a repeater.... and of course now we see people complain when there's no activity occurring on a repeater. He recounts his own experience:  "I remember when stations would come on asking (complaining?) the users to clear the frequency and leave the repeater open for others to use. And after they got chased off as requested, not a single person used the repeater for hours after that."  

And yeah, I've heard the same thing, myself.

4:Jammers: 

They're pretty much a universal issue, anymore. Just about every city has them. It's ssad to see, but not much can really be done about it.Let's say you manage through some coordinated effort to localte the source. I have my doubts that much will be done by the commission. Consider: People have been complaining to the commission about 7.ZOO for years now. Get the picture?

 Not a one of these factors is individually conclusive. Rather, I suggest that they are cumulative. That is to say none of these factors of themselves have left us in our current situation, but add 'em up, and what you see is what you get.

OK enough of the complaints.
I speculate the these things  are going to happen that will bring traffic back to FM repeaters:

Rebound 1:
In about 5 years, the current sunspot cycle will settle back down and the currently hopping HF bands will mostly be ghost towns again, particularly the shorter bands like 10 m. That will cause of itself a fairly significant uptick in repeater traffic.

Rebound 2:  

Next we will see a push forward some kind of standardization of digital voice modes. I suggest that  thus far digital voice modes have been proprietary black boxes. The company is involved with creating those black boxes are not going to be cheerful about giving them up for a different standard so this one may take a while and will most likely come from the ham radio community itself not one of the manufacturers such as Icom or Yaesu. Instead it will come from an independent developer or a developer that is adapted at open standard and modified it for the purpose such as was done with FT-X.

Rebound 3:

 The wide area networks that I mentioned earlier will also aid in getting traffic going. I'm afraid that the RF only purists aren't going to like it much, but WANs like EchoLink,  AllStar, and so on are going to be more than any other Factor responsible for making repeaters active again, particularly amongst younger hams who are just getting into the hobby.

"You mean I can get on my little 5 watt walkie-talkie that I paid $30 for and talk to somebody across the country?"

Yeah it's going to be like that.

And finally there is this.

Rebound 4:
You're not going to see what's at the bottom of the pot until you stir the soup. Toss your call out there and see what happens. All these other factors I've spoken of are long-term factors and won't see fruition for months or years. The best short-term Factor is just hitting the key and letting your voice be heard

It is surprising I think when you understand how much of our amateur radio activity is driven by habit. Well, get into the habit of stirring the pot. Toss your call out there.

Bonus Rebound:

Club activity. Many of the repeaters I've been active on here in the northeast, are club machines which are used by the club and it's members to keep informational and social lines open. Make no mistake here, folks... the weekly nets for each club is great but making a concerted effort to keep the lines of communication open even when ite weekly net is not in session is beneficial. Make the repeater the place where your members, ...as well as outsiders... WANT to be.

6m? Oh, wow....

I haven't spent much time on 6m, mostly because I was convinced my IMAX wasn't working well there. Oh, I could get it to load up, but I never got responses when I called CQ, even using FT8.The numbers work out a couple different ways but my guess at this point is that I'm losing about 9bd in the tuner for 6m.

Today, in the midst of the NAVHF things changed. I happened to pass by 6m this morning and decided I'd see about passing out some points, to a few of the locals, even though I'm not really competing. What I found amazed me....

 The band must be super hot this morning for me to get those kind of reports.

I guess I should see about getting a better antenna for 6m.

Looking at the world through a windshield

Some of you don't know this abouyt me, so.....  I spent many years in the Broadcast business. from there I went into computer support for about 10 years. From there, I started driving truck.... and it's what I do now.

My home away from home

This where I spent the vast majority of my time. It's a 2020 Freightliner Cascadia. Without question, it is best I've ever had. 

I think it LOOKS killer. The Black on Black with that livery is a standout. You might pick up I'm rather proud of it...Let's just say the company treats me VERY well, and this is one result of that.

 

Got the biggest Detroit DD15 engine they make, (505hp,1750 ft lb tq) an DT12, 12 speed automatic, and all the bells and whistles... adaptive cruise, blind spot radar. Disk brakes.(Rare even today for a tractor trailer to have disc brakes.)

Got a huge amount of battery available.. I could start Frankenstein with this thing. .(four glass mat batteries under my drivers seat, four more under the back porch) which means the HVAC can run on the battery for over 12 hours. When it runs out of battery the truck starts itself and charges the battery. Got a complete kitchen, (grill, microwave, coffee maker, fridge/freezer) 19" flat screen TV, the 2/70 and the CB.... Top line stereo. Got 470,000 miles on it, give or take.

Trust me.... I'll be sorry to let it go when the time comes.

  And my Ham radio contacts are a big deal in this thing. It's apparently less of a rarity than it used to be to have an active ham driving truck but still raises eyebrows. In my two trips to Xenia, I've run across more than a handful to fellow drivers on.520, and I'm making friends all over the north east, where I run. I'm getting to be a regular on a couple of Harrisburg systems,, for example I run NY, PA, NJ,MD etc, so if you're in those states you might just hear me....

Quit with the Kenwood rumors, will ya?

I can't tell you how many times I've heard the Rumor being spread that Kenwood is thinking about leaving the Ham Radio business. I've been hearing this stuff long before I even got my tech a few years ago.Well, I have several comments 'bout that.

No, they're not. They've been here for around 60 years and with good reason, and with nothing at all to suggest they're going anywhere.

Indeed comparatively speaking, the indications are quite the opposite.

Consider MFJ who (sadly) pulled out of Hamvention mere hours after making their announcement about folding their Starkville manufacturing operation. Kenwood, on the other hand, was at Xenia and from what I saw there, they made a great showing. They've got the new D75 out. Looks killer, and apparently is selling well. The 590SG, TS890 and TS990 are still out there and also going well.

OK, it's not their biggest type of sales... the commercial and public safety markets are more lucrative, certainly. at least on a per unit basis.But you know what's keeping them doing well in that market? Ham radio.

The TS 990

No, I'm not kidding. 

Most people responsible for installing Commercial and Public Service radio, particularly Mobile, are also Hams. It is a natural extension of their profession. Kenwood understands this.

Look, I'm no Kenwood loyalist, ( I tend to Yaesu.... so shoot me)... but even I recognize that Kenwood Ham radios create a kind of brand loyalty that you're seldom going to find among commercial installers and maintainers. The guy who carries a D74, or has one of the TS HF rigs for example, is far more likely to recommend an NX3200 (again for example) for his current project.

Ham radio, therefore is the loss leader, used for promoting the commercial and public service lines. Kenwood, long ago, recognized there would be no commercial/public service wing of the company without the foundational and stellar reputation they have enjoyed in Ham Radio. It's in their best interests to remain in the Ham Radio Field.

Can we put this rumor to bed, now? Please?

Finally, the ARRL starts answering the LOTW questions

We heard from newington, today and it's exactly as I predicted.

Updated 6/4/2024

On or around May 12, 2024, ARRL was the victim of a sophisticated network attack by a malicious international cyber group. ARRL immediately involved the FBI and engaged with third party experts to investigate.

This serious incident was extensive and categorized by the FBI as “unique,” compromising network devices, servers, cloud-based systems, and PCs.

ARRL management quickly established an incident response team. This has led to an extensive effort to contain and remediate the networks, restore servers, and staff are beginning the testing of applications and interfaces to ensure proper operation.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as our staff continue to work through this with an outstanding team of experts to restore full functionality to our systems and services.

We will continue to update members as advised and to the extent we are able.​

So, they hacked the routers, as I said. They know the systems Newington employs has a great deal of front-end to back-end traffic, and crippling that traffic would cancel the show completely.

I still say this attack smacks of some inside information. International Cyber Group?  I have my doubts, which would seem to be confirmed by the timing of the attack. I mean,does anyone not understand the significance of WHEN all this went down.... a couple days before Dayton?

 Interesting that they're saying"Updating members" when the majority of LOTW's users are NOT members. I've addressed this one previously, so not point in re-hashing it other than confirming it.

Anyway, as someone else said:

From a public relations standpoint, I wish we had seen a statement like this earlier. It would have curbed some of the “specubation.”

 Yes, it would have, and frankly, I fail to understand how Newington's silence helps the FBI in any way.   I must also say I'll be shocked if there's actually any arrests over this.

AI and Ham Radio

 One of the hotter topics on the Ham Radio forums (and in a few places, on the air) has been AI, and how it will (and has been) intersecting with Ham Radio.

Most consider it to be somewhere off in the distant future. I disagree. If you think about it we've already got AI to a large degree. Identifying signals? Grid tracker and CW skimmers, we have.  Nobody's coughed up signal identifiers for the phone modes yet but with voice recognition coming along the way it is I can't imagine that's too far off either.  Signal processing? We already have some really serious advances in noise abatement the last few years. I've had my 991a for a few years now and it's still amazes me with its noise reduction capabilities.

Oh, you mean transmitter signal processing? In other words making the most out of your transmitted signal? Yeah we have that too. (Though I still like using the analog processors that I have)  Automated logging? Again we have that in the digital modes but not in the voice modes as yet.

I'm not quite sure what else could come out of AI for amateur radio but if you think about it that's what innovation is... Going beyond most other people's imagination.

That said, there seems no end of comments about it. 

Many seem concerned that AI will ruin Ham radio. In response, I will make the observation that any new technology that comes down the pike is going to be at least partially destructive to the technology that it builds on. Or, at least it will cause some change of direction of the technology it builds up. That is simply the nature of technology.

It seems to me that the question before us then is do we reject newer technology because it's a change from the old? We see a LOT of that going on in Ham radio today. The Digi modes, for example. 

Now, of course, we've seen this happen with every new advancement in tech on the bands. I've already cited in the past the tussle 50 years ago, over AM vs SSB.

Here's a question: What exactly IS AI? At what point do we cross over from automated processes to artificial intelligence? Where is the exact demarcation point?

To put a human spin on it, people entering higher education all have different levels of intelligence and most have different areas in which that intelligence shines.  But here it is.... intelligence is foundational.  The educational process meanwhile is a process of programming, in my view.  What passes as Artificial intelligence, at least for now, is naught but programming, not intelligence. You know why they don't put legs on computers? Because they'd walk off a cliff if you told them to. We've not yet reached the point where a computer with legs would be intelligent enough to recognize the danger, and want to survive.

There needs be a level of intelligence in the case of humans for programming to work. Computers don't have that, yet, if they ever will

Certainly, there will be more advances in this area.... there always are, despite the Ham who assert that it's not ham radio without a CW key and a couple of 6146 tubes.  But until we get some better definitions going on what AI actually IS, we can't really hang a label on ANY of it.

LOTW has been out for a couple of weeks

 Let's discuss this one because there's a large number of implications here.

There have been complaints about lotw and some of the other systems that are hosted at newington, and the complaints have been going on for quite some time. A couple of decades anyway. Now of course we have this massive outage going on and very little in the way of explanation from the league. 

The usual ARRL cheerleading squad tries rather desperately to separate these issues but I don't think you really can.

If you think about it, I mean really think it through... both those subjects are the same thing, Both (in my view well justified) complaints and the current outage, are indicative of long unaddressed system design flaws only half of which were visible to the average user until recently. That being the extremely clunky interface on LOTW.

As the ever increasing down time in this incident makes clear however, one of the things that has been needed in LOTW for a long time is better system security. Not the laughable "we will mail you a certificate" security , but router, firewall and IP port security, which it is becoming increasingly clear was insufficient to the task.

This is more than just speculation. Consider the systems that went down. The phone system is out, that's obviously going through IP routers, the education system was down, the VEC system was down, access to in-house radios, also IP controlled, was also down... LOTW of course, and we're not sure what else. Yet we are told that the data on all these systems is safe. So, if the data on the individual computer systems is safe as they say, (and to be clear I have no doubt it is) what's left?

The firewall and IP routing system.

For all of those systems to go out at once the only thing that makes any sense at all is that it was their in-house router(s) that got hacked and the cretans managed to have gotten through the firewall to do that. The attack came in from outside Newington on the internet.

Let's be clear on this, this is very high level stuff. Very specialized. Not for the faint of heart and certainly not for, you should pardon the pun, amateurs.

People tend to complain about what they see, not what they can't. The complaints about what end users see on LOTW are valid, IMV.

But...

Even the people that were making such complaints made the assumption that firewall and IP port security wasn't a problem. The league had that covered. Obviously, that was a bad assumption.

Let's add one more piece to the puzzle.An ad, placed by the league looking for it help. The ad apparently was placed prior to the outage. The question immediately arises are they bringing additional people in to take care of some of the problems in LOTW, or is this intended as replacement staffing? 

This raises the possibility of an insider sabotaging the place using inside knowledge to do so. Speculation, certainly but it fits the available facts rather nicely. Maybe we will find out what the story is eventually or maybe we won't. The league has been keeping its cards very close to its vest on this one.

More as I find.

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Xenia photo dump

 I know this has been awhile in coming.