ARRL Asks FCC for Ham Band at 472 kHz

Rather than waiting five years for the FCC to follow up on the actions of the 2012 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-12), as has been the case with WRC-07, the ARRL has filed a Petition for Rule Making requesting the establishment of a domestic amateur radio allocation at 472-479 kHz. The NPRM calls for a power limit of 5 watts EIRP (effective isotropic radiated power), with only 1 watt to be permitted in certain locations. The FCC had not responded to the League's petition as of this posting.

ARRL Offers Daily/Hourly LoTW Updates After Major Malfunction

A bug in the ARRL's Logbook of the World (LoTW) online confirmation system that came to light during the weekend of the CQ World Wide CW DX Contest has been fixed, according to League CEO Dave Sumner, K1ZZ. However, logs submitted before 2100 UTC on November 25 might have been accidentally overwritten, so users should check their logs.

As of mid-December, log processing continued to be very slow, with some 26,000 logs waiting in the queue at any given time. New hardware to resolve this problem was ordered in December and was expected to be up and running by early-to-mid February. Meanwhile, the Logbook website now includes pages with both hourly and daily updates so that users can see how many logs are waiting to be processed and the dates on which the logs currently being processed had been uploaded.

It is not known how these problems with LoTW may impact the projected date of mid-2013 for adding LoTW support for CQ's Worked All Zones (WAZ) award.

Retired Colonel Named to #2 Spot in Army MARS

Paul English, WD8DBY
(Courtesy Army MARS)

Army MARS Chief Stephen Klinefelter has announced the appointment of recently-retired Colonel Paul English, WD8DBY, as the service's Program Officer, formerly known as Deputy Chief. MARS is the Military Auxiliary Radio System. English, who holds an Extra Class license, is now a civilian employee of the Department of Defense. According to a MARS news release, he retired from the post of Director of Communications for U.S. Army South, the Army component of the U.S. Southern Command. He was previously deputy commander of the 7th Signal Command and had served in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there, as well as in Iraq.

KB5TZZ Named Director of Johnson Space Center

Astronaut Eileen Ochoa, KB5TZZ, will become the 11th director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, at the beginning of 2013. She has been Deputy Director since 2007 and will succeed Michael Coats, who is retiring.

Ochoa was the first Hispanic woman to fly in space, a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1993. She subsequently made three more space flights and has held administrative posts at Johnson Space Center since 2002. She has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University and was selected as an astronaut in 1990.

Kornienko (RN3BF) and Kelly to Spend a Year in Space

Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, RN3BF, and Astronaut Scott Kelly have been chosen to spend a full year aboard the International Space Station in 2015-16. A major part of their mission, according to the ARRL Letter, is to help increase understanding of how the human body reacts and adapts to long-term space flight. This understanding is important for planned manned missions in the future around the Moon, an asteroid and, eventually, Mars. The two men are set to begin a two-year training program in early 2013.

Hams Play Role in Production of "Lincoln" Movie

(White House photo)

Nine of the 16 telegraph stations shown in the War Department in the Steven Spielberg movie, "Lincoln," were fully operational and used equipment provided by members of the Morse Telegraph Club, many of whom are hams. According to Newsline, club president Jim Wades, WB8ISW, served as a Technical Advisor for the production. The Morse Telegraph Club is an association of retired railroad and commercial telegraphers, historians, amateur radio operators and others with an interest in the history and traditions of telegraphy and the telegraph industry. For more information, visit <http://www.morsetelegraphclub.org/>.

Contesting News Website to Shut Down

radio-sport.net producer Jamie Dupree, NS3T
(NS3T via qrz.com)

The contesting news website, radio-sport.net, is going to shut its doors at the end of 2012, according to its founder and producer, Jamie Dupree, NS3T. In a posting on the site, Dupree said increasing time demands at work and at home were keeping him from having enough time to devote to running radio-sport.net and keeping it updated.

South Africa: All Hams Must Re-Apply for Licenses

The South African government has said it will begin enforcing a rule that limits amateur radio license renewals to five years, after which the licensee must re-apply. Newsline reports that the South African Radio League (SARL) says that all amateurs in the country will need to reapply between 2013 and 2018.

(Courtesy CIA World Factbook)

  

In a separate development, SARL has launched an antenna defense fund to help South African hams cover the costs of mandatory approvals for antenna towers. It estimates that fees and other associated costs will total roughly US$600 per application. SARL's goal is to raise and maintain a fund of approximately US$60,000 (50,000 Rand) to help the nation's amateurs. Anyone interested in contributing may e-mail <adf@sarl.org.za> for more information.

Visual CW Plans Thwarted by Moon

View of FITSAT-1's LEDs as observed by Prof. Jun-Ho Oh
of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
(Courtesy FITSAT-1 website,
<http://www.fit.ac.jp/~tanaka/fitsat.shtml>)

Plans to flash Morse code messages from the Japanese FITSAT-1 satellite have been delayed until early January due to moonlight! 

Controllers had hoped to send the visual Morse messages in mid-to-late December, but determined that waxing Moon (full on Dec. 28) would make the sky too bright for most people to be able to see the satellite. Other, earlier, attempts were cancelled due to cloudy conditions over the target areas. 

As of the time of this posting in mid-December, the plans are to begin the visual code messaging around January 7, 2013.

IARU Adds Two New Members

The national radio societies of Azerbaijan and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are the newest members of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU). According to the ARRL Letter, the Federation of Radio Sport of Azerbaijan (FRSA) counts all of the country's 50 licensed amateurs among its members. The St. Vincent and Grenadines Amateur Radio Club has been in existence for more than 60 years and includes 21 licensed members from the country's total ham population of approximately 134. Their applications were accepted by current IARU member societies in a vote held on November 1 and announced in mid-December.

Five CQ "Family" Members Honored by YASME Foundation

Two contributing editors for CQ Communications magazines and three members of the CQ World Wide DX Contest Committee have been named as recipients of the 2012 YASME Excellence Awards.

CQ Propagation Editor Tomas Hood, NW7US, and WorldRadio Online Propagation Editor Carl Luetzelschwab, K9LA, were both honored for "their sustained education of the amateur community regarding propagation, solar and geomagnetic physics."

CQWWCC members George Fremin, K5TR, "Tree" Tyree, N6TR, and Trey Garlough, N5KO, were recognized, along with Scott Neader, KA9FOX, "for their contributions to many infrastructure projects that benefit the ham community at large."

They are among a total of 16 amateurs recognized by the YASME Foundation with cash grants and engraved crystal globes. The YASME Foundation helps to fund and support scientific and educational projects related to amateur radio, including DXing and the introduction and promotion of amateur radio in developing countries. (YASME Foundation, via ARRL)

CQ New Products Editor John Wood, WV5J, SK

John Wood, Sr., WV5J, CQ's New Products Editor since 2009, passed away on December 3 after a brief battle with cancer. He was 61. A lifelong journalist, John spent most of his career as a reporter and editor for newspapers in and around Memphis, Tennessee. He lived in the Memphis suburb of Germantown, Tennessee.

A contributor to CQ for several years on a variety of topics, John became editor of the "What's New" column as of the magazine's December, 2009, issue. He continued writing occasional feature articles as well. His most recent, "There's a 'Secret Service' in Memphis on the 222 Ham Band," appears in the Fall 2012 issue of CQ VHF.

John is survived by his wife of 41 years, Marie, WA4WFX; his son, John, Jr. ("Woody"), KI4VCK; his daughter, Christi, and two grandchildren. The family requests that contributions in John's memory be made to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

For those in the Memphis area, a funeral service will be held Friday, December 7, at 11:30 AM at the Memorial Park Funeral Home, 5668 Poplar Ave., Memphis 38119.

CQ Files Comments in Relicensing Proceeding

CQ Communications, Inc., the parent company of CQ, CQ VHF, Popular Communications and WorldRadio Online magazines, has filed comments with the FCC in response to WT Docket 12-283, which, among other things, proposes permanent exam element credit, even for amateurs whose licenses are long-expired.

In the comments, CQ generally supported the concept for former licensees as well as those amateurs who gained partial credit for an upgrade but did not complete the upgrade within the one-year "window" granted by a Certificate of Successful Completion of Examination (CSCE) [for example, a pre-2000 Advanced Class licensee who had passed the Extra Class theory exam but not the 20 word-per-minute code test].

CQ disagreed with the proposal to shorten or eliminate the current two-year grace period for license renewal, primarily to protect a licensee from losing his or her call sign due to missed paperwork. CQ also disagreed with the proposal to reduce the minimum number of Volunteer Examiners at a test session from three to two, and recommended that the FCC initiate a pilot program on remote exam administration before making a final decision on that part of the proposal.

Finally, CQ supported the proposal to permit the use of single-slot TDMA (time domain multiple access) on the amateur bands, but called on the FCC to re-initiate a dialog with the amateur community on broader changes in mode regulation in order to remove the necessity of going through the rule-making process whenever a new operating mode is introduced.

The full text of CQ's comments, along with others received by the FCC in this proceeding, may be accessed through the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) at <http://bit.ly/Ty6Qdh>. Enter 12-283 under "Proceeding Number," then scroll down and click on "Search for Comments." The deadline for filing comments is December 24, 2012, with reply comments accepted through January 22, 2013.

FCC Formally Proposes LF Amateur Band

The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (ET-Docket 12-338) which, among many other things, formally proposes a secondary amateur allocation at 135.7-137.8 kHz. The 130-page notice, whose broad purpose is to implement the decisions of the 2007 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-07), also proposed granting primary status to amateur radio on the 1900-2000 kHz segment of the 160-meter band. That segment is currently shared with radiolocation systems. (The 1800-1900 kHz band segment is already allocated exclusively to the Amateur Service.)

The only current U.S. users of the spectrum segment including the proposed 135.7-137.8 kHz band are power companies operating PLC (power line carrier) systems for monitoring electrical infrastructure. Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) is a form of PLC, but the systems at these frequencies are used internally by the power companies. Ironically, if the amateur allocation is approved here, the FCC says it is likely that hams will have to coordinate with utilities and avoid causing interference to the PLC systems.

Comments on ET Docket 12-338 are due 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, with reply comments due 30 days later. As of this posting, the NPRM had not yet been published in the Register.

CQ Highlighted on "Conan"

There's an old saying in politics: "I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right." The same sentiment applies here as well… at the end of October, comedian and talk show host Conan O'Brien did a segment on his TBS show, "Conan," called "Real Magazines that Outlasted 'Newsweek' " … and guess which magazine was featured first? Yes! CQ!

Talk show host Conan O'Brien holds up the October issue of CQ
to lead off a segment on "Real Magazines that Outlasted'Newsweek' "
on his program, "Conan," which airs weeknights
at 10 PM eastern on TBS. (Internet screen grab)

Of course he was making fun of us (that's his job), but our October cover was still splashed across national television! And the serious point of the whole segment (that he probably didn't realize he was making) was that even though general interest magazines such as "Newsweek" are in trouble, niche magazines - such as this one and the others he featured - are still going strong. There is a future for print magazines and niche magazines are that future. The entire segment may be viewed on YouTube at <http://bit.ly/RsXRpV>.

One Ham Killed, Another Rescued, in Sinking of HMS Bounty

(Courtesy tallshipbounty.org)

One of the first casualties of Superstorm Sandy was the tall ship HMS Bounty, a replica of the British sailing vessel made famous when a band of crew members mutinied on a 1789 voyage to the South Pacific. Fourteen of the 16 crew members were rescued safely. However, the captain - Robin Walbridge, KD4OHZ - was never found and is presumed to have gone down with the ship. The second casualty was Claudene Christian, a descendent of mutineer Fletcher Christian.

A second ham on the crew, Ship's Electrician Doug Faunt, N6TQS, was rescued. He told the ARRL Letter that the ship's crew used various methods, including HF amateur radio, to try to get help but met with little success. Finally, they were able to use Winlink to e-mail a distress message to the Coast Guard. Faunt told the Letter that "ham radio got me into my position on the Bounty, and ham radio got me out alive!"

There was also a closer-than-comfortable link between the Bounty and the CQ "family." Former CQ Youth Editor Brittany Decker, KB1OGL, crewed aboard the ship last summer. Her father, Paul Decker, KG7HF, told CQ she had considered staying on through the fall but, thankfully, decided to head off to college instead.

Post Office Wants to Phase Out IRCs

If the U.S. Postal Service has its way, International Reply Coupons (IRCs) will no longer be available for sale after January 27. According to the ARRL Letter, the postal service published a notice of its plans in the Federal Register on October 28, citing insufficient demand to continue providing the service. Comments were being accepted through November 23. Even if IRCs are no longer offered for sale by the postal service, Universal Postal Union (UPU) regulations require that post offices honor and redeem IRCs that have been purchased in other countries. IRCs are a form of prepaid postage, redeemable for a single unit of airmail postage in any UPU member country. Hams have long used them to provide return postage for QSL cards from DX countries.

W7EQI Re-Elected to Congress, Gains National Position

Oregon Congressman Greg Walden, W7EQI, easily won re-election in the 2012 election. Newsline reports that Walden, who is chairman of the Communications Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the 112th Congress, polled nearly 70% of the vote in his district. The Congressman's website reports that Walden will keep his subcommittee chairmanship when the new Congress convenes in January, and that he has been elected by his fellow GOP lawmakers as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

China Revamping Amateur Radio Regulations

B1Z is a contest station of the
Chinese Radio Amateurs Club,
which is about to receive formal
government recognition. (PY2QI photo)

Revised regulations on amateur radio are working their way through the bureaucracy of China's government and are expected to open the door for widespread licensing of individuals and clubs in the world's most populous nation. The new rules are also expected to expand recognition of amateur radio organizations in China from only the Chinese Radio Sports Association (CRSA) to include the relatively new Chinese Radio Amateurs Club (CRAC). [See PY2QI's article, "Inside a Chinese Contest Station - B1Z in the WPX SSB Contest," in the January 2013 issue of CQ.] According to Newsline, the CRAC is expected to become China's official representative to the International Amateur Radio Union.

New Data Mode Uses Chinese Characters

As the use of amateur radio grows in China, a new digital mode has been developed that uses Chinese characters rather than the Western European/American alphabet. Southgate Amateur Radio News reports that the new mode is called CP-16 and is based on the 16x16 dot-matrix display used to generate Chinese characters on computer screens. It uses 16 on-off keyed audio characters spaced at 17-Hz intervals, resulting in a total signal bandwidth of less than 400 Hz. Transmission speed is two-to-five characters per second and it can be received on any software defined radio (SDR) receiver or SSB receiver/computer combination running waterfall-display software. The characters will appear directly on the waterfall display. More information is available at <www.iaru-r3.org/15r3c/docs/056.doc>.