eHam.net News for Sunday 11 March 2018

[eHam.net via rec.radio.info Admin]

eHam.net News

///////////////////////////////////////////
Orbiting Astronaut Talks Life In Space with Students via Ham Radio:

Posted: 10 Mar 2018 04:03 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/40972


An astronaut flew over San Bruno on Wednesday and revealed to the 800
earthlings below that he wears socks to work, eats lasagna and spent part
of this week fixing the space station toilet. And the Internet doesn't work
any better in near-zero gravity than it does on Earth, spaceman Scott
Tingle said. All 3 hostages, gunman dead at Yountville veterans home
Editorial: On North Korea, Trump is right Source: 49ers agree to terms on
3-year deal with Richard Sherman Oakland coffee shop refuses to serve
police officers -- and... Seeing San Francisco through new eyes after trip
to tidy D.C. Does the Ferry Building still reflect the Bay Area's food...
The Warriors once drafted a woman to play in the NBA: Here's... "It's very
slow," he said. "But it's better than nothing." The 11-minute shortwave
radio conversation with Tingle -- orbiting the Earth aboard the
International Space Station -- was the biggest thing to hit Parkside
Intermediate School in some time. That's because classes were canceled
while Tingle spoke from 250 miles overhead on his special radio hookup.
Students and teachers crammed into the school's gym, where local ham radio
clubs had set up their equipment. Principal Kerry Dees blew a whistle and
called the proceedings to order. She declared it a great day in the history
of the mighty Parkside Panthers. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity," Dees said. "This is beyond your imagination!" And then a
dozen students trooped up to a bank of shortwave radios and read their
questions into the mike. Each student had been instructed to say "over" at
the end of each question, so that Tingle -- who was fed the questions in
advance -- could rattle off his answers. All eyes were on the clock,
because radio contact with the space station would last only about 11
minutes. At the precise moment, the radio folks twiddled their dials and
history arrived at Parkside over frequency 145.805 megahertz.


///////////////////////////////////////////
58th Acadiana Hamfest Invades Rayne:

Posted: 10 Mar 2018 04:02 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/40971


The "fest" offers exhibits, forums and flea markets for all amateur radio
enthusiasts, affectionately known as "hams".


///////////////////////////////////////////
An Autonomous Drone for Working Rare Squares:

Posted: 10 Mar 2018 04:02 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/40970


Amateur radio is an extremely broad church when it comes to the numerous
different activities that it covers. Most of the stories featuring radio
amateurs that we cover here have involved home-made radios, but that
represents a surprisingly small subset of licence holders. One activity
that captivates many operators is grid square collecting. The map is
divided into grid squares, can you make contact with all of them?
Land-based squares in Europe and North America are easy, those in some more
sparsely populated regions a little less so, and some squares out in the
ocean are nigh-on impossible. As an attempt to solve this problem, the
Jupiter Research Foundation Amateur Radio Club have put an HF transceiver
and associated electronics in a WaveGlider autonomous seagoing vehicle. The
idea is that it will traverse the ocean, and you can work it, thus getting
the contact you require to add those rarest of grid squares to your list.
The transceiver in question is a commercial portable one, an Elecraft KX3,
and the brain of the payload is a Raspberry PI. It's operating the FT8
mode, and will respond to a call on 14074 kHz in an automated fashion (Or
it would, were its status page not telling us that it is offline due to
power issues). It's currently somewhere in the Pacific ocean, having been
at sea now for a couple of months.