Ok, everything except the TV. Thanks to digital cable, I'm still using the same TV I've had for many years. Santa didn't dump the big screen HD I've been ogling. But life goes on! Those great folks of the NCVEC have been hard at work preparing the new Technician Class question pool, which came out recently. It will soon be appearing among our test prep materials. Stay tuned!

I have a new fascination. I've recently begun tinkering with and attempting to learn my way around Plan 9 From Bell Labs, an operating system first developed in the late 80s and intended as a successor to Unix. It didn't quite catch on like they hoped, and to this day (at 4th edition) remains relegated to hobbyists and research applications. 4th edition was released in 2002 as open-source, which makes it relevant to this venue. To my knowledge there is no ham software out for Plan 9, and that's something it would intrigue and amuse me to remedy.

A site was just brought to my attention regarding an effort toward a new codec for D*Star [edit: the mistaken and subsequently explained as a mistake presence of this word in this sentence seems to have caused an inordinate amount of consternation, and has thus been remedied] digital transmissions, at http://codec2.org .

Yesterday I added the Canadian Basic and Advanced Qualification pools to the exam review portion of the site. Hopefully this will be helpful to those Canadians preparing to test. Let me know if there's anything specific I should add. I also phased out the item on the left menu for the old Extra pool, though it still appears on the main menu for the practice, and still works. I just wanted to save space on the navigation.

I've created a section in the Forum called "Project Ideas", in the hopes that it might facilitate discussion between those with ideas and with or without expertise and those with expertise who are perhaps at a loss for ideas. I've posed a couple of ideas myself to get things started, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the OSS ham community has to say.

Pardon the slow progress, folks; I have some stuff going on that is taking a little longer to get done than I anticipated, but things should be getting underway here in earnest very soon. I found this today and figured as a first order of business it would be helpful to provide a link to this site: http://selfproject.eu/en/Coursebook_Intro_Free_Software which provides an introduction to Free Software. It attempts to provide an explanation of the history and main concepts of the Free Software movement

I've begun reinventing the site to be targeted at open-source software (OSS). Look for changes all over in the near future. I started a thread on Sourceforge.net that I'm hoping will get some nice results. Stay tuned!

73,
AE5IR

The FCC amended WE2XRH's license grant to exclude the 40m ham frequencies. More information available at arrl.org.

On Monday, October 20, the ARRL filed a Petition for Modification or Cancellation of Experimental Authorization (Petition) with the FCC with respect to WE2XRH., an experimental license issued to Digital Aurora Radio Technologies (DART), permitting operation in the 7.1-7.6 MHz (40m amateur) band using a 20 kHz bandwidth digital emission at a t

It's been a busy couple weeks; I regret being rather negligent with the site here, and thought I'd touch base. I've been itching to finally get on more than just 2m, and given my limited budget, it seems QRP is my best bet. As a result, I've been trying to work up the ambition to resume practicing CW and to set a goal speed for which I'll reward myself with a neat little kit of some sort. I'm thinking of going with a Rock-Mite but am beginning to consider my options. Anyone have any recommendations?