Tropical Storm Alex is on the verge of becoming the first hurricane of the season. As of 11 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 29 (1500 UTC), Alex was located about 355 miles to the southeast of Brownsville, Texas with top winds of 70 MPH. On its current forecast track, Alex should make landfall Wednesday evening, just south of the Rio Grande in Northeast Mexico, with the possibility of becoming a Categor...

Tony Dorbuck, K1FM (ex-W1YNC), passed away May 27 from undisclosed causes. He was 75. Dorbuck was an ARRL Assistant Technical Editor in the League’s former Technical Department from 1971-1978. While at the ARRL, he penned almost 30 articles in QST, including Product Reviews. A memorial service is planned for Wednesday, June 30 in Dorbuck’s hometown of New Britain, Connecticut.

I want to tell you about an area of technology that I am involved in that’s growing in popularity among high school kids today. Just as ham radio provided opportunities for the youth of earlier generations to learn about electronics, electricity and physics, today hobby robotics seems to catch the attention of kids.

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This Saturday morning -- June 26 -- beginning around 1017 UTC, take a look up in sky. If you’re in the central and western portions of the US and Canada, you have a good chance of seeing a partial lunar eclipse. Unfortunately, people in New England and Northeastern Canada will just miss the eclipse, as the Moon sets shortly before it begins. If you’re out camping, getting ready for Field Day t...

Sunspot numbers were lower for the past week, compared to the previous period. The average daily sunspot numbers fell nearly 11 points to 16.1. Sunspot numbers for June 17-23 were 14, 16, 28, 13, 14, 14 and 14, with a mean of 16.1. The 10.7 cm flux was 70.4, 70.5, 68.9, 70, 72, 73.3 and 74, with a mean of 71.3. The estimated planetary A indices were 10, 5, 4, 3, 5, 6 and 4, with a mean of 5.3. ...

By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor

This week, Surfin’ reveals the mother lode of online map sources.

Wednesday evening, the little woman was curious about Betty White’s new television series. I was clueless, so I Googled it.

Turns out that the show airs Wednesday nights at 2200 UTC on our TV channel 106, so we stayed up past our bedtime to watch it and we both were sorry that we did (the ...

Registration remains open through Sunday, July 25, 2010, for these online course sessions beginning on August 6, 2010: Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Level 1.

Each online course has been developed in segments -- learning units with objectives, informative text, student activities and quizzes. Courses are interactive, and some include direct communications with a Mentor/Instructor. Studen...

The July/August issue of QEX is coming soon, and it is full of theoretical and practical technical articles that you won’t want to miss. QEX is the ARRL’s “Forum for Communications Experimenters.” Published bimonthly, it features technical articles, columns and other items of interest to radio amateurs and communications professionals. The mission of QEX is threefold: To provide a medium for th...

The Amateur Radio Safety Foundation (ARSFI) has announced the availability of RMS Express user software with WINMOR, a new radio-email application for use with the Winlink 2000 network.

The WINMOR protocol was introduced at the 2008 ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference in Chicago. The goal of the WINMOR development effort was to create a soundcard digital mode that would provide an alter...

Stations active during ARRL Field Day -- June 26-27 -- are eligible to receive 100 bonus points for copying the special Field Day bulletin transmitted by W1AW (or K6KPH on the West Coast) according to the schedule below. You must include an accurate copy of the message in your Field Day submission. The Field Day bulletin must be copied via Amateur Radio; it will not be included in Internet bull...

In April, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) debuted a new Web site dedicate to hurricane preparedness. The site explains that a lack of hurricane awareness and preparation are common threads among all major hurricane disasters, and that by knowing your vulnerability and what actions you should take, you can reduce the effects of a hurricane disaster. One of the tools that the NHC mentions on ...

The ARRL Annual Report for 2009 -- now available online and in print -- reviews the major events of the year and documents the renewed growth of both the ARRL and the activities of the Amateur Radio Service. In 2009, the ARRL experienced a growth in membership, ending the year with 156,125 members, an increase of nearly 1 percent from 2008.

“Measured against our expectations at its beginning, 20...

But then, there it was, calling to me as certainly as my mother saying it was time to come in for supper. It was cool white like fine china, about 12 inches long with cobalt blue numbers and letters on one end and the same on the other only the color was a faded black. Cylindrical, its size grew larger toward the center and at evenly spaced intervals smooth groves dipped and returned without a ...

We have received several reports from ARRL members with arrl.net e-mail accounts who have recently been contacted via e-mail asking for personal information, such as user names and passwords. Please be assured that these e-mails are fraudulent attempts at “phishing” and did not originate from ARRL. “This is a very crude attempt at phishing, using an easily determined spoof of the originating/re...

ARRL Field Day -- Amateur Radio’s most popular on-the-air event -- is this weekend, June 26-27. Have you registered your Field Day site with the ARRL Field Day Locator Service? First introduced in 2008, the service -- an interactive map that helps amateurs or those interested in Amateur Radio find a Field Day site near them -- is free to clubs or individuals who will be operating public Field D...

The July/August issue of NCJ, The National Contest Journal, is filled with the latest news from the contesting world. Whether you are new to contesting or are a seasoned pro -- or somewhere in the middle -- you will find something in NCJ just for you.

One skill that everyone who participates in the single operator category needs to learn is how to master that second radio. It’s a skill that will...

The 2010 AMSAT Space Symposium and Annual Meeting will be held Friday, October 8 through Sunday, October 10 at the Chicago/Elk Grove Holiday Inn located near O’Hare Airport (the same hotel that recently hosted the Central States VHF Conference, Digital Communications Conference and NIDXCC events). Amateur Radio operators interested in space communications are invited to participate in the Sympo...

The July 2010 issue of QST has a one page overview of some of the major pieces of equipment introduced at the Dayton Hamvention®. There is no way a single person can track down everything on display that’s new in the time available, but QST Technical Editor Joel Hallas, W1ZR, did find quite a bit more -- much more than can be squeezed into the available QST page. “We reported on many other cat...

The average daily sunspot numbers were up 2.5 points from last week, despite the fact that there were no sunspots at all this week on June 15-16. A new sunspot group 1082 emerged yesterday, June 17, and yielded a daily sunspot number of 14. A nice thing about this spot is that it is all the way over on the east side of the visible solar disk, meaning we will probably see its effects as it moves...

By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor

This week, Surfin’ rediscovers the fun -- and frustration -- of ham radio contesting.

In the not so distant past, I actively chased weak signal DX on VHF and UHF. I worked 50, 220 and 432 MHz, but mostly 144 MHz, where I managed to work 26 states, 3 DXCC countries and 1375 miles to N0LL in Kansas via E skip.

Whether on HF, VHF or UHF, active chasers of t...