Kosovo and Serbia

Only one day after Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, I noticed that radio amateurs from both regions started to yell at each other on 20 meters. The same was probably true for other bands too, but I haven’t been on other bands for a while. In only 10 minutes, my vocabulary expanded quite a bit.

Politics and our hobby should be seperated by a wall of at least a mile high, but that’s nearly impossible in this case, as both groups share the same prefix. Let’s hope they can figure things out, preferably in a peaceful manner.

Keeping my English up to date

English has been my second language since elementary school. As far as I’m concerned, English is quite easy to master, although its rules not always consistent.

A slim chance and a fat chance turn out to be the same, but a wise guy and a wise man are definitely two different people. A house can burn up as it burns down, a form is filled in by filling it out and an alarm goes off by going on.

There’s no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither pine nor apple in pineapple, English muffins do not come from England and French fries do not come from France.

People recite at a play and play at a recital, they ship by truck, park on driveways, drive on parkways and people have noses that run and feet that smell.

Oh well.

Icom and Kenwood to join forces

It has been a rumor for some time, but now there’s some evidence that Icom and Kenwood are joining forces. Take a look at then new Kenwood TMW-706 and the Icom IC-208H and you will see that it’s the same dual band transceiver.

Kenwood TMW-706

Icom IC-208H

 

Download product info here (Icom version): Icom IC-208H PDF

Will Kenwood disappear? Will Icom disappear? New brand names? IcWood? KenCom? Questions, questions, but no answers (yet).

The Dove Experiment

Pigeons are sensitive to electromagnetic fields, so they say. True or not? Time to put this to the test. I have a regular visitor, a turtle dove, who takes a daily nap on one of the radials of my 5/8 wave vertical for 10 meters. He/she must really like it there, almost every day, the bird is present.

I set my Yaesu FT-840 to 29.300 MHz, FM mode, and the initial power output to 5 Watts. No reaction. At 10 Watts, the bird raises its head and starts to look around a bit. At 15 Watts, my feathered fan becomes restless and starts to hop around. At 25 Watts, the turtle dove takes off.

I repeated the test a few times, just to be sure. On average, the turtle dove leaves my antenna when the power is around 25 Watts. Amazing, these animals.

GlobalQSL, first impressions

Due to all sorts of reasons my new QSL cards weren’t printed, and I looked for ways to make things easier. One of them was to make use of eQSL (link), which I did, but not many amateurs use that service.

When GlobalQSL (link) came into the picture, I thought I’d give it a try. GlobalQSL is not an electronic service. I mean: it’s not an eQSL look-a-like. Cards are actually printed on high quality paper (full color, both sides) and sent through the bureau. Apart from that, there’s a lot of electronic processing going on.

After creating an account, you can download their QSL card design program. It takes a bit of time and experimenting to get it right, but working with the program is not too hard. When you’re happy with the results, you can upload your design to the GlobalQSl server. For $82, you will get 1000 cards printed, including distribution through the bureau.

You can enter your QSOs manually, or upload them in ADIF format. Multiple QSOs with the same station will be printed on one card, saving time, money and cards.

Pros (so far):

• Easy, saves a lot of time
• reasonably priced
• real cards
• price includes delivery (bureau)
• handles multiple designs and/or call signs

Cons (so far):

• Slow. Cards won’t be be printed immediately: the interval is every 2000 cards or 2 months, which ever comes first. (*)

If you are a fanatic DX or contest operator, 2000 cards is nothing. For an average Ham however, 2000 cards is something that could take a year or more. QSL bureaus are notorious for being slow, and 2 months of extra delay isn’t helping. Maybe the interval could be changed to one month?

I also ordered 100 blank cards, which will be sent to my QTH. Let’s see how fast they can print and deliver them. I’ll keep you posted.

(*) Update 10/11/2007, 14.34 UTC

Paul 4X6UU from GlobalQSL made a comment on this article about the “Cons”:

“GlobalQsl prints the cards every time there are 2000 cards to be printed to a IARU bureau. Having thousands of users uploading ADIF files every day, this means that we print cards every day for a few IARU bureaus. The only bureaus that are printed once every 2 months are the small and rare ones, like HB0 for example.

The every 2 month printing is done even if there are only a few QSLs for that specific bureau.”