June 1999
FEEDBACK
The OFFICIAL Newsletter
of the
Georgian Bay Amateur Radio Club Inc.
P.O. Box 113, Owen Sound, Ontario N4K 5P1
http://greynet.net/~gbarc
GBARC meetings are held on the 4th Tuesday of every month except July and August at the Georgian Yatch Club, 2475 3rd Ave West, Owen Sound.
Breakfast meetings are held at the Rockford Esso at 9:00 a.m. on the 2nd Saturday of the month and every 2nd Saturday after.
Nets 80 metre net on Sunday at 9:30 a.m. on 3.783 Mhz. Two metre net on Thursday at 9 p.m. on VE3OSR 146.94-Mhz.
Submissions are always welcome. Send them to Tom ve3tsa@rac.ca
This Month
Minutes of the last Meeting
Message from the President
The Digital Amateur: Building a Web Page by Brad VE3RHJ
HOW FAST IS ELECTRICITY? by J.N. APPLEBY VA3JNA
BLACK HILLS HAMS HANDLE DOUBLE WHAMMY
From the Mailbox
Field Day
This year, field day will be held on June 26th and 27th at the Georgian Yatch Club, 2475 3rd Ave West, Owen Sound.Talk-in on VE3OSR 146.94-. As usual, bring along what you need for your own comfort and a little something for the pot luck supper. If you have equipment like rigs, coax, antennas ,rope, extension cords, power bars or anything else you think we could use, please bring it out. Better to have a bit too much than not enough. See you there.
For a map click here.(210k)
MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING
Chris VA3MUM, Jim VA3CJM
Georgian Bay Amateur Radio Club Minutes of May 25th, 1999
Meeting was called to order by President Kim DXE at 1930. There were 17 members and 1 guest in attendance. The minutes of April 27th were distributed and accepted as printed. Motion by Joe JNA and seconded by Bob LKD. The Treasurer, Jim CJM reported on a bank balance of $2,723.62.
OLD BUSINESS
Three boats, at the yacht club, had their antenna coax replaced by Carl, Bernie, Jim & Chris. The club recovered $68.00 towards the cable costs. GBARC members will offer any other boats the opportunity to have their antenna systems checked on the Field Day weekend.
Carl has asked for any volunteers to help with Field Day setup, at the Georgian Yacht Club, to come Saturday morning to begin transmitting by 1:00 p.m. We also need operators for the weekend - June 26 & 27! Susan Webster will arrange to ask Roger's TV to cover some of the weekend.
Motion by Brad RHJ to accept the nomination committee report for the 1999 offices as follows:
President Kim DXE
Vice President Bernie BQM
Treasurer Jim CJM
Secretary Chris MUM
Auditor Dave DXO
Newsletter Editor Tom TSA
Program Director Jack TWK
Technical Director Joe JNA
Seconded by Aubrey TUQ. Carried.
Bernie BQM designed the winning QSL club card.
Aubrey TUQ is arranging a seminar on Lightening Protection probably be held off until the Fall.
NEW BUSINESS
Reminder Packet fees are now due to Gene IJD.
Group discussion on having sign up sheets at the field day to track interest in Fall courses. Either beginner or advanced.
Canada Day contest operators welcome at Styan's June 30th 8 p.m. through July 1st. Ivan VE3D0 will be transmitting in the Canada Day contest from Grassy Island, in the new territory of Nunavut with prefix VY0. His call is VY0O.
Show & Tell Dieter VA3DST brought in a home brew 1958 (ARRL Handbook) 20 Watt, 80 Meter transmitter and generator (motor). Carl VE3BY brought in a brand new YAESU FT-100 ultra-compact transceiver with a lightweight 12-volt power supply. Great stuff!
Susan Webster winner of the 50/50 draw.
Aubrey TUQ made the motion to terminate meeting. Carl BY seconded. Carried.
MESSAGE from the PRESIDENT
Kim VE3DXE
ve3dxe@rac.ca
Wow, can't believe how time goes by. Can you imagine that less than 2 weeks is "Field Day"!! Speaking of Field Day, still looking for volunteers for June 26 and 27 anyone interested in setting up and, or operating, let me know. Field Day will be held this year at the Yacht Club. A barbecue and "pot luck" will be held for club members on Saturday. Also we will be doing our annual antenna check for the Yacht Club Members.
Congratulation to Bernie VE3BQM!! Bernie won the QSL card contest, his creation will be GBARC's QSL card. His prize is that he gets to be the QSL manager hi hi. GBARC recieved a stack of QSL cards, mostly from the Canada Day contest. Lots of good contacts, I'll bring them to the meeting.
Also a big congratulations goes out to our new CW operators: Gary Bell VE3IOD- 5wpm, Jack Sinclair VA3WPJ-12wpm, Joe Appleby VA3JNA-12wpm, Bernie Monderie VE3BQM-12wpm, Deiter Shoepperle VA3DST-12wpm, and myself VE3DXE-12wpm. All that hard dedicated work really paid off. Way to go Guys!! Thanks to Carl VE3BY for starting the Morse Code class, it was very much appreciated.
Hope to see everyone at the meeting June 22 at 7:30 remember this is the last one until September.Have a wonderful summer. 73's Kim VE3DXE
The Digital Amateur: Building a Web Page (part 2)
by Brad Rodriguez, VE3RHJ
"The Digital Amateur" is a deliberate ambiguity. Does it mean using computers with amateur radio?
Or experimenting with digital electronics? Both! This and last month's article will tell how to use the Internet to publicize and share your amateur radio activities.
By now, you should have obtained a copy of Netscape 3 Gold, signed up for some space on a web host, created an extremely basic index.html file, and uploaded it to your host. Great! But it's just one page, and it doesn't lead anywhere. Probably you'll want to create several pages for all the nifty things you do. And probably you know some other Internet pages that are relevant to yours. You need to create links from your main page.
You've used web page links in your surfing. A link is a few words of text which are highlighted -- commonly underlined, and displayed in blue. When you click on the link with your mouse, your browser goes to a new web page. Now you can put links on your page, so that visitors can click on them and view other pages...either more of your pages, or someone else's pages.
Creating additional web pages
Creating additional web pages is exactly the same as creating your first page -- except when the time comes to save your page, you don't name it index.html, you give it a different name. Here's a refresher on the procedure:
Start Netscape 3 Gold. Click File/New Document/Blank. Type your headings and text. Click File/Save As... Navigate to your web page folder, such as C:\Webpages. Type a file name for your new page, like myshack.html. Click the Save button.
About step 6: you can use any file name you like, but it must end with .htm or .html . If you don't do this, your web page may not display correctly (or at all). It's a good idea to use a meaningful file name: myshack.html and qrptransmitter.html will be easier to remember than page1.html and page2.html. It's also a convention to use all lower-case letters. You can use upper-case letters -- like Myshack.html or even MYSHACK.HTML, but you and your visitors must always remember to type them exactly the same way! If you stay with lower-case, you never have to remember.
To illustrate this, I've typed both parts of this article as HTML files. Since the article is about building web pages, I've named the files webpage1.html and webpage2.html. (In this case, these are descriptive names.) Now, I have to link them to my main index.html page.
Linking additional pages to your main page
Here's how to use Netscape 3 Gold to edit an existing web page on your computer:
Start Netscape 3 Gold. Click File/Open File. Navigate to your web page folder. If you've been working with other pages, Open File may already be in the right folder. Click on the file name (like index.html), then click the Open button.
Presto! You're back in your main web page. Now you can type more text, and turn some of the text into links.
Remember that a link appears as highlighted text. So type something that describes the page you're linking to. For my article, I typed the text "Building a Web Page, Part 1." Click and drag the mouse to select the text you want to turn into a link. Then click Insert/Link. (If you prefer, you can click, instead, on the Make Link button on the bottom toolbar -- it's the button with a picture of a piece of chain. A link, get it?) A "Properties" window will open.
In the "Link to a page location or local file" box, type the name of the new web page file (in my example, webpage1.html). Be careful to type only the name of the file, not the full "path" (disk drive and directory). Then press Enter, or click the OK button. Now, you're back in your index page, but the "link text" is highlighted in blue and underlined.
That's it! You can repeat this process to link to as many additional pages as you'd like. Remember, each link requires two things: some identifying text (the "link text"), and a file name. Only the link text will actually appear on your web page. So make it descriptive! If necessary, you can add more description as "ordinary" text (not highlighted as part of the link). When you're done, remember to click File/Save to save your changes to disk.
Uploading your new pages
Now you have to copy your new files -- and the index.html file, since you've changed it -- to your web host. You can copy files one at a time, as you edit them, with File/Publish. But if you want to upload several files, there's an easier way:
Make sure you've saved all your web pages to disk. If you're not currently editing a page, start Netscape 3 Gold and use File/Open File to edit index.html (or any other web page in its folder). Dial up your Internet Service Provider (with Dial-up Networking, or whatever you use). In Netscape 3 Gold, click File/Publish. Check that the upload location, user name, and password are still set. They should be whatever you specified when you first uploaded index.html. The password will appear as a line of asterisks (*****). Near the top of the "Publish Files" window, click the button "All files in document's folder". Then click the OK button.
Step 6 tells Netscape to automatically copy all the files in your web page folder to your web host. This is why it's important to keep all your web pages -- and nothing else -- in one folder. With one click, you can upload them all!
Later, when you change these files, or add new files, you'll have to decide whether you want to upload them one at a time or all at once. It's never harmful to upload everything, even if only one or two of the files have changed. You'll just replace some files on the host with identical copies. But when you have a lot of files in your web folder, it can take quite a bit of time to send them all. When that happens, you may want to upload just the changed pages. You'll need to keep a list of the filenames that have been changed. After you click "All files in the document's folder," you'll see a list of filenames in the box underneath, highlighted (white letters in a blue bar). These are the files that will be uploaded. You can deselect any file by single-clicking on its filename with the mouse. (A second click will re-select the file.) When you have just the files you want, click the OK button.
Linking to other web pages on the Internet
You can create links from your page to any web page -- not just your own pages. To do this, you'll need the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the "target" web page. The URL is the thing that begins with http://; it's the complete Internet "address" of the web page. For example, http://ve3rhj.freeservers.com is the URL of my web page. Your web browser should tell you this when you're looking at a web page. (In Netscape, it's displayed in the "Location" bar, just below the Back/Forward/etc. toolbar.)
To link to someone else's web page, write some link text, select it, and click Insert/Link just as before. But now, instead of typing a file name, type the complete URL. You must type everything, even the http://, and you must type it exactly, including any upper-case characters and any funny symbols. (If you're an experienced Windows user, you can often use Cut and Paste to copy a URL from your web browser or email program.) Then click OK.
Let's say you want a link from your page to the GBARC page. Type "Georgian Bay Amateur Radio Club", then click and drag to select this text. Click Insert/Link. Type http://greynet.net/~gbarc in the "Link to a page location or local file" box (the funny character before "gbarc" is a tilde, which should be in some obscure corner of your keyboard.) Then click OK. That's it!
After you upload your pages to the web host, it's a good idea to check your links. Use your web browser to look at your web page, and click on all the links to make sure they work. If they don't, it's usually because you made a mistake when typing the URL.
Removing a link
Sometimes, when you start typing text after a link, Netscape 3 Gold will assume that the new text is part of the link. As you type, it will appear in blue and underlined. Go ahead and type. When you're done, click and drag to select the new text -- the text you don't want in blue -- click Insert/Link, and then click the "Remove Link" button. This will change the selected text back to normal (black).
Changing the appearance of your text
You can click-and-drag to select a block of text, and then use the following buttons on the second toolbar to change its format. (Move the mouse pointer onto a tool button, and leave it there, to see the full name of that button pop up.)
"Paragraph Style" applies to the entire paragraph. You'll most often use Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3. "Bullet List" changes several lines of text to a list with bullets (like this one). Click again to turn this off (revert to normal paragraphs). "Numbered List" changes several lines of text to a numbered list (like the lists above). You'll see # symbols while you're editing. When you view the page with the browser, the entries in the list will be numbered. Click again to turn this off (revert to normal paragraphs). "Decrease Indent" removes one level of indenting from the selected lines. "Increase Indent" indents the selected lines one level. Press again for more indenting. Use "Decrease Indent" to remove the indenting. "Align Left" causes the selected lines to be aligned along the left margin. This is the most common appearance for text (the same as you get with a typewriter). "Center" centers the selected lines on the page. This is useful for titles and headings. "Align Right" causes the selected lines to be aligned along the right margin. This is mostly for special effects.
The first seven buttons on the third toolbar control the appearance of characters (the font). Select some text, and you can do the following:
"Decrease Font Size" makes the characters one size smaller. Don't overuse this or the characters may become unreadable. "Increase Font Size" makes the characters one size larger. Don't overuse this either; a web page with really big letters is like shouting (and just as polite). "Font Size" is most useful to reset the font size to "+0" (normal). "Bold" makes the characters bold face. "Italic" makes the characters italic. "Fixed Width" changes to a font where all the characters have the same width. This is sometimes useful when you are presenting text which is spaced out in columns. "Font Color" lets you change the color of the text. Try to avoid the colors that have special meanings (like blue or purple, both of which indicate a link to another web page!)
The best way to learn about these effects is to select a block of text, and try them!
Next time
In the next installment I'll describe how to add images (pictures) to your web page. I'll also describe how to add document information to help search engines find your page.
HOW FAST IS ELECTRICITY?
Joe N. APPLEBY. VA3JNA
From The Editor: Joe's article contains numbers which are to a power. Since this text based page has trouble representing numbers to powers please use the following convention. 1023 is what I am using to represent 10 to the power of 23 etc.
It would be most interesting to hear the answers to this question from a group of radio amateurs. A friend of mine who is a qualified electrical engineer, expressed surprise that anyone would think other than the 'Speed of Light' unfortunately the question is as vague as 'how Long is a Piece of String'? So we will have to try and define what we mean by electricity!
Let us stick to the simple broad picture which depicts all matter as being made up of "Atoms", each atom having at its centre a nucleus which is positively charged, and with negative electrons circulating around it somewhat like planets around the sun, the number of such electrons depending upon the element concerned, one for hydrogen six for carbon, 29 for copper and so on.
The positive charges of the nucleus is normally cancelled by the negative charge of the electrons, but if for some reason one or more electrons become detached, what is left has a positive balance and the atoms is said to be ionized or just an ion. A current of electricity form A to B, then, consists of electrons moving from A to B or positive ions moving from B to A, or both. If the current is flowing in a solid material, the ions are the fixed material itself, so it can't move, and the current consists wholly of electrons. Our simple picture also shows insulators to be materials that have atoms with the electrons firmly attached so no current can flow. By contrast metals have electrons that move freely, and do so even without any organized inducement. This random movement is called noise and increases with temperature.
Let us now turn from random movement to organized movement, which is what is normally considered an electric current. If some 'Agent' removes electrons from one end of a wire that end becomes positively charged this offers an attraction to the neighbouring electrons which start moving toward it, in doing so they leave behind a positive charged which attracts electrons immediately behind, and so on, until electrons throughout the length of the wire are on the move towards the end from which the first electrons were removed. This would soon create a positive charge at the far end, which would offer a counter attraction that would tend to bring the flow to a stop.
But if the agent that removed the electrons from the start end were somehow to convey them to the other end of the wire, to replace the gaps left by the retreating column, the movement 'The electric current' can be kept going until the agent is removed. The 'Agent' is what we call an EMF. If we make one end of the wire positive and the other negative this creates a difference of potential between the two ends, and if for example, this P.D. is 5 volts, and the length of the wire 10 meters, the wire and all its electrons would be in an electric field of 0.5 volts/meters, the nature of electrons in an electric field is to move (if they can) through it positive wards. In metals they can move, but are greatly hindered by the vast numbers of molecules, with which they keep colliding.... in other words, even a metal has resistance. Suppose our wire has a total resistance of 1 ohm, this gives us a current of 5 amps the ampere is equal to 6.25xl018 electrons per second so the total number electrons flowing is five times that number or 31.2x1018 electrons per second.
To calculate the speed of electrons we must know two things, the number of electrons per second and the total number of electrons in a given amount of metal. For example the speed at which troops would have to move in order to pass a fixed point at the rate of 10 per second would obviously be much greater if they were marching m single file, than if they were marching 20 abreast.
Books on physics give the number of free electrons in one cubic centimeter of copper to be 1023. Since our copper wire has a resistance of 0.1 OHM per meter it must be 26 SWG whose cross sectional area is 0.00164 square cms - so the number of free electrons in each centimeter length is about 1.6x1020.
This is five times the number that pass every second when current is 5 amperes so that speed must be about 0.2cms per sec. In power stations where thousands of amps flow they use much thicker conductors so electron speeds are significantly less. So where comes the notion of light speeds?
If you connect a source of EMF to a pair of wires, electrons start moving in those wires. We have seen that (according to the data supplied by physicists) this movement is incredibly slow, but this does not apply to the speed at which the start of the movement is passed along. One microsecond after 'switching on' electrons nearly 300 meters along the wires are starting to move, assuming the wires are insulated entirely by air, the 'start' or 'signal' is traveling at nearly light speed. Solid insulating material increases capacitance without any corresponding increase of inductance so the speed is reduced. Signals traveling along a coaxial cable for example may travel at over half the speed of light.
If this is hard to grasp a mechanical analogy may help. Imagine a metal tube 20 foot long with a bore of 1/2" if you fill this tube with ball bearings 1/2" in diameter. Then force a ball in at one end a ball immediately falls out of the other end. The ball bearing has actually only moved its own diameter but the effect is seen as if the ball traveled instantly down the tube and fell out the other end, in other words the movement was passed on almost instantly although the ball only moved a very short distance.
SO HOW FAST IS ELECTRICITY?
NOW YOU KNOW.
.J.N APPLEBY. VA3JNA.
BLACK HILLS HAMS HANDLE DOUBLE WHAMMY
Every now and then someone tells me that, with cell phones so widespread,
ham radio and ARES are no longer important for emergency communications.
Then I read something like the following (from the American Radio Relay
League's "ARRL Letter" of 11 Jun 99).
--- begin quoted text ---
BLACK HILLS HAMS HANDLE DOUBLE WHAMMY
Friday, June 4, was not a good day in the Northern Black Hills region of
South Dakota. For starters, sometime before noon a critical fiber optic link
was severed as a result of a construction mishap. That took out telephone
service--including 911 and cellular--for all of two counties and part of a
third. The outage also prompted a call for communications assistance to area
amateurs from the Red Cross. The City of Lead Emergency Operations Center,
home of the Northern Hills Amateur Radio Club's KC0BXH, remained fully
activated during the entire 19-hour telephone blackout. Hams handled health
and welfare traffic, emergency dispatching and coordination, among other traffic.
"In recent years there has been an over-reliance on hard-wired communication
systems and cell phones," Lead's Certified Emergency Manager Jerome Harvey,
N0ZBR, told the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper. Area hams, Harvey said, "are
the 'go-to' folks when all the latest technology bites the dust."
Tim Eggers of the City of Lead Fire Department said the telephone outage
affected all of Lawrence and Pennington counties and part of Meade County.
As if that weren't enough for one day, severe storms led to activation of a
SKYWARN net that afternoon. Weather spotters provided quick information
about threats to the Lead-Deadwood area. And, later that same day, a tornado
struck the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation-Oglala, disrupting telephone
service there for an extended period. The storm left one person dead and
many injured, in addition to damaging homes. Hams, under the leadership of
ARES volunteer Don Sanders, W0KTL, established a base station at Red Cross
headquarters in Pine Ridge and helped to coordinate the Red Cross emergency
rescue and response effort.
"Basically, they didn't have much of any communication there at all,"
Sanders said. Hams accompanied Red Cross workers to visit homes in the
sparsely populated area and report to Red Cross Headquarters on what they
found. Sanders said two teams of three hams spent two days in Oglala. Some
local hams continue to support the effort.
The response team sent by ARES to assist in Oglala, included personnel
cross-trained in Amateur Radio communication, severe weather operations,
CPR, first aid, and disaster operations. Physician William Schnurr, KI0OZ,
reportedly found himself in the middle of trying to provide critical medical
care to those injured in Oglala and using his radio skills to attempt to
coordinate ambulance response to the disaster area.
Three repeaters owned by the Black Hills Amateur Radio Club, W0BLK, were
among those pressed into emergency service for the occasion. All operation
took place on VHF.
ARES member Jamie Tollefson, N0PFS, told the Pioneer that heavy rains
earlier in the week contributed to the problems for hams involved in
emergency response and damage assessment activities following the tornadoes
in Oglala. "They had six inches of rain in the last two days, so just
getting around is very difficult as much of the damage took place in very
rural areas," Tollefson told reporter Scott Randolph. "A lot of the roads
are either washed out or barely passable due to the precipitation."
Operating from the Lead EOC, ARES tied information together from around the
Northern Hills area mitigating the lack of phone communication. In all, 15
hams participated in the emergency response. ARES personnel logged
approximately 190 duty hours--an estimated contribution to the local
community of just under $50,000 in equipment and manpower costs.
"It all kinda came off at one time," Sanders said. "We were pretty
busy."--from Northern Hills ARC reports and a Black Hills Pioneer article by
Scott Randolph, used with permission
--- end quoted text ---
Brad Rodriguez, VE3RHJ................. email ve3rhj@rac.ca
From The Mailbox
THE RADIO H.F. INTERNET NEWSLETTER
VOLUME 1 NUMBER 005 JUNE 1999
http://www.anarc.org/cidx/radiohf/index.html
[from the ARRL Letter]
JPS exits Amateur Radio market
JPS Communications Inc of Raleigh, North Carolina, has announced it plans to leave the ham radio equipment market by the end of 1999. The company will cease manufacture and sales of all of its Amateur Radio products, including the popular NIR-12 DSP box and ANC-4 noiser canceller. JPS says it plans to focus its future efforts on its land mobile and HF product lines. JPS says ham product sales have fallen to a level where manufacturing and selling them is no longer viable for the company. JPS says it will continue to offer product service and support. It's also offering a last-time opportunity to buy either the NIR-12 and ANC-4 and says it will make the designs of these two products available at "reasonable cost" to an organization that might want to continue manufacturing them.
For more information, visit http://www.jps.com; jps@jps.com
Zone 2 Expedition Web Page
Information about this October's "Zone 2" epedition, a contest DXpeditionr for the 1999 CQ Worldwide SSB DX contest, is now available at the web site
http://ve3rhj.freeservers.com/zone2.html
73, Brad
THE BRUCE AMATEUR RADIO CLUB NEWSLETTER FOR
*** May 1999 ***
IS NOW POSTED 73 DE JIM COVERLEY VE3OVV
http://www.brucearc.on.ca
W1AW Code Practice on the Web
: Now you can access W1AW Morse code practice via ARRLWeb using RealAudio files. Visit http://www.arrl.org/w1aw/morse.html . A single click on a file name starts the practice. You'll need RealAudio (available free at http://www.real.com) to listen to these files. The practice files include the same text used for W1AW's regular code practice transmissions. The files are updated after W1AW broadcasts them. The Standard method is used for code speeds above 18 WPM. For code speeds below 18 WPM, Farnsworth method is used. The Web Morse practice follows the same format used by W1AW code practice transmissions. The practice text comes from QST.--Joe Carcia, NJ1Q
Brad Rodriguez, VE3RHJ
Brantford ARC Hamfest '99
at the Burford Fairgrounds, 15 km West of Brantford on Highway #53.
Saturday, 14th August, 1999.
Doors open to public at 9:00 a.m. Vendors gate opens at 7:30 a.m.
Admission $5.00 (Children under 12 free).
Two buildings of treasures * Acres of free parking.
Major Door Prize.
Talk-in on VE3TCR 147.150. +
Tables are $8.00 each plus admission.
Tailgaters only $4.00 plus admission.
Thank you and 73
Bob McKellar VA3BIK
Hamfest Co-Chairperson
va3bik@rac.ca
Portable Lightplants and Generators.
Here is a good site if you want to make your own electricity.
Just a few interesting links for your perusal.
