Ham Radio is kind of hard to explain to people who have had no exposure to it, I think. They tend to lump it all in to one narrow (and not entirely accurate) analogy. In fact, it’s a very broad hobby with all sorts of niche interests. From working orbital stations, to morse code enthusiasts; from slow-scan television to digital radio networks; from casual voice chats with other licensed stations all over the world, to the fast and furious exchanges of contesting … it’s all very interesting, it’s all very different, and its all ham radio.

One facet of ham radio that I find to be fun is working special event stations.

Special event stations may operate via voice, or morse code, or digital/computer modes, etc, but in each case they are only on the air at special dates and times. This means only a limited number of stations will be able to work the special event station during the event. Other stations the world over go on the hunt for these rarer ’special event’ stations in hopes of making contact.

It’s a lot of fun and pretty rewarding to work at getting such a contact and finally managing to log the rare station in your logbook. There’s often even a special reward in it for you if you mange the task … a special QSL card or certificate to commemorate the contact.

It’s also a lot of fun to BE the special event station … to actually operate AS the special event station that everyone else wants to log a contact with.

Indianapolis is blessed with both a number of special events and an active and friendly ham radio community. Thanks to each, I’ve had the great opportunity (and privilege) to work as an operator for the W9IMS special event Amateur Radio station here in Indianapolis.

W9IMS is only on the air for a small number of days each year – surrounding each of the three big races here in Indianapolis: the Indy 500, the Brickyard 400, and the MotoGP. Indianapolis area licensed Amateur Radio Operators (“Hams”) like myself gather and operate the W9IMS station during these special events, and other hams all over the world tune in and attempt to contact W9IMS. Some of those wishing to make contact with W9IMS are race fans, some are just hunting for special event stations, and some just want to take part in all the fun. When a station contacts W9IMS they qualify for a special QSL card. There’s a unique card for each of the races that W9IMS is on the air for, and if a station manages to contact W9IMS for ALL THREE races in a given year there’s a special certificate they can receive.

It’s all a whole lot of fun.

Last weekend while operating the W9IMS “Brickyard 400″ special event, I managed to take a few recordings and decided I’d toss together a quick video to share a bit of that experience here. (Thanks to N9GSU for the still shots)

The voice operator of W9IMS you hear in this video is me (N9LTQ), and the morse code operator you hear is Pat (N2DKB).

Stations heard in this video: K0IMI, W9RCK, W3SO, N0JP, KA1SU, N3DLS

W9IMS Operators heard in this video: N9LTQ (40m SSB), N2DKB (80m CW)

W9IMS Operators seen in this video: WS9H, KC9SPT, N9GSU, N2DKB, K9TLA, W9CSX, W9ILF, K9RU, AB9QB, KC9RZI, N9LTQ, WY9T, W9SU

• CQ = Radio shorthand for “Calling any station” – inviting any station to respond.
• “40“ (as in “CQ40″) or “40 meters” = The frequency ‘band’ in which I was operating.
• W9IMS = The callsign of the station I was operating.
• “Whisky Nine Indianapolis Motor Speedway” = A phonetic spelling of the station callsign (W9IMS). Radio contacts are often choppy, usually have some noise on top of them, and are known to fade in and out. You never know how well or how poorly you’re being received at any given moment … so giving phonetic spellings greatly assists receiving operators.
• 73 = Radio shorthand for “best wishes”.
• QRZ = Radio shorthand for “What station is calling?” – in the context used here, it’s an invitation for any additional stations who wish to contact me to call in now. (pronounced “Q-R-Zed”)
• QSL = Radio shorthand for “Do you copy me?” or “I copy you”. This is essentially “roger” or “acknowledged”
• “Delta Alpha Victor Echo” = Phonetic spelling of my name “Dave”.
• “5-5″, “5-6″, “5-9″, etc = These are signal reports in RST Format. “5-9″ is essentially a perfect reading.
• “+10” = A very strong signal report indicating reception at 10db over a 5-9 rating.
• “+20” = An extremely strong signal report indicating reception at 20db over a 5-9 rating.
• “30 over” = An extremely strong signal report indicating reception at 30db over a 5-9 rating.
• “fine business” = A commonly used phrase among ham radio operators that means “very good”.
• “hi hi” = A commonly used phrase among ham radio operators that indicates a joke. It’s essentially the radio slang version of a smilie face.

Steve Jobs recently replied to an email from a customer about their concerns over the antenna issue with the new iPhone 4. (If you’ve not seen the issues yet, check out: link 1, link 2.) He said “Non issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.”

I’d like to offer this open letter response to that reply (which he certainly knew would be all over the internet once it was received).

Mr. Jobs,

> “Non issue”

It’s a PHONE which will, if you pick it up, drop the call! That’s an issue. Pretty big issue. (NOT just lose bars but keep working … drop the call. – Gigantic issue.)

> “Just avoid holding it in that way.”

This coming from the champion of “technology should be intuitive, and just work”!? Why do you think we loved the previous iPhones?

The statement that essentially says “all phones suffer this sort of issue” that apple is putting out is disingenuous and you know it. I can hold my 3GS naturally and it does NOT go to “no service”. You know perfectly well this issue isn’t just something that happens with all phones. It doesn’t – not even previous models of iPhones with the same OS standing in the same location. This problem is unique to the iPhone4 HARDWARE. My 3GS NEVER does this (which has the exact same software version) regardless of how I hold it.

But yet, you tell us that for this version of the iPhone to be able to make calls or access wifi (for more than a few seconds), we can’t hold it in the most natural and intuitive way? The way I can with any other cell phone out there (even any other version of iPhone). The way I (and just about everyone else) has always held a phone since … ever? The same way you held it on stage at the media event? (you knew there’d be photos of you holding it right?) … One wonders if it was really the bloggers and their wifi that caused you the networking issues you suffered on stage.

I dunno, Steve … this is all sounds like textbook “issue” to me.

I’m certainly not going to be upgrading to a new version of the iPhone … that can’t make calls if I so much as HOLD IT!

- Dave

I’m thinking that this weekend I’m going to re-do my friends and followers list on twitter … and perhaps protect my feed.

First of all there’s a bit of noise … followers/friends that I cannot for the life of me remember how/why we know each other. Secondly I have some followers who, while I like them very much, I may not want following my status day to day. Lastly (and most importantly), the previous point has made me consider that there may be a small number of people I follow that for whatever reason I have now mentally put into the “didn’t really have a fair opt-in choice” as to my following them.

So, while I may unfollow some accounts I’m not interested in … be aware that If I unfollow you, this may not be the reason. I may simply have decided that you deserve a new ‘opt-in’ choice around me following your status day to day.

If I remove you as a follower please don’t take this personally and simply re-follow me if you are interested or shoot me a “WTF” email and I’ll (probably) re-add/un-block you.

Most importantly, if I stop following you – please don’t take this personally either – shoot me a “WTF” email and I’ll re-follow. And lastly, If I do un-follow you and then later send a new follow request – you are free to decline/ignore it.

Anyway, I may or may not get this done this weekend, but its a safe bet I’ll be doing some list pruning in the future. If these actions leaving you thinking “WTF”, just shoot me an email and it’ll all be made well again.

Icom Booth, originally uploaded by Jovan Peric.

I found this photo on Flickr (I dont know the photographer), which includes me at the icom booth at the 2010 Dayton Hamvention.

Other than a few blurry cell phone camera shots, I neglected to take any photos at all while there … so it’s nice to see that there’s some proof I attended out there somewhere.

I was talking with a fellow ham today (I’m not sure how he feels about being named in random blog posts so I wont mention his callsign, but trust me he’s real ), and we were discussing emergency communications on behalf of other stations.

I found the following video on YouTube that I thought he might like. It’s a great old 1940’s news reel style film about Short Wave Radio operators (aka “hams”). The stories told within are presumably true of course … but done in that awesome cheesiness that was 1940-ish news reels.

Well I did it, i broke down (on day one) and got an iPad. I’ve not had a whole lot of time with it yet, and haven’t been been able to install the two apps I most looked forward to (Stanza and Pagaes), but still I have to admit that I already love it.

I’m writing this post on my iPad as a matter of fact (while my desktop iTunes finally gets the latest updates applied). Blogging from my iPhone never really worked for me despite there being ‘an app for that’. Typing on the iPad however is indeed very nice. In landscape mode the keyboard is very very usable. I can totally see myself using this to blog, and work on longer documents.

This was one of the main reasons I wanted to go with the iPad over other readers I was considering. (I was already in the ereader market, but having one that could also let me work on word docs and blog etc was a killer feature for me)

Oooh my Mac is ready to sync up with the iPad and send my ebooks over to it – gotta run. I’ll blog more about this later.

Wordpess released today their new native app for the iPhone!

It let’s you publish new posts and manage existing posts of your wordpress blog (both wordpress.com as well as self hosted blogs). It looks pretty good, and I’m actually using it now to create this post. Having an easy to use way to blog in my pocket may actually get me to blog more often (mobile safari is great but trying to use the wordpress admin pages in it is just too painful IMHO).

Naturally you can post photos you have taken on your iPhone (or that you have syncd to your iPhone) so that makes mobile photoblogging pretty nice (now of there were just an official flickr app for the iPhone).

Check it out at: http://iphone.wordpress.org

Bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers often live and die by their syndication feeds. Syndication feeds such as RSS feeds are just URLs where the recently posted entries/episodes are listed. “Subscribers” enter these URLs into applications like Google Reader, Bloglines, or iTunes in order to get all the latest and greatest content out there without having to actually browse to scores of websites and download each manually.

So, its a good idea for publishers to make sure their Syndication Feed URL is easy to find on their website.

Sometimes a publisher gets lucky enough to have more than himself and his best friend as a subscriber, and watches with glee as he gets more and more and more subscribers over time.

But what happens if the publisher wants to start using a different blogging software, or changes some 3rd party services, or perhaps even just starts using a different set of core-plug-ins and in doing so ends up changing his syndication feed URLs? Does he lose all of those original subscribers? Do all of his original subscribers have to unsubscribe from the old URL and then resubscribe to the new one?

Thankfully, no. With a little planning the publisher can make sure he never has to lose or inconvenience a subscriber just because his source syndication feed URL has changed.

I was recently asked how a publisher might move subscribers from one subscription feed to another without actually asking them to unsubscribe from one URL and then resubscribe at another. The following are my tips on how to set up “publisher friendly” feed URLs. By “publisher friendly” I mean the publisher is now free to do whatever he wants with his blogging software or source feed …. secure in the knowledge he wont lose or inconvenience his subscribers.

This post is a bit long and may be a bit scary, but don’t worry … there are only six steps. I’ve tried to include alot of explanation behind the steps so that you can really understand what is happening, but don’t let the added words here scare you away …. it’s pretty simple.

1. Give your subscribers a feed URL that never changes – no matter what you do on the back-end of your site.
2. Move any existing subscribers over to this “permanent” URL, transparently – no inconvenience to your subscribers.

To accomplish the first goal you have two choices.

1. Use a service like feedburner and just publish the feedburner URL.
2. Create a URL at your own domain such as http://mydomain.com/feed

Option 1 is easier because it doesn’t require that you have the ability to edit your .htaccess file, but it does require you always use feedburner. (i.e. you can’t later switch services without having to readdress this issue again) …. So if you have the ability to edit your .htaccess file, option 2 is ideal. Lets assume you want to use option 2.

Step 1) Find your BLOG-GENERATED FEED URL.

Step 2) Decide if you want to use feedburner (or similar service), and if so use the BLOG-GENERATED FEED URL when creating the FEEDBURNER URL.

NOTE: From now on, when I mention “SOURCE FEED” I mean either a) the FEEDBURNER URL (if you are using feedburner or a similar service) or b) your BLOG-GENERATED FEED URL (if you aren’t using Feedburner or a similar service).

So with that in mind, lets assume for the sake of these instructions that your SOURCE FEED is http://feeds.feedburner.com/MYSOURCEFEED (Be sure to replace this URL with your actual SOURCE FEED URL in any of the instructions below)

Step 3) Now lets pick the FEED URL that you will actually publish to your visitors/subscribers. Pick a URL at your own domain that doesn’t already exist. This is the URL you will publish as your FEED URL, and its only purpose is to redirect (behind the scenes) subscribers to the SOURCE FEED where all the data actually is. Lets assume the FEED URL you chose is http://www.mydomain.com/feed. (It’s the /feed portion that we want our server to redirect to the SOURCE FEED, and we’ll use that portion in our examples/code below.)

(Has Step 3 confused you? Check out this clarification of Step 3)

Goal #1: Give your subscribers a feed URL that never changes.

Step 4) Now all you have to do in order to accomplish Goal #1 is redirect your FEED URL to your SOURCE FEED. The advantage to doing this is that if the location of your SOURCE FEED ever changes, you can just update the redirect, and your subscribers are none-the-wiser. To accomplish the redirect, you’ll need to edit the .htaccess file for your website. (If you’re having problems finding the .htaccess file, try a different FTP / File manager program – the .htaccess may be ‘invisible’ in the listing your application provides)

Add the following lines to your .htaccess file (above any other redirect rules or <IfModule> blocks that are already in the file):

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^feed/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/MYSOURCEFEED [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

Goal #1 is now accomplished!

That was easy wasn’t it!? You can now send any new subscribers to your newly created FEED URL (http://www.mydomain.com/feed) and they will actually be subscribing to your SOURCE FEED (http://feeds.feedburner.com/MYSOURCEFEED). As described before, you can alter the redirect at anytime in the future should your SOURCE FEED URL change … and your subscribers will automatically move with you. Nice.

Goal #2: Moving existing subscribers from an old feed URL to the new one you just set up.

Step 5) First things first, determine what your OLD FEED URL is. Lets suppose it was something like http://mydomain.com/archives/feed.xml. Notice it’s the “archives/feed.xml” part of the OLD FEED URL that defines the file we want to redirect … so lets call this last part the OLD FEED PATH. We’ll only need to reference the OLD FEED PATH (archives/feed.xml) in the .htaccess rule we’re about to write.

Step 6) Now, lets provide a redirect for your OLD FEED to your new FEED URL. We do this just like we did with the last redirect we wrote – by modifying the .htaccess file.

We’re going to use a slightly modified rewrite rule this time however because we want this redirect to report a “permanent” redirect so that smart feed readers will automatically move over to the new url from now on (don’t worry the dumb feed readers will just keep asking for the old one and just keep getting redirected to the new one each time).

To accomplish this redirect, add the following line to the code you just added to the .htaccess file – just above the </IfModule> line.

RewriteRule ^archives/feed.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]

Done and Done! Goals 1 and 2 have now been accomplished.

The overall changes to your .htaccess file should look like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^feed/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/MYSOURCEFEED [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/feed.xml$ /feed [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

And you’ll want to put these lines above any other rewrite rules or <IfModule> blocks you already have in the .htaccess file.

• Your old/existing subscribers will be seamlessly redirected to your new FEED URL (http://mydomain.com/feed) the next time they request the OLD FEED URL (http://mydomain.com/archives/feed.xml)
• New subscribers will start off requesting your new FEED URL (http://mydomain.com/feed)
• So, now ALL of them are asking for your new FEED URL (http://mydomain.com/feed) … which is redirected to your SOURCE FEED

Now, you can change just about anything you like. You can change the source of feedburner, or even drop feedburner all together in the future and your subscribers never have to change their FEED URL. You just simply alter the redirection in your .htaccess file to what you want – and your users wont know the difference.

As an added bonus, you’ve just cheaply and easily ‘branded’ your feed URL with your domain name (instead of feedburners).

Extra Credit:
For extra credit you may want to update your blogs theme or styles to publish your new FEED URL both in the content of your pages as well as in the auto-discovery links in the page headers.

Click image to play Video, or choose a format via links below.

Formats available: Flash Video (.flv) Quicktime/iPod (.mp4)

I started to write a comment to Colin Devroe’s post “Giving into community pressure” and while I was writing said comment I realized two things. 1) Man I should just blog about this, and 2) No, seriously, I really SHOULD just blog about this and send him a pingback as a comment. So here it is …

In Colin’s post he points out how often we seem to jump on a bandwagon for a given web site or service not because it’s the best one out there, or even just because it’s our inexplicable favorite … but rather just because that site or service is where it seems everyone else is going.

I’m somewhere in the middle.

In some ways I do tend to use what “everyone else” is using. Twitter and facebook for exmaple. There are alternatives to each. I use these because they are the ones that everyone else is using.

However in other areas I laugh in the face of convention. I’ve been videoblogging since before YouTube was … YouTube (not that you could tell recently). Despite YouTube coming on the scene and the great exposure it can offer, I don’t plan on using it routinely anytime soon. Granted I don’t really care about exposure, but mainly I avoid YouTube because I’m geekish enough that I want far more control over my presentation, alternate formats, syndication feeds, etc than most walled gardens like YouTube allow for. Also I like the terms and conditions at Blip.tv way more than I do the ones at YouTube. So in this case, despite it being one of those “everybody else in the world is using it” sort of things, I’ll stubbornly post and syndicate from my own site thank you very much.

Honestly, I’m also rather fatigued of constantly trying to get in on the next big thing that may not even be any better at all than the things we’re using today. I dislike ning (even though it’s cool) because I’m sick and freaking tired of signing up for yet another social network. Ning makes this fairly painless I guess, but thats assuming you want the same profile info etc. I may hire someone to shoot me if I have to sign up for one more freakin social network.

This all reminds me of the great IM wars … really preferring service A, but trying to get all your buddies on the same contact list while trying to make sure you are signed into service B often enough to be available to someone who wasn’t on service A … UHG. In the end, we all started using clients that tried to hack together all of them into one place even though such clients had half (or fewer) of the features which made us prefer service A in the first place.

Maybe the interwebs move too fast sometimes. I think that’s the bottom line: there are too many new things every single day to constantly be jumping camps … so, some services (like Pownce) don’t get the use/credit they deserve because … well dang it we just don’t want to reinvent this wheel yet … we just got here. Colin points out that being first is a huge advantage and he’s right … the later the entry the better the service will have to be to convince me to switch.

Through all of this, I’ve become a big fan of the idea that we can and should create distributed social networks and services that are open an cross-compatible. There’s alot of work to be done on that front, but it has already begun (check out http://diso-project.org/ ). It’s one of the reasons I liked Colin’s “The-Diet” page so much – it basically formed up a simple and loose distributed social network.

Someday I’ll be able to enter into my single authorative profile (openID maybe?) my standard profile/avatar info as well as things like:

• My Friends/Buddies are: <url to FOAF/XFN info here>
• My photos feed is: <flikr url here> (or maybe picasa if I use that instead)
• My Updates feed is: <twitter url here> (or maybe pownce if I use that instead)
• My blog feed is: <rss feed here>
• My IM service is: <service>/<screenname>
• etc etc etc etc etc

Social networks could be distributed and dynamically updated. Imagine: you signup at SocialNetwork-A and it automatically gets your buddie info from your authorative profile and knows that I’m one of your friends. (We are friends, right?) It could then check my friends info the same way it checked yours to confirm that I count you as a friend as well. SocialNetwork-A could include for you in your social network view things like my twitter updates, my photo feeds, my blog updates, etc all without my having to enter all that info AGAIN into YET ANOTHER social network. I could do the same for you at SocialNetwork-B. We could chit-chat accross networks via blogs/posts/tags/feeds etc (if you dont have a blog then your socialNetwork-A can provide that feed) … ah it would be so wonderful.

Maybe it sounds too geeky and confusing, but trust me it could be done in a way that is very simple and transparent to the non-geek-user. I guess it will depend on someone figuring out a way to make such a system profitable.

I long for the day I can have one profile and list of services that others can consume without my having to redo it all 150 times every 6 months.

• I use twitter because that’s where everyone else is.
• I don’t use pownce (but I do have an account) because I don’t want to have to do ad-hoc spontaneous updates at two places.
• I use gtalk becuase its awesome, not littered with adds and plugins, and is open.
• I use YahooIM because I have a huge list of contacts that use the service.
• I use MSN because my xBox360 signs me into it.
• I use AIM only because I can now do so through gtalk.
• I use facebook because the dang thing wont stop spamming me with vampire bites and cocktails.
• I use flickr because it both rocks and is where everyone is.
• I use blip.tv because they allow me far more granual control over how/when/where my work is presented, distributed, and discussed than any other service I’ve tried.
• I dont use YouTube because I want/need a video hoster that allows for multiple file formats.
• I use MeFeedia because I can watch sources from all over the net at one site.
• I don’t use GoogleVideo because it sucks.
• I use Seesmic … well I don’t really use it actually, but I do have an account, and look forward to where the service might go.
• I use ning … as rarely as possible.
• … there are others … oh, there are others …