Radio Round-up
MAJOR SERVER UPGRADE ON VOACAP ONLINE : Jari Perkiömäki OH6BG reports: “A few weeks ago, VOACAP Online for Ham Radio, was moved to a new web platform, and this change forced me to re-factor the majority of the code in the back-end. I have now completed this task, and am continuously fine-tuning it, but I am pleased to inform that the coverage area maps and pointto-point prediction graphs are now much cleaner and neater than before, using a different mapping library. In addition, most of the codebase has been optimised and hopefully is more robust than ever. Especially the Propagation Planner, the propagation planning tool for HF contests (e.g. CQWW) & DXpeditions, should now be faster and also, as a bonus, offers the predicted values as CSV files for a more detailed analysis. All the same changes have also been implemented on the site of the VOACAP DX Charts”.
VOACAP Online for Ham Radio is a free HF propagation prediction service for the global ham community, running for more than ten years now, with integrations to the DX Summit and Club Log sites, for example. No registration required, no tracking on the site by Google Analytics, no ads on the pages, and no subscription fee for the service. Follow and subscribe to the latest VOACAP developments on Twitter. www.voacap.com/hf www.voacap.com/dx https://twitter.com/VOACAP
RADIO AMATEUR OLD TIMERS’ ASSOCIATION: The winter 2020 of RAOTA’s quarterly magazine ( OTNews) will be arriving on members’ doorsteps in the near future. As usual the content covers a wide range. Accounts of how members discovered the hobby are a regular feature, as are aerial experiments & suggestions for ‘postage stamp’ gardens. G4JCP submitted an interesting article indicating that reflected power does not only happen at RF, it is present at DC too, with G3MCK weighing into the debate about whether reflected power is real, from a chemist’s viewpoint. G0DHZ re-purposes a couple of old rheostats as variable inductors for ATUs and G4OWY outlines some of the unexpected ways he has come across antique QSL cards.
The Radio Amateur Old Timers’ Association (RAOTA) aims to maintain the traditions and spirit of amateur radio. Although they are passionately interested in the history and traditions of amateur radio, and are fortunate that they can get a lot of this first-hand from their members, they are equally passionate about the future of our hobby. One of the magazine covers demonstrates this quite succinctly, having a cover showing a picture of communications in WW1 next to one of a DDS synthesiser kit. An article about each is contained in that issue.