RSGB Web Revamp

As part of its now long-running efforts to modernise and govern itself properly, the RSGB has now got a new web front page, beta style.

Fair play, they've got one bit right: limiting the choices on offer to just three; it's important not to overload people hitting the page for the first time yet getting them sufficiently interested to find out more.  I think they've hit the mark with this, so well done.

But things fall apart quickly from here on in.  I clicked on the bit where I might be slightly interested in becoming a radio amateur but have confused ideas about what it's all about.

I dunno.  A nice shot like this might attract me to amateur radio.  Gets me outdoors, type of thing...

What do I get?  Text.  Lots of it.  I'm afraid it's an instant turn off.  There are no images of exciting equipment, happy operators or anything else.  It's a big disappointment, frankly.

Erm, no.  Not that kind of image.

It needs more work, and plenty of it.  Urgently.  And the current lack of interest amongst the web page content is probably not down to poor web creators; it's much more likely them doing what they're told to, which is the wrong thing in my estimation.

How about some satellite or ISS images?  Might be attractive to some...

 
Come on lads.  There is plenty of technical and outdoors excitement in amateur radio.  Put some images on there, for God's sake!

SSTV - And a Trip Back to the 1970s

I started playing with SSTV the other day.  Far from being anything like TV, the whole mode seems to be more like analogue file transfer, mediated by digital computers.

Within minutes, I was receiving admirably good quality images from across the EU, with the odd one from south America.  There's something undeniably interesting about SSTV and its digital (and more error-free) counterpart.  But there's one thing I found really unappealing.

One of the more tasteful female images on SSTV.  Others are a bit more, well, revealing...

Images of naked women.  Lots of them!

SSTV indeed seems to be the amateur radio equivalent, for the most part, of a private top shelf channel.  Naked women, scantily-clad ones, fully dressed attractive ones, and ones draped over cars.  They're all here in abundance.

Lord knows what kick anyone gets out of sending such images to one another over radio, and maybe that's why there only seems to be a small, if you'll pardon the pun, hardcore of SSTV operators.  Some do reciprocate my own interests in non-female imagery, and send a sexy picture of a helicopter or aircraft.  But they're not common.

This kind of thing harks back well into the dark ages of 1970s Britain, where sexism was rampant.  It tells us of the ageing population of the radio community, reflects on some rather slow-to-change nations and their attitudes to women and, of course, entirely lacks any female input for lack of any female operators. 

Time and again people wring their hands and wonder why so few people are taking up an interest in the hobby.  Here's yet another glaringly-obvious reason, especially if you happened to be a younger operator, or a woman, or both - none of which seems to bother any of the senders of daily red-top newspaper images that ply their way across the airwaves.

The Future of Amateur Radio - Are Magazines and Societies Just Missing the Point?

It's been another windy period over here for the past few days.  When it's gusting 60, 70 or more miles per hour, it's not time to have complex, expensive antennas up in the air.

Instead, it's time to deploy simple, robust wires like my trusty G-Whip end-feds, a surprisingly effective antenna for the price, easy to deploy in seconds and yielding a near-perfect match across the 20m band.

G-Whip matched end-fed for 20m.  Up in seconds, low cost, global DX.  So why are we bombarded with super-expensive images of amateur radio?

But it's a constant source of irritation for me that, when amateur radio is in a crisis of so few taking up the hobby, far too much emphasis is going on expensive equipment that only the rich can afford.

This is a huge shame, because this evening, with only a 10m-long piece of wire, a matching circuit at the base and a rig, I'm using the latest free digital mode software to get signals into really rather remote parts of the world - all on 30W or much less.  If, sadly, like so many, you live in an urban setting and have intolerant neighbours, such an antenna is unlikely to need planning permission, and if someone really likes complaining, then it can go up and down on a fishing pole in seconds, or be attached to a chimney or such like.

So, if global DX can be pulled in with such simple equipment, shouldn't amateur radio societies, DX clubs and magazines be pushing this stuff instead?  Sellers who want to push £3000 rigs and equally expensive antennas on top of mile-high towers are only going to get away with that sort of marketing strategy for so long; give it about 10 years, and there will be few with that kind of money and the passion in the hobby left.

In other words, those selling advertising space - and those buying it - are simply rushing headlong into amateur radio oblivion in a few years' time.

It's fine to build up your station and work towards towers, yagis and so on - if you really do need them as opposed to never bothering to find out if something simpler might work as well or even better (keep low angle radiation in mind!) But I fear that for a very long time, the hobby has been dominated by the most accomplished, most complex and most expensive operators and those that furnish them with their materialistic wants.  That really is no good at all.

So it's time to ditch the glitzy, blingy, macho attitude and start coming down to earth in order to promote and save amateur radio for what it really is at the bone: self-education, experimentation and making your own stuff for little or no money.  The digital mode revolution has the capacity to catch the imagination of today's computer generation, so let's get that message out, instead of endlessly creating an image that hamming is only for the rich and retired.

ROS Mode

Having had very good, if rather slow-paced success with the JT65 digimode, I somehow found myself playing with ROS mode the other day.

I think it was because someone had spotted a ROSer on the 20m cluster, so I downloaded the free software, see what mess I could get myself into.

My kids love the look of ROS, with its many little clocks and musical notes!

As usual, it takes a little while to learn your way around the macros and the commands peculiar to the software.

In fact, once settled-in, I found the ROS software to be one of the most carefully thought-out pieces of code going.  It lets you resize the window within the software, so you can see everything that's going on.  It connects to the rig seamlessly and with few mouse clicks.  It brings up a link to the QRZ.com page of each callsign, and even a link to short and long path circuit reliability for the band in use.

ROS is not as immediate as PSK, for example.  But you can have a fairly rapid  real-time typed QSO at selectable speeds, and it's much more powerful in covering global distances with few or no decoding errors at QRP and slightly above QRP powers. Each halving of character sending speed effectively doubles your power, so tortoise and hare can apply if conditions aren't so hot.

After just two days of ROS working, I've added two new DX entitites to the log.  I also rather like ROS for the fact that it's so well thought-out, and has relatively few users on 20m, increasing the chances greatly of grabbing those rare DX calls.  ZL2AUB, who features in the above screengrab, has become a daily check-in, which is also very nice!