January 2005 - arrl-odv - reflector.arrl.org

[ARRL-ODV:11696] Re: Orlando Sentinel article re K4VUD/Andamans
by W3KD＠aol.com 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

Sunday's (1/2/05) Washington Post had a similar, and quite spectacular article on the same subject. Chris

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[ARRL-ODV:11695] FW: [NJDXA-L] (Fwd) December 29th, 2004 - Great Day at W1AW
by Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

In light of the question Bob Vallio asked a few days ago I thought it appropriate to forward this to all of you. 73, Dave K1ZZ -----Original Message----- From: Rich Gelber [mailto:k2wr@njdxa.org] Sent: Sun 1/2/2005 4:26 AM To: Carcia, Joe, NJ1Q Cc: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ Subject: Fw: [NJDXA-L] (Fwd) December 29th, 2004 - Great Day at W1AW Joe: Just a note of thanks for the great cooperation you always show to the "3 Steves and a Kurt" team (and that you have always shown to me). 73, Rich K2WR President, NJDXA ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve-KF2TI" <kf2ti(a)mindspring.com> To: <dx-chat(a)njdxa.org>; <njdxa-l(a)njdxa.org> Sent: Friday, December 31, 2004 12:01 PM Subject: [NJDXA-L] (Fwd) December 29th, 2004 - Great Day at W1AW > > ------- Forwarded message follows ------- > Date sent: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 10:22:39 -0500 > From: "Kurt W. Zimmerman" <w2mw(a)amsat.org> > > Greetings all; > I thought I'd provide you a recap of the 3 Steves and a Kurt > DXpedition to W1AW. Yes, as we always do, we had a great time. To > start the day we headed to Lentini's to shop around and to pick up > some odds & ends. Then off for a cuisine lunch at Hooters and then > back to the league. Joe NJ1Q was all ready for us having all of the > computers networked together so we can keep track of everyone while > we > operated. The logging software of choice was Writelog, which was > quite simple to use. > > Bands were not in that bad of shape. We managed to put 460 Q's in > the log, operating as W1AW/90, which I might add is a real pain to > send CW..... > > Here is the breakdown, by band with our Q count: > > Band Q's Mode Operator > 40m 49 SSB Steve - KF2TI > 30m 95 CW Kurt - W2MW > 20M 174 SSB Steve - KB2ENF > 17m 13 SSB Steve - ? (a drop in visitor named Steve. No > kidding) > 15M 107 SSB Steve - N2IFA > 6m 22 SSB Andrew - N2IFB (Son of Steve - N2IFA) > > The only modes we operated were SSB and CW. KF2TI was to busy > collecting his DXCC Honor Roll award from the league as well as > working W1AW from his car to play on other modes besides SSB. > > The following stations will be getting the coveted 3 Steves and a > Kurt > certificate (suitable for framing)... > > KF2TI, KO7X,WB2LEZ,AF2C,W0JM,N2WB,WB4CKO,N1DL,K5WPN and VA5DX > > Some of the local stations that we worked are Jeff - WO5D, Steve - > K0LBY and Bob - W2WG > > I'd like to comment that if you have not had the opportunity to > travel > to the league; it is well worth the trip. The station manager, Joe - > NJ1Q is very helpful and is an all around great person. You have the > option just to visit the station or play with some REALLY NEAT, state > of he art equipment (except for the old Icom 781 that I've been using > for many years ;-) ). > > One final note. I've been working to get the 3Steves&Kurt website up > again. When I do that I will have more pictures to share with all of > you. > > I want to wish everyone a very Happy New Year. > > Best of 73; > Kurt - W2MW > > > ------- End of forwarded message ------- > >

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[ARRL-ODV:11694] Orlando Sentinel article re K4VUD/Andamans
by Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ 01 Jan '05

01 Jan '05

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/nationworld/orl-asectsunamiham01010105j… <http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/nationworld/orl-asectsunamiham01010105j…>

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[ARRL-ODV:11693] The Big Band Era
by dick＠pobox.com 01 Jan '05

01 Jan '05

<http://www.governing.com/articles/1broad.htm>http://www.governing.com/articles/1broad.htm COVER STORY/TECHNOLOGY The Big Band Era The quest for rapid and robust Internet access has cities grappling with how to bring the best of broadband to their businesses and residents. By CHRISTOPHER SWOPE Talk to Chris OBrien about broadband access, and the city of Chicagos technology chief will tell you that more Internet traffic flows through Chicago than anywhere else in the world. Thats a difficult point to prove, a bit like saying that Chicago-style pizza is better than New Yorks. No matter. OBrien knows that broadband means business, and that most companies cant survive today without superfast access to the Internet. So the Windy City has taken to selling itself as Broadband City as much a national hub for Internet infrastructure as its always been for railroads, highways and airports. That claim is an easy one to believe from the vantage point of OBriens 27th-floor downtown office. Underneath the traffic-clogged streets below, private companies have buried miles of fiber-optic cable an Internet backbone that is indeed as quick as any in the world. Here, big finance and technology firms that require huge amounts of bandwidth for the fastest Internet speeds dont have too much trouble getting it. But you dont have to wander far from downtown to see how quickly Chicagos broadband prowess breaks down. In South Side neighborhoods and industrial corridors slated for economic development, fiber is much harder to find. Business customers have fewer broadband options here, and what they do have can be prohibitively expensive. For the modest bandwidth of a T-1 line, they can pay as much as $1,000 a month more than the rent for some of them. Or they can look into two other broadband options: DSL and cable modem. Those are more limited still and arent yet available in some pockets of the city. The broadband landscape looks even more speckled over the city line. In the suburbs, researchers at federal laboratories and universities enjoy top-speed broadband at work but some cant get the modest speeds of DSL at home. The suburbs, however, are better off than the prairie towns that lie farther out. There, most computer users are making do with pokey dial-up Internet service that moves data along at a glacial pace. Broadband access is an essential item for business, and it is quickly becoming one at home too, as everything digital, from e-mail to phone calls to The Sopranos, tries to squeeze through the same Internet pipe. Yet as the Chicago region shows, the state of American broadband in 2005 ranges from Tiffany to the country store. This new digital divide the broadband divide leaves state and local officials facing a lot of tough questions. Whats the best way to smooth out these disparities? And whats the proper role of the public sector? Should government build and own some of the infrastructure itself, as it does with highways? Or should broadband look more like the railroads, built and run by profit-seeking companies? A BROAD REACH The current situation is cause for either hope or despair, depending on how one looks at it. As of last July, 63 million Americans were connecting to the Internet via broadband at home, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Millions more use broadband at the office DSL, T-1 or better making workers more efficient and innovative. Entrepreneurs can now dream up new services to sell over broadband founding new companies that create new j obs. The bad news is that as quickly as broadband is catching on, the U.S. is a laggard compared with other nations. South Korea, Denmark, Japan and Canada have higher rates of residential broadband penetration. In fact, the U.S. is 11th in the world, according to the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva. Part of the problem is that Americans are more spread out than, say, the South Koreans, half of whom live in apartment buildings. But public policy also plays a big role. Japan and South Korea have national broadband strategies. The U.S. doesnt. Broadband deployment is largely up to the giant telephone and cable companies that currently compete with each other in the courtroom just as much as they slug it out in the marketplace. An upside of the American laissez-faire approach is innovation: Carriers have developed lots of technologies for delivering broadband, some using old existing wires, some requiring new lines and others using wireless. The downside is that they only deploy these products in markets where they believe they can turn a profit quickly. Localities are at the forefront of the broadband debate, stirring up controversy. There may be no national policy, but that doesnt mean cities, suburbs and rural communities are sitting on the sidelines. In fact, localities are at the forefront of the broadband debate, stirring up controversy. For example, Philadelphia, like dozens of other cities, is looking at offering cheap broadband service by turning the whole city into a wireless hot spot. Opponents of the idea, led by Verizon Communications, think that cities should stay out of broadband. They persuaded the Pennsylvania legislature in November to pass a law that makes it harder for cities to offer municipal broadband. (Verizon is letting Philadelphia proceed with its plans, however.) Politics may be the least of local officials worries. As they attack the broadband divide, theyre finding that its a terrifically complex problem, one that is only growing more complicated as technology advances and bandwidth needs grow. Realistically, they cant hope to solve the divide so much as manage it over time. Moreover, theres not just one broadband divide. There are at least four of them: Access. Millions of Americans still cant get basic DSL or cable modem service, or the local provider has a monopoly on the market. Service. Theres lots of high-speed fiber in the ground in the U.S., but outside of dense business districts, the last mile problem of tapping into it is expensive to solve. Cost. Even where basic broadband is available, the monthly cost remains higher than many consumers are willing or able to pay. Dont Need It. More than one-third of U.S. households still dont have computers let alone high-speed Internet. And many Internet users dont mind using slow dial-up service. THE GATEKEEPERS You see a range of thinking about these issues across the Chicago region. The most controversial idea came from three cities on the western edge of the Chicago suburbs. Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles, also known as the Tri-Cities, are among the 2,000 U.S. cities that are in the electricity business. Public power has been pretty good for the Tri-Cities. Their electric rates are about 30 percent lower than neighboring towns. So it wasnt a stretch when they proposed getting into the broadband business as well. The idea first came up two years ago. Comcast, the dominant cable company in the Chicago region, hadnt yet rolled out its cable modem service. The local phone company, SBC Communications, had started offering DSL but large swaths of the Tri-Cities still couldnt get it. The city governments held a trump card, however. Each owned a fiber-optic network a valuable byproduct of running an electric utility. Officials began thinking that if they could build that fiber out directly to homes and businesses, it would be a huge draw for economic development. Municipal broadband offering superfast Internet, cable TV and telephone would compete directly with Comcast and SBC. The towns put the question to a referendum in April 2003. Scared by the $62 million price tag, voters turned it down decisively. The plan went before voters again this past November with a new financing scheme. It got steam-rolled again. Comcast and SBC waged an overwhelming campaign against the measure. They bused in employees to knock on doors, and Comcast even sent Hallmark greeting cards to voters homes. There was another factor at play. Not all residents saw the issue as a compelling one. As Jeffery Schielke, the mayor of Batavia, puts it, When we put in sanitary sewers 100 years ago, a number of people said theyd prefer to go to the outhouse. Proponents of municipal broadband are still bitter about the outcome. They argue that Comcast and SBC, by fighting the referendum, are holding back technology. They think its okay to give us limited bandwidth and charge us an arm and a leg for it, says Annie Collins, whose citizens group was behind the second referendum. As Collins sees it, cities should view broadband as they do roads, sewers or any other essential infrastructure they provide. Putting the infrastructure in place is just like pavement, she says. Its basic infrastructure, and the cities should own it. Comcast and SBC share a different view: Municipal broadband is a bad idea. Its wrong of the government to get involved in areas where private corporations are offering choices, says Carrie Hightman, president of SBC Illinois. What about the argument that cities should provide broadband as basic infrastructure? These arent vital services, says Bob Ryan, a Comcast lobbyist. Theyre nice services. But youre not going to die if you dont get video, data and telephony from the government. All is not lost in the Tri-Cities. By the time of the second vote, Comcast and SBC had rolled out their networks almost ubiquitously there. Just two weeks before the election, SBC held a digital ribbon-cutting ceremony in Batavia. Both companies deny wooing voters by bumping the Tri-Cities up their to-do lists. But many observers in Illinois think that the squeaky wheel got the grease. All of a sudden the Tri-Cities are getting better service, says Edward Feser, a University of Illinois professor who studies broadband. Maybe the vote is looked at as a failure, but for the end-market consumer the whole effort has been a bonus. AT YOUR SERVICE Farther west, in the prairie town of Princeton, the broadband battle is playing out somewhat differently. A couple of years ago, manufacturers in town began complaining that the T-1 lines they used for broadband werent fast or robust enough. Rural towns across Illinois have been hit hard lately by manufacturers going overseas. Princeton has fared pretty well so far. But officials there figured that if they could offer manufacturers more bandwidth, it might be all the more reason for companies to stay put. Princeton officials met with the local phone company Verizon in this part of Illinois to see if there was something it could do to upgrade service. But as Princetons Jason Bird puts it, at the end of the day, it came down to the fact that we needed to take on this endeavor ourselves. Princeton owns its electric utility, just as the Tri-Cities do. Unlike the Tri-Cities, however, Princeton is not proposing to go into the broadband business on a retail level. Instead, Princeton will build out the broadband infrastructure and let a local company called Connecting Point sell the service to customers. Princetons plan is to build fiber out to any customers who say they need it most likely the big industrial users. Smaller customers and residential users will be handled differently. Theyll be among the first in the nation to receive broadband over the same power lines that pump electricity into peoples homes. This new technology is a convenient solution to the notorious last mile problem. Customers simply plug a box into a power outlet and plug their computers into the box. Bird thinks Princetons approach to broadband represents a lighter touch to government intervention. We have a partnership here, he says. We didnt want to get into the business of being the provider. We didnt feel comfortable with that. The big telephone and cable companies argue that any form of municipal broadband enjoys unfair advantages, such as tax-free bond financing. But that distinction doesnt mean much to the big telephone and cable companies. The argue that any form of municipal broadband enjoys unfair advantages, such as tax-free bond financing. Comcast, SBC and other broadband providers are expected to lobby the legislature for a law similar to Pennsylvanias, either banning municipal broadband or severely restricting it. Similar laws have passed in 15 other states, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently found such bans constitutional. This is an area where the powerful incumbents want to snuff out consumer option and choice, says Illinois Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn. Theyre snarling in Illinois. It looks like theyll try to wipe out the municipal option for our state this year. Well see. Chicago is more hesitant to use a heavy hand when it comes to broadband. Of course, the city also enjoys two luxuries: a dense downtown and a wealthy mix of corporations that broadband providers are hungry to serve. During the dot-com boom, lots of telecom companies trenched fiber-optic lines under downtown streets. It was a gold rush fueled by the exuberant Internet dreams of the age. Many of those companies later went bankrupt. But their fiber is still there, waiting to be used. In the Loop, Chicagos busy downtown business section, the biggest broadband problem is figuring out where all the fiber is and who owns it. Thats an economic development issue: Businesses looking to tap into that fiber dont know whom to call. But its increasingly a homeland security issue, too. After 9/11, many big corporations are queasy about locating critical operations such as data banks in big cities, fearing a terror attack. They want some assurance that their Internet traffic has redundant routes should disaster strike. Corporate boards are asking whether its dangerous to locate in a big city, Chris OBrien says. We have to prove to them that its not. Chicagos neighborhoods are a different story. Back in 2000, Chicago announced a big idea to wire the whole city for broadband. The plan was called CivicNet, and the idea was to aggregate all the public schools, firehouses and city offices into one massive telecom contract. In exchange for a 10-year deal, Chicago expected the winning bidder to lay broadband infrastructure to some 1,600 city facilities. It wouldnt wire the whole city, but since theres a police station, library or some city building in nearly every neighborhood, it would come pretty close. CivicNet never happened. The telecom bust killed the industrys interest. And Chicagos budget bust killed the citys interest. The silver lining, as OBrien sees it, is that Comcast and SBC have since pumped millions of dollars of their own into rolling out cable modem and DSL service across nearly all of Chicago. The residential issue is not solved, OBrien says. But were a lot closer to eliminating access as a problem because of cable modem and DSL. Of all the broadband divides, the one that now concerns OBrien the most is level of access for small businesses that require more bandwidth than Comcast and SBC are offering. To target this problem, Chicago is considering a CivicNet Lite: a stripped-down version of the original broadband plan, targeted solely at six or seven underserved industrial corridors. WIRE WORKS Others are more concerned about another of the broadband divides: cost. Comcast charges between $43 and $58 a month for cable Internet in Chicago. SBC charges between $27 and $37 a month for the most basic residential DSL. Bob Lieberman thinks that wireless broadband might be a cheaper alternative. Lieberman heads the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, and is experimenting with wireless projects in three neighborhoods in the region. One is Lawndale, a predominantly African-American neighborhood west of the Loop. The median household income in Lawndale is $22,000, so $600 a year for broadband is a big chunk, Lieberman says. Thats a lot of money for what is arguably entertainment. The tallest building in Lawndale is an historic brick tower that rises 260 feet above an old Sears distribution center. Its the first Sears Tower, Lieberman says. Just as the namesake skyscraper downtown is crowned with radio antennae, Lieberman has placed a small, barely visible antenna in the Lawndale tower. The antenna is wired to the Internet and beams a signal out to nodes scattered atop row houses in the neighborhood, which relay the signal back and forth to computers in peoples homes. An unusual feature of this so-called mesh network is that the system actually becomes stronger and more reliable as more people use it. The Lawndale project is up to 100 users, who for the time being are getting the service for free (the Center hooks people up with used computers, too). Lieberman thinks it could serve as a prototype for small cities or neighborhoods. He estimates the municipal cost of providing such a service would ring in at about $8 to $10 per month, per household. Wireless really gives you the opportunity, on a relatively low-cost basis, to put technology into neighborhoods that could never afford it before, Lieberman says. A lot of other cities are having exactly the same thought. The technology is cheap enough that Philadelphia thinks it could fill the air with a cloud of Internet signals for just about $10 million. And wireless technology is advancing quickly. A new generation of wireless broadband, called WiMax, is due out in the next year or so. WiMax will offer greater bandwidth than the current Wi-Fi does and work to a range of 30 miles. In other words, a single antenna could blanket entire cities, or large swaths of countryside, with broadband coverage. A lot of people in city government around the country are very excited about wireless. Chicago has created Wi-Fi hot spots at all its city libraries, and in places where business travelers congregate, such as the airport and convention center. Yet Chris OBrien is skeptical of taking on a broader, city-wide wireless project. Simply put, Chicago doesnt want to step on the private sectors turf. Government needs to tread a very fine line, OBrien says. We could create a wireless network for the entire city if we wanted to. We own enough fiber that we could get into the telecom business, too. Figuring out where our leverage ends and where we leave it to the private sector is the tough issue. Copyright © 2005, <http://www.cq.com/>Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.

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[ARRL-ODV:11692] Humanitarian award winners - close call
by Bruce Frahm K0BJ 01 Jan '05

01 Jan '05

Our current Humanitarian Award recipients -- KM9D and KF4TUG -- had a close call with the tsunami. They've left their yacht Don Henry in New Zealand and flew to se Asia, where they met up with a friend in Phuket Thailand to help crew his yacht Te Ni on a voyage to the Red Sea and Mediterranean. They left Phuket THE DAY BEFORE the tsunami, making way to the Maldives. At sea, the tsunami wave passed harmlessly under them. BTW they sailed right through the Andamans on their way to 8Q. Te Ni doesn't have a resident ham but an ICOM HF radio allows Mike to send APRS position reports (as KM9D) and he's in touch via email through Winlink 2000. It has been a great pleasure, and relief, to stay in touch with them. I met Mike and Jan when we were all in ZF January 1999 -- near the beginning of their sailing adventure. Happy 2005 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Bruce Frahm KØBJ http://www.carrollsweb.com/bfrahm/

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