IN-Newsletter Vol. 26, No. 50 December 17, 2003 Upcoming Meetings January 15th in Newington, CT at 8:30am A & F Committee January 15th in Newington, CT at 8:30am Volunteer Resources Committee January 15th in Newington, CT at 9:00am Membership Services Committee January 16-17, 2004 in Windsor, CT Board Meeting Development The 2004 Spectrum Defense Fund has reached $178,297 from 4,097 donors for an average gift of $43.52. The Diamond Club continues to grow. To date the program has 919 donors. The W1AW campaign will mail mid-January to the full file. Media Relations Jennifer and Ed Hare worked with a reporter from The Tampa (FL) Tribune for an upcoming story on the negative effects of BPL on ham radio. With the help of Oregon Public Information Coordinator Everett Curry, W6ABM, Mark Perrin, N7MQ, succeeded in getting his response to a recent BPL story printed in The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR). Jennifer helped a member prepare for an interview he had scheduled with a local newspaper in Culpeper, VA. Based on several recent requests for radio public service announcements, Jennifer put in a duplication order for 50 spots on CD. Requests will be fulfilled shortly. The October clip reports were mailed out to the Directors. Jennifer submitted "Media Hits" for the February issue of QST. Production/Editorial Brennan Price reports that the first submission to the 2004-2005 edition of The ARRL Repeater Directory (Hawaii) came in well ahead of deadline and appears to be in good shape. The ARRL Letter, Vol 22, No 49, distributed to 66,627 members on Dec 12 (up by 1941 from a year earlier). There's one more issue in 2003. Rick compiled "Happenings" for Feb 2004 QST and wrote/edited reports on FEMA's comments on the BPL NOI, an ARISS school group contact in Germany, a Spectrum Protection/CC&R bills update, the debut of ULS License Manager, the ARISS Phase 2 equipment, "In Brief" (17 items), ITU-R Morse new draft recommendation, FCC amateur enforcement actions and some Web crawlies. Rick compiled and edited The ARRL Letter, and--with voiceover assistance--from Jennifer Hagy, he voiced/edited/produced ARRL Audio News. Production and editorial work is wrapping up on the February 2004 issue of QST. Sales & Marketing Fulfillment staffers Mark Dzamba and Cathy Stepina report we are just starting to receive early returns for the third renewal notice test mailings. These returns are from the East Coast so we expect to see greater numbers as the mailings work westward. There have been 15 membership applications received as a result of the recent ICOM/ARRL membership recruitment initiative. The redeemed membership vouchers have been associated with equipment purchases made at Ham Radio Outlet, Amateur Electronic Supply, and GigaParts. A couple of email solicitations sent to members last week helped sustain high levels of Holiday ordering activity via the ARRLWeb e-Store. This past weekend saw over $16,000 in gross sales (excluding shipping & handling and tax) in 343 orders. A computer glitch resulted in several copies of Friday's promotion going to members who are subscribed to the product promotion email list. Bob Inderbitzen has handled several complaints from members. A pop-up ad also directs ARRLWeb browsers to the online store and our recent "free shipping" promotion. Jon Bloom has designed the pop-up to display only once for users. We use pop-ups infrequently--and particularly when we want to ensure that all of our members and customers know about an unusual promotion. This gimmick has proved to be an effective sales tool, and (surprisingly) generates very little criticism. As anticipated, early orders indicate that our customers prefer the new DVD-format Technician Class Video Course to the VHS videotape format. 90 DVD courses have shipped in this first week vs. 40 VHS courses. Bob Inderbitzen turned in material to produce a handful of new house ads for QST. Among these are ads for the upcoming new edition of The ARRL Operating Manual, 2003 ARRL Periodicals on CD-ROM, Klingenfuss Radio Monitoring products, and the International Antenna Collection. Roseanne Lawrence reported on a successful promotion conducted in the lobby store during November. Bob and Roseanne have plans to offer a new promotion every month for HQ visitors. Throughout the month of December, visitors purchasing a copy of TravelPlus for Repeaters CD-ROM are given a free ARRL Repeater Directory. Bob contributed ideas used in new artwork celebrating the organization's 90-year anniversary. Janet Rocco and Steve Capodicasa assembled and shipped holiday gifts sent to our major business clients. Our four-page newsletter to advertisers, Advertising Matters is at the printer. Advertisers will be able to look at a full year's schedule of regular and specialty advertising (including reservation and materials due dates. Secondary solicitations for many of our specialty offerings will be taken from this core newsletter and enhanced with some additional text and graphics. Thanks to Joe Bottiglieri, Janet Rocco, Lisa Tardette, and Di Szlachetka for pitching in with all aspects of advertising duties this month. In addition to shouldering new tasks, their assistance and input has been invaluable in scrutinizing our current processes and will result in many streamlined changes. Membership Services Awards Branch WAS Certs. (450 QSLs ES/C) 9 WAS Certs. (350 QSLs F/C) 7 Extra Class Certs. 20 RCC Certs. 7 Friendship Certs. 7 LTMA Inquiries 1 50-Year Member Award 1 A-1 Op. Noms. 1 A-1 Op. Certs. 5 Awards Mailed 140 VUCC Initial Apps. 4 Grids 457 Also compiled the latest VUCC award recipient list for February QST. Processing Status: Current or up to four weeks. For the coming week-WAS and WAC QSL card checking, WAS endorsements, OTC and VUCC awards, mail out all awards processed this week, work on report for BOD, and complete the filing chores associated with the long term member awards issued earlier this year. Contest Branch The IARU write-up was sent to Production and to the WSDD for layout. The 2003 September VHF results were received from the log checker, formatted and imported to the master database. The preliminary boxes were then run and sent to the author. Data entry for SS, entries, cups and pins continued. Due to band conditions sale of clean sweep mugs is dramatically down from previous years. Final revisions for the PDF of the Field Day write-up were done and taken to Production. We finished importing data for the new contest address database and printed mailing labels for DX stations for the 2003 DX Contest from the new database, making adjustments in the new queries for creating them. The semi-annual report for the Board was written. DXCC Branch For the week of: December 14, 2003 Beginning Cards 137,468 Cards Received 2,900 Cards Processed 20,464 Ending Cards 119,904 Applications Pending 1,003 Processing Time 10.7 Weeks Year-to-date (2003) Cards Received 600,436 Cards Returned 697,753 DXCC is currently mailing applications received on September 30, 2003. DXCC is currently entering cards received on September 30, 2003. Heather Dzamba conducted two tours this past week. QSL Bureau QSL Service Status: There is a delay of approximately 1 week. Cards mailed as of 12/14/03: 1,273,775. No cards were mailed this week. W1AW Thanks to Dan Henderson, N1ND for operating W1AW in ARRL 10-Meter Contest. 374 QSOs were made, with 45 sections and 36 countries, for a claimed score of 60,588. Thanks also to Joel Hallas, W1ZR for his running EZNEC profiles on two 6-meter vertical dipole antennas to be used at W1AW for possible use for a 6-meter bulletin station. Joe started construction on the antennas. Scott worked on fast and slow code practice files for the latter part of the month of December. He also handled some evening phone sales calls in the 5 PM to 8 PM time slot. Joe continues in the process of inputting Frequency Measuring Test submissions. (To date, there are 184 submissions.) The cut-off date for FMT submissions is December 19, 2003. He also worked the late afternoon/night shift on Monday for a vacationing Scott Gee. W1AW Telephone Sales year to date (2003): $34,862. Field & Educational Services Rosalie and Jerry Herman (Hurricane Watch Net) were named co-chairs for the ham radio forum at future years' National Hurricane Conferences. She assisted a volunteer who will present an ARISS talk at a Johnson Space Center national Educators Conference. She took part in the videotaping of ARRL Hq. An ARISS QSO took place with a school in Niebull, Germany. We've begun to receive QSLs for the Roy Neal special event. Dennis and Kathy came to an F&ES department meet to talk on the interface between Sales & Marketing staff and F&ES staff. Field Organization/Public Service Team Leona Adams completed sending the monthly Field Organization Appointment Reports to SMs. Now that we are nearly at the end of year, she has been handling the expected increase of submitted Section expense reports. In a follow-up to an FCC request, Chuck Skolaut prepared and sent two tape recordings of an operation by a Technician class licensee in Florida on 20 meters. Per another FCC request, Chuck received documents from several OOs about an on-going interference case on a California repeater. Steve Ewald worked on the February QST Public Service Column and FO reports. NC SEC Bernie Nobels reports: "In a critique that NC Emergency Management held for Isabel, they gave us many praises for our work during and after the storm." NNJ SM Bill Hudzik described the Amateur Radio & Emergency Communications workshop that he and NNJ SEC Steve Ostrove presented at the New Jersey League of Municipalities Convention: "70 elected officials and municipal professionals attended our workshop. Steve opened with the Cronkite video that just wowed the audience! We passed out 30 CDs and 50 ARES fliers. This was the first time amateur radio was featured at the convention in 40 years!" Regulatory Information John Hennessee has completed his review of the FCC Rule Book for the next printing. He also assisted an amateur with a local government zoning problem in Palm Springs, CA (K8ZZO). Field & Education Support Team Gail Iannone processed 27 hamfest and 4 convention announcements, and generated 8 hamfest approval letters. Jean Wolfgang is seeing an increase in emails and phone calls pertaining to the upcoming Kid's Day event scheduled for January 4. She received an ARISS application and responded to several ARISS-related questions. Tom Cote processed 2 club vanity email forwarding requests and 2 SSC renewals. He assisted the CCE program with package assembly and data input, and continued with physical file organizing for our SSC records. Congratulations to Tom on passing his Technician License exam. His new call sign is KB1KOS, and the F&ES staff has already helped him with his first QSO. Linda Mullally updated 41 club records with 3 reactivations. She registered 6 Instructors and 1 Teacher. Linda worked on Club new amateur mailings, label requests, and compiled Field Organization Reports [PSHR, BPL, SEC, STM] for QST. Mary Lau processed Foundation contribution acknowledgments and continued work on revisions to the Club Kit (forms package for those seeking to affiliate a club). Amateur Radio Education & Technology Program Mark Spencer says a number of schools gratefully received the 2-meter radios donated by the FBI, and reported these arrived at a good time. One of our members offered schools up to 5 free subscriptions to HamTestOnline, a Web site for practicing for Amateur Radio exams. Seven schools took advantage of the offer. The program is an alternative to the more traditional methods of studying for a license. A school reported success using APRS in the classroom, and will send lesson suggestions. EmComm Grants Dan Miller reports that 86 of the 130 participants at his Salt Lake City seminar filled out surveys showing that 75% were ARRL members, and 28 were Field Org appointees who put in about 9 hours per month on emcomm-related activity. Attending the conference were personnel from the Elizabeth Smart search and rescue effort, which included some ham radio. SM John Thomason (OK) is working with the state OEM about offering an event like the one in Salt Lake City. VEC Department On December 1, the new Element 3 General class question pool was release by the QPC on schedule. The new pool contains 432 questions, up from 385 in the circa 2000 pool. All General written exams administered by VEs must use these new questions starting July 1, 2004 at 12:01 am local time. VEs will have updated software and hardcopy test booklets by mid June 2004. A public call for syllabus input was made in conjunction with the General pool release. The new Extra syllabus and pool will be developed over a two-year window years (barring any changes to the license structure, any newly revised Extra class pool would not take effect until July 1, 2006). FCC On Line Filing: FCC held a Conference Call with several VECs and COLEMs on December 3rd to discuss new FCC web screens for ULS on line filing (a project underway for the better part of a year). FCC's planned deployment for the updated page(s) is later this month. FCC expects these new web screens to overcome the current JAVA script security and limited platform challenges on-line filers have faced over the past few years. The new screen should be fully functional under Windows or Mac, and should be compatible with screen reading devices for the handicapped. 73, Sincerely, Mark Wilson, K1RO Chief Operating Officer MW:lk Staff Absentee List All Staff 12/25-12/26 Holiday All Staff 1/1 Holiday Dave Sumner 1/29-2/5 Vacation Mark Wilson 12/24-1/2 Vacation Jennifer Hagy 12/24 & 1/2 Vacation Lisa Kustosik 12/29-1/2 Vacation Mary Hobart 12/23-12/24 Vacation Debra Johnson 12/19 Personal Steve Ford 12/24-1/5 Vacation Rick Lindquist 12/17 Vacation `` 12/22-12/24 Vacation Zoe Belliveau 12/29-12/31 Vacation Lisa Tardette 12/24pm-1/2 Vacation Cathy Stepina 12/23-12/24 Vacation Scott Gee 12/29 Vacation Deb Jahnke 12/24-1/2 Vacation John Hennessee 12/19-12/29 Vacation Perry Williams 12/23-12/29 Vacation Joe Carcia 12/19 Vacation Bill Moore 12/11-12/17 Vacation Wayne Mills 12/19-12/31 Vacation Dan Henderson 12/22-12/29 Vacation Martin Cook 12/29-12/30 Vacation 12/31pm-1/6 Vacation Sandy Lund 12/29-12/31 Vacation Kathy Allison 12/29-1/2 Vacation Mike Tracy 12/15-12/19 Vacation `` 12/29-12/31 Vacation Monique Levesque 12/24pm-1/2 Vacation Fatima Lorusso 1/2 Vacation Dave Hassler 12/29-12/31 Vacation Bob Schetgen 12/17 Vacation `` 12/22-1/5 Vacation Steve Capodicasa 12/22-12/24 Vacation Mark Spencer 12/15-12/24 Vacation Gail Iannone 12/22-1/2 Vacation Dan Miller 12/22-1/2 Vacation Leona Adams 12/23-12/24 Vacation Rosalie White 12/29-1/2 Vacation Sharon Taratula 12/19 Vacation `` 12/24 Vacation Diane Szlachetka 12/29-12/31 Vacation