Hi David, "Not so sure what we can do about Arecibo, but I sure wish we could get a High Earth Orbiting or Geosynchronous satellite over our side of the globe. We need Apple or Tesla to fund the ride!" Elon Musk's interest is squarely on Mars right now. SpaceX is a good way to extract money from NASA and private companies wanting to do space launches but his real goal is to go (back home to?) Mars. Note that this is entirely separate, privately held and not part of TSLA. With regard to Arecibo, while the dish looks pretty cool, the technology is obsolete. There is interest in using smaller phased arrays of antennas, rather than single large dishes like the ground mounted dish at Arecibo. There are also ambitious plans by NASA to put a radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, in a crater. It will have the advantage of being free of terrestrial noise and the effects of our atmosphere. As such it can also work on the lower frequency regions of the radio spectrum. https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_I_Phase_II/lunar... 73 Ria, N2RJ On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 12:01 PM Minster, David NA2AA (CEO) <dminster@arrl.org> wrote:
It occurs to me that with COVID as a backdrop, our community has been facing some additional sad events over the past couple of months that has been further bringing things down.
We lost Universal Radio.
We watched the untimely collapse of Arecibo.
We read about the demise of Ham-Com.
Even at HQ things have been pretty low. There’s little to no ‘Christmas spirit’ amongst the team. Luci distinguished herself in not giving into it by holding an ‘Ugly Sweater’ contest. Frankly, it was poorly participated in. She didn’t give up though, and wound up with 3 sweater models and 50 virtual judges – so pretty good!
These times require us to take on these challenges as leadership moments for ARRL.
In the spirit of more updates:
We have approached Universal Radio about taking over the radio archive part of their website – that people still actively refer to today – and building an access path to that content through our website as a digital historical archive. If we don’t do it, it will die.
Director Stratton and I had – I think – a fabulous brainstorming session on how ARRL could approach the community in north TX to rehabilitate the Ham-Com event by providing marketing and branded content support – like an NCJ Contest Forum. We must reach beyond that commercial line and take the lead on nurturing this event back to life. My understanding is that they had nearly 3500 people preregistered for the 2021 event!
Not so sure what we can do about Arecibo, but I sure wish we could get a High Earth Orbiting or Geosynchronous satellite over our side of the globe. We need Apple or Tesla to fund the ride!
It is an honor to work with all of you. 2021 will be a huge year for ARRL with many initiatives underway – like our 2023 100th Anniversary Handbook project – and many others to be discussed and implemented – like Project Eagle: The 5 Year ARRL Strategic Plan. People are watching me. People are watching you. People are expecting great things from us.
With the mood so low at the moment, I humbly send my holiday wishes onto all of you. This Christmas song, which is supposed to be happy, is sung by Judy Garland with the melancholy that many are feeling today.
Very 73.
David
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