Following the magnitude 6.2 earthquake which struck central Italy on 24 August killing 38 people, Italian radio amateurs are active in the emergency response.
Please keep 7060 kHz clear along with other Emergency Centre of Activity frequencies in the 80m and 40m bands for emergency communications within Italy.
No external assistance is required at this time. The Italian radio amateur groups are following their planned response with their government. Any requests for information on missing persons should be made via the Red Cross or other recognised relief organisations.
(Jim Linton VK3PV, Chairman IARU Region 3 Disaster Communications Committee)
The WIA Board continues to discuss a range of matters on its busy agenda each month.
An idea floated at the AGM was to give all new radio amateurs a period of free WIA membership with hard copies of the Amateur Radio magazine in the post. It fits in with the WIA Board priority of seeking to recruit new members. It was a good suggestion however, after investigation, it was considered that the administration costs of the proposal would be too high.
Out of this exercise came a better way to effect the original recruitment tool. This would be a coupon system that allows new amateurs to download a free digital edition of Amateur Radio magazine, for a limited period. The Board decided to move ahead with development of such a coupon system for new radio amateurs.
On another matter the WIA Board is keen to strengthen is the WIA Committee System.
A new structure was discussed where each Committee could consist of a Director, and a Committee Leader. This would reduce the day-to-day involvement of Directors, except in Committees dealing with Regulatory, Financial and Administrative issues.
Instead of having them all just called a Committee, it was decided to reflect more closely their purpose and method working, with them to fall under four categories.
Permanent Committee:One that acts together or meets regularly, to effect its on-going functions or tasks.
Advisory Groups:Set up on an ad-hoc basis to provide advice to the WIA Board.
Working Groups:To study and report on all aspects of a particular issue, and make recommendations.
While Taskforces will work on a single, defined task or activity to be completed within a specified time frame.
On another matter, also arising out of the AGM, where about 40 per cent of members present indicated that they preferred the digital edition of Amateur Radio magazine, and do not want the paper copy. When specifically asked, most did not expect to receive a WIA membership fee reduction.
The WIA Board has resolved to move ahead with the development of an paper edition opt-out for Amateur Radio magazine. WIA members who still wish to receive the paper edition will not be affected. The WIA Board is to be briefed further on the mechanics of the proposed opt-out system, before testing and then introducing the system later this year.
International Amateur Radio Union Region 3 Directors have met in Tokyo with an agenda that included measures to further improve the website facility and support to seek greater access to 50 MHz at the next World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC).
The JARL headquarters gathering saw Professor Rhee HL1AQQ, Peter Young VK3MV, Don Wallace ZL2TLL, Wisnu Widjaja YB0AZ, Shizuo Endo JE1MUI, Gopal Madhavan VU2GMN, and Secretary Ken Yamamoto JA1CJP. Also attending the two-day meeting were IARU President Tim Ellam VE6SH, and IARU Region 2 President Reinaldo Leandro YV5AM.
Special attention was given to how all member societies could take action in support the IARU move for spectrum defence and expansion at the upcoming WRC in 2019. In particular the IARU is seeking support for Agenda Item 1.1 that seeks the 50 MHz amateur allocation now in Region 1, to be harmonized worldwide. The IARU Region 3 will have high level representation at the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity Preparatory Group (APG) meetings in the lead up to WRC-19.
The meeting also decided it was essential for member societies to have interactive pages on the IARU Region 3 website where they can update information themselves and post important news items. Major work is underway to re-format the Region 3 bandplan so it aligns with the other two regions and also to make it easier to read. All documents including guidelines have now been reformatted and are also on the website.
The reactivation of Amateur Radio in Fiji and the other Pacific islands is being actively pursued, along with consideration on how to assist newcomers to the hobby, especially young radio amateurs, with low cost entry level transceivers. Directors also reviewed the various resolutions made at the Region 3 Conference in Bali Indonesia last year to measure progress and future action on them.
The WIA in 2013 initiated the Michael J Owen Award to recognise excellent Single Operator achievement within Region 3 during the IARU HF Championship. This prestigious award is to be presented.
The directors are expected to have a face-to-face meeting in the first week of September 2017, soon after the JARL Ham Fair in Tokyo.
Tech lets wireless access points cancel out interference, providing a speed boost for crowded venues. It might help cellphone towers, too.
Look at the night sky on a camping trip and the stars are everywhere. Look from a city full of lights and you barely see any. The disappointment is similar when you go from a Wi-Fi network in isolation to one crowded with dozens, maybe hundreds, of other users. The problem, in both cases, is interference: signals crashing into each other. Adding more Wi-Fi access points, or APs, to extend the coverage area can cause more collisions, since they are all fighting over the same limited spectrum.
Now MIT researchers say they’ve found a fix: getting APs to anticipate how they will collide and tweak the signals to undo the damage. In today’s world of busy Wi-Fi networks, the way to avoid a crash is to take turns, like cars meeting at a four-way stop sign.
“If you’re the only person, you get to send [data] all the time,” says Hariharan Rahul, a visiting researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. “If there are two people you get to send … about half the time. As there are more and more people, you get less and less opportunities to send.”
Rahul worked with two PhD students and professor Dina Katabi on a new solution: Instead of avoiding collisions, take advantage of them.
Now get ready for the jargon salad. The technology MIT developed is named MegaMIMO 2.0. (It’s an extension of a technology called MIMO that coordinates multiple antennas inside a single AP.) It was outlined this week in a paper called “Real-time Distributed MIMO Systems” at the Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications conference in Brazil.
Wireless Pileup
To understand what happens when radio waves collide, go back to your high school lessons that show them as undulating lines with peaks and valleys. If two of these lines overlap perfectly, peak-to-peak and valley-to-valley, they boost each other. If they line up peak-to-valley, they cancel each other out. Usually, they are at some point in between the two extremes, each warping the other. The MIT team’s ah-ha moment: If they could anticipate how waves would overlap, they could tweak the signals ahead of time to counteract the warping. “Now when these modified signals come through the air, they are still going to collide with each other,” says Rahul. “But after the collision, the signal is now what you want.”
Easier said than done. In fact, the process requires continuous measurement of the wireless network as it’s disturbed by things like connected laptops and phones moving around or people walking by. It also requires keeping all the access points in communication to coordinate signal-tweaking efforts. That rapidly eats up bandwidth until none is left. “If you are coordinating 16 APs, you would essentially spend all your time exchanging information and never actually have any time to send the data,” says Rahul. That’s hardly a way to boost performance.
This is WIA DirectorRoger Harrison VK2ZRHwith news on licensee numbers and what might be done about attracting new amateurs.
In WIA News Roger VK2ZRH says:
In a recent broadcast, I reported that the total number of individual amateur licensees in 2015 reached 14,144, which is up from 14,035 for 2014.
Well. I was wrong!
I am informed that the figure of 14,144 individual amateur licensees for 2015, is in fact 13,977.
So – we lost fifty eight amateurs over 2015, compared to 2014, when there were 14,035 licensees.
Marc Hillman VK3OHM, who ran the numbers from the ACMA database for the WIA’s Open Forum Reports published for the AGM in May, has – er – “confessed” to the error. “I accept all the blame for misleading people”, he said in an email to me.
Marc’s sterling analytical efforts to provide snapshots of amateur licensee numbers over the years are widely appreciated, no less so than by the WIA Board.
I am reminded of a few lines from the Goon Shows’ “Tales of old Dartmoor”. The Goons take Dartmoor Prison for a sailing holiday to the south of France. Having discovered that Eccles is responsible for a miscalculation in navigation, Neddy Seagoon berates Eccles, shouting: “You idiot! We’re 4000 miles off-course!”. Eccles responds with, “Nobody’s perfect…”
Anyway, amid the bad news of 58 licensees lost over 2015, I took a look at 2013 versus 2014.
We had 14,202 licensees in 2013, which fell to 14,035 for 2014. That’s a loss of 167 amateurs.
Wow.
Can we conclude that the loss is declining because we only lost 58 over 2015?
Well, no. Not until we know what happened over this year.
Naturally, of course, the naysayers out there will blame these losses on the nearest available target – the Institute.
But then. Aren’t we all in this together?
At the regular August WIA Board meeting this past week, the Board agreed to organise a symposium, you might call it a summit, in November, in Canberra, for all those interested or involved in S.T.E.M or S.T.E.A.M activities – Science Technology Engineering Arts and Maths – to plan ways and means the amateur radio community can engage those interested in technical pursuits.
This is one area from which future radio amateurs will likely emerge.
Watch this space.
This has been WIA Director Roger Harrison VK2ZRH for VK1WIA News.
