Subj : Amateur Radio Newsline (C)
To : All
From : Daryl Stout
Date : Fri Jun 09 2017 09:24 am
HAM RADIO, A SERVICE TO VETS
STEPHEN/ANCHOR: Not all the ham radio news out of Xenia has to do with
last month's Hamvention. Another important meeting of amateurs has been
quietly going on since last year, bringing results and hope to some
military veterans who need both. Here's Amateur Radio Newsline's Mike
Askins, KE5CXP, with that report.
MIKE: While Xenia, Ohio made big ham radio news this year, as the new
home of Dayton Hamvention, other hams in that same community have been
working a more quiet kind of amateur radio magic.
The station is called W8DVA, and it's based on the campus of the Dayton
VA Medical Center where it was set up - just like Hamvention - with the
help of the Dayton Amateur Radio Association. It's not even a year old
yet, but already it has begun to fulfill its mission to help military
veterans get over the trauma of combat.
Xenia amateur Jim Simpson, WB8QZZ, who assisted with the station's
setup, told the Xenia Gazette newspaper that radio communication
provides an extreme focus that helps redirect the veterans' minds
toward something more positive.
The veterans are in good company at the hospital. It seems that one of
the physicians there is a ham too. The chief of radiology is Dr. John
Mathis, WA5FAC, an enthusiastic fellow amateur. He told the newspaper
that many of the veterans respond positively to the sight of the
vintage equipment in the shack. The tube radio, he said, was used in
the military during the Vietnam War.
Mathis said many of the veterans get on the air, and talk to others
across the U.S., or perhaps the world, who have had similar struggles
of their own, whether in the military or not. In this radio shack,
commiseration not only loves company but can be downright therapeutic.
Jim said the VA's ham shack is also another means by which local
amateurs can fulfill the community service obligation that comes with
having an FCC license. Not all needs, requiring life-saving assistance
from radio are visible to the eye, after all.
For Amateur Radio Newsline, I'm Mike Askins, KE5CXP.
(XENIA GAZETTE)
**
A TOWERING NEED FOR SAFETY FIRST
STEPHEN/ANCHOR: If you've got tower work on your list of things to do
at your home QTH, or are planning to climb and help out a friend or
local club, you might want to have this guidebook in your shack. It
was released jointly by the FCC and the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration on June 1. This special report comes to us courtesy of
Amateur News Weekly's Phil Thomas, W8RMJ.
PHIL'S REPORT: The FCC and OSHA have announced the release of a free
publication, "Communications Towers, Best Practices Guide." The guide
offers information applicable to the amateur radio community, and to
contractors working on amateur radio antenna support structures. The
FCC said the guide was the result of two tower safety workshops
regarding the risks that tower employees face. OSHA and the FCC held
a workshop on communication tower safety on Oct. 14, 2014. During this
workshop, the families of communication tower employees who had been
killed on the job, gathered to discuss issues affecting the safety of
communication tower workers. A second workshop was held on the best
practices that could reduce injuries and fatalities among tower
workers. The document is a collection of the best practices gathered
from those workshops, and from discussions that continued beyond those
events.
Among other points, the guide emphasizes that all tower workers need
to have and use proper safety equipment at all times, and that no work
should be done if proper safety equipment is unavailable, or if the
safety equipment is not functioning properly. The guide also notes that
drones are being used today for tower inspections. This technology has
the potential to reduce unnecessary climbing, and to avoid putting
tower workers at risk.
FCC chairman Ajit Pai said that communications tower workers today face
potential hazards that can prove fatal if not performed safely. Every
tower worker's death is preventable.
STEPHEN/ANCHOR: That was Amateur News Weekly's Phil Thomas, W8RMJ. For
more news from the Cincinnati-Ohio-Kentucky area, visit
amateurnewsweekly.com
**
NOT JUST A CRUISE ALONG THE COAST
STEPHEN/ANCHOR: Want to ride along on a ship that's making its way
through Canada's Northwest Passage? Be listening on the air for the
ship's onboard WSPR beacon - and give a listen, meanwhile, to this
report from Amateur Radio Newsline's Jim Meachen, ZL2BHF.
JIM'S REPORT: What a journey it has been for Canada's C3 Vessel, which
departed from Toronto, Ontario on June 1 for 150 days of travel to
Victoria, British Columbia, via the Northwest Passage. The ship bears
the special mission of marking Canada's Sesquiceentennial - but it's
also carrying an important passenger of sorts: CG3EXP, an Amateur Radio
WSPR beacon, that is part of an onboard science experiment.
Radio Amateurs of Canada reports that the mission's organizers have
worked with Barrie Crampton, VE3BSB, to make the beacon operational
to enable others to track its sailing voyage along the world's largest
coastline. The live tracking link, which generates a dot for each
Maidenhead grid square of the journey, is being hosted by Jeff Milne,
VE3EFF. One of the experiment's goals is to produce a map, at the end
of the journey, showing the course the vessel took, displaying the
number of listeners who logged the beacon, and where they were located.
To see the live tracking link, visit QRP hyphen labs dot com forward
slash cee three (qrp-labs.com/c3)
Canada C3 has an ambitious schedule of daily stops, so there's plenty
of opportunity for tracking. Its agenda includes 13 national parks, 20
migratory bird sanctuaries, and 50 coastal communities.
Don't expect the beacon to have an easy time of it on this cruise. The
RAC notes that a number of the locations on the itinerary are in
marginal areas for radio, subject to auroral disturbances and "arctic
flutter".
For CG3EXP, it looks like this scenic trip is going to be a working
holiday.
For Amateur Radio Newsline, I'm Jim Meachen, ZL2BHF.
(ARRL, CANADA3C WEBSITE)
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