Courage Center Handiham System

When ARRL Treasurer Jim McCobb, K1LU, announced last year that he would retire after more than three decades of volunteer service to the ARRL, ARRL President Kay Craigie, N3KN, appointed a search committee to find a suitable replacement. The committee received many resumes from League members, and after interviewing several applicants, selected Rick Niswander, K7GM, of Greenville, North Carolin...

Welcome to Handiham World.
Remember last week's E-letter and podcast, when I mentioned that the number one priority here at Handihams would be to fix the website? That time has come, and here is the reason why:
Typically on Fridays I concentrate on producing new audio lectures for our licensing classes. Fridays are also a good time to catch up on loose ends that have collected during the week. Doing website updates is generally a little bit easier on Fridays because I know that I will be logging into FTP in order to put the audio I have produced onto the website anyway, so why not do other web updates while I am at it?
Well, last Friday proved to be a bit unnerving. As I had mentioned before, we had been having serious issues with the performance of the website Handiham.org that had caused pages to either be unavailable or load so slowly that many web browsers would simply timeout. Many of you could not reach our files or would only be able to download a partial file. Needless to say, this situation simply cannot go on. Not only is it bad service for our members, but it can eat up a lot of my time as I try to work my way through the many tech support complaints. Sometimes I have a way to work around it and help the person get the files they need and other times I don't. In any case, Friday was not a good day for Handiham.org because it went down early in the morning and was off-line most of the day. I contacted the hosting service and they began to work on the problem which was on one particular machine in Utah.
Late on Friday the website did return to service. During the outage, it was difficult for me to work since I had to do everything that I could off-line and only later on plan to FTP the files to the website. Of course any members who needed files during the day were out of luck. Since we have had issues extending over months (though nothing quite this bad), we had already procured server space with Network Solutions, a respected company with which we already had a long-term relationship as our domain name registrar. I decided to start putting some serious effort into building a new beta website that would be the eventual replacement for the current one, but I had to step this effort up several notches over this past weekend.
When something like this happens, you really have two choices. You can either whine or complain about how awful things are and make excuses or you can look on circumstances as an opportunity to make something better. It is sort of like having your old fishing boat sink to the bottom of the lake. Yes, you miss your old fishing boat with all its dents and barnacles. On the other hand, you have an opportunity to get a new fishing boat and it can be exactly the kind of boat you have always wanted. A website is like that. We have had the old website for quite a few years now, and it has served us pretty well. However, over the years it has become cluttered with barnacles – too many links and just too much confusing stuff. It has become a little bit too dated and clunky to be useful, especially to newcomers who may be happening on it for the very first time.
Our opportunity is to build a new website that is easier to administer using Drupal 7, and to incorporate some much-needed changes. One new feature is the addition of a "Skip to Content" link near the top of the page so that blind users who are reading the page with screen reading software can skip listening to all of the menu links and go straight to the main page content. Another feature is a more pleasing view for sighted users without making the website inaccessible to blind users. And, of course, we are simplifying the menu structure to make the site less cluttered.
Our choice of Drupal for a content management system goes back quite a number of years when it was originally suggested by long-time Handiham volunteer Phil Temples, K9HI. We have been using Drupal 5.X and for the past few years 6.X. Drupal 7 has been under development for a couple of years and I have been testing it on my private website for quite a long time, watching as it matured. I feel that the time has come to make the change as long as we are redoing the website anyway. The new version of Drupal incorporates many features that had to be manually added to the old versions. Many administrative tasks are easier. We will eventually need to redirect Handiham.org to the new site, and, because of what we experienced last Friday, are going to try to do this as soon as possible.
As you might expect, there are going to be some problems. Any time you make a big website migration like this, coupled with a major redesign, there are going to be some things that might not work correctly or perhaps will be missing or not work at all. This will all take time to iron out. One thing that will have to be done is that we will have to re--register all of our users. I know this will be a major inconvenience for everyone, but it is really the only way to update the database on the new server with a clean installation. I think the strategy needs to be developed on exactly how we will do this, and I welcome user suggestions. I do have a data dump with e-mail addresses and usernames, so we could send out a blanket e-mail when the new site is ready. However, one concern I have about that strategy is that we may get an overwhelming number of hits on the new website as users try to create their new accounts. It may be better to use a targeted strategy of mailing perhaps 25 users at a time to even out the load. Anyone who has Drupal experience or who has administered a website is welcome to contact me directly with their comments.
The old website will still sit on the old server in Utah, but once the name Handiham.org is redirected, it will become unreachable. I will then take steps to reactivate our other Handiham domain name, Handiham.net. The old site would be available there for some period of time.
One problem that I anticipate is that the Handiham mailing lists with the Handiham.org domain name will cease to function. These two lists are the Handiham Radio Club list and the Handiham Volunteer Instructors list. The Wednesday E-letter list and the Friday New Audio Notification list will not be affected because they are hosted at Freelists. I may be able to reconfigure the club and volunteer lists with the.net address, but I would also welcome suggestions on how we should proceed with these lists.
Some of our users may be concerned about how this will affect the two Handiham Internet remote base stations. Neither station is connected in any way with the web hosting service and both are separately hosted on their own dedicated computers on Courage Center properties. Therefore, neither station will be affected in any way. We do update the remote base station status daily on the website, and this update will be continued on the new website as well.
Another change that will be implemented is the availability of more materials in DAISY format. This new format will replace some of the older MP3 audio for our blind members. This advancement will allow for easier navigation through the material for our blind Handiham members. This does not mean that we are moving away from human readers, so please don't worry that you will never hear a human voice again on Handiham.org! Some materials, if they are available in computer text in the first place, are most easily converted to DAISY format that incorporates a voice produced by the computer software. Other materials are more properly and efficiently read by a human reader and can be imported into DAISY by special software. Our original production will still be done by Audacity so that we can more easily edit the audio and still produce four track cassette recordings for the Handiham members who need them during 2012. Of course Audacity remains our editor of choice for the Friday audio lectures and for the Wednesday podcast. As before, the free podcast will remain available to the general public in the iTunes store.
We are hoping that the transition will go smoothly, but you know as well as I do that a project like this is pretty complicated and there will always be some unforeseen problems. In fact, to me it sort of feels like planning for and setting up for Field Day. You always anticipate how much fun it is going to be and you have participated in the planning process for past years and like to think that you know you are not going to forget anything this year. Naturally, when you arrive at the Field Day site and start getting everything set up that is when you find out that no one packed Styrofoam cups for the coffee and the power supply cables are still sitting in one of the club member's basement. That is how it will be for any new project and I am not going to be surprised when things don't work on the website. What we can do is to work together to make the new website project successful by helpful suggestions that include specific recommendations on how to fix a problem whenever possible.
So, even though this is going to be a real roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work couple of weeks, I know that we are doing the right thing. I am encouraged by the American Council of the Blind website, which also uses Drupal 7 and the Bartik theme as its public portal. I also want to thank Handiham Radio Club members and Handiham volunteers who have visited the new beta website and given me suggestions and feedback. I really appreciate your help!
For Handiham World, I'm...Patrick Tice, WA0TDA
Handiham Manager

The ARRL Board of Directors had the pleasure and distinction of bestowing three annual awards at its 2012 Annual Meeting -- the George Hart Distinguished Service Award, the Bill Leonard, W2SKE, Professional Media Award for print, audio and video, and the ARRL International Humanitarian Award.

The George Hart Distinguished Service Award: This year, the Board named two recipients: ARRL Connecticut...

Beginning Sunday, January 22, it will cost more to mail first class letters, postcards and packages within the US. The cost to mail a first class letter will be 45 cents, an increase of 1 cent. According to the USPS, this is the first increase since May 2009. The cost of mailing a postcard will be 32 cents, an increase of 3 cents. This is the second increase for postcard postage in less than a ...

The ARRL Board of Directors held its 2012 Annual Meeting January 13-14, 2012 in Windsor, Connecticut, under the chairmanship of President Kay Craigie, N3KN. Newly elected Delta Division Director David Norris, K5UZ, attended his first Board meeting as Director. In addition, two recently elected vice directors -- Glen Clayton, W4BDB, Delta Division, and Dale Williams, WA8EFK, Great Lakes Division...

 

According to Pudge Forrester, AAA9GL, government liaison for Army MARS, Lieutenant General Susan Lawrence has reversed the decision to phase out the use of the WinLink 2000 global radio e-mail system by Army MARS members.

Gen. Lawrence stated that the Army, after reviewing its capabilities, had decided that the continued use of WinLink 2000 was a valuable asset to Army MARS members and agencies...

On January 10, the US District Court for Maine issued a ruling in the FCC’s lawsuit to collect monetary forfeitures issued to Glenn Baxter, K1MAN, of Belgrade Lakes, Maine. The FCC had assessed forfeitures in the amount of $21,000 against Baxter on three asserted violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and its regulations: Failure to respond to an FCC inquiry in violation of Title 47, Sect...

The average daily sunspot numbers were up this week by a tiny bit, from 88.1 to 90.6, while the average daily solar flux was down slightly, from 136.2 to 134.9. Sunspot numbers for January 5-11 were 99, 118, 110, 90, 90, 63 and 64, with a mean of 90.6. The 10.7 cm flux was 141.3, 135.5, 140.5, 135.8, 142.3, 128.8 and 120.1, with a mean of 134.9. The estimated planetary A indices were 5, 5, 5, 4...

By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor

This week, Surfin’ describes how to become a PopComm monitoring station and obtain another call sign to boot.

I just got a new call sign: WPC1LOU. It joins WPE1GYX and WA1LOU in my call sign collection.

During the holidays, I began chasing long and medium wave DX using my Kenwood TS-440S transceiver and an inverted V antenna cut for 40 meters. Also, I am...

On January 10, the US District Court for Maine issued its ruling in the FCC’s case against Glenn Baxter, K1MAN, of Belgrade Lakes, Maine. The FCC brought forfeitures in the amount of $21,000 against Baxter on three asserted violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and its regulations: Failure to respond to an FCC inquiry in violation of Title 47, Section 308 of the US Code, willful or malic...

On January 11, the FCC issued a Memorandum Opinion and Order, denying an ARRL Petition for Reconsideration concerning vanity and club call signs. Filed with the Commission in January 2011, the ARRL’s Petition was in response to the FCC’s Report and Order (R&O) that detailed rules changes to the vanity call sign system and call signs for Amateur Radio clubs. These new rules went into effect on F...

VHF operators will be on the bands in force the weekend of January 21-23, as the ARRL January VHF Sweepstakes hits the airwaves. This contest gives the VHFer in all of us a chance to do some contesting during the winter months. “Don’t let the cold weather in much of the US dissuade you from getting on the air,” said ARRL Contest Branch Manager Sean Kutzko, KX9X. “Many a portable or Rover operat...

Thanks to the generosity of dedicated members and friends, the ARRL successfully met its 2011 fundraising goals. More than 6000 individuals and clubs supported the efforts of the ARRL this past year through gifts to the Diamond Club, the Spectrum Defense Fund, the Education & Technology Fund, the Historic Preservation Fund, the W1AW Endowment Fund and the ARRL Endowment Fund.

Many of the ARRL’s ...

Welcome to Handiham World.What better time to review things that need doing or fixing than the beginning of a fresh, new year?  Here at the Handiham office we are busy getting our 2012 bucket list ready to go.  Here are some of our major "to-do's" for 2012:

1. Fix the website.  This morning I tried to reach Handiham.org and it was so painfully slow to load that the web browser just gave up and displayed an error message. We have been encountering this problem more and more over the past year, and it is related to the shared web hosting server that we are using. More than once the hosting company took the site down, surprising us and causing me to have to drop everything else to deal with the problem.  Furthermore, I have received complaints about audio files not playing through.  This can happen through the loss of connectivity due to server overload.  The Fix: Move the website to another hosting service.  This project is a major one, and will result in a disruption of our website-based services, but it is going to have to happen sometime soon.  We will keep you posted, but before we make the move I would like to hear from you if there is some website feature that you really would like to have that currently does not exist.  In the meantime, if Handiham.org appears to be down, it may instead just be really slow due to overload. Wait a while and try again.  If audio files do not stream all the way through, an alternative is to download them onto your hard drive then open them.  If downloading is slow, try again later.
2. Improve our audio recording quality.  We depend a lot on audio delivered from the website, both for our weekly audio news and for audio lectures for those who are working on a license or upgrade. And we must not forget about the audio tutorials on how to use various rigs, either.  It has come to my attention that some of the audio lectures are incomplete.  One, for example, is Extra Class Lecture 59, which simply cuts off at the 42 minute mark. An alert Extra Class student let me know about this, and when I downloaded the lecture to check it, sure enough - the audio file was okay up to 42 minutes, after which it simply flat lined to the end.  Checking my original MP3 file, I was disappointed to learn that it was also defective.  Unfortunately the original Audacity file was long gone, so recovery was impossible.  Since the Extra Class pool changes this summer, we have decided to just leave the defective file in place and concentrate on solving these kinds of quality issues with the new recordings that will begin as soon as the 2012 Extra Class pool is released.  To improve our audio, we will be updating Audacity and tweaking the settings.  We will also be using a new version of the Lame encoder for MP3 production.  Because volunteers also produce audio for us at their own homes, we need to get more information out about how to record digitally.  A series of how-to articles on this subject will be appearing in Worldradio Magazine soon. 
3. Upgrade the equipment at Radio Camp.  Recently I proposed that we acquire a new radio for training purposes at Radio Camp.  At the same time, we would buy a new rotor to replace a non-working old unit on the 50 foot tower at Camp Courage. The proposed radio is the Kenwood TS-590S with VGS1 Voice Guide module.  Following the camp session, the radio could be pressed into service as a remote base station using the accessible Kenwood software interface. This suggestion is under discussion on the Handiham Radio Club mailing list. 
4. Assess the working space at HQ and make it more productive.  A visit to our headquarters will make you a believer - that we need to do something to organize the working space better, that is. A hodgepodge of work stations, storage cabinets, and donated gear that needs assessment greets you as you walk in.  We need to put some serious elbow grease into making our headquarters a better space for working and operating, as well as for checking radios and accessories out to see if they are working and to make minor repairs, assemble power cables and coax jumpers, and make sure that each radio has all of its accessories.
5. Expand our Internet Remote Base capabilities.  The addition of a TS-590S station would definitely be an improvement, but what if we could add a DX station with a tower and beam?  That is what we will be discussing as we gather for Radio Camp 2012 in June.  In the long run such a station benefits our members whether or not they attend a radio camp session.  It is an essential service to offer remote base capability now, having begun as a quirky experimental project at Courage North several years ago.  Included in our effort is a revamp of the existing W4MQ software, which could use some additional accessibility features.  Since 2011 we have been hosting the W4MQ software project following the untimely death at age 58 of Bob Arnold, N2JEU, who had been hosting it for the past couple of years. 
6. Prepare a new Extra Class lecture series.  As mentioned, the question pool changes on July 1.  The Extra Class lecture series, designed to be blind-friendly and accessible to Handiham members with reading disabilities, takes an enormous amount of time to produce.  Based on a variety of references, it will take the student through the concepts and not simply a reading of a textbook or the question pool. I hope to get through it more quickly this time and with better audio.  
7. Plan for the future.  In the past we have periodically called on volunteers who serve as members of an advisory board. It is time once again to bring the Handiham Advisory Board back to life so that we can be sure we are hearing from our members as we plan our way forward into the next few years.  Obviously technology is changing, and our services must change with it.  I can't see the future any better than the next person, but one thing I have learned from experience is that there is usually wisdom and insight to be gained by bringing knowledgeable people together to tackle projects like this.  Any one person has limitations based on their likes and dislikes.  In a group, we will have a chance to bring forward new ideas, hash them through, and decide where we need to place our efforts.  This is timely, since I will turn 64 in April and will eventually retire.  While that may not happen for a few years, we need to plan now for a smooth transition, and that can't really take place easily without a "future plan" of where the Handiham program should be in the years ahead. 
8. Leverage social media.  With other amateur radio organizations and services already in the game, we have some catching up to do.  The Handiham program does not have a Facebook or Google Plus presence, and it is no longer possible to ignore these powerful marketing tools. Courage Center, our parent nonprofit company, and Courage Center Camps (of which we are part) both have Facebook pages. Figuring out a strategy is key, since we would need to limit our administrative time on such an account due to limited resources.

So there you have it.  It's ambitious as lists go, but I think you will agree that these are all things that must be done to maintain the program. In due course I will be calling for help and I am confident that we can work together during 2012 to make Handihams even better.For Handiham World, I'm...Patrick Tice, WA0TDA
Handiham Manager

Four new poll questions have just been published on the QuickStats page on the ARRL website. Let your voice be heard!

Questions in this month’s QuickStats poll:

• Do you have a call sign license plate on your vehicle?
• Do you still have some vacuum tubes in your parts box?
• Will the new privileges on the 60 meter band make you more inclined to operate there?
• Are you active on APRS (Automatic Position...

By H. Ward Silver, N0AX
n0ax@arrl.net

With ham radio getting a little exposure in the form of Mike Baxter, KA0XTT, on the hit ABC comedy Last Man Standing, let’s have some fun remembering some other hammy appearances in the media (Thanks to the AD7DB, KB9MWR and AC6V websites for the references!).

1) Which of the Munsters sometimes operated a ham radio?
a. Lily
b. Herman
c. Grandpa
d. Eddie

2) In the ...

Phil Williams, KA1GMN, has been granted a Special Temporary Authority (STA) by the Federal Communications Commission to conduct Spread Spectrum experiments within 2.5 kHz signal bandwidths on 160 through 2 meters at a maximum of 100 W effective radiated power.  The 6-month authorization takes effect February 1 and expires on July 31. The FCC has assigned Williams the call sign WF9XJD for use du...

The FCC released a Public Notice on January 6, reminding land mobile licensees, frequency coordinators and equipment manufacturers that they have less than one year to transition to narrowband operations in the 150-174 and 421-512 MHz bands. While the latter frequency range includes amateur service allocations, radio amateurs are not affected by the narrowbanding requirement. Land mobile operat...

ARRL policy is made by its Board of Directors. The 15 voting members of the Board are the Directors who are elected by the ARRL members in their respective divisions. The Board meets in January and July, usually in the Hartford area. ARRL members also elect Vice Directors who may attend the meetings. ARRL Directors and Vice Directors are volunteers who work hard to represent the ARRL in their d...

We’re continuing to see good conditions, although sunspot activity has declined a bit. The average daily sunspot numbers for December 29-January 4 declined nearly 20 points (when compared to the previous seven days) to 88.1; this is the lowest reported weekly sunspot number average since September 2011. The average daily solar flux was off 6.4 points to 143.1. Sunspot numbers for December 29-Ja...