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IRTS Radio News Bulletin Sunday 04 December 2022


Silent Key, Les Booth

Michael, Ei3GYB informs us the death has occurred of Les Booth, Cloonshanbally, Culfadda, Ballymote, Co. Sligo. Les was an avid 11 metre operator and very active in the Mayo and Sligo area for decades. He was known all over the world as a gentleman operator. He was also active in the Mayo Radio Experimenters Club. In fact my first contact as a licensed radio experimenter was with Les, he was operating under supervision with the call of the Mayo radio club. For a while he was also a member of the IRTS as aSWL. He sat a licence exam manyyears back but unfortunately he was not successful. Les was a very social person. His involvement as a lorry driver bringing food and supplies to the Romanian orphanages in the 1990s are well remembered.

Les Booth, Rest in Peace.


The New HAREC Guide

After nine months of work of the core team of seven authors and editors, the National Short Wave Listeners Club are delighted to see the general release of the pre-publication draft of the new IRTS HAREC Amateur Station Licence Study Guide. Please download it from irts.ie/guide. The guide has three hundred and eighty five pages, thirty three tables, some two hundred illustrations, and over one hundred and thirty thousand words. It will help many newcomers pass the recently updated licensing exams. It should also be of interest to experienced amateurs, who would like to catch up, for example, on SDR technology, or on antenna safety. However, to improve the quality of the new guide, the editors would like to ask you to read it, and to share your comments. All feedback will be gladly considered, and the corrections will be incorporated into a print-ready, final version, by late Spring next year. Once again, please download this new book from irts.ie/guide and enjoy learning about the magic of amateur radio!


News from the IRTS

The first `face to face' IRTS committee meeting in over 2 and a half years took place on Saturday the 19th of November at the Maldron Hotel in Portlaoise. The meeting which started at 11 a.m. and concluded at 1 p.m. was well attended by IRTS committee members, officers of the society and many club representatives from the various radio clubs around Ireland. IRTS Vice-President Enda EI2II chaired the meeting which was very productive and over the two hours a large number of new topics and the day to day matters relevant to the running of the society were discussed. Regretfully Andy EI5JF had to resign from the committee due to personal commitments and the IRTS thank him for his service to the society. Some of the topics discussed included ComReg's requesting amendments to the current process of handling automatic station licence applications and work on finalising this new procedure is currently underway. The idea of electronic voting was talked about and although it is not part of our current constitution it may be included in the new constitution which is currently being written. Also discussed was the excellent 2021 SWOT analyses carried out on behalf of the society by Adrian EI9HAB on the needs of amateur radio in Ireland as part of an IARU study program. Following on from this report we are in the process of putting together a working group to take the findings from this report and make recommendations to the committee on areas the IRTS can improve. We already have Adrian EI9HAB, Robbie EI2IP and Niall EI6HIB involved, but there are still a few places for any members with an interest in shaping our future to assist and anyone interested is asked to send an email to irts_secretary /at/ irts.ie. The IRTS are also looking for 3 or 4 people to become part of a working group to deal with EMC. There are a few different roles to be filled within this group including a representative to deal with the NSAI. Another role in this working group would include the reading of documents relating to EMC so this might be suitable for a semi-retired or retired person. Anyone interested or looking for more details is asked to get in touch with EMC Manager Liam EI4GB by email to liam.mangan /at/ ymail.com. The next IRTS committee meeting will take place on December 17th at 11 a.m. and will take place on the Zoom platform.


Galway Radio Experimenters Club

The July meeting of the Galway Radio Experimenters Club EI4GRC will take place tomorrow night, Monday the 5th ofDecember at 8.00 p.m. sharp at The Menlo Park Hotel, Terryland, Headford Road, Galway, Eircode H91 E98N. There will also be virtual access to the meeting - please contact the Club Secretary via. email - secretary /at/ galwayradio.com for access details. The club website is www.galwayradio.com and anyone is welcome to come to our club nights or contact the secretary for more information.


South Dublin Radio Club

This year's South Dublin Radio Club Christmas Party will take place on Tuesday the 13th of December 2022 at 8pm.The venue will be the "The Morgue" pub in Tempelogue Village. Members of other clubs and visitors are as usual very welcome to this social event. Limited free food will be available for paid-up members; visitors can choose from the bar menu until 9.00 pm. The club will then break for Xmas and return on January 3rd 2023.


IRTS News Readers Required

The IRTS are currently compiling a panel of newsreaders for the weekly Sunday morning 40m and 80m IRTS news bulletins for 2023. The rota which was setup in 2022 is to share the news reading duties amongst the entire panel of newsreaders and it ensures that the work load is evenly spread out. The more people that volunteer the less often each individual reader will have to do the broadcast. There is very little involved in the broadcast and no experience is necessary. If any fully licensed EI feels like that they would be interested in becoming part of the IRTS News Readers panel, can they please get in touch with the IRTS Public Relations Officer Seany EI2HZB directly on 083 4713001 or by email to irts_pro /at/ irts.ie by December 12th. Likewise, if anyone has any further questions, please get in touch also. Once a list of those interested has been compiled, we will set about getting a rota in place for both the 40m and 80m Sunday bulletins for 2023.


Contesting

As a follow-on to our item in last week's bulletin about the recent RSGB announcement of support for the UK/EI DX contests, IRTS has been supporting both the SSB and CW UK/EI DX contests since 2015, initially by sponsoring plaques for the leading EI stations in the respective UK/EI DX contests and, since 2020, two of the society's longstanding trophies have been allocated to those contests. The IRTS HF Shield is awarded to the highest scoring Single Operator EI station in the SSB contest, while the Paddy Smyth Memorial Cup is awarded to the highest scoring Single Operator EI station in the CW contest. The SSB DX contest takes place in the Autumn, while the CW event is in April.

Next weekend's ARRL 10-Meter Contest will likely be helped by good propagation conditions, expect much activity in the CW and SSB segments. To avoid single operators getting carried away with DX fever, operation is limited to a maximum of 36 hours out of the 48-hour period, starting at 00:00 UTC next Saturday. 'Off' times must be at least 30 minutes long. The exchange is signal report and serial number. American, Canadian and Mexican stations also send their state or province code. Logs are due within seven days after the event is over. Logs may be submitted either online or via mail, but electronic Cabrillo logs are the preferred method. More info at contests.arrl.org

Finland's Independence Day is marked annually by the traditional radio event PRT35. A vintage radio station can use the suffix /S after the call-sign. If the transmitter has already been in service during the Second World War, the additional suffix can be /SA. More detailed information about the schedule and frequencies of the event on the website of the Tube Radio Museum. Military radio amateur stations with the OI prefix will also be activated on Tuesday. Radio amateurs of the Central Finland club OH6AD invite all radio amateurs with Morse skills to compete for the Kuutosten Cup. On the 6th of December at 10 a.m. Finnish time, the hour-long CW contest will be held at 80 and 40 meters. This year's contest rules added the new YL class.


The Propagation Horoscope

This week, in 1995, NASA launched the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, also known as SOHO. This sun-monitoring satellite is a collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency that has been operational for 27 years. SOHO's main objective is to investigate the physics behind how the sun works, and provide useful data for predicting space weather events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Numerous mission extensions have enabled the spacecraft to observe two 11-year solar cycles and to discover thousands of comets from it's perch at the L1 Lagrange point about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Unlike a solar powered space craft, mere earthlings still have to foot an electricity bill: John, Ei7GL, reports on ei7gl.blogspot.com : The OZ7IGY team in Denmark have announced that their 8m beacon on 40.071 MHz has been turned off due to increased electricity costs, just as the lower VHF bands are coming alive. On www.oz7igy.dk one can see that most of the power hungry microwave beacons are also off-air. The coming week on HF will see a slight increase in Solar flux to about 125 units, the geomagnetic field is unsettled since Thursday, due to minor storm and high speed streams from Coronal Hole 1117. Solar wind speed at SOHO ranged between 608 and 817 km/sec. The high latitude magnetometer at Andenes recorded active to major storm levels on Friday morning. Although no Earth directed CMEs were observed in the past 24 hours, Coronal Hole 1118 will likely rotate across the central meridian Sunday noon, and may be good for surprises. The day-time MUF is not as quickly rising to the higher bands any longer, good conditions can still be found on 40 to 15 meters. Late afternoon and evening long-path openings towards Asia and Oceania occur on the lower bands. The improved night-time propagation brings with it an increase of background noise on the lower frequencies, due to noise that is generated in far away locations, and then propagated on 160 and 80m, thus adding to the local noise floor.

That is the news for this week. Items for inclusion in next week's radio news can be submitted by email to newsteam /at/ irts.ie for automatic forwarding to both the radio and printed news services. The deadline is Friday noon.

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