Eire's youngest radio ham receives award

On Sunday 23 March 2014, Jordan Cummins EI4HLB was awarded the Arup Cup at the AGM of the Eire / Irish national amateur radio society the IRTS

Unlike other countries, Eire doesn't have an entry level licence, to get an amateur radio licence you need to pass the equivalent of the UK Advanced exam (USA Extra).

Jordan received his award at the IRTS rally and AGM hosted by the Galway VHF Group at the Galway Bay Hotel.

In 2013 as a 14 year old SWL he attended the Youngsters On The Air (YOTA) event in Estonia and wrote about his experiences in the October 2013 edition of the IRTS

Journal which can be read - http://irts.ie/downloads/IRTS_Sample_Newsletter.pdf

Jordan reports that in a first for the IRTS, his mother, Lisa Cummins EI9GSB, was elected as a committee member for the coming year and is the first ever female to sit on the committee since its formation, 82 years ago!!

The Arup Cup was donated to the IRTS by the Arup family in memory of their son EI3M who died at an early age. The cup is beautifully crafted in Danish silver and is awarded for exceptional service to the Society or to Amateur Radio by an amateur licensed for a period of five years or less. It was first awarded in 1948.

Read Jordan's report - http://ei4hlb.blogspot.ie/2014/03/irts-agm.html

Youth Spark! The ham radio world through the eyes of EI's youngest radio amateur - http://ei4hlb.blogspot.ie/

EI4HLB on Twitter - https://twitter.com/EI4HLB

K9LA to receive the 2013 Bill Orr, W6SAI, Technical Writing Award

Carl Luetzelschwab, K9LA, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, has been named the winner of The Bill Orr, W6SAI, Technical Writing Award for the 2013.

The ARRL Foundation selected Luetzelschwab at its 21 January 2014 meeting for his article “The Sun and the Ionosphere,” which appeared in the March 2013 issue of QST. Luetzelschwab won the March QST Cover Plaque Award last year for the same article. Luetzelschwab, who frequently writes on solar and propagation phenomena and trends, is the “Propagation” columnist for NCJ — National Contest Journal.

“I am honored to receive the William Orr Award from the ARRL,” Luetzelschwab said. “Orr’s Radio Handbook (23rd ed) is one of my favorite references in my library because of its practical information.”

— Carl Luetzelschwab winner of the 2013 Bill Orr, W6SAI, Technical Writing Award

Read the full ARRL story - http://www.arrl.org/news/k9la-named-to-receive-the-2013-bill-orr-w6sai-technical-writing-award

Summits on the Air revitalised by involvement from "Down Under"

The Summits on the Air award scheme, which has been going since 2002 when it was started in the UK, has become the most interesting part of the Amateur Radio hobby in Australia as more and more Australian States get qualified as associations in the scheme. The monthly magazine of the national association, the WIA, has featured many articles over the last six months, with one edition having no less than three separate articles on SOTA in it.  

The idea of operating portable with low power has always appealed in Australia. The structure of SOTA ensuring that home stations are available whenever a portable station activates from a mountain top, means that doing so outside of the normal contest and holiday times now makes sense. There is a real community feeling between the "activators" (those who climb the summits) and the "chasers" (the home stations) and in many cases activators are also chasers and vice versa.

For some time on the SOTA UK web reflector requests have been made for VK stations to be active on summits at times when European stations are active, either as chasers or themselves out on European summits. With the clock changes in both hemispheres this has now become possible and a few planned activations have been made in the early evening (until dark) hours in Australia and the early dawn hours in Europe. As always safety has to be born in mind and coming back down a mountain in the dark can be dangerous so there are limitations how long an Australian station can keep operating unless he is camping out overnight on the summit.

The biggest of these planned multiple activations so far occurred on December 7th. thanks to the efforts of Andrew VK1NAM organising the event. There were Australian summits active in 4 of the 5 classified associations. Many, many contacts were made between the Australian activators and the European chasers as well as a handful of Summit to Summit contacts where SOTA activators in Europe had gone out to the top of local hills to contact the Australian activators.

There were even a couple of US chasers who managed to work some of the Australian activators however the time difference made a summit-to-summit with the US impossible.  

It appears that early morning Summit to Summit contacts between the European activators have also taken place during the event, so perhaps this VK-EU action has also started so additional early morning SOTA activity within Europe.

There is still one major hurdle to get over though. The majority of Australian activators run SSB while the majority of European ones run CW. These planned activations have shown however that 5 watts to a dipole can get reliably around the world, EVEN on SSB.

Main thanks to Ed VK2JI - SOTA manager Hunter Region, VK2 association for this story.