ESRG March 2024 Key Messages

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The Exams and Syllabus Review Group (ESRG) met four times during March. It has released these key messages from those meetings:

  • We have been concentrating on v1.6 of the syllabus. It was sent to the Exam Standards Committee (ESC) for comments and we have spent the last month sorting through those and addressing them

  • We have been preparing four new mock papers covering each licence exam, from Foundation through to Direct to Full. We had some 150 questions from the ESC and the

  • Tutors’ Forum to review across those four papers

In addition, we had four question challenges from tutors which were considered but not upheld. We responded to the tutors with our decision

RSGB - https://rsgb.org/main/blog/esrg-minutes/2024/04/16/esrg-march-2024-key-messages/

Hytera Communications Banned from Worldwide Sale of 2-Way Radios

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The latest chapter in a long-simmering patent dispute between Motorola and Hytera. A US federal court in the Northern District of Illinois has prohibited Hytera Communications, a major provider of two-way radios, from selling, distributing or importing its radios "until further notice," requiring the company to pay a daily fine of $1-million to the court if they do not comply.

Even as it acted in compliance with the US court injunction, Hytera separately announced it was withdrawing its own counterclaims against Illinois-based Motorola that it had filed in a Shenzhen court. Hytera has denied claims that its H-series radios have infringed on Motorola's trademark and copyright.

The US court injunction banning the radios' global sales came just as Hytera was preparing to show at ISC West, a major security conference being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, starting on 9th April 2024.

Source - https://www.arnewsline.org/news/2024/4/12/amateur-radio-newsline-report-2424-for-friday-april-12th-2024

Ham’s Efforts Help Shed Light on Solar Eclipse

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The recent solar eclipse over North America gave hams a chance to give back to science in a big way - as big as the sun itself, you might say.

The day after the 8th April 2024 solar eclipse, logs were already rolling in from hams and radio clubs in North America who had taken part in the Solar Eclipse QSO Party. The party's organizer, the citizen science group HamSCI, was already embarking on its next big challenge: to study the logs and the results of other propagation experiments that were taking place concurrently.

“We are certainly very very happy with yesterday. A lot of people were on the air who understood that from the standpoint of science you have to populate to propagate.”
— Ed Efchak, WX2R

That population included the Suffolk County Radio Club, W2DQ, which set up a Field Day-style operation outside an eastern Long Island library where it operated SSB and FT8. It was also a chance to educate visitors as club vice president Ed Wilson N2XDD explained the hams' roles in the ionospheric studies.

Meanwhile, HamSCI reported that WSPR data was already coming in from a concurrent event, the Gladstone Signal Spotting Challenge. He said valuable results were collected as well from HamSCI's personal weather stations, the time-delay-of-arrival experiment and the medium-wave recordings experiment.

Conclusions are, of course, a long way off -- but visitors to Hamvention in Ohio next month will be hearing more of what's to come.