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 Previous: The Amateur Amateur: The Junkman Cometh, Part I |  Next: ARRL Addresses Concerns, Unveils Logbook of the World at Dayton Hamvention |
By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
May 20, 2003
Last weekend was the great Dayton Hamvention and your editor was surfin' there and back while leaving his tracks on the Internet.
It's 715 miles from Surfin' Headquarters in Downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, to the Hara Arena in the northwestern suburban sprawl of Dayton, Ohio, by way of the byways named I-84, 81, 80, 76, 71, 270, 70, and 75. Before dawn last Thursday, I revved up the six cylinders in the old land barge and headed west for 10 or 12 hours to join the biggest annual assemblage of ham radio operators this side of Silent Key City, ie, the Dayton Hamvention.
This year, all three Hamvention award winners were ham radio software developers. Tree Tyree, N6TR, received the Amateur of the Year honor for creating, organizing, and promoting Amateur Radio Kids' Days. Tree also created the popular logging program called TR-LOG. Special Achievement award winner, Jonathan Taylor, K1RFD, carried home his award for writing and developing the Internet linking program called EchoLink. And Steve Dimse, K4HG, took home the Technical Achievement award for inventing, developing, and personally funding and maintaining the global APRS Internet network that links 20,000-plus worldwide APRS operators.
Has the annual Hamvention triumvirate ever been so heavily weighed in software? I don't think so. This is likely to be a trend as software performs more and more tasks previously performed by hardware. In the near future, you are likely to hear acronyms like SDR (for software-defined radio) more and more in the ham radio lexicon, but that is a topic for another column.
Getting back to Dayton or should I say getting to Dayton and back... It was a long ride, a real road trip. The wife, daughter, dogs and cats worried all weekend long about the Old Man. Did he have another flat? Did he miss the exit in Akron again? Did he run out of gas? Did he run out of cash? Did he get some bad vibes? Whatever...
 The findu.com web site, "Findu" for short, is where you can find me and everyone else using APRS while traveling to and from the Dayton Hamvention or anywhere else. |
One way to allay some of their fears was to point them in the direction of findu.com, which is the result of this year's Technical Achievement award winner's fine work. Using "Findu," they could find me (or you assuming we were using APRS, ie, the Automatic Position Reporting System).
If they enter the URL http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=WA1LOU-8 in an Internet browser, Findu will look up WA1LOU-8 in its database and figure out the last time an APRS packet from WA1LOU-8 entered the system by way of the APRS Internet gateways (I-gates) that populate the globe. Findu will display its findings in text including the number of miles and direction from the nearest major city relative to WA1LOU-8's location, as well as WA1LOU-8's course, speed, and altitude). Findu will also pinpoint WA1LOU-8's location on three maps of varying scales (approximately 1 x 3/5 mile, 58 x 31 miles, and 588 x 311 miles).
Findu gets a big workout during the Hamvention. In addition to the loved ones at home who miss their APRS'ing hams, those who can't attend the Hamvention do so virtually by way of Findu. What a great application! Thank you K4HG; you certainly deserve the award!
Until next time, keep on surfin'.
Editor's note:
Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, resides in downtown Wolcott, Connecticut, and is a member
of the QQCC (QST quarter century club), i.e., he has been a QST writer for 25
years. Since getting his ticket in 1969, Stan has sampled nearly every entrée
in the Amateur Radio menu (including a stint as Connecticut Section Manager),
but he keeps coming back to his favorite preoccupations: VHF and packet radio.
As a result, he runs a 2-meter APRS digipeater and weather station (WA1LOU-15)
from his mountaintop location in central Connecticut. Stan has been a long time
advocate of using computers with Amateur Radio and wrote programs to dupe
contests and calculate antenna bearings way back in 1978. Today, he is on the
board of directors of the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) and uses his Mac
to surf the Internet searching for that perfect ham radio web page. To contact
Stan, send e-mail to wa1lou@arrl.net.
| Previous: The Amateur Amateur: The Junkman Cometh, Part I | Next: ARRL Addresses Concerns, Unveils Logbook of the World at Dayton Hamvention |
