You may or may not be aware of the rift that happened towards the end of 2017 between the the ​WWFF and the individuals running the companion US program - KFF. If you are an active participant, it's old news, but others might not have any idea it even happened.  Because of this, I wanted to share my take on the situation. 

3 sentance summary:
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Any time people are managing a large program, there can be differences of opinions and ideas. How those difference are handled can range from elegantly to downright ugly, depending on which side of the fence you land on.  At the end of the day, this split was simply different people with different ideas.

     From my viewpoint, what this all boiled down to was that while the global rules seemed to give some leniency to the member countries to adapt and modify rules to suit their own operators and awards, there were things that the US managers wanted to do, that the global program couldn't (or wouldn't) support.  Unfortunately, when it comes to something as large as a QSO management system with over a million records, some future requests can be hard to anticipate, and therefore can be very difficult to implement, and differences of opinions on how to handle those requests can escalate quickly.  

    What happened as a results, was that the primary stakeholders in the US program decided to split off and form an entirely separate program - POTA (Parks on the Air.)  The old US program and the global program still exist under new leadership, but there were some rule changes that some individuals may or may not like, while the rules for the newly formed POTA program are nearly identical to those that many US hams became accustomed to with ARRL's 2016 NPOTA event. 

     The most notable difference between POTA and it's predecessor, is that for a successful POTA activation, only 10 contacts need to be made, whereas it's predecessor requires 44.  Additionally, the POTA program is being built to support some things that we came to love about NPOTA a couple years ago - trails, parks that cross state lines, and at some point in the future, 2fers! (and 3fers/4fers/etc.)

     So why write about this?  I have two main reasons:

• I love activating parks when I travel for work!
• In the interest of full disclosure, I volunteered to help build the new QSO storage and award database for the POTA group.  

       So why did I, a person that usually hangs back from this type of controversy, volunteer to help out?  That's actually an easy one - I've been working on my Information Systems degree (I'll be done in 3 weeks!)  and I thought this was an excellent opportunity to use some of the things I've been learning to get some real-world experience.  Also, whatever disagreements there were between the US managers and the global managers arn't my business, and since I personally like the individuals starting the POTA program, I wanted to help them out!

     With all that said, here's my take on the two programs:

     I know there are some people that are very loyal to one program or the other - because of that, whenever I activate a park, I'll just be sending my logs to any groups that give location based awards, so that any chasers out there get the credit they are looking for.  To me this is really not a big deal, because I already send my logs to multiple places when I activate.  People chase all kinds of stuff - grid squares, counties, states, islands, summits, etc.  If I can help a fellow ham reach a goal of theirs simply by emailing someone my log, or doing a simple upload - why wouldn't I?

     For my own personal motivation however, I will probably be paying much closer attention to how I perform in the POTA program, because at the end of the day it better suits my style and more closely resembles what I became accustomed to while doing activations for ARRL's 2016 NPOTA event (but with a lot more parks to choose from!)  After all, with a busy schedule, a great family, and a sometimes intense travel schedule for work, it is much more appealing (to me) to have the option of sneaking out somewhere for 10 quick contacts, vs. debating whether or not I have the time, conditions, etc. to try to get in a full 44 contacts before the park in whatever city I end up in, closes.

     Anyway, I'll just wrap it up by saying that even though POTA and WWFF-KFF are now two completely separate things, I personally don't hold any grudges.  A park is a park after all, and I'm more than happy to send my logs to whatever storage system chasers would like, to help them reach their goals!  

73!

One final note - comments are welcome as always, but my blog is a "safe space" and all comments are moderated.  

Remember the crowd-sourced project I was working on? You know - the thing where each step along the way I asked all of you for your ideas and input? Well, I haven't forgotten about it!

I've had several major things going on (one of them being finishing up my Information System degree - 5 weeks to go!) Anyway, because of my busy schedule I've just been picking away at all my various projects a little bit at a time. This week, I managed to steal a few minutes in the garage while the kids were chalking on the driveway to work on the box the project is going into. For now this consisted of removing all of the old stuff from the box that isn't being reused, which left me with just the battery from it's prior life:

     With all the old parts out of the way, I'm just about ready to start mounting up the parts of my Bitx40 that are going in here.  The only real thing to do before I start that, is to fill in the holes that were left by removing the old connectors - the next time I get to spend a few minutes on this project I'll show you my trick for doing that :-)

​     73 for now!

     I would venture to say that any ham that does logging with a computer, phone, or tablet, has at least some basic understanding of ADIF - it's the file type that most of our logs are stored in!
     But what is it really?  For those without much software knowledge, files like these can sometimes be a rather amorphous thing, but explaining ADIF can actually be done pretty quickly - it's a text file!  That's right, its just a file of plain text.  If you don't believe me, right click on one of your ADIF files (they end with .adi) on your computer, and choose "open with."  In the dialog box that pops up, choose "Notepad" (or your favorite text editor.)  Voila - you're looking at your log!

     Now, if you do the above, you might notice some things in the text like this: <STATION_CALLSIGN:5>.   All of the things inside the brackets just tell logging programs and QSO storage systems (like LOTW) which field the next bit of data came from, and how many characters are in it.  Pretty slick huh?  

     All of the field names that we use in our loggers should be pretty much standardized to make matching simpler.  With that in mind, it helps to know that ADIF is really more than a file type - it's the agreed upon standard for what gets put in that text file!  If you're curious about the full details, you can check out www.adif.org, for the full list of field types and how they are used.

     Okay - since you insist - 
One of the reason I wanted to touch on ADIF is because, like we joke about in our house "your doin' it wrong!" (spoken in the most naggy voice you can muster up.)

     Now, no one intentionally logs incorrectly, but especially for new-comers, some of the fields in loggers can be a bit confusing, so I really just wanted to touch on some of the most common fields / mistakes that I've seen in logs:

CALL - This is really just short for "callsign" which should be straight-forward, but for new folks, it can be unclear if this is your callsign, or the other person's - for anyone who wasn't sure, this is for the "other" person's callsign.

STATION_CALLSIGN - This also seems straight-forward, but sometimes there is confusion between this field and the next one I'll discuss.  To help clear it up, this is intended to be the callsign you use over the air - i.e. when I call "CQ - this is November Three Victor Echo Mike" I'm putting N3VEM in the "Station Callsign" field.

OPERATOR - This is probably the field that is used incorrectly most often! (heck, I was using it wrong myself for quite some time.)  It is not uncommon for me to see people put names, initials, etc. in this field, but that is not it's intent.  This field is meant to be another callsign!  Normally the "Station" and "Operator" are the same callsign (i.e. N3VEM is usually operating the station of N3VEM) but there are many cases where they will be different - like field day operations, contests, special events, etc. where the "Station" is a club, or the callsign being used over the air, and the "Operator" is someone else.  (i.e. during field day N3VEM may be an operator of the W3RRR station.)

SIG - At first pass, this might seem like a a shortened version of the word signal, and I have seen individuals put "59" etc. in this field, but signal reports actually go in the "RST" fields.  SIG is actually an abbreviation for "Special Interest Group" and it is where you log the "program" the person you are contacting is participating in.  This is the field where you would put "POTA", "WWFF", "MOTA" (Mota?) to indicate that you contacted someone participating in one of those programs.  If you are the one participating, you would use the companion field to this one - "MY_SIG" to indicate that you're activating one of these programs locations.

SIG_INFO - If you do contact someone who is participating in a special interest group, they will often give you a "reference number" of some sort.  SIG_INFO is where you put that number!  If you're the one in the park (or in the mine!) you would put the reference number for the location you are operating from in the companion "MY_SIG_INFO" field.  As a point of clarification, some groups are so big, they get their own fields in the ADIF format - IOTA and SOTA.

     In addition to fields that are commonly misused, there are also situations where people use generic fields when they wouldn't have to.  Just like we commonly say "there's an app for that" when thinking logging, just remember that "there's a field for that."  Some of the more obscure (to most folks) ones that jump out:

MS_SHOWER (the name of the meteor shower that you're making your meteor scatter contacts with)

K_INDEX, SFI - in case you like to log the solar conditions at the time of your contacts.

QSO_RANDOM - a true/false field used to indicate if this was a schedule contact or a random contact

Thanks for stopping by -  feel free to comment if you regularly use one of the many more obscure fields.  Also let me know if there are fields that you have misunderstood in the past - it helps us to share our own mistakes with the next generation of hams, so that they don't repeat our follies!

bye for now!

I  almost forgot what activating a park was like!  

     Like many of you, I am a busy person.  Thanks to my busy life, most of my ham radio time since about December has just been from the temporary home shack in the master bedroom closet, when I could sneak in a few contacts (come to think of it, I've been spending a lot of time in that closet....my shack/office is still under construction.)  This past Tuesday evening however, I found myself near Washington DC, for work, so I slipped over to the George Washington Memorial Parkway and did a quick activation - thanks to a forgotten connector I could only do 40 meters, but I still managed to get in about 30 contacts.

     The contacts included some of the folks with callsigns that I'm really starting to become familiar with, like K0ATZ, W8MSC, W4JL, W2RAN, and a few others - thanks for being on the other end!

    So what is it that keeps me so busy?  Well, my family and work are the most obvious time commitments I have.  I travel for 2-3 days every other week, so my home time is pretty important for me and my family.  In addition to that, some of you may recall that I'm an adult learner - I'm now 8 weeks away from finishing up my Information Systems degree, so I have just a little bit of time invested in that :-)

     Even though family, work, and school keeps me busy, I still find time for my ham radio projects (mostly after the kids are in bed). If you poke around my blog for a little bit you can find the list of all of my ongoing projects.  In addition to those projects, I've been working pretty closely with one of the folks whose call sign I mentioned above, on a project that we hope a lot of you out there will like.....but I've said to much already - more on that to come soon!

     Howdy all!  I just have another short update for everyone this week, related to the progress on my primary project - the home ham shack.  The shack and the main "rec room" part of the basement are part of the same project, so the last couple weeks have been tied up with drywall and related work in the main part of the basement, which is mostly not ham radio related (which is why I haven't bored all of you with those details...)  
     Before I started hanging the drywall in that room, I did share some of the work I did to run coax, rotor cable, conduit, etc. across the rec room.  I discussed that way back here, but if you recall, I basically ran a bunch of wire, coax, and conduit, and left the ends in a box against the outside wall.  The idea was to make it easy to do the penetration to the exterior when the time came.  Here's a couple pics as a reminder of that:

     Now, with drywall in place, the same spot looks like this:

     This gives me an easy access panel in the basement, so that when I get to the tower part of the project, I'll be able to put a matching box outside the house, drill through the exterior wall into the back of this box, pull my cable and wires through, and make my connections in the outside box, where all the connections to tower, ground, etc. will be.

     Just trying to plan ahead as I keep plugging along with this project!