A rather nebulous, but increasingly used, apparent requirement for holding an FCC license has appeared in the last few years. It is the “character qualification”.
On February 25, 2009 the Federal Communications Commission revoked the license of Lonnie L. Keeney, KB9RFO, of Greencastle Indiana.
According to the FCC, Keeney’s 2002 conviction of child molestation, a Class C felony, renders him "lack[ing] the requisite character qualifications to be and remain a Commission licensee." Keeney has 30 days to appeal the revocation.
The complete (PDF file) Notice of Revocation is available online.
SOURCE: The ARRL Letter/American Radio Relay League
KPTM-TV42 News in Omaha, NB brings us this gem about police mistaking unspecified ham radio equipment for a bomb. A friend of mine was stopped by police several times in one week because his Screwdriver mobile antenna, that looked similar to this one, scared them.
Police evacuated a midtown neighborhood briefly Thursday morning for what was originally thought to be a bomb, but in the end, it turned out to be ham radio equipment.
The house, located near 48th and Mayberry, caught fire last week. A cleaning company found the equipment and called police, thinking it was a pipe bomb.
Police were called, and officers detonated the equipment. The neighborhood was evacuated during the investigation.
SOURCE: KPTM-TV42
| UPDATE: The “bomb” turned out to be a trap from an antenna. Other sources have reported having good luck painting phone numbers and e-mail addresses on ammo boxes and other “scary looking stuff”. The authorities usually figure that people who are placing bombs won’t bother to put a phone number on the unit. |
The Department of Emergency Management in Multnomah County, (Portland area) OR, has been accused of "dismal accounting practices" and "flagrant mismanagement". The department received and spent $12 million in federal grants between 2003 and 2007. Apparently, it kept no records of how it spent the money, who it contracted with and for how much, what it bought, or who got the equipment.
According to Multnomah County Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade, who is resigning her position to run for Portland City Auditor, "It’s pretty astonishing and embarrassing for the county."
Well, duh, Ms Griffin-Valade! It sounds like they needed to have been (wait for it) audited.
I find it most interesting to contrast the above story with this one. My wife, who is the director of a rural district library here inn SE Michigan, says that they were once questioned during their annual audit because they did not have a receipt for twenty-three cents worth of postage stamps.
Read the complete article in The Oregonian.
This nice Collins “S Line” filled shack belongs to Douglas Pelley, WB7TUJ, from Mesa, AZ. This sort of operating desk can be built with a Saturday’s worth of work after some thought and a trip to Home Depot.
The Onion has long been highly regarded for its biting satire. This series of TV parodies would be absolutely hilarious were it not for the fact that the parody is almost identical to what we get shoveled to us as everyday fare by Rupert Murdoch’s FOX networks.
WARNING TO YOUR DELICATE SENSIBILITIES: This video contains the “F” word used in context. If you have a problem with that, don’t complain to me, just don’t watch it.
Those whose vision is less than 20/20 will appreciate this tip from Martin at gHacks.net.
I recently had two conversations with Firefox users who did not know that Firefox came with the means to zoom in and out of a website. They were using external applications to magnify parts of the screen and where surprised that they could achieve the same effect with less work.
All of the zooming options are available from the View menu in Firefox. Firefox users find options to zoom in, zoom out and restore the default level in the Zoom submenu there. There is also one additional option to change the default zoom behavior to only zoom the text of a website. The default behavior is to zoom all elements of a website. Not many users will use the View > Zoom menu though to zoom in Firefox. It simply takes to long which is why the same effect can be achieved with keyboard shortcuts:
- - Zoom in: [CTRL +] or [CTRL Mousewheel up]
- - Zoom out: [CTRL -] or [CTRL Mousewheel down]
- - Reset Zoom: [CTRL 0]
SOURCE: gHacks.net
Those little 7 inch USB monitors really look like they could be used in a hundred different, useful, ways. Tekzilla brought my attention to this one, the MiMo’s UM-710, which costs $129.
Both power and video are taken from a pair of USB ports using DisplayLink technology so it works horizontally, or vertically, under both Windows and Mac OS X. No double header video card needed.
It works great for things like displaying control panels, or applications that you always want to be visible. Picture your rig control software running on its own screen.
The company’s model UM0740, which has a touch screen, would be the absolute cat’s a** to control a CarPC or a Home Theater.
If you use Adobe’s Acrobat, or Adobe Reader software to view .PDF files, you need to know that a critical vulnerability has been identified. Acording to Adobe, “This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this issue is being exploited.”
All versions from 7 forward on all operating systems are suspected to be at risk.
Adobe is working with anti-virus software vendors to patch the holes. The bad news is that the patches might not be ready until March 11th, 2009.
In the interim, considering how severe the flaw, it is recommended that you install an alternative applications to handle the viewing of .PDF files. Sumatra and FoxIt are reportedly good alternatives for use under Windows. Mac users may want to play it safe and stick to using Preview.
The complete security bulletin from Adobe is here.
Continue reading about Vulnerability in Adobe Reader & Acrobat
This photo of the KA2KS operating position was taken back in 1959. It was state-of-the — art for the time period. Click on the picture to see a larger version.
It reminds me of an almost identical console that was built by a friend of mine at about the same time. My friend’s console was constructed of plywood and when last seen housed a Heathkit TX-1 Apache transmitter and RX-1 Mohawk receiver combination.
You had to give your protractor a real workout in order to design one of these things. Maybe that’s why not too many of them were ever built.
John Kanzius, K3TUP, of Erie, Pennsylvania, passed away February 18 in Florida from pneumonia. He was 64. Kanzius was best known for his research into finding a cure for cancer using radio waves, specifically 13.56 MHz.
In 1966 at age 22, Kanzius came to Erie, Pennsylvania to work for JET Broadcasting. After 24 years as a broadcast engineer, he was appointed vice president and general manager of the company in 1980. After retiring, Kanzius was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002. He summarized his chemotherapy in a February 2008 article in QST as "Hoping we kill the cancer before we kill the person"<http://p1k.arrl.org/cgi-bin/topdf.cgi?id=109317&pub=qst>. In October 2003 — thinking there had to be a better treatment — Kanzius had the idea to kill the cancer cell with radio waves, not a new idea. But Kanzius went a bit further: Instead of using needles, as was currently used, why not "trick" the cancer cells into absorbing a metal target — sent by RF — into the inside of the cancer cells, leaving the healthy cells alone?
My name is Bob, and I am a ham radio operator, freelance web developer and a retired commercial radio personality. It turns out that I also enjoy blogging...
