Ria's Ham Shack news - May 28, 2024 - the renaissance

I'm back.

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A tribute to a friend - John Hays K7VE

My first encounter with ARDC was none other than its outreach manager, John Hays, K7VE. And once I became involved in their board of directors, John and I became good friends. We also traveled across the world, to Europe and Japan and to Dayton Hamvention in the US. His sense of humor was the typical “dad joke” style, and we enjoyed being around him.

Sadly, John left us suddenly. It was a shock to me when ARDC’s executive director, Rosy, gave us the news. John was a crucial part of ARDC and will be missed. He had very specific shoes to fill and I don’t think that they can be fully filled.

Where have I been?

Hello to all of you in radio land! I have been on hiatus due to life’s challenges. But I want to start back doing this again on a regular basis. I am also switching the podcast replays of the radio show here because I feel it integrates better. Also Podbean is charging $14 per month. Something’s gotta give.

The details of where I’ve been - well to put it one way, the economy hasn’t been all that good. I suffered a layoff and had to spend all of my efforts finding something new. Now that I have something new I can get back to life as usual. This is a hobby for me after all. And the amateur’s code does say, “Radio is a hobby, never interfering with duties owed to family, job, school or community.”

In the meantime I have also been trying to get a radio club at my kids school going. And it’s been a resounding success - the students love it. We build kits, we do fox hunts, we get on HF, we fly drones, we play with APRS.

Unfortunately the school is closing. But a dedicated group of parents are trying to save it. We do have a gofundme to help. If you want (and ONLY if you want) to help, you can check it out here: Link

I’ve also decided to go back to school - I’m now at Southern New Hampshire University doing a degree in cybersecurity. That has taken up a lot of time as I have to do a lot of writing. But I should be done by next year.

ARRL hit by (apparent) cyberattack - several services down

For approximately two weeks now, ARRL’s Logbook of The World (LoTW), the Learning Center and other ARRL websites have gone offline. A few days later, ARRL posted on their website that they are currently “responding to a serious incident involving access to our network and headquarters-based systems.”

Since then there have been a few updates, mostly to give assurance that data was not compromised. However, as someone who has responded to data breaches and incidents both as a security professional and a customer, I think it is too early to make such a determination.

How did we get here? We don’t know exactly how the incident took place, but ARRL has been without an IT director since last year. The previous IT director was Steve Berry, N1EZ. Berry had resigned in late 2023. The ARRL CEO has since not named a replacement and apparently had been doing a lot of the IT department management duties himself. ARRL has had numerous issues including arrl.net email being blacklisted often and repeatedly, repeated outages with LoTW and a week-long outage during the upgrade of the association management software.

Users have been frustrated and have been posting repeatedly about the outage on social media. It is unclear whether LoTW and contest log submission (also affected by this outage) will be back online before the ARRL Digi contest taking place on June 1-2.

“Ham radio is dying” - Hamvention 2024 sees record attendance

I shouldn’t need a sarcasm tag for this. Ham radio is absolutely NOT dead. Ham radio is evolving and changing, however. But it is nice to see record attendance at ham radio’s premier in-person event. Hamvention has reported almost 36,000 attendees - a new record.

I spent most of my time indoors at the ARDC booth. After the loss of ARDC’s outreach manager, John Hays, K7VE, who recently became a silent key, we have all had to pitch in more to staff the booth. ARDC’s booth saw a lot of visitors who had interest in both the grants side and the new 44-Net portal.

There were some doubts after a flagship ham radio manufacturer - MFJ - decided to call it quits and CQ magazine also (indefinitely?) suspended publication. However, the halls were lively and so was the flea! I also attended FDIM vendor night and picked up a nice QMX+ radio kit. I also picked up an SBITX from my friend Farhan VU2ESE. You can check it out here: hfsignals.com

“Ham radio is dying” - MFJ is now LFJ? Longtime ham radio manufacturer shuts domestic production

MFJ - we know them as “Mighty Fine Junk” or in some circles as “More F***** Junk”. Well it looks like “more” is now “less” as MFJ has shut down domestic production, effective May 17, 2024.

But is this the end? MFJ has made plenty of products for “traditional” ham radio - antennas, tuners, dummy loads, amplifiers, audio accessories etc. And they themselves have stated that they have plenty of stock on hand still. And they are still selling items on their website - and some are now at really great prices. I may pick up a few things. Martin Jue is 80 years old and wants to retire. Who can blame him? He has worked so hard all his life. Time to relax and enjoy the rewards a little.

But this isn’t the end for ham radio. Over the years I’ve seen a number of small businesses pop up and make ham radio accessories. As has been noted in Zero Retries - another SubStack that you should definitely subscribe to - many of the smaller guys are stepping up and making stuff. And ham radio has always been more of a boutique niche anyway. In particular I have seen Scott Robbins, W4PA, take on the ownership of Vibroplex and add many more product lines. Ironically they are even selling microphones.

Main Trading Company in Texas is now selling more stuff and apparently growing? I just bought a radio from them. Fast and amazing service! Gigaparts in Huntsville opened a brand spanking new store, bigger and better. DX Engineering seems to be growing too, and is becoming essentially the Amazon of ham radio.

We are seeing more products coming out of overseas, particularly China. Open Source designs like NanoVNA and TinySA are picked up by Chinese factories, manufactured and sold to US radio amateurs at rock bottom prices. While I wish more products were made in the USA and EU, this is better than them not being made at all.

And on the education front, while ARRL has acquired Gordon West licensing books, upstarts such as Ham Radio Prep (Use code RIA for 20% off) and Hamstudy.org are new alternatives to study to get a ham radio license.

Time will tell but I suspect that this is just an evolution, rather than a sunset.

We wish Martin all the best in his retirement.

Time to tie the ribbons on it

73 and see you all! And tell a friend!