Welcome to Ria’s Ham Shack News! The news is heard every week on the Ria’s Ham Shack radio show. The show airs on WRMI shortwave radio, 5050kHz/5950kHz, Fridays at 2100 UTC/6PM ET or streamed on WRMILegends.com. Also available wherever you get podcasts.
Also check out my YouTube channel where I talk ham radio and other interesting radio related things.
In this edition:
Armed Forces Day Test
Dave Casler’s (KE0OG) YouTube channel hacked
OSCAR India to hold conference
Lakshadweep VU7W
QRZ.com celebrates 30th anniversary with a new award
DXpedition timeline for May, 2023
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Armed Forces Day Test
The annual Armed Forces Day Test will be held on May 13, 2023. The annual event is an opportunity for radio amateurs to communicate with and demonstrate interoperability between military communicators and amateur radio operators. This event is specifically authorized under FCC rules, § 97.111 (a)(5).
Amateur stations transmit on amateur frequencies and receive on military frequencies, while military stations do the opposite.
More information including a comprehensive list of stations and frequencies is here.
Dave Casler’s (KE0OG) YouTube channel hacked
Ham Radio content creator, Dave Casler, KE0OG is the latest victim of hacking and channel takeover by cryptocurrency scammers. On or around April 24, Casler’s channel no longer had its videos visible and instead had a livestream of a cryptocurrency scam.
Later on, YouTube took the channel down and cited “violations of community guidelines.” This “termination” may have been a result of Casler or his followers reporting the hack to YouTube, and them taking down the channel as a precautionary measure. Recently, Jim Heath, W6LG’s channel was also hacked, but fans were able to get it restored. Other high profile channels including several channels owned by Linus Media Group (Linus Tech Tips and others) have also recently fallen victim to hacking.
On April 26 the channel was restored, but several videos had to either be re-uploaded or made visible again.
Casler later explained how the hack happened in his live stream.
The vector for the attack is often an email offering a partnership or marketing opportunity. The potential victim is often sent a virus disguising itself as a PDF, often with a .scr extension. Execute this on a Windows machine and it proceeds to take over your Google account including bypassing all authentication. Details on this kind of attack are found here.
OSCAR India to hold conference
(Source: OSCAR India)
Open Source Classes for Amateur Radio, India (OSCAR India) plans to hold a convention on 23-24 September, 2023, in Santiniketan, West Bengal. The theme will be “Get on air.” It is the first ham radio convention held in Eastern India in recent years and will feature a Fox Hunt, CW contest, workshops, and tourism for non-ham spouses. Registration will be at beaham.in.
Lakshadweep VU7W
(Source: DXpedition website)
Yuris YL2GM operated from Kavaratti in the Lakshadweep Islands using callsign VU7W. Activity was on 160 through 6 meters using CW, SSB and FT8. Noise levels are high, making for challenging conditions, especially on the low bands. QSL via YL2GN.
Yuris also had a meeting with local ham, Mr. Aboobacker (VU3EBX).
QRZ.com celebrates 30th anniversary with a new award
Amateur callsign database QRZ.com is celebrating 30 years of operation. Eight years ago it also started an awards program and has since issued over 373,000 awards with over 736 million contacts hosted in QRZ logbooks.
To commemorate this event, QRZ is offering a “30 years of QRZ” award. To obtain the award, one needs 30 contacts with other QRZ users. Once this is achieved, users may apply in the QRZ logbook awards portal.
More details and discussion here: https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/happy-birthday-qrz-were-30.861813/
DXpedition timeline for May, 2023
(Source: DX-World.net)
Here is a handy chart of upcoming DXpeditions. I will be covering some of these.
That’s it for now. See you on the bands.