Firefox 4 and IE9

I have been looking at the new Internet Explorer 9 and the new Firefox 4 internet browsers. I have to say that after what I have seen and heard I will be going with Firefox 4. Jillian, G4ILO, has an entry on his Blog about this very subject, see it here. I liked the older Internet Explorer's, they were simple and useful to me. The new IE9 is to integrated with everything. I am probably too old school on this subject. The Firefox browser is nice but it has some problems also. It seems to take longer to transition to Web pages. It also has the buttons at the top in different places, so it takes some getting used to. All in all I will be transitioning to Firefox 4. Firefox is easy to install and does not cause a bunch of trouble upgrading. Try it out and let me know what you think.


www.mozilla.com

1439 Miles on 2.4 GHZ Across the Tasman Sea

It looks like Steve Hayman, ZL1TPH, and Adrian Pollock, VK4OX have set a new record for 13 Centimeters. It was for 1439 Miles on 2.4 GHz for the first trans-Tasman Sea contact. This is a great feat since this band is considered line of sight!

For more information: http://www.arnewsline.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=145

WinDRM Digital Voice

WinDRM is a sound card program for digital voice and sending pictures. The software uses DRM, Digital Radio Mondiale, modified by Cesco, HB9TLK, for Ham radio. The minimum requirement is a 1 GHz computer running Windows 2000 or higher and one or two sound cards. It is recommended to use two sound cards with digital voice, as cheap as a usb sound card is, it should not be a problem to run two. DRM is open source software, and I do like open source! I have been playing with the software and when time permits I will try to use on the air. There is very good instructions on Jason, N1SU, site. If you have used this software, let me know what you think about it.

http://n1su.com/windrm/download.html

http://n1su.com/windrm/WinDRM_QuickSetupV1r1.pdf

Spread Spectrum Rules Changes

FCC Adopts Spread Spectrum Rules Changes

In a Report and Order adopted February 22 and released March 4, 2011, the Federal Communications Commission has eliminated the requirement that amateur stations transmitting Spread Spectrum use Automatic Power Control (APC) to reduce transmitter power. At the same time, the Commission has reduced the maximum power of a Spread Spectrum emission from 100 to 10 W PEP.........

For more information: http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-adopts-spread-spectrum-rules-changes


This will have some effect on HSMM some good and some not so good. It is a good thing to do away with the automatic power control rule, but the 10 W PEP will hopefully be looked at more in the future. The power limitation is not a huge problem now but will limit some of the experimentation in the near future.