Courage Center Handiham System

The Handiham Net returns to United States Central Standard Time. The local net (Minneapolis time) is at 11:00 am daily except Sunday. The Wednesday evening net is at 7:30 pm. If you go by GMT, the daily net now meets at 17:00 Z. The Minneapolis evening session is at 01:30 Z Thursday mornings London time. Look for the HANDIHAM conference on Echolink worldwide, or 145.450 MHz in the Minneapolis area.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released its beta website tool for consumers who wish to test their internet connection speeds. Service providers are not shy about making speed claims, and this tool should provide an easy way for any broadband customer to find out what their internet connection is really delivering.

According to Spaceweather.com, sunspot group 1054 is growing and could pose a threat for C-class solar flares. This sounds ominous, but actually C-class flares are the least likely to cause disruptive interference on Earth. The news of continuing sunspot activity (spot group 1055 is also Earth-facing today) is good news for amateur radio HF enthusiasts who are looking forward to better short-wave communication worldwide with increasing sunspot counts.

Submitted by k9hi on Wed, 03/10/2010 - 21:33

Members of the Waltham Amateur Radio Association recently embarked upon a project to benefit the Courage Center Handiham program, and to honor the memory of long-time member and Silent Key, Laurie Cote, KC1BN.

A Cote family member contacted Handiham in November, 2009 to inform them that KC1BN had left a sizeable amount of ham equipment from his estate to the non-profit organization based in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Handiham's Manager, Pat Tice, WA0TDA reached out to Eastern MA Handiham volunteer instructor Phil Temples, K9HI.

Courage Center Handiham World Weekly E-Letter for the week of Wednesday, 10 March 2010

This is a free weekly news & information update from Courage Center Handiham System. Please do not reply to this message. Use the contact information at the end, or simply email handiham@couragecenter.org.

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Welcome to Handiham World!

Recently I had a nice visit with another operator, and what do you think we talked about?

That's right - we talked about our stations!  The conversation took a turn to receiver performance, and he mentioned that one of his radios has a much more sensitive but quieter receiver than the other. I wondered how he knew that, and he said that he had performed an "A-B" test.  That's what today's essay is about - not receiver performance. 

When we compare two pieces of equipment, we want to know which one performs the best. How many times have you heard someone make a claim on the air for one rig's superiority over another one? Or that one antenna works better than another? Whenever I hear such claims, I wonder if they are really backed up by testing.  I know that most of us will never have a test lab full of instrumentation to run tests the way they are done at the ARRL  product review lab, but that doesn't mean that we have no way to perform simple, but more meaningful testing.