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This Week's News

IRTS Radio News Bulletin Sunday 04 December 2022
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Silent Key, Les Booth

Michael, Ei3GYB informs us the death has occurred of Les Booth,
Cloonshanbally, Culfadda, Ballymote, Co. Sligo. Les was an avid 11
metre operator and very active in the Mayo and Sligo area for decades.
He was known all over the world as a gentleman operator. He was also
active in the Mayo Radio Experimenters Club. In fact my first contact
as a licensed radio experimenter was with Les, he was operating under
supervision with the call of the Mayo radio club. For a while he was
also a member of the IRTS as aSWL. He sat a licence exam manyyears back
but unfortunately he was not successful. Les was a very social person.
His involvement as a lorry driver bringing food and supplies to the
Romanian orphanages in the 1990s are well remembered.

Les Booth, Rest in Peace.
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The New HAREC Guide

After nine months of work of the core team of seven authors and
editors, the National Short Wave Listeners Club are delighted to see
the general release of the pre-publication draft of the new IRTS HAREC
Amateur Station Licence Study Guide. Please download it from
irts.ie/guide. The guide has three hundred and eighty five pages,
thirty three tables, some two hundred illustrations, and over one
hundred and thirty thousand words. It will help many newcomers pass the
recently updated licensing exams. It should also be of interest to
experienced amateurs, who would like to catch up, for example, on SDR
technology, or on antenna safety. However, to improve the quality of
the new guide, the editors would like to ask you to read it, and to
share your comments. All feedback will be gladly considered, and the
corrections will be incorporated into a print-ready, final version, by
late Spring next year. Once again, please download this new book from
irts.ie/guide and enjoy learning about the magic of amateur radio!
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News from the IRTS

The first `face to face' IRTS committee meeting in over 2 and a half
years took place on Saturday the 19th of November at the Maldron Hotel
in Portlaoise. The meeting which started at 11 a.m. and concluded at 1
p.m. was well attended by IRTS committee members, officers of the
society and many club representatives from the various radio clubs
around Ireland. IRTS Vice-President Enda EI2II chaired the meeting
which was very productive and over the two hours a large number of new
topics and the day to day matters relevant to the running of the
society were discussed. Regretfully Andy EI5JF had to resign from the
committee due to personal commitments and the IRTS thank him for his
service to the society. Some of the topics discussed included ComReg's
requesting amendments to the current process of handling automatic
station licence applications and work on finalising this new procedure
is currently underway. The idea of electronic voting was talked about
and although it is not part of our current constitution it may be
included in the new constitution which is currently being written. Also
discussed was the excellent 2021 SWOT analyses carried out on behalf of
the society by Adrian EI9HAB on the needs of amateur radio in Ireland
as part of an IARU study program. Following on from this report we are
in the process of putting together a working group to take the findings
from this report and make recommendations to the committee on areas the
IRTS can improve. We already have Adrian EI9HAB, Robbie EI2IP and Niall
EI6HIB involved, but there are still a few places for any members with
an interest in shaping our future to assist and anyone interested is
asked to send an email to irts_secretary /at/ irts.ie. The IRTS are
also looking for 3 or 4 people to become part of a working group to
deal with EMC. There are a few different roles to be filled within this
group including a representative to deal with the NSAI. Another role in
this working group would include the reading of documents relating to
EMC so this might be suitable for a semi-retired or retired person.
Anyone interested or looking for more details is asked to get in touch
with EMC Manager Liam EI4GB by email to liam.mangan /at/ ymail.com. The
next IRTS committee meeting will take place on December 17th at 11 a.m.
and will take place on the Zoom platform.
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Galway Radio Experimenters Club

The July meeting of the Galway Radio Experimenters Club EI4GRC will
take place tomorrow night, Monday the 5th ofDecember at 8.00 p.m. sharp
at The Menlo Park Hotel, Terryland, Headford Road, Galway, Eircode H91
E98N. There will also be virtual access to the meeting - please contact
the Club Secretary via. email - secretary /at/ galwayradio.com for
access details. The club website is www.galwayradio.com and anyone is
welcome to come to our club nights or contact the secretary for more
information.
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South Dublin Radio Club

This year's South Dublin Radio Club Christmas Party will take place on
Tuesday the 13th of December 2022 at 8pm.The venue will be the "The
Morgue" pub in Tempelogue Village. Members of other clubs and visitors
are as usual very welcome to this social event. Limited free food will
be available for paid-up members; visitors can choose from the bar menu
until 9.00 pm. The club will then break for Xmas and return on January
3rd 2023.
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IRTS News Readers Required

The IRTS are currently compiling a panel of newsreaders for the weekly
Sunday morning 40m and 80m IRTS news bulletins for 2023. The rota which
was setup in 2022 is to share the news reading duties amongst the
entire panel of newsreaders and it ensures that the work load is evenly
spread out. The more people that volunteer the less often each
individual reader will have to do the broadcast. There is very little
involved in the broadcast and no experience is necessary. If any fully
licensed EI feels like that they would be interested in becoming part
of the IRTS News Readers panel, can they please get in touch with the
IRTS Public Relations Officer Seany EI2HZB directly on 083 4713001 or
by email to irts_pro /at/ irts.ie by December 12th. Likewise, if anyone
has any further questions, please get in touch also. Once a list of
those interested has been compiled, we will set about getting a rota in
place for both the 40m and 80m Sunday bulletins for 2023.
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Contesting

As a follow-on to our item in last week's bulletin about the recent
RSGB announcement of support for the UK/EI DX contests, IRTS has been
supporting both the SSB and CW UK/EI DX contests since 2015, initially
by sponsoring plaques for the leading EI stations in the respective
UK/EI DX contests and, since 2020, two of the society's longstanding
trophies have been allocated to those contests. The IRTS HF Shield is
awarded to the highest scoring Single Operator EI station in the SSB
contest, while the Paddy Smyth Memorial Cup is awarded to the highest
scoring Single Operator EI station in the CW contest. The SSB DX
contest takes place in the Autumn, while the CW event is in April.

Next weekend's ARRL 10-Meter Contest will likely be helped by good
propagation conditions, expect much activity in the CW and SSB
segments. To avoid single operators getting carried away with DX fever,
operation is limited to a maximum of 36 hours out of the 48-hour
period, starting at 00:00 UTC next Saturday. 'Off' times must be at
least 30 minutes long. The exchange is signal report and serial number.
American, Canadian and Mexican stations also send their state or
province code. Logs are due within seven days after the event is over.
Logs may be submitted either online or via mail, but electronic
Cabrillo logs are the preferred method. More info at contests.arrl.org

Finland's Independence Day is marked annually by the traditional radio
event PRT35. A vintage radio station can use the suffix /S after the
call-sign. If the transmitter has already been in service during the
Second World War, the additional suffix can be /SA. More detailed
information about the schedule and frequencies of the event on the
website of the Tube Radio Museum. Military radio amateur stations with
the OI prefix will also be activated on Tuesday. Radio amateurs of the
Central Finland club OH6AD invite all radio amateurs with Morse skills
to compete for the Kuutosten Cup. On the 6th of December at 10 a.m.
Finnish time, the hour-long CW contest will be held at 80 and 40
meters. This year's contest rules added the new YL class.
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The Propagation Horoscope

This week, in 1995, NASA launched the Solar and Heliospheric
Observatory, also known as SOHO. This sun-monitoring satellite is a
collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency that
has been operational for 27 years. SOHO's main objective is to
investigate the physics behind how the sun works, and provide useful
data for predicting space weather events like solar flares and coronal
mass ejections. Numerous mission extensions have enabled the spacecraft
to observe two 11-year solar cycles and to discover thousands of comets
from it's perch at the L1 Lagrange point about 1.5 million kilometers
from Earth. Unlike a solar powered space craft, mere earthlings still
have to foot an electricity bill: John, Ei7GL, reports on
ei7gl.blogspot.com : The OZ7IGY team in Denmark have announced that
their 8m beacon on 40.071 MHz has been turned off due to increased
electricity costs, just as the lower VHF bands are coming alive. On
www.oz7igy.dk one can see that most of the power hungry microwave
beacons are also off-air. The coming week on HF will see a slight
increase in Solar flux to about 125 units, the geomagnetic field is
unsettled since Thursday, due to minor storm and high speed streams
from Coronal Hole 1117. Solar wind speed at SOHO ranged between 608 and
817 km/sec. The high latitude magnetometer at Andenes recorded active
to major storm levels on Friday morning. Although no Earth directed
CMEs were observed in the past 24 hours, Coronal Hole 1118 will likely
rotate across the central meridian Sunday noon, and may be good for
surprises. The day-time MUF is not as quickly rising to the higher
bands any longer, good conditions can still be found on 40 to 15
meters. Late afternoon and evening long-path openings towards Asia and
Oceania occur on the lower bands. The improved night-time propagation
brings with it an increase of background noise on the lower
frequencies, due to noise that is generated in far away locations, and
then propagated on 160 and 80m, thus adding to the local noise floor.

That is the news for this week. Items for inclusion in next week's
radio news can be submitted by email to newsteam /at/ irts.ie for
automatic forwarding to both the radio and printed news services. The
deadline is Friday noon.

[C]
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