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From: Shirley Date: Thu Jan 23, 2003 1:56 am Subject: Canadian Short Wave Radio Report A bit more to report this month. In spite of the cold weather we are having here, this station is stil on the air. Still working on getting my Morse code speed up. Our local ham radio club has a lot of nets. A radionet is when, at a scheduled time, people will check in with a net controller. Our club nets are sponsored by the emergency section of the club, as a training exercise for members who wish to become proficient in dealing with emergencies which can be encountered, such as large earthquakes, floods, etc., or merely small local emergencies. The whole point of this preamble is that I am now getting into controlling some of these nets. Our club secretary first suggested that I should start doing this, but as Iexplained to her, it is really awkward to try and control a net when you have to make a note of who is checking in, with their call signs, etc., when you need two hands to use the computer and you have to keep putting down the microphone. I also explained this to my sponsor and mentor, who took matters into his own hands and built me a small unit. This has a headset/microphone combination which plugs into the computer, so I can hear what I am writing without the speech going over the air. The microphone, though, is controlled by a foot switch, and is plugged into the radio, so I don't ever have to use my hands, which are then free to read Braille net preambles (the little blurb one reads at the beginning of each net, explaining that one is the controller and that the net is sponsored by ARES, the emergency section of the club), and to write check-ins onto the computer with no horrible pauses between writing them down and acknowledging them. The whole thing is, doing this should accustom me to controlling a lot of people if they all decide to call in on the radio at once, with whatever emergency situations they may have. I am just doing a little net right now, but I suppose soon they will be after me to control the big one, which is on Wednesday nights and is usually quite busy. I did an interview on the CNIB Amateur Radio newsletter, and since then people have been asking the CNIB if I can control some of the nets. One of them is ONTARS (can't remember exactly what the acronym is now, but it of course has something to do with Ontario)! This is a big net which has check-ins from all over the province. Luckily--because that thing is too big and makes me nervous--I can't do it because I am not on 80 metres. Phew! We are now on six metres, though. I had a Kenwood TS570D, which did not have the six metre band on it. One other guy who is on the lease-to-own CNIB programme had a TS570S, which does have the six metres but he didn't want it. So the CNIB gave him my radio and me his, but I did have to pay $100.00 for the swap, because this is a slightly better radio. I thought it was worth it, though, and at least they only charged me $100.00, not $200.00, as normal, because the radio of course was not new anymore. So here we are gradually getting ready for emergency situations, which could, theoretically, come at any time now, because of the cold weather.