Run Silent, Run Deep

The USS Massachusetts, the Navy's newest Virginia-class fast attack submarine, was commissioned this past Saturday (March 28) in South Boston.  The new nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN-798), is the first submarine named after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the eighth Navy vessel to bear the name. 

Historically, the name has been carried by eight other vessels including two battleships:

USS Massachusetts (BB-59): A South Dakota-class fast battleship commissioned in 1942, which served extensively in World War II (including the invasions of North Africa, the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and the Battle of Okinawa) before being decommissioned in 1947.  Since 1965, it has been preserved as a museum ship at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts, since 1965. 

USS Massachusetts (BB-2): An Indiana-class pre-dreadnought battleship commissioned in 1896 that served in the Spanish–American War and World War I before being renamed Coast Battleship Number 2 and scuttled off Pensacola, Florida, in 1921, where its wreck now serves as an artificial reef and diving spot. 

The current SSN-798, built by Newport News Shipbuilding, is a 377-foot-long vessel with a displacement of 7,800 tons and a complement of 135 crew members, featuring advanced stealth, surveillance, and special warfare capabilities.

Look closely, because this may be the last time you're able to see her.

Godspeed to the USS Massachusetts and her crew.

The Radio Geek’s Doomscrolling Antidote

Immerse yourself in a digital collection of amateur radio and communication artifacts

The internet has aged to the point where it is easy to fall into a rabbit hole, reminiscing about websites from decades past.

The site that fuels those scrolling endeavors is the Internet Archive — a nonprofit that hosts a digital library of internet sites and other artifacts in digital form. The project began in 1996 to archive the web.

Today, it contains one trillion web pages through its “Wayback Machine,” as well as 56 million books and texts. It also works with approximately 1,400 libraries through its Archive-It program to identify and preserve important digital history.

Kay Savetz (K6KJN) freely admits to having been an Internet Archive power user. Savetz used not just the archive.org website, but also its command line interface to upload many documents. 

A licensed amateur radio operator since 1989, Savetz’s own interviews with Atari 8-bit computer pioneers are among those early uploads.  So when the Amateur Radio Digital Communications foundation provided a significant grant to the Internet Archive to form a collection of the history of amateur radio and adjacent endeavors, the archive sought a lead curator. Savetz was a natural fit. 

The project was funded in 2022 and titled the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Today, DLARC has approximately 225,000 items, spanning magazines, newsletters and call books.

In computing terms, that’s about 26 terabytes of storage space, Savetz told us.

All you need is time.

Click this link to peruse the collection — and you’ll probably all of a sudden wonder where an hour of your day went. From QSL cards to logbooks to newsletters to even lectures on DX and related topics.

DLARC is a haven for radio amateurs, but also shortwave enthusiasts, long-distance radio reception clubs, early communication pioneers and more recently, college and community radio. 

Full runs of 73 Magazine are available, as well as early public-domain QST issues. There are also Aviation and Wireless magazines that date back to the early 1900s.

“We have Radio News from the early part of the 1900s, from back in the day when the hot new things were airplanes and radios,” Savetz said.

The items go beyond paper, as Savetz has helped digitize 35mm slides, reel-to-reel tapes, 16mm film, U-matic, Beta and various floppy disk formats. 

One of the approximately 150 searchable callbooks that are part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications.

Sixty Pounds to the Summit!

On CW Worldwide CW weekend, Jason Goldsberry began his station setup with a hike.

The path climbs through dusty bike trails and scrubland on the edge of Santiago, Chile. The city sprawls out below him—glass towers, apartment blocks, and the distant haze of one of South America’s largest urban centers. In his hands and on his back is everything required to operate in one of amateur radio’s most competitive global contests.

Radios. Batteries. Antennas. Masts. Laptop. Cables.

All of it carried in by hand.

In total, the load weighs about sixty pounds.

It takes two trips from the car to move the entire station into position. First the antenna gear and lighter equipment. Then the heavier items: batteries and a massive sun umbrella that will double as shade and operating shelter. After twenty minutes of hiking and another thirty minutes of setup, the portable contest station comes to life.

A Yaesu FT-891 sits on a small operating table beneath the umbrella. A laptop running N1MM waits to log contacts. Around the station, tripods and vertical antenna elements form what looks less like a portable field station and more like a miniature HF contest array.

Then Jason taps the key and sends the first CQ.

Yaesu Releases WiRES-X 2.0 (But Beware!)

Random Wire 174 published at 5:00 am Pacific last Friday. RW 174 opened with a mention of the update available to take WiRES-X from version 1.57 to version 2.0, but noted only one Yaesu-hosted instance that supported this as an official release.

Later that day, Yaesu posted a WiRES-X 2.0 webinar online, announcing and describing this significant software update. It’s an odd way to release information to a community of users (release it, publish update instructions, but don’t tell anyone until later) that feels like it was not well thought out or orchestrated.

The webinar video is about 45 minutes long, providing a thorough review of the major differences between the releases, including changes, limitations, and more. While I would have preferred to embed the video here as a convenience to you, Yaesu seems to have disabled embedding. Why? I have no idea. The link worked for a day and then the video was pulled and a replacement video was published. Note that it, too, won’t embed, so click the “Watch on YouTube” link to get to it. (Maybe this will have changed by the time RW 175 goes to press.)

A major change in WiRES-X 2.0 is it allows room owners to mute (or boot) individual users from the room. This desirable feature was requested by WiRES-X room owners.

An important consideration in deciding whether to update to version 2.0 is that the updated software requires IPv6 addressing. We’re all familiar with IPv4 addressing (you know, formats like 192.168.0.12). IPv6 is different and not all internet service providers (ISPs) provide IPv6 addresses to their customers. If you don’t have IPv6 and your ISP won’t provide it, don’t upgrade to WiRES-X 2.0, because it won’t work for you.

If you are running a WiRES-X system and are thinking about upgrading to 2.0, it will be worth your time to track down whether your ISP provides IPv6 addressing.  The deployment is apparently not without other ssues.  For example, KCWide  (America's Kansas City Wide) has reverted to the 1.57 release of Wires-X due to problems in 2.0. Unfortunately, those who have updated their home Wires-X nodes to 2.0 will not be able to see KCWide. The only solution is to reinstall 1.57. (Note that these issues do not affect those connecting via YSF, DStar, DMR, etc.)

What does this mean? It means we haven’t heard the last of this update and what happens if you install it.

Understanding HamClock's TOA and VOACAP Maps

If you're a long time HamClock fan like me you'll appreciate these videos on how to use TOA (Take Off Angle) and MUF VOACAP information in your hamshack.  Take a look at these two great videos just made available by Brian Wilkins of HamClock Heaven on Facebook as well as Open Hamclock Backend (OHB), one of the great backend server projects which have rapidly stepped up to be the successors to the original Clear Sky Institute (CSI) backend.  (CSI was the originator of HamClock and its backend ‒ which is where all its information feeds from) but recently shut down due to the untimely passing of Elwood Downey, WB0OEW, its creator.  (OHB is the backend that I use and recommend as it is open source.)

Learn and enjoy!