It's 2008, in case you overslept. Solar cycle 24 has been declared open for business, so get ready for the coming activity.
I have been idle lately, due to uncomfortably low temperatures in the shack (truck). But I have been listening with interest to the spotty 10-meter openings that come and go through the day. Somewhere I heard (read?) a guy say "Keep 27.385 MHz in a memory channel; when activity picks up there, it means 10 will be open." And it seems he's right - the skip workers on .385 are tireless and ubiquitous; they hear every opening and jump in like crazy. The opening on 10 is there so call or listen.
I have just completed writing some software that I have wanted for two years - a callsign bot that runs on AIM. Sitting in the truck I have often wished I had qrz.com at hand to look up a callsign to see if it is a state I need or some such thing. On Lifehacker I found an article on writing AIM bots, and after a little experimentation I got one working that lets me IM a callsign from my cellphone and responds with the name and address associated with the call. Sweet. It runs in Windows under Cygwin using Perl. I would entertain sharing the code with anyone interested in running their own callbot, but I won't open mine for general use, due to security concerns.
The inspiration for my callbot is here. I hacked the code to read callsign data from the call files used by ACLog, which I use for my logging on the home PC. The data search routine is dependent on the format of the callsign file(s), so it has to be customized to that format.
So watch for me on 10 meters, and 73 for now.
Posted in Operating by WA5ICA at January 9, 2008 09:53 AM