On hot, muggy days when ominous weather builds with the afternoon, a legion of lakes area residents takes sky watching to the next level.
Maybe they started as youngsters watching clouds or grew to have an appreciation for the power of storms as adults.
On Tuesday night, James McLaughlin Jr., 55, gave his wife his usual send-off: “OK, I gotta go. I love you. Bye-bye.”
Hours later, James McLaughlin was dead, one of nine Americans shot and killed at a military compound near the Kabul airport by a veteran Afghan military pilot.
Seven Texas high school students received their first radio as a result of a generous donation from BP, one of the world’s major oil refining companies. The students are enrolled in a new class offering of Telecommunications and Networking at Pine Tree High School in Longview, Texas. I used lessons learned from the ARRL Teachers? Institute last summer to teach the telecommunications portion of the new state education standards for this class.
According to reports, the Project Blue Horizon 5 high-altitude transatlantic balloon flight has been aborted. The flight began Thursday, April 28 from Oswego, New York, but the balloon envelope apparently ruptured above 100,000 feet late Friday morning. The payload descended for landing in an area approximately 10 miles northeast of Warsaw, New York.
In a Petition for Rulemaking filed with the FCC on April 15, the Anchorage VEC — one of 14 Volunteer Examiner Coordinators in the US — asked the Commission to give permanent credit to radio amateurs for examination elements they have successfully passed. This would, in effect, create a license exam credit that would be valid throughout an amateurs? lifetime, never expiring.
So far, Wednesday’s tornado outbreak in the southeastern U.S. is the second-worst since reliable weather records began in 1950. Only the “Super Outbreak” of April 3, 1974, had a higher death toll (315) than Wednesday’s number of fatalities (269 as of Thursday evening). So this begs the question: what made these tornadoes so deadly?
As violent storms swept through Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and North Carolina, served agencies called upon Amateur Radio operators to help provide communications support and real-time weather observations. The storms and flooding were the latest in the severe weather that has pummeled much of the mid-South this month. Just a week ago, storms tore a wide path from Oklahoma all the way to North Carolina.
The Project Blue Horizon 5 high-altitude transatlantic balloon flight launched successfully at 2030 EDST April 29 (0030 UTC April 30) from Owego, New York. Thirty minutes later the balloon had passed 23,000 feet heading northeast.
James McLaughlin, WA2EWE/T6AF, was one of several killed in Kabul, Afghanistan on Wednesday, April 27. News sources say that eight American troops and a US contractor died Wednesday after an Afghan military pilot opened fire during a meeting in an operations room of the Afghan Air Corps at the Kabul airport — the deadliest episode to date of an Afghan turning against his coalition partners, officials with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISF) in Afghanistan said. McLaughlin — a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel — was a contractor serving as a flight instructor for Afghan pilots.
The annual conference of the Southeastern VHF Society (SVHFS) — scheduled for April 29-30 in Huntsville, Alabama — has been cancelled due to the severe storms that have recently swept through the area. According to the SVHFS website, much of North Alabama remains without power. The City of Huntsville has requested that events be canceled until such time as services are restored and the city has recovered from the damage. SVHFS will make a determination regarding the rescheduling of the conference to a future date. Any information regarding the rescheduling of the conference will be posted on the Society?s website.
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Squelching out the QRM of Ham Radio Searches
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