It was seventy-two years ago this very day, on July 2nd, 1937 that during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe by airplane, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean somewhere near Howland Island.

Though her disappearance has been investigated as much as any other 20th century event, there has never been any undisputed evidence to indicate whatever became of Earhart, her navigator Fred Noonan or the Lockheed Electra 10E aircraft they were flying in.

This is a strange coincidence since I intend to go missing later today as well. I’ll be on vacation for the next several days and posting to the blog will be suspended.

If you’re a first time commenter, your comments may be held until the next time I’m online to approve them.

With any luck, my disappearance won’t become a 21st century mystery.

Wishing you a wonderful holiday weekend!

1. The Echoes of Apollo event was huge. Huge. An amazing number of people were literally focused on the moon. Read about it at the site above and don’t miss this comment from Robert Brand on the blog. Did I mention this event was HUGE and that the story made the New York Times?
2. Garmin is finally getting it with its built-in support for APRS in their Colorado and Oregon.
3. Clandestine HF Beacons – these unlicensed beacons do not follow government regulations for operation (such as Part 15), and are technically illegal. There are many of these beacons, quite a few are run as propagation experiments. Due to their nature, the exact location of these stations is generally not known, although many are believed to operate from remote locations in the deserts of the southwest USA.
4. Microsoft announced that Hotmail email account aggregation is rolling out in the US, Canada and Brazil.  This is a feature that allows consumers to receive email from other POP-enabled email accounts (including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL) directly into their Windows Live Hotmail inbox.
5. Looking for some technology content for your iPod or smart phone? TimeSys recently introduced LinuxLink Radio, a free podcast focused on embedded Linux.

In days of old when men were bold and hams were required to log their operations…

And it wasn’t supposed to be just a casual bit of hit-and-miss record keeping. If commercial traffic was being interfered with and a radio ham suspected of the interference, the station log could incriminate or exonerate the said ham. But time passed and eventually the legal burden of logging was removed; by that time, most hams continued the practice. There is value in data and most operators use their station logs as a way of tracking the performance of a particular antenna or piece of equipment, or for keeping track of how many states, provinces, counties, continents or countries had been worked, etc.

This had been a handwritten exercise on ruled paper until the 1980s when personal computers hit the scene and the ham shack.

Since that time, we have seen hundreds; if not thousands of logging programs come and go. Some are exceptionally powerful and useful tools while others provide only the most fundamental information. Problems of compatibility between applications were monumental at one time but through the years most of those have been hashed out among those who craft these applications.

But there remains much room for improvement…

Enter the Cloud

Cloud Computing is a method of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them.

Think of your Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail account. These are cloud services. You don’t need to install any special application to use these services — the mail "application" is running on servers that you don’t own, and can’t see (and probably don’t know where they are even located) by way of your Web browser.

And it’s high time that ham radio logging be made available in the same manner!

Imagine for a moment an environment where your ham radio logging could be done in a Web browser – any Web browser, running on a Mac or PC, using the latest version of Windows or a seriously old Linux distribution. No headaches, no hassles, no more keeping that old piece of junk laptop because it’s the only hardware that runs your seriously old logging application.

You could access your log from anywhere that has a browser and Web access.

Now let’s further imagine that the ARRL were to take on this sort of project. Their servers could issue a token that matches a certificate when you log in so that your contacts auto magically matches up via their LoTW database. No more uploading a signed file that was generated by another program to get award credit, it would all be seamless to the end user.

If someone were to pursue this project, I would encourage them to make the API open so others could easily expand the system. I can envision small browser "plug-ins" that would extend the application. Think of the rich depth of your logged data if you could mash-up Google maps with propagation data, etc.

Since all the data from every user would reside on central servers, how cool would it be to click a button and see who all worked a particular station – and on what band, mode, and time?

Spelunking the airwaves could be preceded by doing a deep dive on the data to discover what methods and patterns that rare DX station that you need typically uses. And no one would ever have to upload or send off log data from a contest – all the data would already be on the servers in the cloud.

And by the way, contest organizers could upload a logging template for their particular contest. That way when I open my browser and select "CQWW CW contest" the right template would appear for me to enter my data for that particular contest.

Users might also upload some personal data including their email or home page URL. That way when we work each other and log the contact we could just click a link and visit your homepage, a picture of your shack, get your QSL information or even auto-generate a PDF QSL card for that contact that you could download with a single click.

Need your rig to "talk" to your log? Grab a comm plug-in for that. Want to access your log when you are offline? That’s another plug-in; just like Google-Gears that allows me to read and write email whenever I am not connected (the data is cached until the next time it can connect to the servers to sync the data).

I like the idea of having a common interface for entering log data into any Web browser, and I like the idea of being able to extend that application through widgets and plug-ins even more. You would never require another logging program upgrade (though the server side software could be continuously updated and improved) and if one day you decided to dump your Mac in favor of Ubuntu, the change would be completely invisible to you.

If the ARRL were to offer a service like that, they could charge two dollars a month and make money at it though they may find it even more lucrative to offer it as a free benefit of membership. Why pay $50 a year (or more) for a logging application "license" when you get a free logging service with your ARRL membership?

With a sea of information coming at us from all directions, how do we sift out the misinformation and bogus claims, and get to the truth? Michael Shermer the editor in chief of Skeptic Magazine lays out a "Baloney Detection Kit," ten questions we should ask when encountering a given claim.

If you can’t see the embedded video above, here’s the direct link to it on YouTube.

As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer has exposed fallacies behind intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracies, the low-carb craze, alien sightings and other popular beliefs and paranoia’s. But it’s not about debunking for debunking’s sake. Shermer defends the notion that we can understand our world better only by matching good theory with good science. Thus, in order to explore a conspiracy theory that pre-planted explosives caused the World Trade Center towers to fall on 9/11, the magazine called on demolition experts.

Shermer’s work offers cognitive context for our often misguided beliefs: In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can powerfully combine with the power of suggestion (helping us hear Satanic lyrics when "Stairway to Heaven" plays backwards, for example). In fact, a common thread that runs through beliefs of all sorts, he says, is our tendency to convince ourselves: We overvalue the shreds of evidence that support our preferred outcome, and ignore the facts we aren’t looking for.

The Gonset company was doing well with its compact design of mobile radio equipment in 1962 when the founder of the company, Mr. Faust Gonset, W6VR founded a new company, SideBand Engineers.

Its goal was to create ideal mobile equipment with latest transistor technology and advanced design and in 1963, SBE began to sell their first model, the SB-33 transceiver — known as the first practical transistorized rig; a significant milestone in amateur radio equipment history.