CAUHF Group web site receives W7SAV Gold Website Award

The CAUHF Group's web site was recently recognized by Steve Vermillion, W7SAV with a "Gold Amateur Radio Web Site" award.  In Vermillion's email informing of the web site's award he said he "found it a complete pleasure."

Vermillion started the awards program after he received his first website award.  He said, "It's a great way to reward Individuals for their hard work on their websites when they get so little recognition."

The W7SAV web site, with a listing of other awardees, can be found at http://w7sav.net/awards.htm.

CAUHF announces "Get Your Pet On The Air" movement

The CAUHF Group, in conjunction with local animal rights groups, have started a new movement that they have titled "Get Your Pet On The Air".  It's stated mission is to support the creation of a Pet Radio Operator's license for animal family members of other licensed Amateur Radio operators.

Randy Wright, AE5RW, said "The looks that I get from Sasha every single Tuesday night during the AR Links System Net are just unbearable.  She's always wanted her own license since she was a puppy.  Now she has hope that someday she too can check-in... short of time... with no traffic."

Pet owners all around central Arkansas have expressed interest in helping to create such a movement for several hours, but it wasn't until recently that this dream seemed possible.

But not everyone is in favor of the idea.  Tem Moore, N5KWL said, "That is just crazy.  Seriously, how could my dog remember his own call sign?  He has a hard enough time remembering mine."

Arkansas Section Manager J.M. Rowe, N5XFW, said that he wasn't sure how this would be accepted by the ARRL or the FCC but he was definitely in favor of being favorable.

For the CAUHF Group, I'm N5JLC.  73!

NOTE: For those who may be a little dense, this was an April Fool's joke.

CAUHF members accounts

This past week all members of the CAUHF Group, who have already renewed their memberships for the year 2010, were issued accounts to login to member services at http://members.cauhf.org.

With these new accounts members have several benefits, including an email address with over 7 megabytes of storage. If they prefer, members can optionally forward mail to an email address of their choosing, just like with the ARRL email forwarding service.

Through this portal members also have access to the Documents section which is being used to manage and consolidate many of our club related documents. It is in the Documents section that members will soon find the full list of linking codes for the AR Links System.

If you haven't renewed your membership for the 2010 year and you wish to do so online, you can visit http://www.cauhf.org/join/renew/.

If you have never been a member of the CAUHF Group and you are interested in joining, please visit http://www.cauhf.org/join/ for information.

WarnIM frequently asked questions

Since we recently opened the CAUHF WarnIM for Open Registration I've received several questions that I thought I should share.

1. Why does the map get blurry when zomming in?
   The radar and county lines on the map get "blurry" when you zoom aren't meant to be used this way. That are bitmap images, so when you zoom in, you will eventually see the pixels that comprise the image. When this happens on digital photos and images, this is called being "pixelated".
   
   
2. How often does the radar update?
   The radar will refresh every 55 seconds on the map, but the National Weather Service only updates the source image every 10 minutes.
   
   
3. My pin on the map is close to me, but not exactly right. Why?
   The locations of the pins on the map are encoded into latitude and longitude coordinates by Google's mapping API (a process called "geocoding"). This process will get the location pretty close, but isn't perfect. If you insist on it being more precise, you can email your exact position (in decimal latitude and longitude) to N5JLC.
   

New weather conference server online!

We have a new weather conference server for "off-the-air" emergency communication. You can find the Skywarn Instant Messenger by visiting http://tools.cauhf.org/cauhf/warnim.