CollegeARC Reaches 1 Month Mark

Well www.CollegeARC.com the College Amateur Radio Club Association is one month old! We have learned a lot about starting a community, it's been one heck of a ride to say the least. Slowly but surely the website is taking form and people are signing up. We now have roughly 47 users and a core group of people who are on almost daily. CollegeARC receives about 100 unique IP address visitors and roughly 400 page views daily. Not bad for the first month.

Recently the featured article list was updated to a MUCH better looking let alone the improvement in usability. One problem that has absolutely been a pain to try and fix is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Using the core Joomla 1.5 SEO with the Search Engine Friendly (SEF) links causes the user to not be able to login or logout (if already logged in when activated). I have the .htaccess file modified and played around with commenting the RewrightBase / line. Any suggestions would be VERY VERY VERY appreciated.




Bryce Salmi KB1LQC
www.CollegeARC.com

CollegeARC.com

CollegeARC.com is experiencing a lot of interest and it continues to get busier! We quite literally DOUBLED our bandwidth in 12 hours (Cool!). A few new updates to announce

• Posting articles is currently disabled due to a small bug that is being fixed
• Comments work fine now
• Registration works great
• follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/CollegeARC

Please share the website and let as many people as possible know about it! The success of the website is up to those who are involved with it. We hope you you share some of the enthusiasm for spreading Amateur Radio (ham) and inspiring younger people to enjoy the hobby!

CollegeARC.com

So what is my big project this summer? Is it all these antennas I am building? No. Is it the amplifiers I will be repairing? No. Actually, its a website! I am the Vice President of K2GXT the Rochester Institute of Technology Amateur Radio Club and have been a dedicated member since my first year at RIT. In high school I also founded the Chelmsford High School Amateur Radio Club KB1NAY which was awarded the ARRL Big Project grant. So I have been in several school clubs and have had a lot of experience not only being an active and productive member but also how one is formed and maintained.

My brother and I want to give back to the amateur radio community, we have been greatly appreciative of the support and generosity of the radio amateur. Our way of giving back has been to start a club and promote the hobby since we both got our licenses, but we want to give more. We are doing this by starting www.CollegeARC.com. This website is dedicated to providing a community to share the activities of college and university amateur radio clubs to the general public and radio amateurs. It even provides a way for prospective students or alumni to find out information regarding their universities club. It also serves as a way for clubs to interact, share ideas, and work together to build stronger member involvement and relations to the public.

We recognized that there are large swings of activity with college clubs, it happens. However, we feel that if there was a way to stirr excitement, share knowledge, and provide a community for clubs to grow a foundation on we can aleviate some of the problems. www.CollegeARC.com is a big step towards this and the more involvment we can get the better.

Both my brother and I have email over 40+ clubs but only 3 have responded and more than ten emails bounced back. We are feeling the effects of outdated contact information and old websites. So we have posted on the www.qrz.com news forum under the topic "CollegeARC.com Needs Your Help"about our goals for this project and asked for help just as I am doing here.

If anyone who reads this blog or stumbles upon it knows about amateur radio clubs at universities and colleges please comment or send and email! The website is not open to the public at this time, however it is planned to be launched in August just before the academic year. Thank you for reading this blog and post! I hope to hear from you!

Bryce
KB1LQC

Web-Based Software Defined Radio

Well it's been a crazy quarter... super busy and just making me crave summer more and more! Onto what I want to talk about now! I was informed of an online web based Software Defined Radio for anyone to use. It allows multiple users of the radio on different frequencies which an uncommon ability for online radios.

The radio is located is located at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. It allows anyone to monitor a portion of the 40 meter and 80 meter amateur radio bands. You can use it to monitor morse code conversation, PSK31, other digital modes, and SSB. It is a very fun project to use and makes me want to finally experiment with software defined radio this summer! Follow the link to access the web-based receiver!

WebSDR

Enjoy,

Bryce

School Club Roundup 2008 - Day 1

School Club Roundup is an annual contest that is aimed for school amateur radio clubs. I started participating in it when my brother Brent and I founded the Chelmsford High School Amateur Radio Club KB1NAY in 2005. Click on the name of this post to find out more info about the contest.

RIT Amateur Radio Club K2GXT Daily Dispatch:

SCHOOL CLUB ROUNDUP DAILY DISPATCH
11:46 PM, Monday, February 11, 2008

Operating Hours: 4.34
Voice Contacts: 1
Digital Contacts: 1
Current Score: 9

1 State Contacted:
FLORIDA

1 Radio Club Contacted:
W4LX

So we didn't have much luck. We are pretty sure that our G5RV is "dead" we are in the process of building an Off Center Fed Dipole to replace it (I will post my power point presentation on a later post). Our beam is only made for 20 meters (14 MHz) and higher, it will tune on 40 but we haven't had much luck with that.

The best option we have might be to get on 20 meters during the day and operate, we will see how that works out! Good luck to all those who are participating!