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!

RIT: Orange, Brown, and Green?

With President Destler running campus this year, he is apparently pushing to make RIT a "greener" campus. From the President's website, he is trying to initiate a movement to produce "...the nation's first "Innovation University"..." by hosting the "Imagine RIT" creativity festival that aims to attract about 30,000 people from the Rochester area.

RIT recently launched the Golisano Institute for Sustainability which from what I can reason would be a stepping stone to "greening" RIT. So with the buzz on campus for a more sustainable outlook to life and industry practices, what better time than now to help out?

I am part of a First Year Enrichment group that is designing a renewable energy alternative for RIT. Our project simply started with an idea for the class project and has grown into an interest to see if our idea is feasible to be implemented on campus.

Our group is researching the idea of providing some of the hot water used in a couple dorms with solar hot water. Hot water is one of the most energy demanding commodities used during the day. According to Solar Roofs, the average electric home water heater can use more energy than the average car per year; only by a little bit, but never-the-less a surprising reality.

Solar hot water is used to pre-heat the water before it enters the water boilers. This reduces the temperature difference that the water heater needs to use energy to heat the water. Groundwater is typically 45 F and the average hot water temperature is roughly 110 F, a difference of 65 F. Even with a solar hot water system that brings the temperature of the water to 50 F during the winter on a cold day, is still saving the energy used to heat the water by 5 F. During the summer, a system could bring the water up to 110 F and provide a relatively large percentage of the hot water during peak usage.

We are working on our final presentation for class and will then, time permitting, push this further and try to gain some support from campus. As I said before, this is a personal interest among the group members. We are only required to provide an outline for class, and we are already computing statistics and other data such as cost. Being Electrical Engineering majors, we are running off of our enthusiasm and hope to learn more from this project while being able to at least stir some interest among the community here on campus.

If there are any comments on this, please feel free to share them!

The K2GXT Clubroom Is Becoming Quite The Station!

The efforts to renovate and set up the club room below the SAU (Student Alumni Union), have made strides of progress. We have added new equipment and the room is turning into a place that is fun to hang out in!

We have received new(er) computers that are much faster than the old ones including LCD flatscreen monitors to replace the old, cumbersome, RF emitting CRT monitors. The computers are being loaded with amateur radio software at the moment. We are installing programs such as:

DX Lab Suite:
-Commander
-DX Keeper
-DX Viewer
-Propview
-Spot Collector
-Pathfinder
-WinWarbler

Other software such as:

-Echolink
-Pidgin (AIM)
-Alt/Azi rotor control software
-Much more as we get a chance

The room was also furnished with several workbenches, I am pretty sure they are from the Freshman Electrical Engineering Labs, but they are NICE! The main benefits are that they do not come out as far into the room, creating more walk space and they are heavy duty.

So if any student or faculty on campus walks by and the door is open, feel free to stop and find out what K2GXT is all about. After posting this blog on " The College Blog Network" I know there are student from campus reading it and would greatly appreciate feedback or questions about any topics I may post.

Thank you for the interest in K2GXT, reading the blog, and I hope you enjoy the updates about the many activities here at RIT!

K2GXT: The RIT Blimp

On Friday January 18, 2008 K2GXT RIT Amateur Radio Club flew a remote controlled blimp during the RIT vs. Sacred Heart hockey game. This is the first time the blimp has flown in about five years. The blimp was constructed in conjunction with RIT Aero Club and students (including K2GXT Members such as KC2LLT).

The RIT amateur radio club decided to resurrect the blimp and fly it during the hockey games again. We practiced flying before the game and planned to operate during intermissions between periods. The 12 foot blimp has roughly 3 oz of lift when filled with helium and has a 20 minute battery life. The batteries are recharged during the game when we are not flying.



When we first flew the blimp it was a great success, people absolutely LOVED it! The blimp was flown around the Ritter Ice Arena in a counter clockwise fashion, occasionally flying close to the ice. We apparently had fun "buzzing" Stu, the Zamboni driver after the game who had just about as much fun himself. While flying, we had some unexpected trouble that we did not experience while practicing. During the game, the air conditioning system was on and every few minutes our blimp would be thrown around by the air currents. This made flying the blimp very difficult during those times, especially with the turning and elevation control delay inherent with blimps.

We will be continuing to fly the blimp in future games and possibly other events around the RIT campus. We have plans to install amateur television equipment (ATV) and provide aerial video of the game, possibly down linking the video feed to ESPN Sportszone. K2GXT is committed to being an active club that benefits the RIT community with its actions.

First Year Enrichment Project

My second quarter First Year Enrichment (FYE) teacher posed a nice challenge to us electrical engineering majors. We need to come up with an idea for an "Imagine RIT" display/idea for the upcoming festival in May 2008. We were not required to sign up for the event, rather complete proposals and if we want to, create a display for the festival.

The group I am in has decided on an idea that hit me over winter break as a technology that could be implemented at RIT. I have always had a keen interest in renewable energy and resources, so the idea benefits RIT and the environment in some way! I do not want to go into it with too much detail until our project is completed and we decide if we want to go further onto the festival.

We will try to propose to the RIT community on a way to use a solar based renewable energy source to provide a vital resource on campus with much more efficiency than is experienced now. Whether we go to the festival or not, we are taking it serious and have already contacted faculty to provide information needed to complete the project. If we do decided to build a small prototype to demonstrate the concept at the "Imagine RIT" we will seriously try to gain support and a backing to implement the technology.

I am finally on winter break, what a crazy three weeks... it does not feel like Christmas at all! I've been worked up until now and had no time to get in that xmass mood! The third week was absolutely insane... I had testing in classes as well as Crew. A test in microeconomics, physics, and calculus plus all the homework due for those classes. For RIT crew we had our four day test series consisting of a ten second piece and 6000 Meter test (6k race) on Monday, 2000M (2K race) on Tuesday, 60-second test Wednesday, and the lovely "Hour of Power" 60 minute race on Thursday. Fitting that in with all the other work was comparable if not surpassing the stress of Finals week first quarter.

The ride home was pretty good. Drove two friends back so we had great conversations as well as it helped with the gas money haha. It normally takes me about 6-7 hours to get home from RIT but just before Albany on a Thruway service station we had a McDonald's "Incident". Somehow McDonald's forgot my friends Chicken Fillet order and it took about 45 minutes to make a simple sandwich...we were there for an hour and a half!... so in the end it was about an 8 hour trip!

Being home is great, but I'm slowly trying to relax because I am still stressed out! I decided to play around with Ubuntu a little, get GNOME to be a little more personalized. I am not a Linux geek but I enjoy the open-source idea and the challenge.

I tweaked GNOME to have some Mac OS X features like the App Dock (I used Avant Window Navigator) and the themes for OS X. However, I did not use all the OS X changes and kept it with the original Ubuntu feeling versus a total OS X feeling to the computer.

Winter Quarter at RIT

So Winter quarter is insane for me... I'm basically attending classes, rowing, and doing homework from 8 am until 1-3 am everyday... ouch. I'll try and keep the blog updated when I can, Christmas break is in two weeks so I'm trying to keep up until then!