New Year's Eve

Today the last day of year 2008 has been passed peacefully here in Machida, Japan.
On the way back from a local hot spa which is located just 10 min drive from my home, I could see beautiful silhouette of Tanzawa mountains and head of Mt.Fuji on sunset.

Unconsciously I thanked to the god for our health and safe in this year and prayed for good luck in 2009.

Fine Paddles

There are many kinds of fine paddles in the world.
So, I've been collecting some of them.
Among those paddles I've ever used, following two paddles are the best of bests and it is hard to decide which one is better than the other.

Chevron Morse Key
Begali Graciella Vertical Paddle

I wrote some report on these paddles before.
http://a1club.net/je1trv/key/

Spider-Beam Antenna (2)

I'm enjoying assembly work of the spider-beam antenna.
It takes time but it's also a kind of fun to measure and cut from the scratch.
At a very initial stage, we must fabricate the Guy Lines.
A special fibre rope "Kevlar" is used for the guy line.
Once Kevlar is cut, the end of rope become feazing. Like photo below;


The instruction manual says to melt the ends with a lighter.
However I found that the melted ends became thicker than original diameter then it will not go through the 3mm hole of the plastic insulatiors.

So, without melting the ends, I wind thin & tough wire like photo below;


Then go it though 3mm hole of the plastic insulator then pulled it out.





I needed to make this kind of work 16 times, (^^;;

Memorial Ceremony for JA7SSB

According to Fukushima CW association (FCWA), Memorial Ceremony for JA7SSB Jun-OM will be taken place on 2009-01-18 at Fukushima, Japan.
Before that, they are asking to send memorial message about Jun-OM.
If you have special memory on JA7SSB, please send message by text or word or PDF to the secretary of FCWA, JI7VBW Ms.Yoko Horikiri by 2009-01-12.
E-mail address is shown in the following link;
http://www.roy.hi-ho.ne.jp/hamradio/fcwatop06.htm
If you cannot read & write Japanese, please send me je1trv@a1club.net so that I will transfer to her with translation.

Let's Use YYYY-MM-DD Format

Let's use international standard numeric representation of Dates

How do you usually express date?
For example, what dose the date 08-12-07 mean?

08-12-07;
For American, it means the 12th day of August in 2007.
For European, it means the 8th day of December in 2007.
For Japanese, it means the 7th day of December in 2008.
(I'm not sure but, some other asian people recognize
as same as Japanese dose.)

The ISO (International Standard Organization) specifies
the numeric representation of Dates in ISO-8601.

===QUOTE===
ISO 8601 advises numeric representation of dates and
times on an internationally agreed basis.
It represents elements from the largest to the smallest element: year-month-day:

Calendar date is the most common date representation. It is:
YYYY-MM-DD

where YYYY is the year in the Gregorian calendar, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31.

Example: 2003-04-01 represents the first day of April in 2003.
===UNQUOTE===

I'd like to recommend that we as an internationally recognized licensed amateur radio operator, must use the expression recommended in ISO.
That is, 2008-12-07 for the 7th date of December in 2008.

JA7SSB SK

Today I got an very sad news from JI7VBW Ms.Horikiri who is a secretary of FCWA (Fukushima CW Association).
Her mail said JA7SSB, Jun (Mr.Junji Saito) has been passed away last night (2008-12-2).
He was 77 years old but he was very well and active on the air just before he died.
He has been maintained a nice website "The Hamradio" since 1998.
He has been revised the DX news almost everyday for 10 years on that website.
Also, he was a big boss of hamradio community.
I personaly met him on 1997, when I moved to Fukushima-prefecture due to my job rotation. I joined FCWA and enjoyed and learned many things with him and FCWA members in Fukushima.
During my stay in Fukushima, I was inspired by his activity on hamradio community and it leads me to found A1 CLUB in Oct.1998.
Now a days, A1 CLUB was grown up as a biggest CW fan club in Japan with 1200 members.
He was a really great elmer of our hamradio operators.
I'll keep his memory forever and we must keep his wishes "Don't forget amateur spirit, don't forget to challenge, don't forget to study"
Thank you Jun OM, nice dreams there!

73 de JE1TRV Atsu