Membership and
Dues
As we are no longer providing a printed VISION News letter,only this
e-mail version. We have reduced operating expenses, we do however request
members to provide the membership dues to the treasurer James Gaither
W4CR to help cover the Dayton Ohio meetings and other operation
expenses.
Contact James W4CR at
w4cr@cs.com
Get on the IVCA Yahoo
reflector! (Just to remind new viewers)
Any one that would like to receive and exchange
e-mail information with the IVCA members can do this by going to the Yahoo group
page ,i.e. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ivca
and on the right side of the page click the "Join this group" and fill in
the details. The Yahoo IVCA reflector let's you receive all the mail that
members are sending and you can also send mail to them at
ivca@yahoogroups.com This is a free
service that members can take advantage of for information exchange. It also
permits file attachments with size limits.
Large Video
Display
We all know displays are getting brighter, sharper , larger and
cheaper all the time but have you seen the one the German computer club
"CCC" has that uses the lighted windows of an office building to display moving
graphic pictures and messages, that can be controlled with a Cell
Phone. Check it out at
http://www.blinkenlights.de/ If
it's still up! ( They also have live web cams) Now that's what we call
a big dot pitch pixel display! ( What next, more pixels and
with color?)
Prices are Still Falling on Computer
Hardware
If you are using a old slow computer and small
monitor etc. I find when we go from a 15 Inch CRT monitor to even a 17 inch
there is an amazing improvement and the screen is very much easier to view and
read. and the newer computers are all cheaper and Win XP compatible and almost
crash proof. As an example you can pick up a 19 inch monitor at the Tiger
Direct web site at
http://www.tigerdirect.com for
as little as $159.00 .US (a good place to check and compare prices on
various hardware etc.) It's also a good time to add computer memory as it
is only a fraction of it's previous price. The proceeding applies in this slow
US economy only if your still gainfully employed!!
SSTV & Digital Audio The Almost
Best Kept Secretes in Amateur Radio
There has been very little written to date on SSTV and it has not been
easy to get any thing published in the Amateur Journals. I now find it
is starting to get easier.With the web any one can publish and every one
reads. Even the editor of QST magazine has written some good recent
articles. The ARRL/QST is posting articles on the web in the Adobe PDF format
that permits simple color printing on any computer system. Even my old QST
article of Sept 1997 "Getting Started in SSTV" is available in PDF
format. (The PDF reader is available free even for WinXP operating system at the
Adobe web site at
http://www.adobe.com
(with the free PDF reader installed when you click a PDF link it
displays.) After you have installed the PDF reader be sure to check
the ARRL web site on Digital Voice/Video transmission and scroll down and play
the sample digital audio files etc. at
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/digivoice.html
You will find that Digital Audio was developed during World War 2 for secure
voice communications but may soon find some new applications.
Digital Encryption
and Copy Protection? (just a little hacker information)
To prevent the copying of music CD's and
making them available on the web with the Napster type program or any
of the various Peer to Peer file transfer programs, a large music company
"Universal" has used copy protection on their new music CD "Fast & Furious"
It was quickly discovered that with the "CloneCD" or the "CDex" program (you can
locate with a search engine and download them) then the "Cactus Data
Shield" copy protection can be removed and the music ripped or
recorded. The original CD did not even run on a Linux or a Mac
computer before and had to even use it's special player to
run on a Windows system!) Note: I have found Fast & Furious music is
posted at numerous locations available on the web for download! (Oh well
back to the drawing board.) Note: The cost of Music CD's is droping fast some
for less than $5.00 available now.
(The main function of copy protection for
E-Books,WinXP etc. it seems is just to challenge the dedicated
hackers!)
What is the Best SSTV
System? (easy question
difficult answer)
Of the numerous e-mails we have received from
folks wishing to start operating with SSTV, the most frequent question is "What
is the best SSTV system or software. As we now have an increasing number of
hardware and software programs and more arriving almost daily along with
upgrades. I'm not able to give a simple answer. As several considerations must
be made including price and functions or features etc. I have personally
had experience with only fifteen of the various software DOS and Windows
programs and several stand alone hardware systems.I do find they all run and
are all fun to operate. In general the newer software sound card programs
have more features and I find are easier to configure. I usually suggest the new
operator try several programs as we still have individual personal preferences
to consider. (I would like to congratulate all the Designers and
Programmer's for their efforts to improve and make SSTV systems easier and
more fun.) But what do I know? Ray W5NOO
Computer Tips
I have found several free programs to diagnose or
help keep my IBM computer running. One program is the "Belarc
Advisor" that will give all the information on your installed hardware
and software, you can locate it with the Google search engine (available at http://www.google.com) it's listed by
TechTV, and down load it. One more good free program to view and test your
hardware setup is by the SiSoft Co. called "Sandra" it can be
also located with a Google.search. A third free program that can be
installed in windows 98 and used similar to "Go Back" program is available and
called "System Safe Gold" that keeps your windows operation
files history so if they get damaged you can go to a previous copy. It also can
be found with a Google search for "System Safe Gold"
Happy New Year and Happy
Viewing 73 Ray
Glidden W5NOO Editor/Director IVCA
