EQSL Awards and Hyper Squirrels

"Stay away from too much Caffeine"


Continuing my "Funny Animals" theme I thought I would choose this wide-eyed and hyper-looking squirrel for today's blog!

We had a nice club net on 2 meters last night and got talking about photo-editing software and eQSL Awards. I have just qualified for The eDX Award awarded by eQSL for having worked at least 25 different countries confirmed by eQSL card. It sounds easy, but there are a couple of rules that make the award slightly harder to achieve: the worked stations must be a Bronze or Silver member (qualifying by having made a minimum donation to eQSL of the necessary amount) and be "Authenticity Guaranteed" (in other words, they must have sent in a scan of their licence document), or else they must be a Gold member.

The next award issued by eQSL is for having worked 100 stations. There is nothing inbetween. I have asked eQSL a couple of times whether one can re-apply for the eDX award when one has worked, say, 50 countries or 75 countries, but I have yet to receive an answer from them. So I was wondering whether the certificate issued for 25 countries in "GIF" format could be ammended to show the new number of stations achieved and simply re-printed, rather than re-applying for the award on eQSL (which might not be possible).

My current certificate looks like this:



Anyway that's enough from me for today. I am taking Bradley to Dawlish to have a run on the beach today. After that I shall pop into the "Open Door" - this is a coffee morning held in "Wesley's" Cafe in the local Methodist Church there where, for 50p, you can get a nice hot cup of tea and a few biscuits. As the forecast is so good and it was warm enough to eat lunch outside in the garden yesterday, I have been brave enough to pack a picnic!

Finally, when I was choosing which HF transceiver to go for before finally settling on the Icom 703, on my wish list had been the FT450 which Paul (PC4T) is collecting for his QRP shack today. I shall be genuinely interested to hear how Paul gets along with it in the next few days and weeks. The 450 is a cracking radio and has IF DSP technology which I was eager to try out. Also on Paul's blog Andre commented that it is excellent for dealing with high noise floors, hearing signals his FT817 couldn't pull out of the noise. Good luck Paul. Enjoy your day collecting & setting up this smashing radio, and don't forget to tell us all about it.

Sunshine!

"Get Outside In The Sun Every Once In A While"


I received the above image from a friend in Australia in a set of 25 photos entitled "25 Ways to be Healthier". They were so funny I thought I would post one or two of them on my blog. This one was quite an appropriate picture as the sky outside is as blue as blue can be and we have an excellent forecast for the next 5 days: not a single grey or wet day expected.

Thanks for the positive comments on eQSL cards. The longer I am in HAM radio the more often I come across people who are big fans of this method of QSLing, and it is not so rare to some across messages on PSK like "QSL SURE via EQSL or LOTW", which I think is the message I received from PD5SS yesterday.

I watched an interersting programme last night on BBC2 by David Attenborough about the world's population growth and how many people the planet can support. At the start of his career the world's population was just over 2 billion. Now, towards the end of it, it is almost 7 billion and projected to rise to, I think it was 9 billion by 2015. This means more people consuming shrinking resources like water and oil with food productivity already at its maximum. Unless something is done to stop the huge increases in population the situation looked very bleak.

In Kerala in India, education for ALL children meant young women growing up wanting fewer children: perhaps only one or two. They also started having children later. As oppose to poorer areas of that country where less educated women as young as 18 often start having families and end up with perhaps 6 or more children. So the solutions to the predicament were not always radical: such as the one child policy in China. If I have my statistics right, I think he said that had China not have introduced the one child policy in the 70's, its population would have grown by the equivelant of the total population of India.

eQSL

This is my eQSL from my chat with PD5SS earlier this morning. It is fantastic to get the confirmation so soon after the contact: that's a real bonus about eQSLs. And look at my signal report: 59+20! I can assure you I don't get very many of those! I like the windmills, very appropriate for a Dutch QSL and very environmentally friendly - as indeed are eQSLs themselves: no ink, no rainforest being destroyed for the card & envelope, and no airmiles (if you believe they are a contributory factor in global warming).

I was initially very unsure about eQSLs and sent many paper cards to my initial contacts. But that cost a lot of money, the return rate was pretty abysmal, and to be honest what do you do with them: you stick them in a folder and hardly ever look at them until after 20 years you have shoe-boxes full of them. My eQSLs are displayed on Google Desktop, where a new card is displayed every few seconds for me to see, keeping the whole thing alive and active rather than stuffed away in the darkness of a drawer. Very often, when I see the card, I can remember the contact and so the memories as well as the attractive designs are kept alive.

I am delighted I persevered with eQSL. I have only been licensed since March this year, but already I have 125 eQSL cards in my ever-expanding collection. I use WinLog32 to log my contacts, and it automatically loads my logs to the eQSL system and turns them into cards waiting to be viewed in the recipients inbox. I then go into eQSL and if that station is an eQSL member I write a little message to personalize my card.

Clarinets & Radio

We had a bit of a Christmas party at the radio club on Monday night: fish & chips, beer, wine, Christmas cakes & mince pies. It was really nice. I have been going along to the club for 12 months now and really look forward both to the Monday night meetings and the Thursday evening net on 2 meters. Whilst munching on my Christmas cake I got chatting to G7UGT, the Clarinetist. I told him that, inspired by our last conversation, I had bought both the Weber and Mozart concertos on CD and was enjoying them tremendously. He asked if I had heard of a composer called Krommer who also composed music for the clarinet. I hadn't, but looked him up as soon as I got home on Google and then YouTube, and the above video is the 2nd Movement of his 2nd Concerto for two clarinets. Watching the players has advantages over just listening to them - I think you can better see the way the two instruments talk to one another.

Conditions were particularly good between the UK and The Netherlands this morning and I had a nice chat with PD5SS on 40M SSB. We were both 59+20 and it was strange to have this signal from over 300 miles away booming into my 703. I can't remember exactly but I seem to remember that the "PD" suffixes are low power, 30W stations. It was certainly nice to know my 10W was making it across so well. I sometimes worry about the little box at the house end of the Par End Fedz and whether it was designed to be outside semi-permanently in all weathers. I have considered trying to protect it in some way, but am not sure how best to proceed. When I hear that my signal has indeed made it through to wherever I was calling it is always with some relief as I know that that little box hasn't (yet) been damaged by all the rain.

Sinterklaas

I read with interest Paul's (PC4T) blog this morning about the Sinterklaas holiday in The Netherlands. I am very interested in these mid-Winter European festivals and came across the following article on the internet:

In the Netherlands, Saint Nicholas' Eve (December 5) is the primary occasion for gift-giving, when his reputed birthday is celebrated. In this case, roles are reversed, though, in that Sinterklaas is the one who gives the presents. In Belgium, presents are generally given only to children on that day.
In the days leading up to December 5 (starting when Saint Nicholas has arrived in the Netherlands by steamboat in late November), young children put their shoes in front of the chimneys and sing special 'Sinterklaas-songs'. Often the shoe is filled with a carrot or some hay for the horse of St. Nicholas ( who in recent years has been named Amerigo). On the next morning they will find a small present in their shoe, ranging from a bag of chocolate coins to a bag of marbles or some other small toy.
In recent years, Christmas (along with Santa Claus) has been pushed by shopkeepers as another gift-giving festival, with some success; although, especially for young children, Saint Nicholas' Eve is still much more important than Christmas. The rise of Father Christmas (known in Dutch as de Kerstman) is often cited as an example of (undesirable) globalisation and Americanisation.

What Meditation Is and what it is Not

GW7AAV recently left some comments on my blog with his own take on Satish Kumar's ideas for living a more simple life. That's fine. That's what comments are for. I personally find Mr Kumar's advice and ideas on living more simply a breath of fresh air in this fast-paced and often stressful world.
However GW7AAV's comment, "I do not like the concept of emptying the mind in meditation" needs to be addressed as he has clearly misunderstood the concept of meditation and I do not want my blog to be responsible for misinforming people about so useful a practice.

In my experience the false assumption that meditation is in some way about "stopping thought" is quite common and deters many people from starting it. I want to set the record straight that meditation has nothing to do with emptying the mind. The mind never goes blank (unless you are deeply unconscious) and trying to make your mind go blank or chase thoughts away doesn't work and isn't what meditation is about. Meditation, and especially the Buddhist Mindfulness of Breathing practice, is concerned with developing clarity of mind and with becoming more aware of ourselves and the world around us. This slow process of becoming more aware and learning to encourage what is best in us is the Buddhist path of meditation.

For anyone interested in learning more about meditation I thoroughly recommend a book called "Change your Mind - A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation" published by Windhorse Publications, who are associated with The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. This is a terrific book, beautifully written, and will do much in inspiring you to take up this most worthwhile of practices.

Simple Living

I was searching through some blogs this morning and came across this wonderful entry from Emme in Minnesota:

http://simplereduce.blogspot.com/2007/02/sense-of-entitlement.html

I think Emme hits the nail on the head here when she talks about what it is that makes people happy and what it is that causes so much dissatisfaction.

I have become increasingly more interested in this whole concept of simple living since becoming very ill with acute anxiety and depression about 10 years ago when my deteriorating health forced me to simplify my life. My interest in simple living grew stronger upon discovering Buddhist meditation about two years ago as a way to help deal with some of the anxiety.

We have a magazine here in the UK called "Saga". It is a lifestyle magazine for the over 50's and in the December 2008 edition there was a fascinating article by a man called Satish Kumar, a 72 year old former Jain monk who now works at the Schumacher College at Totnes (a town about 5 miles away from me) that teaches sustainable living. The interview was so fascinating and helpful that I thought I would list some of the main points here on my blog:

Make a New Year resolution to slow down. The curse of modern living is speed. You cannot write a poem, make a beautiful painting or cook a beautiful meal in a hurry.

You can get a long way without money. From 1967 to 1968 I went around the world for 2 years: 8,000 miles from the grave of Gandhi to the grave of JFK in Washington. I depended on people's hospitality and was looked after everywhere. Now I give people hospitality in return. To passers-by and back-packers I say, "Come and have a meal".

Walk More. It not only brings physical fitness but is therapy for the mind and soul.

Meditate. I rise at 6.30, have a cup of tea and meditate for half an hour. I become aware and focus on my breathing - the pace and sensation of it, the gentle rhythm. If you practise, meditation becomes a way of life.

Experiment to see how much you can do without money. Money is not wealth, only a measure of wealth, not an end in itself. Real wealth is our trees, our land, our people, our communities, our happiness and wellbeing.

Consume less. Live more lightly. You need two paris of shoes made to last, not 10 pairs. To feel contentment we need the wisdom to know when enough is enough. Most people have too many possessions, too much to look after. Work less, grow vegetables, bake bread, take time to study.

Happiness does not come from material things. Switch from being a consumer into an artist. I possess very little. I give away books twice a year to Oxfam or the library; I put out clothes for anyone to have. Once you have enough you have abundance. No need to buy and hoard.

Resolve not to be enslaved by your fixed opinions which become stale & dogmatic.
Replace opinions with thought and liberate yourself.

Optimism. It is easy to be a pessimist. Abandon your cynicism, born of fear. Don't give up. Fear is disempowering.

Earth is our gracious host. We must be her gracious guest!