RAC Bulletin 2015-11-14

RAC Ontario Sections Bulletin for November 14, 2015

This is V__3____, Official Bulletin Station for Radio Amateurs of Canada, with this week's bulletin

NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL NEWS

1. Fragile Agreement for 5 MHz Amateur Allocation Clears First Hurdles at WRC-15

At WRC-15, in Geneva, consensus continues to shape up around a new 15 kHz-wide global secondary
60 meter Amateur Radio allocation at 5351.5-5366.5 kHz.
On November 12, Conference Working Group 4B agreed to the global secondary allocation,
with power limits designed to protect primary services from harmful interference.
Sub Working Group 4B1, had presented its output document with two options,
the other being no change — a position many administrations favored going into the conference.
The current compromise making the allocation possible still must clear two more levels 
at the conference.
This won’t happen until next week, and the issue is not final until it does.

-- arrl.org/news

ONTARIO SECTIONS NEWS

ITEMS OF INTEREST

2. New symbol graphics at aprs.fi and better support for mobile devices

The new aprs.fi symbol set will be soon be published as open source on GitHub, in both 
vector and raster formats.
Other APRS applications may then use them at no cost.
The symbol set release even comes with a little piece of javascript which crunches out the 3 PNG files
(primary, secondary, overlay characters) at the 4 resolutions in a few seconds.

aprs.fi will now work better than before on mobile devices. the signup/login flow and most of the text
and data table views were fixed to scale more nicely on small devices,
allowing horizontal scrolling of tables.
It'll need some more work to make it very nice, but this is a good start.

-- aprs.fi news

3. WRC-15 allocates flight tracking spectrum

Following the loss of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 in March 2014, WRC-15 has agreed to 
allocate spectrum for global flight tracking.

The frequency band 1087.7-1092.3 MHz – currently being utilized for the transmission of ADS-B 
signals from aircraft to terrestrial stations within line-of-sight – has also been
allocated to the aeronautical mobile-satellite service (Earth-to-space) for reception by space
stations of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) emissions from aircraft transmitters.

This extends ADS-B signals beyond line-of-sight to facilitate reporting the position of aircraft 
equipped with ADS-B anywhere in the world, including oceanic, polar and other remote areas.

the full story is available at http://newslog.itu.int/archives/1146

-- Southgate Amateur Radio News

4. South African Disaster Exercise.

The Hamnet Summer Communications Exercise held in late October in South Africa was such a 
total disaster – just as everyone had hoped - that it proved to be a total success.
Disaster was the whole idea, in fact, since the 60 or so participating hams, working in teams, 
had committed to operating their field stations in remote locations while living off the grid, 
as if some cataclysm had struck.
All activities, including cooking, lighting and of course, radio communications were done under
simulated emergency conditions. But the 16 stations across South Africa, and in Namibia, 
benefitted from fortunate propagation conditions and the experiment went forward on Oct.
24 and 25 as planned. Plans are under way for next years' exercise.

-- SOUTH AFRICAN RADIO LEAGUE, SOUTHGATE radio news

This concludes this week's bulletin. Does anyone require repeats or clarifications?
Hearing none, This is V__3____ returning the frequency to net control.

=====================================================================
Bulletin sent from Official Bulletin Manager

Posted by: Paul Caccamo