A website make-over and expansion has been on the to-do list for several months now. But work on other projects—especially the Magnolia Intertie Inc. and the Radio Experimenter’s Society of Mississippi—has taken precedence. But I’ve started the process…and to poke fun at myself, created the whimsical logo shown at left.
As soon as I’ve completed the rewiring project where I can switch among several HF rigs quickly and easily is completed, I’ll document the building of my current shack. Previous posts gave some of the layout and so forth but I’ve added more equipment and antennas. I’ll document those in the near future.
One of the offshoots of my work with the ARRL Delta Division on the survey of members in the Division in 2011 and 2013, I’ve completed several additional databases on hams and ham radio.
One is simply the FCC ULS extract that I’ve geocoded using services kindly contributed by SmartyStreetstm company. Thanks to Joe Speroni AH0A’s sharing of his historic FCC license files, I’ve geocoded the license files from 2000-2013. (In January 2015, I’ll complete 2014 and 2015.) With the 2015 files, I’ll have a 15 years of files, all geocoded to street addresses which will further yield zipcode, city, county, metro area, and state. Having the space and time data on license files can yield some significant facts about hams. Movement from place to place, license upgrades, terminations, and expirations are important elements generating the overall trends that the ARRL and Joe’s cool website use each year in various reports. The migration aspects of ham relocations is an unexplored aspect of hams in the U.S. If we just had the birth date in the public releases of the file….
Another is a web-scraping of the popular eHam.net website’s product reviews: the entire database. While not all reviewers use ham call signs as their user names (and not all have them), I’ll link the characteristics of those I can identify to the individual reviews. My interest is in the variation in the reviews themselves, especially for the same product or manufacturer. More on this study in a future post.
A third dataset is the combination of the famous Rob Sherwood receiver characteristics with both price of rig and the eHam.net (satisfaction) ratings. This will, for receiving at least, combine the best standardized laboratory measurements with the subjective ratings of eHam reviewers and how price figures into that.
As of this post, however, what I’ve added is a set of Resources available on the top menu. One is a few presentations I’ve made in recent months. Another is a set of maps depicting hams, ARRL affiliated clubs, and repeaters in Mississippi and the Delta Division. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the repeater data or the others technically but they should be useful. I hope so, at least!