Subj : Amateur Radio Newsline (B) To : All From : Daryl Stout Date : Fri Aug 04 2017 07:30 am BREAK HERE: Time for you to identify your station. We are the Amateur Radio Newsline, heard on bulletin stations around the world, including W3BN, the 2-meter repeater of the Reading Radio Club in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Friday evenings at 8 p.m. local time. *** AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK AGAIN DON/ANCHOR: The Spirit has landed. With the single-engine aircraft's wheels once again on the ground, rest assured that the traveling days of pilot Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN, aren't over just yet. He completed his around-the-world tribute flight to Amelia Earhart, with a July 31 landing at California's Oakland Airport. The 80th anniversary flight honoring Earhart's final trip is in the books. While logging all those miles and all those QSOs too, Brian faced some technical as well as bureaucratic challenges. As of production deadline at Newsline, he was on his way safely home to Spring Branch, Texas with a stopover at Earhart's Atchison, Kansas birthplace -- and thus, Brian Lloyd pays Amelia Earhart his final tribute. ** SUN CAN'T ECLIPSE EMERGENCY SERVICES DON/ANCHOR: Here comes the sun - or rather, there goes the sun as an eclipse moves in on Aug. 21. So what happens to emergency communications? Jim Damron, N8TMW, has this report. JIM: As the saying goes, "when all else fails, ham radio." In this case, with the coming of a total solar eclipse, what's going to fail - in a manner of speaking - is the sun itself, at least for a short while. Emergency dispatch centers around central Oregon aren't taking any chances. Oregon is expected to have a 70-mile-wide zone of totality when the eclipse happens. According to a report in the Central Oregon Bulletin, a number of emergency services personnel are already making plans that include area amateur radio operators, so that emergency calls still get through. Nathan Garibay, a sergeant with the Deschutes County sheriff's office, and emergency services manager for the county, has coordinated with Don Shurtleff WB0DVS, information officer for the Deschutes County Amateur Radio Emergency Service, and the High Desert Amateur Radio Group. Shurtleff's team will staff a joint-information center throughout the eclipse, joining others from emergency response teams from around the region. If necessary, hams will be sent to locations, such as busy highways, to make sure emergencies are noted and reported. Meanwhile, to the north in Jefferson County, Mark Carman, KI7MRC, the emergency management coordinator there, will staff a communications center, where eight hams will be checking in from their designated patrol areas. Their job will be to give realtime traffic reports either by foot patrol, golf cart, or any other means that doesn't involve an automobile. Mark Carman told the Bulletin newspaper [QUOTE] "We're going to have hams up and down the Highway 97 corridor." [ENDQUOTE] For Amateur Radio Newsline, I'm Jim Damron, N8TMW. (THE BULLETIN OF CENTRAL OREGON) ** ECLIPSE EXPERIMENT SHOULD SHED SOME LIGHT DON/ANCHOR: This month's eclipse is also turning into an amateur radio project for a college team based in Virginia. We hear more from Mike Askins, KE5CXP. MIKE: A senior at Virginia Tech is using her Blacksburg, Virginia backyard as a kind of propagation laboratory. Magda Moses, KM4EGE, is part of a team of students and faculty who - like so many others - are eagerly awaitng the solar eclipse on Aug. 21. The team's backyard experiment is focused on a different kind of special effects that involve measuring - not viewing. The group is hoping to study changes that occur in the ionosphere during the total solar eclipse. It is the first such eclipse to be visible from the U.S. since 1979. The team is being led by Greg Earle, W4GDE, a professor of electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. Faculty and students will be monitoring radio waves from locations in Oregon, where the eclipse will begin, Kansas, the eclipse's mid-point and South Carolina, as the eclipse departs. Magda's backyard has been outfitted with four pole-mounted antennas. The team will analyze data they collect about how radio waves behave when the moon blocks the sun's radiation from entering the ionosphere - exactly what will be happening as the eclipse occurs. Those few moments are the students' only chance to be doing this as undergraduates: the next such eclipse won't be happening until 2024. For Amateur Radio Newsline, I'm Mike Askins, KE5CXP. (THE ROANOKE TIMES) ** IN ILLINOIS, A SPECIAL SOLAR EVENT DON/ANCHOR: Meanwhile, another group of eclipse-minded experimenters will be testing the layers of the ionosphere as well on Aug. 21. The Lewis & Clark Radio Club, K9HAM, will set up a special event station in Riverview Park in Alton, Illinois, and attempt to work as many stations as possible between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. A report in Illinois' Telegraph newspaper said that the event's chairman, John Nell, K9JDN, considers it a to be a "citizens' scientific experiment." In other words, they'll use the momentary darkness to shed some light on things -- or hope to, anyway. *** --- þ Synchronet þ The Thunderbolt BBS - wx1der.dyndns.org .