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Stanford Amateur Radio Station W6YX
Contest is held at Stanford's 'Shack':
Contact During the Contest: 650-856-2737
(Stanford, California) -- The Stanford Amateur Radio Club (call sign W6YX) will participate in Field Day, the annual emergency communications preparedness exercise, this year held June 25 11am to June 26 11am. Field Day is sponsored by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL, www.arrl.org), the national association for Amateur Radio (a.k.a. "ham radio").
The Amateur Radio Service creates a corps of Federally licensed radio operators who volunteer their skills to assist public safety agencies in the event of a disaster or other incident. Amateur Radio operators must pass a Federal examination and be issued a FCC radio license, which grants licensees "operating privileges" - such as the right to use high power transmitters (over a thousand watts), different modes (such as voice, Morse code, digital, and even television), and thousands of frequencies. In addition to their technology know-how, these trained volunteers provide important communications resources in disasters, locally and globally.
During Field Day, ham radio operators set up in local parks, at shopping malls, or even in their own backyards, and get on the air using generators or battery power. Field Day was designed to test operators' abilities to set up and operate portable stations under emergency conditions such as the loss of electricity.
"We want the community to know that in the event of an emergency, ham radio operators will be ready to assist in any way we can,” says Kenneth Dueker, Director of Emergency Services for the City of Palo Alto. "In major disasters during which time normal telecommunications services are disrupted, Amateur Radio has served as an important resource to local relief efforts, working with police, fire, the Red Cross, and other agencies."
Field Day is a serious test of skill, but it is also a contest for fun and the largest "on-air" operating event each year since it began in 1933. During the weekend, radio operators try to contact as many other Field Day stations as possible, simulating emergency message handling.
The Stanford Amateur Radio Club will hold Field Day at Site 530, a location near the famous Stanford Dish, and will be operating during a 24-hour period. The public is invited to visit anytime from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 26. Directions are on the club’s web page (below). Access to the Stanford Academic Preserve Field Sites by visitors is limited to pedestrians only.
Today there are more than 670,000 Amateur Radio operators in the United States and more than 2.5 million worldwide. Since the 1920s, the Stanford Amateur Radio Club has been a home to wireless and electronics pioneers, including Professor Frederick Terman and many other faculty, students, and alumni. To find out more about Amateur Radio or how you can get a radio license, go to the Stanford Amateur Radio Club website: http://w6yx.stanford.edu.
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We are excited and honored to have Bruce Parens speaking at our monthly radio club meeting!
Topic: FreeDV and Codec2 Open Source Digital Voice, Algoram's Katena Handheld Software-Defined Radio
Date / Time: Tuesday, January 12, 2016 - 7:30pm to 8:30pm
Venue: Packard 202
Speaker: Bruce Parens (Algoram)
Description:
The meeting will start at 7:00P.M. with food and light refreshments. The presentation will begin at 7:30 P.M.
Bio:
Bruce Perens K6BP is one of the founders of the Open Source movement in software, and was the person to announce "Open Source" to the world. He created the Open Source Definition, the set of legal requirements for Open Source licensing which still stands today.
Mr. Perens is presently CEO of Algoram, a start-up business which is producing a 50-1000 MHz software-defined radio transceiver, and of Legal Engineering, a legal-technical consultancy.
Mr. Perens was Senior Global Strategist for Linux and Open Source with HP, and vice president of Sourcelabs. He represented Open Source at the U.N. Summit on the Information Society, at the invitation of the U.N. Development Project. Mr. Perens is the creator of Busybox, which is a component of Millions of commercial devices that use Linux. Busybox has the unfortunate feature of being the most-litigated Open Source program, although Mr. Perens was never associated with the plaintiffs. Mr. Perens eventually started assisting the defendants in these cases, which led to the formation of Legal Engineering.
Mr. Perens is a generalist, and feels that the most creative work is done at the intersections between fields rather than as a specialist in only one. Thus, he has worked on the junction of art and software at Pixar Animation Studios, the junction of intellectual property, economics, community, and programming in his work on Open Source, the junction of law and software for Legal Engineering, and the junction of electronics, communications, and software in his software-defined radio work for Algoram.
For his consultancy, Legal Engineering, Bruce Perens is the bridge between lawyers and engineers, helping one to understand the other. He instructs engineers in how to comply with legal requirements and how to deal with intellectual property issues in their own work, and produces clarity for attorneys who are working on issues of computer software.
Among his skills, Mr. Perens is an operating systems programmer, a microcode (a level lower than assembly language, used in CPU design) programmer, computer language designer, is knowledgeable in electronics and an innovator in wireless communications, and is an intellectual property specialist. He is well-known as a technology evangelist, has published 24 books as a series editor, and made his living for several years as a paid public speaker.
Mr. Perens was involved in the creation of the field of 3-D animated feature film, working for 19 years in total in the film industry as a software developer, the last 12 of those years at Pixar, where he interacted frequently with Steve Jobs, designed a computer language for image processing, produced some of the software that Pixar uses to create animation, and was a Unix kernel programmer. He is credited as a senior systems programmer on the films Toy Story II and A Bug's Life, and had uncredited technical roles in the production of many other films.
Mr. Perens was expert for the plaintiff in the appeal of Jacobsen v. Katzer, which established the legality of Open Source licenses. He was a case strategy consultant for Google's outside counsel in the lower court case of Oracle v. Google. He has taught Continuing Legal Education classes in many states, although he is not an attorney. Most recently, he was keynote speaker at the Baker and Mackenzie Tech Days 2015, a Silicon Valley event attracting over 250 attorneys.
Mr. Perens was an operating systems programmer at the Computer Graphics Laboratory of the New York Institute of Technology, and a visiting researcher at the Univesity of Agder under a 3-year grant from the Competence Fund of Southern Norway. He was a remote researcher with the Cyber Security Policy Research Institute of George Washington University.
As series editor of the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series with Prentice Hall PTR publishers, Mr. Perens published 24 books on Open Source software under an Open Publications license (predecessor to the Creative Commons licenses). All but one of the books was profitable and several still sell well more than a decade after publication.
Mr. Perens was founder of No-Code International, which helped to convince the International Telecommunications Union, FCC and the telecommunications regulators of many nations to drop the Morse code requirement for Amateur Radio licensing. With the possible exception of Russia, all nations have now dropped that requirement. Mr. Perens is a Radio Amateur, and holds an holds an Amateur Extra class license, with station license K6BP. He is active in the innovation of new codecs and protocols for digital voice communications. He serves AMSAT in helping to create a new geostationary satellite in cooperation with FEMA, which will provide 24-hour digital communications including disaster services.
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W6YX Hiking Trip to Sierra Morena | Photos: Nathan Staffa (KK6TFV) |