can you point me toward some good noob recourses for Ham Radio?

As many hams are somewhat techie nerd types and with that type comes the love of fiddling with all things electronic, ham radio has a big presence on the internet.

Some sites:

eHam.net

The Forums section is a huge set of discussions for the exchange of information. Elmers is a great spot for asking Noob questions. By the way, the US FCC is eliminating even the 5 wpm Morse Code requirement for high frequency licenses.

QRZ.com

ARRL

ARRL is the major US ham radio organization. It publishes materials such as the Handbook, licensing guides and other materials such as the QST magazine. Click “licensing” or “education” in the yellow header tabs. It has a list of local clubs, licensing classes and so on. If you put a location into the “licensing” “call signs” “lookup” search function all the licensed hams in the area will be listed.

73.

Sheppard Software has some useful interactive geography games; my co-worker was struggling with the states of the US. :-/
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/Geography.htm

Dunc, the equator practically splits Africa, and people from Australia, especially Tasmania and Southern Australia have posted pictures of aurora australis on BAUT. You can see this Google image search of aurora australis. Quite beautiful displays.

Here’s a page of aurora australis seen from the Cape of South Africa. (Since Phil has a page on this site about this, I’m sure he meant “southern Africa or Australia as he somewhat wrote):
http://www.saao.ac.za/public-info/pictures/aurora-australis/

I’m perfectly well aware that southern Australia gets many auroral displays, and I expect that is what he meant. But, curmudgeon that I am, it winds me up to see people refer to entire continents when they mean to refer to only particular areas of those continents. It’s particularly bad with Africa, which many people seems to speak of as if it’s one country, and a not very large one at that.

Given the generally appalling level of geographic literacy in the USA (notice I did not say “the Americas”, or even “North America”), I kinda hoped that good folks like Phil would be more careful.

And don’t even think about saying “England” when you mean to refer to either the United Kingdom or the British Isles…

Dec. 13, 2006 — A significant geomagnetic storm is expected to impact the Earth beginning early Thursday afternoon around 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, according to forecasters at the NOAA Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colo. Impacts from this event can cause problems with High Frequency communications, satellite operations and induce currents in power grids.

…
Combs added, “With the Space Shuttle in orbit and astronauts working on continued construction of the International Space Station, NASA is watching the activity with great interest. NASA officials said they did take precautions to avoid the effects of the radiation storm from the solar flare by having the astronauts aboard the International Space Station and shuttle Discovery sleep in protected areas of their respective spacecraft overnight.”

http://sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html

Dunc
Says:

December 14th, 2006 at 6:40 am
[…] or southern like Africa, Australia, etc. […]

Ummm… Africa straddles the equator, dude. It’s only the extreme southern parts of Africa that you could consider “southern regions”. And much of Australia is in the tropics. Again, not exactly prime aurora territory…

Dunc, the equator practically splits Africa, and people from Australia, especially Tasmania and Southern Australia have posted pictures of aurora australis on BAUT. You can see this Google image search of aurora australis. Quite beautiful displays.

Here’s a page of aurora australis seen from the Cape of South Africa. (Since Phil has a page on this site about this, I’m sure he meant “southern Africa or Australia as he somewhat wrote):
http://www.saao.ac.za/public-info/pictures/aurora-australis/

Happy observing everyone!
Astrogirl

Yes, so get yourself up to 2 m where you might find an Es opening!

Indeed, I should get an antenna up for 2m (rather than working satellites from my car).

I actually want to do some moonbounce, but I will need to suck up to relatives for space for the towers since my urban yard will not permit that sort of antenna array.

I haven’t heard any reports from people trying meteor scatter off the Geminids, although I’m sure some results will be bragged in the next few days.

For people not ham radio aware, the moon makes a wonderful communications satellite… Just point your antennas at it and use it like a giant reflector to talk to people on the whole moon-facing side of the world. You can do that with VHF and UHF radio, allowing you to span distances that would otherwise be pretty much impossible.

Meteor showers present the radio enthusiast to bounce radio signals off the ionized trails of meteors. Like a bad lover, you have to be quick to do that, but it is possible.

[...] or southern like Africa, Australia, etc. [...]

Ummm… Africa straddles the equator, dude. It’s only the extreme southern parts of Africa that you could consider “southern regions”. And much of Australia is in the tropics. Again, not exactly prime aurora territory…

Yes, so get yourself up to 2 m where you might find an Es opening!

Plus, you must also be able to work Aurora from where you are with the extra deep ionisation from the X3 flare.
Nigel, G0TSR

The wind has picked up & changed direction so the smoke haze has cleared here in Melbourne. Some rain on the way but not enough to do much good unfortunately.

http://www.rac.ca can get you started. They have various links and information. Of course, if you’re American, the regulatory stuff will be different. For US-specific information you’d want to google on “ARRL”

Of course, I need clear skies here too. I was hoping it would stay clear for the Geminids tonight, but it’s not happenning.

A couple of days ago I had the chance to look directly at the Sun, courtesy of thick smoke from a nearby bushfire. There were indistinct marks on the Sun, but I think they were actually small clouds, not sunspots.

However, in the past I have actually seen sunspots on the Sun. On that occasion, however, I was looking at the Sun through thick fog, and the sunspots were obvious as little black specks.

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Around my home location, there is a wide band where there are almost no contacts. This is because the RF leaves my antenna at a certain angle and bounces off the ionosphere, but that means there is an area where the RF is too high for people to receive. After it bounces it comes down for people to receive, and you can see it forms a relatively distinctive line.

I am in Ottawa, Ontario.

The file can be found at: http://www.squidzone.ca/ve3oij/files/QSO.kmz

If it wasn’t cloudy tonight, I’d probably be out photographing the aurora.