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/