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FROZEN NEWS FROM RADIO ARCALA, CR2X, OH8X AND OH0XIt is today, February 1st, when the Northern Village of Arcala is gripped by an arctic frost weighing down on the massive antenna structures. The thermometer has hit a 2012 low - an icy reading of minus 27 C (minus 16.6 F) which makes the towers turn rather slowly. Slow are the movements of those frozen people as well. Radio Arcala has decided to send the Frozen Four (FF) of OH2BH, OH2MM, OH2PM and OH8NC to more southerly latitudes as their balancing act. FF will soon embark on a three week long operating stint taking them to the Azores to activate CR2A and CR2X along with CU2KG and CU2KH in a variety of configurations in the ARRL CW & SSB Contests, in addition to the CQWW 160M SSB Contest. Up in the Frozen North, their mothership OH8X will be piloted by OH6KZP in the ARRL CW Contest and by OH6UM in the ARRL SSB Contest. Moreover, the team of OH6CT, OH8WW, OH8KTN and OH8GDU will be at the controls in the WPX RTTY Contest on February 11-12. Please note that Kim, OH6KZP, 33, is the latest addition to the team at Radio Arcala. Additionally, their associate station OH0X from Aland Islands will be activated by Pekka, OH2TA in the ARRL CW Contest. As Radio Arcala is now celebrating their 5th anniversary, the WPX SSB Contest of March 24-25 is scheduled to be featured as an all-out team effort when OH8X members, local and overseas, will be gathering at the Northern Village of Arcala to set their strategy for the next few years, using a special callsign to be released at a later date. OH8/CU2CE and OH8/CU2DX will also be activated. Please note that Radio Arcala is in the process of including a remote station section along with discussing the future of Amateur Radio through their Mission X, both tentatively presented at their website. www.radioarcala.com/ NEWS FROM THE DX SUMMIT DESK OF RADIO ARCALAA small group of people noticed the soft launch of the first in a series of two-way communications with the renowned DX Summit of OH8X, allowing masses of people to specify their desired information out of the DX data flow after registration. As it was expected that the system might face some kind of a bottleneck, given a sudden surge of traffic, a total of 500 users were taken onboard in the first wave. This number of users came in just a moment after the service was opened. Now the service has opened for an unlimited number of users - welcome on board! Now that we have the needed platform and capacity, we will be seeking new application ideas. Please note that there is a new discussion forum at the above address thrashing out and seeking your breakthrough ideas - this forum is monitored by the software folks of Radio Arcala. SOFT LAUNCH OF MY SUMMIT BY THE FOLKS OF RADIO ARCALA
MY SUMMIT function was pre-tested by dedicated DXers world over as invited "friendly users". Pictured is one of our testers, Juan Munoz, TG9AJR representing the Republic of Guatemala, one of the 187 countries connected to DX Summit. FIRST 200 WELCOMED – JOIN THOSE 121.446 HAPPY DXers!The renowned DX Summit by OH8X has been a reliable source of current and historical DX activity on radio for many years. The original innovation is often described as the one that changed the DX hunt once and forever. DX hunting by spinning the dial is gone for the most part; spots are coming from the world to you almost on a real-time basis.
The fact that 121,446 unique users from 187 countries were connected
to DX Summit last month, with growing numbers, suggests that the DX summit is the World’s largest DX related Internet portal. The question is can we entertain people with additional information or do we make the current information better served? Yes, we can!
As the latest in a series of innovations, we now take another step and launch a feature that would open up a new application to those who register themselves to what is called MY SUMMIT. With that step, we would like to establish a new two-way personalized channel from you to DX Summit. That feature may not sound like a major breakthrough at a first glance – but hold on – this will allow us to take a first step toward a social community in DX that can potentially interact with many exiting applications. So to you “first two hundred,” welcome on board. FIRST APPLICATION NOW ON HAND - DX FILTERINGWhen entering MY SUMMIT, you can specify what DX information you would like to receive, and you can feature the DXCC counters or callsigns. You can specify the bands and modes you need. You can choose to be alerted when such DX appears. It can be also a friend of yours in DX – not only a new country or band. You can be selective and let the MY SUMMIT look toward the future from past and current. Future related information may be the only one that you would like to have. Alternatively you can specify those spots that you do not want to have. The DX Summit will also allow only you to release the spots that bear your callsign. FUTURE SPOTS CHOSEN BY YOU WILL BE SENT TO YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS.
WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP?These alerts should be converted to the device you would like to use. If you are mobile, it may be your cell-phone, but it can be anything. Here we will soon provide software to send your PC spots to your cell-phone, but you can also invent your own.
Soon we envision the DX contact to be made by your highly automated –maybe remote controlled station - back-to-back with DX Summit. We are here to witness major changes and make them fit into our hobby with long history and many innovations. Come along and make your own application to make our hobby and life more interesting. If you wish to share such applications with others, you may join the DX Summit user group for such information sharing. http://dxsummit.freeforums.org/ We wish to do more through this portal, but the soft launch is a first step to make sure that masses of users and messages can be handled in a timely and efficient manner. TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMWe have now secured the original DX Summit and created a scalable platform that will handle a huge number of users and large quantities of information, screening it at the speed of light. Today we salute the launch of MY SUMMIT together with our IT partners – Admino Technologies – great people to work with. We had a learning tour with our service providers and apologize for the outages during 2009. Now we have reliable 24/7 service, using Nokia Corporation’s fast computer servers between Europe and the United States, where the majority of our users are located. Our servers are now much better attended. RECOGNIZING THE VALUABLE SUPPORTYASME FOUNDATION, Inc.We are grateful to The Yasme Foundation for their long-term support, helping to secure and operate the Radio Arcala DX Summit and to provide DX community a valuable tool for their DX hunt. Yasme's commitment has helped our development team to overcome the critical points where re-design had to take place. http://www.yasme.org/ NOKIA CORPORATION, Inc.We also thank Nokia for their continuing support for Amateur Radio related applications when making people communicate from one to another and for paying a tribute to those industrial pioneers that as part of amateur radio community have helped the Finnish telecom industry flourish domestically and globally. http://www.nokia.com/ ABOUT RADIO ARCALAIs a non-profit group of like-minded individuals – Telecom, IT and business professionals -- who in their leisure time draft new communication concepts by using latest state-of-art techniques to further support their passion and help the three-million strong amateur radio global community to promote an innovative spirit of experimentation as part of their own pleasure. www.radioarcala.com DX Summit is now using TwitterYOUNG BRIT CAME OUT AS WINNER OF RADIO ARCALA ESSAY CONTESTIt was in February 2009 when the team at Radio Arcala, OH8X launched an essay contest to get some fresh ideas from today's youth and their elders to boost recruitment to the ranks of Amateur Radio. Great participation was ensured, and determining the winners took some effort from a multinational jury representing six nations. A 19-year old Briton, Mark Dumpleton, 2E0NCG came out as winner by a fair margin while two U.S. hams, John Scott Anderson, KC9OQO and Brian Wood, W0DZ , finished in second and third place respectively. Argentinian Diego Salom, LU8DX was recognized for his submission of the best Spanish language piece. You can read Mark's piece and his interview at www.radioarcala.com under the Young People Terms button and get your personal inspiration to do your share for Amateur Radio. NEW DX SUMMIT TAKES OVER THE MOTHER OF ALL DX SUMMITSThe Group at OH8X is honoured to continue the services initiated by members of the OH2AQ Radio Club more than ten years ago. In the words of the President of Yasme Foundation, we capture the essence of this original innovation. Yasme Foundation and the whole world of Amateur Radio congratulate Jukka Salomaa, OH2BUA and Antti Kantola, OH5TB for conceiving, operating and maintaining the DX Summit, the first widely-used Web-based spotting network portal. They created a tool that fundamentally changed the nature of HF operating, a true advancement of the radio art. The New DX Summit is operated by Radio Arcala, OH8X, located in the Far North at the Arctic Circle, within the Aurora Belt, with a mission to encourage today's youth to make possible the impossible in the course of their own innovations through radio communication experience and related exciting theories. Arcala Extremes is headquartered in Finland while operating in a European context. The message is global, and the experience is for us to share. Read about the Arcala mission and let your imagination fly to do your share among the young people and secure the continuation of this great passion that has enriched our lives and made the communication among people more effective and enjoyable. The New DX Summit and its future applications are targeted to be part of this vision. DX SUMMIT ALERTThe Old OH2AQ DX Summit Goes Offline November 19, 2008 at 1000 UTC The new DX Summit website at http://www.dxsummit.fi debuted on May 23, 2008. The site has been redeveloped from the ground up and uses the latest technology available. The new DX Summit has been ramping up steadily and today the number of hits is approaching 1 million a day. In addition to providing the same functionality as the old DX Summit, the new platform offers the necessary flexibility to easily add new features which are currently on the drawing board. The old DX Summit homepage at http://oh2aq.kolumbus.com redirects users to the new DX Summit website. However, all the old DX Summit data pages are still online but the trend for daily hits has decreased, as we expected. The number still remains high but the time has come to shut down the old DX Summit machine which may cause your software to stop working. To try and maintain compatibility with older software which may no longer be supported, the new DX Summit includes a series of DX spot webpages which are 100% HTML compatible with the same pages on the old DX Summit. Simply changing the URLs in your software according to the information below should keep it working with the new DX Summit. If your software does not allow you to edit the URLs, please contact the author of your software and ask them to change the URLs according to the information below. URLs to change Software authors who wish to implement data exchange with the new DX Summit should visit http://www.dxsummit.fi/technical.aspx for information on data formats and URLs. If your software does not work with the new DX Summit, we encourage you to forward this information to the author of the software you are using. We hope all software relying on the DX Summit can be successfully updated to work with the new DX Summit. We look forward to providing you with this valuable DX resource for many years to come!
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