On my way home from the hamfest yesterday, I stopped at the Harmony Park Safari, a cageless animal preserve near Huntsville. It isn’t a zoo in the conventional sense, but more of a big natural enclosure with a gravel path for your car. They don’t have the same variety of animals as a typical zoo, but that is made up for by the fact that they can move around freely and will often walk right up to your window. Some of them are quite bold, in fact — at one point I had my passenger side window open to get a picture of a camel wandering to the right of my car, and before I knew it he had his entire neck inside and was reaching for a drink that was in the center console! The ostriches were also rather persistent, using their long necks to stare at me at eye level from a foot away, or to stick their heads inside for a better look.
This was an excellent setting for photography, although I didn’t get nearly as many usable pictures as I wanted, and next time I will try to go closer to sunset, and do more continuous shooting rather than waiting for the animals to strike the perfect pose.
Harmony Park Safari doesn’t seem to have a website, but here is a link with some information and a map.
I just got back from the Huntsville Hamfest — it actually is continuing tomorrow, but I only wanted to stay in a motel for one night. Huntsville is always the biggest hamfest in Alabama, but this year it was especially large because it was also this year’s ARRL national convention, and earlier in the week Huntsville was also host to the Global Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Conference. I guess that makes Alabama the center of ham radio for a few days! The crowds proved to be a bit much for the space, I think, especially around the bigger commercial dealers. (It’s a gear driven hobby after all, and for a lot of us hamfests are our best chance to do some in-person shopping.)
One of the popular topics this year — and one I am very interested in — is D-STAR digital communications for ham radio. D-STAR is fully digital; in less bandwidth than a conventional FM voice or packet channel, it fits a digitized voice stream with error correction and a low speed data stream which can be used for messages or automatic GPS position reporting. D-STAR repeaters can route calls across the Internet, with the ability to find users by their callsign no matter where they actually are. And in the 1.2 GHz band (where there is room for this kind of thing), it supports IP networking at 128kbps — and it doesn’t even require any special software, as the radio for that mode has an ethernet jack for direct connection to a computer.
As it happens, Alabama is currently the biggest hotbed of D-STAR activity in the country. One reason for that is its potential for emergency communications. After a disaster, hams could bring in a portable D-STAR repeater and satellite Internet almost immediately, allowing aid workers to have access to their own e-mail and intranet web applications. And with callsign routing of voice calls, it would be easy for field workers and coordinators at home base to contact one another, all using bands and modes available to nearly every ham, not just those with HF capability.
At the D-STAR introduction panel, the room was packed, which is something I have hardly ever seen at a hamfest panel, especially at a fest with multiple tracks of programming. Every time I went past one of the radio dealer booths, someone was buying a D-STAR radio or accessories for one. (Icom has got to be loving Alabama right now, since they are the only company making D-STAR stuff at the moment.) And for me, it’s the most exciting development in ham radio to come along in quite a while.
All in all, a really good hamfest, even though I’m missing half of it including some of the advanced D-STAR discussions. I will of course go back next year, even though I’m sure it won’t be quite as big.
Recent Comments