Organization

Approximately sixty-five ARRL members from across the division attended the New England Division Town Hall Zoom meeting on September 5 to hear and ask questions about the recent legislative actions that could adversely impact our amateur 902 MHz band, and ARRL’s response. Other topics discussed included:

• the recent cyberattack on ARRL Headquarters
• assistance for amateurs in restricted areas
• our path forward
• help with RFI
• public service and EmComm
• hamfests and events

The September 2024 Western MA Section Newsletter is now available at https://wma.arrl.org/blog/2024/09/07/section-managers-report-september-2024/.

I would like to invite you to a Town Hall Meeting for ARRL New England Division Members on Thursday, September 5th at 7 pm where we will discuss the actions taken by the board, what we might expect next, hear your thoughts, and answer your questions.

We plan to spend a good deal of our time together answering your questions. If you’d like to send us a question in advance, you can do so via an email to ab1oc@arrl.org, or you can just plan to ask your questions during the Town Hall Meeting.

We will hold our Town Hall Meeting via a Zoom Webinar. You can get a personal link to join the Town Hall Meeting via the following link (please paste the link into your browser and register in advance) –

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Nmj7dgSbRyGoi7xf3Z0l8A

After registering, you will receive a follow-up confirmation email within a day containing information about how to join the webinar.

We hope to see you on September 5th.

Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC

ARRL Director

New England Division

ab1oc@arrl.org

From ARRL News:

08/19/2024

ARRL® The National Association for Amateur Radio® has announced that the candidates for the 2024 ARRL Division elections are now official. ARRL members will choose between two candidates for Director in the Hudson, New England, and Northwestern Divisions. The sole candidates in the Central and Roanoke Divisions for both Director and Vice Director are unopposed. The Vice Director incumbents in the Hudson, New England, and Northwestern Divisions are also unopposed.

Declared Elected without Opposition

In the Central Division, candidate and current Vice Director Brent Walls, N9BA, will be the next Director having served as Vice Director since 2021, and candidate Josh Long, W9HT, will be the next Vice Director, both candidates running unopposed.

In the Hudson Division, Vice Director David Galletly, KM2O, who has held the seat since 2024.

In the New England Division, Vice Director Phil Temples, K9HI, who has served in the role since 2020.

In the Northwestern Division, Vice Director Michael Sterba, KG7HQ, who has served in the role since 2024.

In the Roanoke Division, Director Jim Boehner, N2ZZ, who was elected back to the board in 2022, and Vice Director Bill Morine, N2COP, who has held the seat since 2016.

Contested Seats

In the Hudson Division, Director Ed Wilson, N2XDD, will face challenger John Crovelli, W2GD for the seat.

In the New England Division, Director Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC, will face challenger Tom Frenaye, K1KI, who has previously held the positions of Director and Vice President.

In the Northwestern Division, Director Mark Tharp, KB7HDX, will run against Dan Marler, K7REX, who is currently a Section Manager.

Balloting for contested seats will take place this fall. Votes will be counted, and successful candidates announced, in November. Candidates declared elected will assume their roles for terms beginning January 1, 2025.

ARRL is governed by its Board of Directors. Elections are held for five of the 15 ARRL Divisions each year, for terms of 3 years.

A number of individuals have expressed concerned over the recent IT issues that have prevented them from obtaining renewed ARRL VEC credentials.  ARRL VEC Manager Maria Somma, AB1FM, addresses those concerns:

Thank you for emailing the ARRL VEC.

ARRL previously reported that we are responding to a serious incident that occurred on May 12, 2024, involving access to our network and headquarters-based systems. Several services have been affected, including those administered by the ARRL Volunteer Examiner Coordinator (ARRL VEC).

A comprehensive update on the status of ARRL VEC services is available here.

Please continue to check our website for the most up-to-date information.

We’ve recently had our email access restored and are working our way through more than a thousand emails. 

We thank you in advance for your patience, as we work our way through this unprecedented event.

We will renew your VE status and ship renewal stickers as soon as we have access to our program systems.

Meanwhile, please know that your ARRL VE accreditation is valid, and you are qualified to participate in ARRL VEC exam sessions.

We appreciate your willingness to serve the community.

Sincerely,

Maria Somma, AB1FM
ARRL VEC Manager
ARRL  The National Association for Amateur Radio®
225 Main Street, Newington, CT 06111-1494 USA
Phone: 1-888-277-5289 
FAX: 1-860-594-0339
Email:  msomma@arrl.org 
ARRL Web:  www.arrl.org

The July 2024 Section Newsletter is now available at https://ema.arrl.org/july-2024-section-news.

From ARRL News:

Updated 07/09/2024

As previously reported, ARRL® Logbook of The World® (LoTW®) returned to service on Monday, July 1, 2024. As anticipated, there was a significant rise in use to catch up on processing logs following the outage. It took 4 days for normal processing times to return.

The ARRL Radiosport Department has resumed processing applications for most awards. The systems for Worked All States (WAS), VUCC, and issuing credits for CQ WAZ and CQ WPX awards have returned to service. These award applications are being processed on a “first in/first out” basis.

WAS applications submitted through July 4 and VUCC applications submitted through July 1 have been processed. CQ awards applications are processed by CQ and not ARRL.

While we can process these ARRL awards and update records, the ability to print and deliver certificates, endorsements, and other material has not yet returned.

The online DXCC® application is unavailable at this time and DXCC awards are not able to be processed. Work continues to return the DXCC systems to service. All DXCC data is secure.

This story will be updated with new developments.

Updated 7/1/24:

Effective 12:00pm ET / 16:00 UTC we will be returning Logbook of The World® (LoTW®) to service. 

As work progressed on the network, some users encountered LoTW opening briefly during which some 6600 logs were uploaded. The logs were not processed until this weekend as we tested that the interfaces to LoTW were functioning properly.

We are taking steps to help manage what will likely be a huge influx of logs. We are requesting that if you have large uploads, perhaps from contests or from a DXpedition, please wait a week or two before uploading to give LoTW a chance to catch up. We have also implemented a process to reject logs with excessive duplicates. Please do not upload your entire log to “ensure” your contacts are in LoTW as they will be rejected. Lastly, please do not call ARRL Headquarters to report issues you are having with LoTW. You can contact support at LoTW-help@arrl.org.

Through the end of the year, you may experience planned times when LoTW will be unavailable. We have been using this time to evaluate operational and infrastructure improvements we would like to make to LoTW. Those times will be announced.

We appreciate your patience as we worked through the challenges keeping LoTW from returning to service. We know the importance of LoTW to our members, and to the tens of thousands of LoTW users who are not ARRL members. LoTW, just behind QST, is our second most popular ARRL benefit.  

This story will be updated with new developments.

Despite several ARRL statements that Logbook of The World (LoTW) and DXCC data are safe, it seems that some users are still concerned that this may not be the case due to the time that it’s taking to restore service.

Follows is a recent post from Jon Bloom, ex-KE3Z, one of the original LoTW authors:

—

Perhaps it will ease some minds if I tell you that I know for certain that these data are safe. I know this because I personally assisted ARRL staff to get these data backed up to locations and systems that are in no way connected to ARRL HQ or cloud systems. The LoTW data, for example, exists in multiple physical locations and cloud backup services. Such is also the case for the LoTW source code. In addition, I imported the LoTW data backup into a separate, new test database system to verify it. This took several days since the database is about 3 Terabytes in size. (It’s a LOT of data!)

Getting the systems themselves back on-line is another matter, and I have no information to share about that as I’m not involved in the ongoing process of restoring them. ARRL has apparently made the decision, wisely in my view, not to bring any affected systems back into service until all parts of them can be vetted and secured. But the data itself is safe, and LoTW will definitely be back at some point.

— Jon

[We are working with Jon to get LoTW back online. As you can see from his explanation, there is not a definite timeframe. We want to be sure that the LoTW platform is secure before we bring the system back up. I hope that this helps. —Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC]