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Copyright © 1996 by the Virtual Publishing Company.
Ham Radio Online Is 1 Year Old!
Ham Radio Online is now 1 years old. It does not seem like an entire year has gone by but our first edition of Ham Radio Online was published on October 30th, 1995. Thanks to you, we are one of the world's most popular online sites for Amateur Radio news, stories and information about telecommunications.
How Ham Radio Online Got Started
Ham Radio Online was started by accident as an excuse to learn HTML (the web "layout" language) and learn how to run a web site. Looking around the net back in the summer of 1995, we saw many web pages that consisted only of links to other people's web pages, which in turn pointed to someone else's web pages. We had a novel idea: why not create a web site with actual content instead of just links? To create content we decided to pick a topic that we knew about - hence, ham radio. The result was the Ham Radio Online web site that evolved, through frequent additions of new material, into this "online magazine" format.
Our goal is to present a classy web site about ham radio for existing and prospective
ham radio operators.
We originally ran Ham Radio Online out of our personal file space at our Internet Service Provider. Unfortunately that resulted in a mouthful of an Internet address: http://www.accessone.com/~vbook/hronline.htm. This lengthy URL was largely impossible to convey to anyone who asked for the URL of our web site. Through a sequence of painful steps we eventually found ourselves at www.hamradio-online.com.
Internet Publishing Adventures!
In mid-1996 we were offered a great price on web hosting at Ganet.net. Unfortunately it proved too good to be true. First they screwed up our application for the hamradio-online.com name and then days after we moved our entire web site to their host, they told everyone they were leaving the web hosting business and gave us 30 days to find a new home! Ouch!
After two weeks of scrambling to find a new host that we could afford, Mike Cheponis, K3MC of California Wireless generously offered to let us use his web server at his business. And this is where we have been ever since.
Web Site Access Problems
One thing you quickly learn when running a web site is that much of the Internet still
has its ups and downs. Occassionally, we know that you (and us) have had difficulty
accessing www.hamradio-online.com. The web server is located about 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) south of us - if you are having access difficulties, then so are we.
These outages have been caused by such things as:
- A massive power outage hit the west coast of the U.S. (about 15 U.S. states, 2 Canadian provinces and parts of Mexico) and knocked out electrical power to California's Silicon Valley where the web server is located.
- A packet router located upstream and outside of California Wireless failed and had to be replaced.
- A "network storm" occurred when a network interface card went berserk and flooded a network segment with bogus packets. This happened at least twice that we've seen.
- Lastly, the Internet itself is showing signs of congestion. Just over 50% of all
web surfers in the United States reside in California which also means that California
can become a bottleneck for web traffic. We've added links to our web page where you can
view Internet traffic statistics all over the world and observe some of those traffic jams
first hand.
Mike has done a fantastic job of keeping everything running at the server and even brought
in a backup T-1 line. But do remember that we run this as a hobby web site - its free to you. Keeping it as a hobby web site limits our ability to plan for every contingency with power backups, multiple access lines and so forth. In spite of that, we do maintain our original web site location as a backup in the case of extended outages. You can check our
backup location for information on significant outages. The backup is located at
http://www.accessone.com/~vbook/hronline.htm
Like the days of the (U.S.) Old West, the Internet is the new frontier, a bit unpredictable, of questionable reliability and at times a bit wild and crazy! We hope you can put up with these limitations and continue to enjoy one of the world's most popular Amateur Radio web sites!
Coming in November
We have a number of stories coming up in November. Since Ed, KF7VY is also the volunteer director of communications for the Seattle Marathon (at the end of November), we may update pages a little less frequently during this month. Life will return to normal in December. Please continue to enjoy our web site. Please send Amateur radio news and stories that you would like to see shared with a worldwide audience of licensed amateur radio operators and those who would like to become licensed - to vbook@vbook.com
(By the way, if you live in the Seattle, Washington area we need about 75 volunteers to help out at the Marathon. Drop us a line if you can help. Thanks.)
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