EuCW Bulletin No 2019/Dec/19 ============================ 1) Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Just to wish you and your families Merry X-Mas and Happy New Year. I really hope to listen to you on the air more often. Keep in touch with all the EuCW activities and 1st of all with the Snakes and Ladders. 2) EUCW complaints As Chairman of the EUCW it is my task to defend the interests of the CW community in case of band-plan abuse at the expense of dedicated CW-only frequencies. Occasionally, I do this by sending out a letter. Usually, I invite the involved parties to respect the recommendations of the band-plan. Lately, we observed two types of abuses. One refers to uncoordinated beacons that occupy CW frequencies in a semi-permanent way (such as SM6AAL or RN6HI) blocking the frequency for QSOs. Please do not send reception reports to beacons that are not coordinated by the IARU. The other one is the use of digital mode FT8 by DXpeditions (such as EX0QP or TO9W) around the CW frequency 3567 kHz. If you are a DXer, please check DXpeditions announcing CW frequencies for digital modes. If you detect them, please let the organizers know that the IARU band plan should be respected by us all. 3) EuCW rules Our EUCW rule is that all our ECMs have a decent command of the English language because English is our working language as it is established in our constitutions. ECMs who feel insecure in this field should try to find an appropriate successor. Nevertheless, none of us is a fault-finder and we are all tolerant with possible errors or imprecision. Moreover, most ECMs will translate all news into the languages of their clubs. Even if not perfect, any contribution is better than no contribution. If ever possible please DO NOT use machine translation. Machine translation is a great tool to overcome language barriers, however, it is absolutely not the task of machine translations to provide output for publication. In our context it should be nothing but a last resort if everything else fails. If you have to use machine translation, please get familiar with the instructions for the particular software you are using. It is of utmost importance that the input format is correct. Some machines produce garbage if you interrupt sentences with line breaks in it, all machines depend on a correct use of commas, full stops, colons, semi-colons, etc. Virtually none of us speaks a foreign language well enough to feed amachine translation. Therefore, please do not feed machine translators with anything other than text written by educated native speakers. Any machine output must be checked by a human. Do not translate into a language you do not speak at all unless you know somebody to do the checking for you. 4) EuCW formats for communications via web: advice As long as we stick to the fact that our working language is English it is safe to provide texts as pure ASCII. If we need a more comfortable set of symbols it is perfect to use Unicode text, since this has become a de facto standard for many years. If you want to underpin your texts with logos or other graphic input it is safe to provide a link to the graphical item. For general distribution do *not* use PDF, very few of us can modify PDF, moreover, the PDF format has become a major vector of malware and it may be unsafe to open PDF. Do not take it for granted that every ECM has access to the text processor of your choice (e.g. Word, libreoffice, TeX, or whatever). Provide simple *.txt output using either ASCII or UTF8 code. Avoid the use of the old standards like ISO-8859-N or Latin. 5) ARI Loano - Marconi Club 04.01.2020 activity on the air I inform you that A.R.I Loano, to promote the MARCONI CLUB A.R.I. LOANO, founded on May the 8th 1988 by Libero Meriggi I1YXN, strongly motivated by the famous DXpeditioners Baldur DJ6SI, intend to organize a day to introduce the new generations to the Club, and bring together all those who truly love in the wonderful art of telegraphy. For having a successfully event, we ask you to spend a few hours on the key. Date: 04/01/2020 Time: from 09:00 UTC - 21:00 UTC. Band : 20m - 40m - 80m - Exchange: "CQ MCD" - RST report and the membership number. Non members: RST report + progressive number (Logs: marconiclub@ariloano.it). IZ2FME MiKi