ARRL Adds Dick Warren Scholarship

(Adapted from ARRL.ORG) The ARRL Foundation has announced that the Dick Warren, K6OBS, Memorial Scholarship will join the growing list of scholarships administered by the ARRL Foundation. The scholarship is funded through the generosity of the family of San Diego longtime broadcast engineer, announcer, and ham radio operator Dick Warren, K6OBS, who passed away earlier this year. Intended exclusively for educational use, this scholarship will provide assistance with the costs of tuition, room, board, books, and other fees essential to the recipient’s higher education. The scholarship award will be $500 annually, with the first scholarship expected to be awarded in 2019.

An applicant must be a US citizen, but without regard to gender, race, national origin, or disability. The applicant must be performing at a high academic level or be an at-risk youth with at least two counselor or teacher recommendations describing why the applicant is deserving. All applicants must hold a valid FCC-issued Amateur Radio license and be attending, either part-time or full-time, a regionally accredited technical school, community college, college, or university in a program leading to an undergraduate degree education, science, math, engineering, technology, or a health care-related field.

Applicants must demonstrate activity and interest in radio service or some technical proficiency by participating in some form of radio-related activities such as emergency communication, equipment construction, community radio service, or scouting. Award preference will go to applicants residing in San Diego or Imperial County.

Christyahna CP for 93.7 Translator on Miguel

On October 2, 2018, the FCC granted a Construction Permit for Christyahna Broadcasting to build a 4 W FM translator station on 93.7 MHz at Mt. San Miguel with its city of license Lemon Grove but a service pattern aimed northeast toward El Cajon.

This summer they were granted an accompanying CP for a 500 watt AM radio station on 1400 kHz with a curiously located daytime transmitter at the old KSDO transmitter site and nighttime transmitter at a house in Lemon Grove.

According to Wikipedia, Christyahna principal Gerry Turro was past Chief Engineer at WNEW New York, then the operator of the famous “Jukebox Radio” network WJUX in northern New Jersey. The FCC eventually broke up the network of low power FM stations in 2003 after it was accused by competitors of improperly extending its coverage with translators outside its primary coverage area using fiber links to the various transmitters. Turro helped build KRLY-LP in Alpine, California, but left the station in 2005 and the station license was transferred.

Replace Your Expiring DASDEC IPAWS Certificate

Digital Alert Systems and Monroe Electronics announced the availability of an important update of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) digital certificates used to authenticate messaging from the IPAWS system. The companies have released updated IPAWS Certificate Authority (CA) credentials for the One-Net™ and DASDEC™ series of Emergency Alert System/Common Alerting Protocol (EAS/CAP) encoder/decoders to replace a certificate in the current certification chain that will expire on Sept. 24. One-Net and DASDEC users in the U.S. are advised to replace the soon-to-expire certificate to assure that devices configured to require message authentication will continue to operate properly. T

“DASDEC and One-Net users are urged to take the simple step of updating their certificate files before Sept. 24 to allow continued authentication of IPAWS CAP alert messaging,” said Ed Czarnecki, senior director of strategy and government affairs for Monroe Electronics and Digital Alert Systems. “This is the second such certificate replacement this year, so we are actively working with FEMA IPAWS to look at methods for automating this update process and hope to have such a process in place before the next certificate update occurs in 2019.”

Continue reading Replace Your Expiring DASDEC IPAWS Certificate

September 19 Meeting: Digital Watermarking

You missed a great presentation if you weren’t with us for this meeting. Niels Thorwirth of Verimatrix gave an overview of content identification, recognition and marking technologies used as a data carrier or forensic tool with a deep dive into one implementation of digital watermarking. Niels described watermarking in a simple but meaningful way. 

Many thanks to iHeartMedia for providing the space.

About Niels

Niels Thorwirth is the VP of Advanced Technology at Verimatrix, Inc. and is responsible for Innovation and Research in areas such as digital watermarking, IoT Security and Machine Learning. Since April 2005 Niels Thorwirth is spearheading content security innovation efforts to meet and exceed requirements of content owners and digital TV operators, resulting in among others the Verimatrix VideoMark® and StreamMark® forensic video watermarking technologies.

Prior experience includes research activity at the Fraunhofer Society and guiding the technology development at MediaSec, Inc. in Providence, RI, and Essen, Germany, from the company’s inception to its acquisition. Mr. Thorwirth has published several international papers and obtained various patents in the field of digital rights management and digital watermarking. He holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science and Business Management from the University of Mannheim, Germany and the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France.

Society of Broadcast Engineers