[NLRS] Spring Ahead!

[John P. Toscano]

Daylight Savings Time (or, for you astronomy buffs, Darness Squandering
Time) is upon us.  Hopefully, you remembered to set your clocks ahead
and so didn't show up to Sunday church services or somewhere else an
hour late today.  So what does this have to do with radio operations?

If you are using VHF-DX as your logging program, you should immediately
go and re-configure it, or all copies if you have more than one of them
on your computer(s), for the proper UTC offset.  Unfortunately, VHF-DX
doesn't understand the Daylight Savings Time vs. Standard Time thing,
it only understands "number of hours offset from UTC".  The good news/
bad news about this is that nearly all VHF and above contests occur
during DST, the main exception being the January VHF Sweepstakes which
is already behind us for this year, and some of the Spring Sprints
(this year, only the 2 Meter Sprint of last week).   (Yes, I had the
offset incorrectly set for DST for the first half-dozen contacts in the
January VHF SS, then realized my error and quickly fixed it and edited
the affected entries!)  So if you have the logging program set up
correctly NOW, it will be good for all major VHF and above contests
until next January.  (Of course, if you use VHF-DX for non-contest
logging all year long, you should promptly re-configure it twice a year
on the Sunday that the DST comes and goes.)

And while we're on the subject of Spring, a few more reminders:

  1) The next Spring Sprint, for 222-225 MHz, occurs on Tuesday 4/9/02.
     A little more information has been added to the NLRS web page.

  2) Aurora 2002 is drawing ever closer.  If you somehow failed to get
     an announcement flyer in the mail, look on the NLRS web page for
     one.  And remember, pre-registration is strongly encouraged, so
     get those forms turned in soon!

  3) I added a "calendar of events" section to the NLRS web pages to
     summarize events of interest to the group.  If you are aware of
     other pertinent events, please let me know.

73 de KB0ZEV