For the club’s February 5th meeting, Andrew Koenig, KE5GDB, will give a presentation about amateur radio direction finding, also known as fox hunting, a skill set useful for finding transmitters, jammers, and sources of interference.

Please consider helping with set-up and take-down for the Irving Hamfest on March 2nd, 2019. We need 4-5 volunteers for setup on Friday night, 4-5 volunteers for Takedown on Saturday afternoon at about 13:15, and 2 volunteers for each of three security shifts, beginning at 6:30 am, 8:30 am, and 10:30 am.

The hamfest will be running with a simplified table layout, so setup and takedown will be quick, probably an hour or less. Also, as in previous years every volunteer will receive free admission to the event, which includes a raffle ticket.

There are a few contests in progress this weekend: The 10-10 International Winter QSO Party (SSB), and state QSO parties for Vermont, Minnesota, and British Columbia.

In news from the world of ham radio:

The ARRL reports that the FCC is working on the backlog of amateur radio applications received during the partial government shutdown.

In news from the world of science:

Birds are often bright-colored, and they’re even more bright-colored to other birds! A new camera combined with new image processing software shows us that everything looks more exciting when you’re a bird; even the upper and lower sides of boring, green leaves look dramatically different.

Lettuce has been used to test a new method for removing oil spills from topsoil, without destroying the topsoil. If you get the soil really hot, but not too hot and not for too long, you can save it.

The story of ancient humans in Asia is becoming more interesting; new optical dating studies, based on when rocks were last exposed to light, have been conducted on finds from a cave containing Denisovan, Neandertal, and modern human remains and they show that the three varieties of human coexisted for tens of thousands of years.