The club events calendar has been updated with a number of relevant contests to the end of 2016.  These are those relevant to Australian contesters (eg Spring VHF/UHF Field Day, VK QRP 40m Sprint) or those that are relatively easy with modest stations.

03-04 SEP  All Asian DX Phone Contest .  80m, 40m, 20m, 15m, 10m. Contact Asian stations only.  An easy introduction to DX contesting for the VK (even with only modest station equipment)  and a good preparation for larger DX contests such as CQWW. http://www.jarl.org/English/4_Library/A-4-3_Contests/2016AA_rule.htm

24-25 SEP CQ WW RTTY Contest.  3.5, 7, 14, 21 and 28 MHz.  The first of three of the world’s premier international HF contests, the CQ WW series.   A great contest for the digital mode fans and the mic shy! http://www.cqwwrtty.com/rules.htm

01-02 OCT Oceania DX Phone Contest.  1.8, 3.5, 7, 14, 21 and 28 MHz.  The ideal international contest for Australian stations, even with modest stations.  All DX stations are looking for Oceania contacts (that’s us!).  Take the opportunity to build up your DXCC count of new countries for the DXCC Award, or the Worked All Continents Award. http://www.oceaniadxcontest.com/index.htm

08-09 OCT Oceania DX CW Contest. 1.8, 3.5, 7, 14, 21 and 28 MHz.  The companion to the phone contest the previous weekend. http://www.oceaniadxcontest.com/index.htm

23 OCT VK QRP 40m contest/sprint.  0500 UTC (1600 local) – 0659 UTC.  A short QRP contest of 1 hour CW/PSK followed by 1 hour SSB.  Ideal for the QRP, SOTA and WWFF operators. http://vkqrpclub.org/qrp_new/qrp1_contest_page.php

29-30 OCT CQ WW SSB Contest. 1.8, 3.5, 7, 14, 21 and 28 MHz. The world’s largest international DX contest, with some 35,000 participants.  Watch the ‘dead bands’ come alive! An opportunity to work some new DXCC countries and work towards some operating awards such as DXCC, Worked All Continents, grid squares etc. http://www.cqww.com/

26-27 OCT CQ WW CW Contest.  1.8, 3.5, 7, 14, 21 and 28 MHz. 1.8, 3.5, 7, 14, 21 and 28 MHz. The companion to the CQ WW SSB contest. http://www.cqww.com/

26-27 OCT Spring VH/UHF Field Day.  50MHz and up.  As the seasons change, so too does VHF and UHF propagation.   Find a hill top and operate portable, or operate from home. http://www.wia.org.au/members/contests/vhfuhf/

I’m happy with the performance of the web site on the new AWS Instance.   The initial instance was the ‘t1.micro’ which is the old option from Amazon using para-virtualisation (PVM), unfortunately performance on this instance was terrible as access was capped at 10% of the CPU and the cycles ‘stolen’ exceeded 90%.

Instead of sticking with the poor performing PVM I’ve opted to moved to a HVM instance which allows for bursts in processing capability above the subscription level, providing you have sufficient cpu credits available that is..   A CPU Credit is simply an accounting of when your not using the full amount of CPU your subscribed to, so you can use it to burst later.

I’ve also enabled caching via Amazon CloudFront, which will cost a little extra but delivers all the large content (images, style sheets, etc) via the AWS Cache and Proxy servers reducing load time for the user and reducing performance overheads on the virtual server.

The change in performance with both of these changes is significant with page rendering times down under 5 seconds for all content.   I’m hopeful that this will continue to be the case.

The site has been fully migrated to the new instance, and the mailing list migration will likely occur next week.

If you experience any issues, please let me know.

Jason (vk2vjb).

Hi all,

The vk2bv.org web site has been migrated to a new AWS instance to provide better performance as the original instance type simply wasn’t adequately resourced.   The new instance is already proving more capable and performant.

If there are any issues please email me at jason AT ball.net and I’ll get onto it ASAP.

Regards

Jason