Planning
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Morse Code (CW) is an operating mode (often referred to a "continuous wave" or CW) for the amateur radio service (also known as A1A radio emissions using the ITU type classification). A continuous wave (CW) of constant amplitude and frequency is turned on an off. Duration of the wave is used to denote a dash (-) or a dot (.). Combinations of dashes, dots and periods of no wave can be assembled to represent a character. Combinations of characters make up words. And words make up messages.
This is called telegraphy. The image above is of such a system known as an optical telegraph. It was used in Napoleonic times for visual communications. The modern day successors to this system include railway signaling systems, traffic lights etc.
In wireless communications systems this is called radiotelegraphy. Pioneered by many famous engineers and inventors, it was really Guglielmo Marconi who brought about the use of radiotelegraphy as a commercially viable activity. More importantly his work, and that of others, transformed the 20th Century. Perhaps an even more significant evolution of radiotelegraphy was the quest for the harmonic telegraph - an attempt to use different tones and thus send multiple CW messages using the same wire. This eventually led to the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell as well as Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) - something in common use today with wireless networks and cellular telephones. A simple 19th century technology at the root of modern day technologies...
For the amateur radio service, the image of the amateur radio operator (HAM) tapping away at a straight key is a stereotype. And while Morse Code seems archaic, there is a reason why it remains in use.
Technologically one does not need much equipment to send out CW or to receive it. The equipment is not sophisticated and can easily be built and maintained. Power requirements are fairly low and bandwidth is narrow. Because CW is modulated onto one tone, that tone can easily be picked out of the noise floor by the human ear. While there are computer programs that can decipher CW, having a sophisticated computer defeats the elegance of the simplicity of CW (it is "cheating").
In the North, all of this makes CW a very relevant mode. It is conducive to low power operations (QRP) and one can simply toss a CW transceiver, key and battery into one's backpack and set up an operational CW stations in the middle of nowhere. With solar panels to recharge batteries, one has an amateur radio station deployed and capable of being operated indefinitely.
YARS is very interested in promoting CW. For those of its members who have the Basic Qualification without an Honours Pass, getting a CW 5 WPM Qualification opens up the HF bands to them. For Field Day, each CW contact is worth 2 points, while each voice contact is only 1 point. There is a reason behind this difference in score value - and it has to do with emergency preparedness as well as well as skill.
More importantly, as revealed in contests, CW operators tend to invest in antennas and carefully listen for CW contacts. We have found that if we can hear them, they can hear us. This is not the case in SSB communications where many amateurs prefer blasting high power but their antenna set-up is poor as is their equipment and they are unable to hear the weaker stations. Many a time we have replied to an SSB station only to receive silence from them. This has never been the case with CW.
During contests we often operate in CW. We usually get extra points. It is possible to send and decode CW signals using a program such as fldigi, but it is more challenging to do that manually and by ear.
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A Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Website
2026-05-08 - We have updated the website to v. 5.4.5. Some of the bugs have been resolved and this is reflected by their correction on the website. Masthead has been fixed and so has the RRS feed for the weather in Yellowknife. A number of images were broken - these came from Wikipedia. They appear to change from time to time. Civil Defence page is being updated.
2022-09-07 - Strangely this article is the most read article on the website. We think there is great interest in DIY websites.
Around 2012 the Yellowknife Amateur Radio Society (YARS) decided to take control of its domain name and to build its own website, rather than contracting that out. This was a cost-saving measure but also a way in which to abandon the use of the increasingly defunct FrontPage software used to maintain HTML pages on the site. One can see the original site by looking up YKARS.COM in the Wayback Machine.
In 2012 we decided to make use of Joomla 1.3, an open source content management (CMS) program. The use of a CMS is how most modern websites operate and others in use include WordPress and Drupal. In 2012 Joomla was one of the most popular. In 2020 WordPress (which is actually a blog system rather than a proper CMS) was used by about 40.4% of websites on the Internet, followed by Shopify and then Joomla. On 17 August 2021, Joomla released Joomla 4.0. We decided to abandon Joomla 1.3 and work with Joomla 4.0.
On 23 August 2021 we deactivated the old site and embarked on creating a new site under Joomla 4.0 and its upgrades. All links on the website are gradually being verified and articles put through an editorial review. We will also be installing and using a mass mailing system that conforms to Canada's anti-SPAM legislation. Persons may subscribe. Also we will be setting up a blog type newsletter to replace our old newsletter, The Ensign. That newsletter was discontinued and taken off-line around 2015 for various reasons, despite its popularity.
Category Organization Follows Incident Command System (ICS)
This website is structured using the Incident Command System (ICS). That system is a standardized approach to the command, control and coordination of emergency response, providing a common hierarchy that can be used amongst multiple emergency response agencies. It is scalable up or down and so can be used in a relatively small organization such as YARS or a huge organization such as the armed forces. Those in the armed forces might see a similarity to the General Staff System (GSS), based on the 19th century French army system.
The ICS and its adoption by YARS is a key component to our orientation to emergency preparedness and our function in emergency management or civil defence.
The ICS is also an important management tool mentioned in the Northwest Territories Emergency Plan (2018):
6.2 Incident Command System
The Incident Command System (ICS) is an incident management tool designed as a standardized and
coordinated approach to managing emergencies that provides functional interoperability at all levels of
emergency management. ICS breaks up tasks into functional areas of Command, Operations, Planning,
logistics and Finance/Administration. The NWT EMO has adopted ICS as its response model for the
purposes of the NWT Emergency Plan.
Articles
We have systematically reviewed all articles, adding new articles and corrected most broken links. If you think that an article should appear or have comments, let Ian Rennie know. Registered users have the ability to login to our system and submit articles. They will be put through an editorial process before they are published.
Captcha
We started to receive some robot emails that were testing the contact page in preparation for the sending of spam emails for the soliciting of Viagra and mail order wives etc. This is very common. To counter this we installed a Captcha ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") system so that robots that attempt to do this sort of thing are defeated. Usually a user has to enter in characters that appear in some sort of image or count the instances of an item in a picture - in this case we were able to install such a system that is invisible to the user. We are touching upon the realm of hackers and artificial intelligence with CAPTCHA. Unfortunately this a reality of the Internet.
Updates
2022-09-07 - Today we updated the CMS to Joomla 4.2.2. We will probably implement 2-factor authentication in the near future to make the site more secure.
Joomla 4.0 has gone through 4 updates since its release. Joomla is a content management system (CMS) - the modern approach to running a website. Essentially a CMS is a database and the maintainer, through a backend, carries out data entry - so an article is a form of data. When a visitor visits the website and a link, they launch a query that reports on the data and dynamically formats it into whatever pre-defined format has been set up. Maintainers do not need to worry about any formatting and are effectively just data entry operators. Joomla 4.0 has gone through many updates since its release in August 2021 and we are now running Joomla 4.1.3 as of 11 May 2022.
As of April 2023 we are running Joomla 4.3 but we have also realized that with the upgrading our photo gallery has failed to function properly, so we have de-activated it. The website images generally link directly to our image files - unless they are in the public domain, in which case we just link them (saves space).
As of 2023-05-02 we are now operating Joomla 4.3.1. We also updated the footer copyright year.
As of 2023-05-09 we have solved the photogallery issue and have full capabilities. We have ditched the old web gallery system and installed the RC Gallery plugin. An Example of this is the restoration of the QSL gallery at http://www.ykars.com/index.php/amateur-radio/activities/qsl-card-gallery . We did the same thing with the abandonment of Luxcal and installed JEvents extension for the events calendar: http://www.ykars.com/index.php/events . In addition we have figured out how to make banners work properly as shown by the banner for this week for Emergency Preparedness week.
As of 2023-05-30 we are running Joomla 4.3.2.
As of 2023-07-12 we are running Joomla 4.3.3.
As of 2023-11-29 we are running Joomla 4.4.1.
As of 2024-12-18 we updated our PHP file from 5.6 to 8.2. Joomla was giving us a security warning. This has now been fixed. While we are running Joomla 4.4.6 at this time, we are looking into upgrading to Joomla 5.x.
Users and Mass Mailings
9 May 2022. We have set up the user features and users may login to access restricted articles and submit their own articles for addition to the website. These articles will go through an editorial review - to ensure there are no copyright violations or to check spelling and grammar etc. We have the capacity to accept articles in French as well as in English. The users are also subject to mass email-ings - and we make sure they are bcc'd and that there is a footer explaining how they got on our email list and how they can get off it - in compliance with Canada's anti-SPAM legislation.
Accessibility Checking
Interestingly the current version of our CMS has an Accessibility Checking feature. Many of the images (i.e. all of them on this page) fail that check but the text is alright. We think this is for visual accessibility by the visually impaired.
Images Issue
2025-02-02 - The Masthead to the website has been altered by adding the Canadian national flag, the Royal Union Flag (with its placement it is symbolic of the Crown) and an improved version of the flag of the Northwest Territories. The placement of these flags is to show solidarity with 41 million other Canadians and the citizens of other nations being targetted - including Americans.
2023-07-02 - The image problem has now been fixed. Initially we attempted to make use of an independent gallery program CMS and that was quickly found to be incompatible with the underlying system. This is why our photo gallery disappeared for a while. Eventually we used a simple gallery plugin for Joomla, the overall CMS and generated a library of images over the years. This also allowed us to start cleaning up our underlying subdirectories to free up space. In the process a number of image links were broken. Over the next little while we will correct these image links, so please bear with us.
More Testing
2023-07-12 - Testing way in which menus and listings of articles work - See Activities and the Linux sub category. The plan is to modify the listings under Activities so as to maintain a document repository.
Some Bandwidth Errors
2024-07-16 - We were getting notifications of bandwidth issues. Our thinking is that the images we had online were occupying too much space and being visited too frequently by robots. We have deactivated the photo gallery and also the activities pages.
2024-12-18 - A cursory examination of the website statistics reveals that there are a fair number of robots spidering our site. We have not blocked this and note that some AI systems have scanned our site and summarize aspects of it.
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Northwest Territories
- GNWT Evacuee Registration Form
- NWT Wildfire Update (ECC)
- NWT Public Safety (MACA)
- NWT Alert Page (Lists all alerts in the Northwest Territories)
- NWT Fire Facebook Page
- GNWT Facebook Page
- Air Quality - updates (NWT Alert)
- NWT Highway Map
- NWT Status of Highways (INF)
- NWT Emergency Plan (2018)
- Yellowknife Emergency Plan
- Emergency Management Act, SNWT 2018, c.17
- Continental Smoke Plume (Environment Canada)
- Continental Wildfire Situation (NASA FIRMS)
- Public Safety Canada
We no longer list Facebook/Meta information. We discontinued our page long ago. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook . The GNWT still uses it.
YARS Repeater Frequencies.
The Yellowknife Amateur Radio Society runs two VHF 2 m repeaters in the Northwest Territories:
- VE8YK/R (146.940 MHz with -600 kHz offset with a 100 Hz sub-audible tone) based in Yellowknife (IRLP was verified as functional as of 2023-08-02 by VE8IR and M0XWS and VE8RT); and
- VE8RAE/R (145.150 MHz with -600 kHz offset) based in Behchokǫ̀ (formerly Rae).
There is also a Yellowknife Amateur Radio Society test repeater in operation on the 70 cm band:
- VE8YK/R-2 (440.000 MHz with +5 MHz offset) based in Yellowknife.
YARS Simplex Frequency
The Yellowknife Amateur Radio Society also has traditionally used a simplex frequency to fall back on should any repeaters fail - 146.520 MHz .
Members of the Yellowknife Amateur Radio Society and all amateur radio operators in the area are asked to monitor the VE8YK and VE8RAE repeaters when they can for emergency traffic that needs to be relayed.
Other Amateur Repeaters in Yellowknife
Unknown
National HF Emergency Communications Frequencies for the Amateur Radio Service
| Single Sideband | CW | Digital | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Band | Frequency | Tactical | Frequency | Tactical | Frequency | Tactical |
| 80 m | 3.675 MHz LSB | Alfa | 3.535 MHz | Golf | 3.596 MHz | Mike |
| 40 m | 7.135 MHz LSB | Bravo | 7.035 MHz | Hotel | 7.096 MHz | November |
| 20 m | 14.135 MHz USB | Charlie | 14.035 MHz | India | 14.096 MHz | Oscar |
| 17 m | 18.135 MHz USB | Delta | 18.075 MHz | Juliet | 18.096 MHz | Papa |
| 15 m | 21.235 MHz USB | Echo | 21.035 MHz | Kilo | 21.096 MHz | Quebec |
| 10 m | 28.235 MHz USB | Foxtrot | 28.035 MHz | Lima | 28.096 MHz | Romeo |
https://www.rac.ca/national-hf-emergency-communications-frequencies/
For more information see:
- NWT Wildfire Alert page
- Repeaters
- 2017 Images (Images of 2017 Refurbishment of the VE8RAE repeater)
- https://www.repeaterbook.com/repeaters/location_search.php?state_id=CA13&type=city&loc=Yellowknife
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On February 2, 2023 North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) issued a press release indicating that NORAD and US Northern Command detected and is tracking a high altitude surveillance balloon over the continental United States. The NORAD commander, General VanHerk stated that the balloon does not present a threat to persons on the ground. The balloon is travelling well above commercial air traffic.
Read more: Military Applications of High Altitude Balloons in the 21st Century