When I talk to fellow hams about their computer usage, the subject of junk email often comes up. Most of us are plagued by spam to some extent. There are a number of approaches to the problem, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Some users maintain multiple email addresses and are careful about their distribution. One private address is reserved for close acquaintances. Other disposable ones are used for any commercial (or otherwise public) transactions. Once you get into the habit of selecting the right address for each email this method is not too difficult to administer, and when one of the "public" addresses becomes too plagued with spam it can be discarded. Unfortunately, there is a certain amount of "leakage" of the private address when people forward emails or include you in a long To: line, but it is possible for a private address to remain so for a remarkable length of time.

Other users rely on the spam filtering of their Internet Provider. Some providers are reputed to have very good filtering. My own provider, Verizon does have filtering in place, but I have never found a significant proportion of the spam caught in that net.

If you have a broadband connection, it is feasible to filter the mail after it reaches your machine. I use a free program called POPFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/). It uses a Bayes algorithm to sort mail based on the frequencies of words found in the messages. Initially the program has no statistics to go on, but after you show it which "bucket" you would place some emails in, it learns very quickly. I use it to mark mail with four tags which I call Ham (personal mail), List (mailing lists that I subscribe to), Splist, (spam from companies who legitimately have me on their list) and Spam (junk mail). Once messages are marked, it is simple to have my email client place them into different folders. This makes it easy to take care of important mail before even looking at the rest. Now that I have been using the program for a while it is sufficiently accurate that I have it put mail marked with the Spam category directly into the deleted folder. I occasionally glance through the headers on this mail before purging the deleted folder, but I very rarely find any real mail there. When I'm not busy, I look through the headers of the Splist category, and then read only the relevant stuff.

Before I started to use POPFile, I found that spam was becoming increasingly annoying. My current email address has been very widely published for a long time now, so that is not surprising. Now that the mail is sorted reasonably accurately into categories, I find that the irritation is reduced to a tolerable level. This may be partly that I have become accustomed to spam, but I think the program has helped considerably. At one time I thought that I understood the principle behind the program, but I have noticed that the emails containing esoteric word lists (which I think are specifically intended to get past Bayesian filters) are always correctly categorized as spam. This tells me that something subtle is going on, but I'm inclined not to look that particular gift horse in the mouth!

Whatever approach you have adopted, I hope that you have been able to "tame the dragon" in your inbox, and that you will share your tips and tricks with us all.

73 de AE6NX

At the July meeting, Jonathan Fox ( KT6LA ) will present a photographic tour of CBS Television City. Tours of the facility at Beverly and Fairfax in Hollywood are not normally available. We will get an inside look, however, at the CBS Television Network production facility. This technical tour will cover everything from the ground floor to the roof. Popular TV shows produced here include The Bold & Beautiful, The Young & Restless, Price is Right, Late Late Show, Tyra Banks Show, Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol. See what it takes to put together one of these productions.

Jonathan, who has only been a ham for about a year, has been in broadcasting for 36 years. Starting out, while attending the New Jersey Institute of Technology, his first radio experience was on a 33,000 watt FM station covering parts of NJ, NY and PA. The first TV experience was at a CBS affiliate in Atlanta, GA as a transmitter engineer. Following college graduation, he joined the Engineering and Development department at CBS in New York. The Broadcast Center in NY, CBS News - Washington and CBS TVC in Hollywood were some of locations of his work. Eventually, Jonathan decided to make Los Angeles his home and he is now the Audio Maintenance Supervisor of CBS TVC.

The Conejo Valley Amateur Radio Club, (CVARC) sponsors amateur radio license classes throughout the year. The Technician Class license, which is the entry level license for amateur radio, is presented four times a year and each class lasts for eight weeks. Classes are held on Tuesday evenings from 7:00 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. and are free. The only cost related to this class is the cost for the Ham Radio License Manual which is $24.95 plus tax. Students who wish to purchase this manual through the CVARC class may do at the time of class registration. This book is a brand new course manual presented by the Amateur Radio Relay League and replaces the Now You're Talking, fifth edition, lesson manual which was the official study guide through June 2006. The new manual covers the new FCC test requirements for all Technician exams after July 1, 2006.

Classes are taught in Thousand Oaks in classroom facilities provided as a community service by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The current classes are held at 3645 Moorpark Road, in Thousand Oaks. This is on Moorpark Road, one block North of Olson Road.

Classes are open to all ages, and CVARC is proud to report that our graduates include 7 year old children and 84 year old adults. There are no age limits imposed by the FCC on the Amateur Radio license, and both men and women participate in the magic of radio.

Whether you are interested in radio communications with other amateur operators around the world, or just want to have your radio license for emergency preparedness, the Technician Class license is your entry to amateur radio. If you are interested, or want to know more about amateur radio, call Karl Moody at (805) 523-0622 for information regarding the next class.

Field Day 2006 is behind us, the points are being tallied and submitted, and we look back and decide "how did it go this year?" Field day attendance from both club members and the public was little light this year, but we still put in a respectable showing as you can see from the pictures on the web site (www.cvarc.org/fielddays.html). Take a few minutes to look through and find familiar faces, look at the setups and the rigs. There are some of our club members that this is about the only time of the year you see them.

Field Day has many goals, but the main one is emergency preparedness. The ARRL says "The event is designed to test operators skills in setting up and operating radio communications equipment in situations where electrical power is limited or unavailable". It is run as a contest to make it a little more "fun" for those who like to be competitive, but the rules are by-and-large designed to further the main objective. That is why you can get some points even for just getting on the air from your house and operating there from regular wall power, but more points are given for field operations. With an eye toward sustainable operations you are rewarded for operating in a manner that conserves your available power resources (QRP), and even more points for operating with power that is indefinitely sustainable (solar, water power, etc.). The rules are not perfect, but they are pretty good, and best of all, you can work to influence them if you have a better idea of furthering the event's objectives.

Field Day has other facets as well. Since we are able to work on more than one thing at a time, Field Day is used to promote amateur radio in the general public. A related goal is to improve relations with local government officials and agencies to help them recognize the benefits ham's can provide their constituents in the event of local disasters. This is why we choose the club Field Day site in areas that seem less than perfect for UHF signal propagation, HF antenna erection and less than ideal ground conductivity. We can lose a few contact points that we might have otherwise have gained to further another important goal of the event, and of CVARC in general. An additional benefit with our current location is that we are set up right outside of a large government building with good communication capabilities (the former Thousand Oaks City Hall).

Another goal and benefit of Field Day is getting hams active and operating together. If the numbers are similar this year, somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 amateurs will be active participants this year. We don't really have any other events of this magnitude in the hobby able to galvanize that kind of support and cooperation. Having operated on several bands this year, I was again impressed with the patience, courteously and respect shown by operators from around the entire North American continent tried to make contacts. I was part of a small pile-up over a station operating somewhere in Alberta Canada. We all patiently worked the station and provided our "exchange" (call sign, number of simultaneously operating stations, class and section). Our exchange was "AA6CV 7A SB" since we operated under the CVARC AA6CV club call sign, we had a maximum of seven simultaneous stations, operating class A (club/non-club battery), and we were operating from the Santa Barbara ARRL section.

There is a social part of the Field Day event as well. All of us breaking bread together at Friday night's pot-luck after erecting antennas, pitching tents, driving stakes, and such was a great experience in sharing a common experience. Saturday evening was similar, but even bigger with many of the families being there. The opportunity for XYLs and kids to meet our amateur radio colleagues was fun and rewarding.

Another part of the Field Day experience I particularly enjoy is learning little tid-bits of operating and preparation lore from old-timers with years of experience and wide exposure to other environments. Pete Heins (N6ZE) mentioned in an email to another group what his "color" is and how he unobtrusively marks all of his cables, adapters, radios, etc. with a small dab of dark blue Testor's model paint with a Q-tip so he is able to quickly and accurately determine which parts were his when disassembling any joint effort setups in the field. If you have a larger group, it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a color and pattern (red white and blue triangle, green square, etc.) that would be unique. A great idea to file away for the future. I sure wish we had thought to do this when a group of us worked together to wire-up Flory Elementary School for the NASA Space Station contact last year. Sorting out everyone's cables and contributions afterwards was more time consuming than it would have been with this.

I saw another at another event a few years ago was a five gallon paint bucket and lid ("Homer buckets" from Home Depot work as well), re-fitted with a upholstered thick compressed foam pad that was used to store much of the hams emergency kit. Four buckets, a card table, a few batteries and the mobiles in his car and he would be headed for the field with everything he needed, including several days water, emergency rations, blankets, air mattress, sun screen, changes of clothes, etc. The buckets are air, water and vermin-tight, are conveniently sized, don't weigh too much, have built-in handles and can be used as seats that are a great height to work with the card table as operating and logging positions.

I hope to start a series of articles in the near future on these operating tid-bits and ideas to document and share them and encourage others in the club to bring forward great ideas that they have developed, or were taught so we all benefit from the experiences of others. If you have any ideas you would like to share, please contact me (my call sign at ARRL.net) and I will start a dialog. Please plan on joining us next year at Field Day and seeing for yourself. There is something for literally everyone. You don't have to camp all night to participate and enjoy!

Ventura County Area 2 R.A.C.E.S. members are encouraged to check in every Tuesday night at 7:00 pm on the Area 2 Check-in Net. Specific ARES/RACES times and frequencies are as follows:

Net Control operations for the weekly ARES/RACES Area 2 check-in is run from the ARES/RACES communications center at East County Cheriff Station on Olsen Road each Tuesday at 7:00 PM. Visitors are welcome and have the opportunity to operate the station equipment. Contact Jerry Goldman KC6SO ( 805) 241-9187 if you plan to attend. RACES members, should remember that their RACES card is issued for only two years. When your card is due to expire call Jackie ( 805) 646-2551 at the Office of Emergency Services in Ventura to renew your card. For questions concerning ARES/RACES call Area 2 Emergency Coordinator Ken Larson KJ6RZ ( 805) 495-9435 or go to the ARES/RACES secion of the CVARC website at http://www.cvarc.org.

The Conejo Valley Amateur Radio Club is an ARRL affiliated Special Service Club. Meetings are held on the second Thursday of each month, unless otherwise noted. Meeting location is at the Elks Lodge, 158 Conejo School Rd., Thousand Oaks, CA. Meetings start at 7:30 pm. with a pre-meeting social and technical assistance session, for those who are interested at 7:15 pm. Meetings are open to the public, and members are encouraged to bring their friends.