June 2021 – HamGab

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THANK-YOU: I am glad that we were able to continue our monthly meetings during this pandemic time. Also, we are thankful for those members continuing to catch us on-line. Of course, none of that would have been possible without our Zoom moderator, Brian W9HLQ. Thank you, Brian. We are back to in person regular meetings for the next few months, unless otherwise stated on the website.

Also, thank you to Dave Bukowski N9KPD for his Basic Weather Spotter class on Zoom in April and to all those who came out for the White Elephant sale in May. It was great to see everyone again.

HEALTH AND WELFARE: Hope everyone is staying safe and well. Prayers are also being sent to those members who are suffering or struggling.

HAPPENINGS: A lot of people have been asking for T-Shirts again. So we are looking into that and will be placing an order and we should have some T-shirts and Polos again for sale soon.

JUNE MEETING: Presentation will once again be given by Jim Riley W9JPR on our Field Day operations. At this time, we are planning to hold it outdoors at our current location of the Southbridge Church. We need volunteers for several things on those days. So be sure to come to June’s meeting and sign up.

JULY MEETING: We are having our usual holiday gathering and will have music and some food to share to celebrate the holiday.

AUGUST 1, 2021: Hamfest in Peotone.

AWARDS: We were finally able to deliver the award of Hamfester of the Year to our winner, Al Bukowski N9ZD. Congratulations, Al. It was well deserved. Most notably, Al has continued to hold VE testings each month during this pandemic. Because of the regular facility being shut down, they were held at either Al’s garage or at fellow members Garage, Steve Peters W9KXT, with all safety precautions adhered to. Thanks for your generous use of your homes to facilitate the testing and bringing in new ham operators. You do our club proud.

NEW MEMBERS: Welcome to Larry Jennings KD9GVY, Russell Leaming N9GIX and Paul Truback KD9RRY. We would like to also congratulate Don’s cousin, Rowdy Rejholec, KD9SRF, on becoming a new Ham Radio Operator.

EDUCATION: Hamfesters is looking forward to bringing a new Technician Class on-line training course, to be followed by a General Class.

On behalf of Don and me, we wish everyone a very safe and happy summer.

As always, we ask you to keep an eye on the website (dutifully brought to us by Brian Davis and Gene Phillips) for the most current happenings in our club. Remember to Like us on our Hamfesters Page and spread the word about our great club too! We are the fun place to have a good time of fellowship at all of our events!

Secretary’s Beat – Meeting Minutes

W9AA Hamfesters amateur radio club meeting Fri. May 6, 2021 7:45 pm

Please check Hamfesters.org for important updates.

Tonight’s in person attendance (no Zoom) 50, 13 visitors, 36 members, (50 was the actual head count) Welcome everyone.

Tonight’s program our annual white elephant sale.

President’s Report: by Nora KC9MLV, new club member Larry Jensen.

Minutes: The April club (Zoom) minutes approved by; John KB9FQB, & Steve W9KXT.

New Business: Connie Ac9CK, gave Brian W9HLQ, an engineering t-shirt, and back pack as a thank you for the Tech license class that was held on Zoom. Mike K9ACM, will be given the t-shirt, & backpack, he was also an instructor for the class.

Our new club’s Treasurer is Kurt WB9FMC. Ed WA9EOL, is stepping down after 10 years. Thank You, Ed, & Kurt.

Al N9ZD, was awarded the Hamfesters “Hamfester of the year for 2020”. Congratulations, Al thanks for all you’ve done, and continue to do, for our club.

Education: by Brian W9HLQ, in the Fall on Zoom there will be Tech & General license classes.

Programs: by Don KC9EQQ, these programs will be held in person.

June 4, Jim W9JPR, Field Day

July Annual Picnic (not sure of the date, the 9th, I think, check Hamfesters.org)

Field Day 2021 by Jim W9JPR, Field Day 2021 pin orders will be taken at the June 4 meeting. Pins are $6.00 each, cash, or checks, made out to Jim Riley. Pins will be available on Field Day.

Field Day June 26-27 we need volunteers for meals and lots of other stuff. It’s important to check Hamfesters.org for
updates. Field Day will be held at Stonebridge church. Saturday lunch will be Jimmy John’s.

Adjournment: Jim W9JPR, Don KC9EQQ 7:58 pm

There was a winner for split the pot drawing tonight. Congratulations, to the lucky winner.

Hamfester of the Year!

Resolving Windows 10 corruption issues on your Hamshack computer.

By Gregory D. Rosenberg (AB9MZ) (Gregg)

Computers, just like us humans don’t always age gracefully. Dust can easily build up in the case, processor, or graphics card fans reducing airflow and causing heat to build up in our computer cases. This can damage your electrolytic capacitors, CPU, graphics card, memory, and disk drives. Eventually, the fans may build up enough debris to even damage the fan’s motor or bearings. Like fans, older hard disk drives (HDDs) have a platter that spins at thousands of RPMs a minute. The motor in the drive can overheat causing the drive to stop spinning. Worse the heat will cause the platters to expand in such a way that the head that reads and writes data is askew from the cylinder containing the sectors of data being written or read. This can easily result in data loss and corruption to the disk drives sector allocation tables, directory entries, or, sub-directory entries. If the processor or graphics card fan dies this can damage or destroy your central processing unit (CPU) or graphics processing unit (GPU) respectively.

Many computers are bought with Windows 10 Starter or Home edition. Although these will meet many users application needs, they unfortunately exclude a big percentage of the tools used to repair corruption on disk or in Windows registry. So if your budget can handle it always choose the professional edition of Windows 10.

If you bought a lower end consumer grade computer I can all but guarantee the computer was built with the cheapest parts the manufacturer can find. Dell for examples may by different parts from weak to weak. So it makes it difficult for them to anticipate the underlying causes of lower end consumer computer failures.

SSDs don’t have moving parts like hard disks. So one might argue that they should take a lot longer to fail. Just like computers drive manufacturers to make anywhere from three to five versions of their drives. There are two key differences. The number of spare bits per bit and the ability to perform a hardware level secure erase before recycling. I have found that the Samsung EVO 860 product line has been the most reliable SSDs on the market. Intel and Crucial are number two and three respectively. I have some NAS grade drives I put in my backup devices in 2003 that are still working fine. This goes back to the old adage “You get what you pay for!).

The drives made to are dramatically better and you can expect the low-end consumer drives will give you at least three to five years and often more than seven years. The middle of the pack business grade drives will generally give you seven to ten years of life. And the top-tier NAS drives can easily go well past a decade and a half and often more. Of course, the caveat here is how many hours of use your drive has. If you are a light computer user and say use your computer an hour or two a day you will find your drives will last much longer than someone like me that pounds on the 14 to 16 hours in a day. Since SSDs are all silicon the only risks they face are temperature (extreme heat or extreme cold. (Note: Temperature changes impact the placement of the head that reads from and writes relative to where the tracks were laid down on the platter of the HDD), or water damage. The higher the quality of the SSD the more redundant bits are used to store copies of a given bit. In lower end consumer drives you may have two or three bits extra to backup the bit being written to. As you spend more money on an SSD you will have more backup bits and many other error correction technologies.

So enough about hardware. Now lets focus on the logical contents stored on your HDD or SSD. So, if your computer crashes with a blue screen of death (BSD), the battery dies on your laptop before it was cleanly shutdown, an electrical surge, brownout, or blackout occurred one too many times you can wind up with corrupt information in the operating system files or the operating systems registry where it stores all of your OS and application settings.

Microsoft tells us that chkdsk checks the file system and file system metadata of a volume for logical and physical errors. If used without parameters, chkdsk displays only the status of the volume and does not fix any errors. If used with the /f, /r, /x, or /b parameters, it fixes errors on the volume.
It is a good idea to run a tool called chkdsk at least twice a year. This will asses the quality of your hard drive and move failing or failed disk sectors to spare sectors to try to protect the data or program that was sitting in that sector. The easiest way to get their is to move your cursor over the start button and right-mouse it to open up the following menu.”

Where you will select “Windows PowerShell (Admin)” or “Command Prompt (Admin)”. It depends on the version of Windows 10 you are on.

Chkdsk can run in a PowerShell or Windows Command prompt, but not all commands will. The “C:” is the drive letter you wish to scan for errors and fix them. The “/f” says to fix anything that was found to be damaged and attempt to move bad disk sectors to a spare area of disk that the operating system sets aside. If you are scanning your operating system it will tell you that the disk volume can’t be dismounted and would you like to run this chkdsk after the system is restarted. You will type a “Y” for “Yes”. Then left-mouse your start button, select the power icon, and then “Restart”. You will want to watch the lower half of your screen when the system restarts. When Windows 10 runs chkdsk it will show progress messages.

IMPORTANT: Interrupting chkdsk is not recommended. However, canceling or interrupting chkdsk should not leave the volume any more corrupt than it was before chkdsk was run. Running chkdsk again checks and should repair any remaining corruption on the volume.

If you have more than one disk drive you can run chkdsk on each drive. If chkdsk reports errors rerun chkdsk again and again until it stops report errors. You will reboot in between each chkdsk run.

chkdsk /f c:

Here is how it looks when there are no errors.

chkdsk /f C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is SYSTEM.
Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure …
535040 file records processed.
File verification completed.
4602 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
Stage 2: Examining file name linkage …
566820 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found.
Stage 3: Examining security descriptors …
Security descriptor verification completed.
15891 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal…
420153088 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.

Here are some typical errors you might see (these are but a few examples):

Orphaned (parts of a file got lost).
File record segment 45B1 is an orphan.
File record segment 45B2 is an orphan.
File record segment 6BDC5 is an orphan.

An unexpected error (this often indicates quite severe corruption. Usually is an indicator your drive could be failing.

Stage 2: Examining file name linkage …
An unspecified error occurred (696e647863686b2e 532).
An unspecified error occurred (6e74667363686b2e 1713).

You may see messages starting with “Cleaning up…” This indicates an error was found and in theory corrected. You will want to reboot and rerun the chkdsk again.

Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive. 
Cleaning up 6 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9. 
Cleaning up 6 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9. 
Cleaning up 6 unused security descriptors.

Once chkdsk gives a clean bill of health you can move onto the next series of steps.

The next step you want to do is to use the System File Checker (SFC) command line utility. This examines the Windows executable (EXE,CMD,…) and dynamic link library (DLL) files and will report if their are any corrupt files.

PS C:> cmd
C:> sfc /scannow

If SFC ran clean you will see the following:

If it reported errors you will want to perform the following five Deployment Imaging Servicing and Management (DISM) commands.

C:> DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth

C:> DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth

C:> DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

If you see that “Component Store Cleanup Reconebded : No” you can skip the “Component Store Cleanup”. Although I tend to run it regardless.

C:> DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

C:> DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

If you get a virus on your computer and your anti-virus removes it, it can sometimes remove important system files. So it is important to keep an eye on what your anti-virus / anti-malware / anti-rootkit / … software is reporting in its quarantine logs. If your system starts SFC and the DISM commands can generally get you out of the weeds.

It is beyond the scope of this article to cover all failure scenarios or errors you might encounter, but performing the above steps will 90% if the time restore your system to health.

You can fairly safely run these commands. Once they are finished running, it is a good idea to rerun the “sfc /scannow”. If it still reports errors, then you will want to get some technical help if your computer literacy isn’t at a system administrator’s level.

There are lots of other tools that can be used besides what I offer in this article.

VE Exams By Appointment

Hamfesters conducts FCC authorized VE (volunteer examiner) tests for Technician, General, and Extra class licenses monthly.

Date: 2nd Saturday of each Month

Location: TBA upon email registration NOTE: Oak Forest City Hall closed during Pandemic. We will announce when re-opened!

Time: Start time of Exam: TBD time by slots – (0900 hrs) – (1100 hrs) 3 candidates per time Slot

NO WALK-INS ALLOWED!

The VE Team is NOT CONSIDERING any exams during the Hamfester’s Hamfest in August.

Exam Candidates: You are REQUIRED to register in the FCC CORES system and receive a FCC Registration Number (FRN) before exam day. Already Licensed? Please bring your Amateur License and Copy of Your License. Also Bring any CSCE from previous Exams and A Copy if FCC has not acted upon.

Exam Session Requirements
Candidates could go directly to the FCC CORES User Account and Registration
page: https://apps.fcc.gov/cores/userLogin.do

FEES: (currently $15) for the test. We urge you to bring the exact amount of cash. NO CHECKS or CREDIT CARDS EXCEPTED!

The $35 FCC Application Fee has NOT been implemented yet.

CONTACT: Al Bukowski – N9ZD >> Registration by email ONLY!

N9ZD@ARRL.NET – primary OR aln9zd@gmail.com – secondary

PLEASE – NO TELEPHONE CALLS!

Exam Day
What to Bring to an ARRL Exam Session:

1. One legal photo ID (identification):
   a. State Driver’s License
   b. Government issued Passport
   c. Military or Law Enforcement Officer Photo ID card
   d. Student School Photo ID card
   e. State Photo ID card
2. If no photo ID is available, two forms of identification:
   a. Non-photo State ID card (some states still have them)
   b. Birth certificate (must have the appropriate seal)
   c. Social security card
   d. Employer’s wage statement or Minor’s work permit
   e. School ID card
   f. School or Public Library card
   g. Utility bill, bank statement or other business correspondence that specifically names the person; or a postmarked envelope addressed to the person at his or her current mailing address as it appears on
   the Form 605.
3. Students/minors without a photo ID need to bring only one of the above items if a legal guardian presents their photo ID; otherwise two non-photo IDs are required. Minor children (under the age of 18) may be accompanied in the room by an adult during the test.
4. FCC Registration Number (FRN): VECs are required by the FCC to submit your FRN with your license application form.
   New license applicants MUST create an FCC user account and register their Social Security Number (SSN) in the FCC Commission Registration System (CORES) before attending exam sessions.
   Registrants will be assigned an FRN which will be used in all license transactions with the FCC. Examinee Must bring their FRN number to the Exam Session.
   For instructions on how to register your SSN and receive an FRN from the FCC, visit the FCC’s Registration page and the FCC’s Registration instructions page. Per FCC rules, a valid email address is also mandatory on the application form.
5. If applicable, bring a printed copy of either your official Amateur Radio license or a reference copy available from the FCC website, or the original(s) and photocopy(s) of any Certificates of Successful Completion of Examination (CSCE) you may hold from previous exam sessions. If your license has already been issued by FCC, the CSCE showing license credit is not needed. The photocopy(s) will not be returned.
   Instructions on how to obtain an official FCC license copy are on our Obtain License Copy web page.
6. Two number two pencils with erasers and a pen for in-person sessions.
7. A calculator with the memory erased and formulas cleared is allowed. You may not bring any written notes or calculations into the exam session. Slide rules and logarithmic tables are acceptable, as long as they’re free
   of notes and formulas. Cell phone must be silenced or turned off during the exam session and the phones’ calculator function may not be used. In addition, iPhones, iPads, Androids, smartphones, Blackberry devices
   and all similar electronic devices with a calculator capability, may NOT be used.

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Hamfest 2021!

• When: August 1st, 2021
• Where: Will County Fairgrounds
• How Much?
  • Advance Tickets: $8.00 (w/ double stub)
  • At door: $10 (w/ Single Stub)
  • Kids under 12 are Free!
• We already have vendors signing up!
• Stay tuned for more info!

A Note from the Editor

Gene W9PNG

Welcome back to another HamGab. Trying something new again. I have started to add a section for ham radio contests. I am using WA7BNM as a source for data.

Field Day is here! Sadly I will have to miss Field Day. Please take pictures and share them on social media! I will be living vicariously through you!

I do also include information submitted by the readers. The content must be respectful and related to Ham Radio in some way. You can email content to me at hamgab@hamfesters.org

Thank you all for reading my ramblings! Gene

June 2021 Contest Calendar

From WA7BNM Contest Calendar Website

+ 10-10 Int. Open Season PSK Contest	0000Z, Jun 5 to 2359Z, Jun 6
+ Wake-Up! QRP Sprint	0600Z-0800Z, Jun 5
+ Tisza Cup CW Contest	1200Z, Jun 5 to 1159Z, Jun 6
+ ARS Spartan Sprint	0100Z-0300Z, Jun 8
+ VK Shires Contest	0000Z-2359Z, Jun 12
+ Asia-Pacific Sprint, SSB	1100Z-1300Z, Jun 12
+ Portugal Day Contest	1200Z, Jun 12 to 1200Z, Jun 13
+ SKCC Weekend Sprintathon	1200Z, Jun 12 to 2359Z, Jun 13
+ AGCW VHF/UHF Contest	1400Z-1800Z, Jun 12
+ GACW WWSA CW DX Contest	1500Z, Jun 12 to 1500Z, Jun 13
+ REF DDFM 6m Contest	1600Z, Jun 12 to 1600Z, Jun 13
+ ARRL June VHF Contest	1800Z, Jun 12 to 0259Z, Jun 14
+ 4 States QRP Group Second Sunday Sprint	0000Z-0200Z, Jun 14
+ All Asian DX Contest, CW	0000Z, Jun 19 to 2359Z, Jun 20
+ Stew Perry Topband Challenge	1500Z, Jun 19 to 1500Z, Jun 20
+ West Virginia QSO Party	1600Z, Jun 19 to 0400Z, Jun 20
+ ARRL Kids Day	1800Z-2359Z, Jun 19
+ Run for the Bacon QRP Contest	2300Z, Jun 20 to 0100Z, Jun 21
+ SKCC Sprint	0000Z-0200Z, Jun 23
+ His Maj. King of Spain Contest, SSB	1200Z, Jun 26 to 1200Z, Jun 27
+ Ukrainian DX DIGI Contest	1200Z, Jun 26 to 1200Z, Jun 27
+ ARRL Field Day	1800Z, Jun 26 to 2100Z, Jun 27

Club Information

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Pics from the March Aborted Meeting

No pictures were available from the May White Elephant meeting.

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Notice: Beginning with Feb 2021, all HamGab issues will be gluten and salt-free. This is part of my commitment to provide you with the healthiest and environmentally friendly reading possible. You will notice no degradation in image quality due to the clever design of the editor. If you choose to print HamGab we suggest you use low-fat, vegetarian-based ink in your printer.