A couple of days ago when I fired up the shack laptop, there was an open window that notified me that F-PROT, my anti-virus program, had found several files that had been infected with the JS/Injector.A virus. This is the first time that my shack computer had ever been infected, and it was kind of unsettling.
I set up F-PROT to do a complete disk scan, and got a little concerned when the program quit only partway through the scan, but the second time I started it up, it ran all the way through without finding anything, so I’m hopeful it got rid of the virus.
Guess I need to do complete scans more often. When was the last time to you did one?
Club Nets
For whatever reason, I seem to have become the de facto net control station for the ARROW Monday Night Net. To be honest, I don’t mind. I think it’s important to have a net. It helps keep the club together.
I try to keep it fun. I joke with the guys and ask them questions about what they’ve been doing in ham radio. If they enjoy it, the chances are they’re more likely to check in again. This Monday we had 12 check-ins and the net lasted just about a half hour. It’s just another way to have fun with ham radio.
Gutter Antenna
On Monday night, I also worked Tony, K3DY. When it came time to tell me about his rig, he proudly told me that he was using the gutter on his townhouse as a transmitting antenna! Here’s what his QRZ.Com page has to say:
Current TX antenna: 35 ft +/- downspout with 4:1 unun at feedpoint. Plenty of radials. It is working very well. With this antenna I finally achieved DXCC, WAS, WAC and WPX. Not bad for a no antenna zone.
My Secret… To use a seperate receiving antenna. Downspout is noisy otherwise so it is a necessity to have something else to hear that weak DX. I build a receive only 3ft diameter loop with coaxial cable and a preamp based on a differential design with a pair of 2N5109. Very simple device and it works really good! I am now having a blast on low bands 160, 80 and 40m (especially during the low SSN times that we are facing now, Oct. 2016).
How cool is that!
Did you check to see what files, if any, it quarantined? I’ve had ‘false positives’ from my AV program, sometimes when I’ve downloaded an update to the N1MM logging program. It seems that some library it uses is common in some viruses, so it gets tagged on a heuristic basis. I have to go find the program within the AV program, and tell it to restore it and ignore it, to get N1MM running again. The N1MM team is aware of this, and have pleaded with the various AV providers to no avail.
None of the files I saw in the reports were N1MM files. I’ll have to check to make sure that N1MM is still running.