Hi All,

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Kimberly and I have a couple of quick announcements:

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Just a quick reminder that the change back to standard time will occur during the November Sweepstakes CW contest this weekend.? The Sweepstake program checks your UTC offset setting on startup, but not continually.? If you operate or?leave the program running through the night, you'll need to change the offset manually.? To do that,?click Setup from the menu options and enter the new value in the Hours Added for UTC field after the change to standard time.

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This program requires a little explanation.? Other than the possibility of heating your shack with solar hot air, this is not directly related to Amateur Radio.? If home brewing solar hot air panels doesn't interest you, please skip this section.

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A couple weeks ago, my son Brad, KB3MNE,?and I completed a 13 inch high by 24 foot long, "low profile", (neighborhood friendly)?solar hot air collector project ().? After putting the web page up, I?had several folks e-mail me directly with plans and pictures of the hot air collector projects that they are working on.? That got me to thinking that it might be worth setting up an e-mail group specifically for brainstorming easy to build, neighborhood friendly, solar hot air projects.:

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From there, we began the fun and interesting process of calculating the efficiency of our collectors (total BTUs generated / total BTUs striking the panel from the sun) to get an idea of which designs work best.? I created an Excel spreadsheet to do the calculations, but since some folks don't have Excel, I wound up writing a program to perform the same functions.? Both the Excel spreadsheet and the program are free and they can be downloaded from:

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