Archive-name: radio/rec-radio-info/welcome Last-modified: $Date: 1993/04/09 20:30 $ Version: $Revision: 1.03 $ *** Welcome to rec.radio.info! *** Welcome to rec.radio.info, a group that aims to provide a noise-free source of information and news for the entire rec.radio hierarchy. Two introductory articles about rec.radio.info are posted to the group and to news.answers every two weeks. You are now reading the first article, which explains what rec.radio.info is, and answers some Frequently Asked Questions. The second article is titled "Submission Guidelines", and you only need to read it if you want to submit an article to rec.radio.info. -- What is the purpose of rec.radio.info? The purpose or charter of rec.radio.info is to provide the Usenet community with a resource for information, news, and facts about any and all things radio. All the other rec.radio groups are intended for discussions and general chit chat about radio. Rec.radio.info will contain informational, factual articles only. Follow-ups are redirected to an appropriate other group, and further discussion (if any) will not take place in rec.radio.info. In order to ensure that rec.radio.info contains only appropriate articles, it was decided to create the group as a moderated newsgroup. -- Why are messages almost always cross posted to rec.radio.info? It provides a "tag" for each article to be assembled into a filtered presentation in rec.radio.info (even with cross-posting, only one message, with a unique Message-ID, is propogated across the net). This tag also facilitates a pre-existing method of dropping or cancelling the articles locally within the discussion groups if you don't want to see them. This accommodates individuals who want to separate the bulletins from the discussions, discussions from the bulletins, as well as those who are adamant about not reading another newsgroup and wanted to see everything all in one basket. With the total size of Usenet (in number of newsgroups and total traffic) doubling every year or so, this is no insignificant contribution to reducing information noise and chaos. Making the discussion groups a catch-all, and making extra newsgroups filters on that catch-all, is also the most realistic way to implement such a scheme (It's not intuitively obvious what the charter, contents, and general appropriate topics for each and every newsgroup are. Seeing FAQ's and charter/intro postings in the home newsgroup is beneficial for new readers). By cross-posting one only is adding a few tens of bytes to each bulletin (to specify the extra group on the Newsgroups line), but are adding the capability for very powerful filtering features available on most news servers, listservers and readers. Your local news guru could probably explain these features in more detail. In rn, for example, according to Leanne Phillips in her rn kill-file FAQ, add a line of the form: /Newsgroups:.*[ ,]rec\.radio\.info/h:j either in ~/News/KILL (if you don't want to see rec.radio.info articles anywhere) or ~/News/rec/radio/amateur/misc/KILL (if you don't want to see them just in rec.radio.amateur.misc). The latter method means your kill file will only be consulted during rec.radio.amateur.misc (and hence runs more efficiently), and will probably work for most people. In nn, according to Bill Wohler in his nn FAQ, add a line of the form: rec.radio.info:!s/:^ in ~/.nn/kill (if you don't want to see rec.radio.info articles anywhere), or put the following lines: sequence rec.radio.info rec.radio. at the end of ~/.nn/init in order to see all the rec.radio.info bulletins first, then read the remaining rec.radio.* without the bulletins. -- What is a 'follow-up', and what does 'moderated' mean? If you are new to Usenet and are not familiar with the terminology, you might want to read the general introductory articles found in the newsgroup news.announce.newusers. Doing so will make your life on the net much easier, and will probably save you from making silly beginner's mistakes. If you think that at this moment you are reading an echo, a conference, or a bulletin board, I'd also strongly suggest a trip over to news.announce.newusers. For the rest of this article, I will assume you have a basic knowledge of Usenet terminology and mechanics. -- OK, so now I know what 'moderated' means. Tell me more. Rec.radio.info is a moderated newsgroup, which means that all articles submitted to the group will have to be approved by the moderator first. The current moderator of the group is Mark Salyzyn. Submissions to rec.radio.info can be posted, or e-mailed to: rec-radio-info@ve6mgs.ampr.ab.ca Comments, criticisms, suggestions or questions about the group can be e-mailed to: rec-radio-request@ve6mgs.ampr.ab.ca But before you do so, please be sure to check out the "Submission Guidelines" article. The influence of the moderator should be minimal and of an administrative nature, consisting chiefly of weeding out obviously inappropriate articles, while making sure correct headers etc. are used for the appropriate ones. -- What type of material is considered inappropriate? There are three broad categories of articles which will be rejected by the moderator: 1) Requests for information: rec.radio.info is strictly a one-way street. I receive information in my mailbox; I then post it to rec.radio.info. Requests for specific information belong in the normal discussion newsgroups. If your request gets answered, you might consider passing the answer on to rec.radio.info, though. Especially if you can edit it into a informational, rather than a discussion, format. 2) Obvious discussion articles, or articles that appear unsubstantiated. 3) Commercial stuff: a relatively unbiased test of a radio product would be accepted, but any hint of for-profit might be reason for rejection. For three reasons: This is not the purpose of the list, for-profit is a controversial topic, and this list may be passed onto Amateur Packet Radio (where for-profit is prohibited except under certain provisos). rec.radio.swap may be more deserving of the posting in any matter. Similarly, copyrighted material generally cannot be used. If it's TRULY worthwhile to the net, I would recommend obtaining permission from the copyright holder. Please note the source, and if permission was given. I reserve the right to make the final decision concerning appropriateness in all situations. In most cases, a brief summary of, or pointer to, the copyrighted information may be all I can allow. -- I do not have access to news, how can I get the information posted to rec.radio.info? brian@UCSD.EDU (Brian Kantor) has kindly supplied a mail list server for rec.radio.info. Non of the articles will be digested, due to their size, so you will receive individual mailings for every article posted to the group. Mail sent to radio-info@ucsd.edu will be forwarded to the moderator and thus is an alias to rec-radio-info@ve6mgs.ampr.ab.ca To subscribe and unsubscribe via the listserver; the format for that is sub address radio-info unsub address radio-info where 'address' is your full mailing address. Send this request to listserv@ucsd.edu Note that the server will automatically delete any address that bounces mail. If you leave the address portion blank, it will try to deduce your address from the mail headers. This may not work if you are on bitnet, milnet or some other non-Unix host, so it is recommended to put your return address in any case. For example: sub mymailbox@myhost.mydomain.mil radio-info or sub MEMEME01@DMBHST.bitnet radio-info or something like that. -- Will the material appearing in rec.radio.info be archived somewhere? Yes. Still firming up details at the moment but here is a preliminary list: - unbc.edu as maintained by Lyndon Nerenberg - nic.funet.fi maintained by Risto Kotalampi saved to /pub/dx/text/rec.radio.info currently stored as numbered files. Effectively this means that anything you post to rec.radio.info will be permanently stored, so your work will not be lost. -- I have a regular posting with timely information, is there a way to speed up it's delivery, or automate for more convenience? Yes, there is! It may take a bit of chatter with the moderator, but we are willing to take responsible people and provide them the means of posting the articles directly from their site. We will try everything we can as we fully realize that DX (distant signal) and astronomical data can be somewhat transitory. We are also willing to allow regular posters of information the same courtesy, even if the information is not as timely. We refer to this as self-moderation, which is partly based on the model for news.answer. This requires co-operation and good will to be beneficial to the community in the rec.radio hierarchy. I suggest reading the posting guidelines for more information. I am open to suggestions. I thank the following individuals for their input into this article: rec.music.info moderator Leo Breebaart rec-music-info@cp.tn.tudelft.nl rec.radio.broadcasting moderator Bill Pfeiffer wdp@gagme.chi.il.us Paul W. Schleck, KD3FU pschleck@unomaha.edu Ian Kluft, KD6EUI ikluft@uts.amdahl.com -- Mark Salyzyn -- Moderator rec.radio.info Submissions to: rec-radio-info@ve6mgs.ampr.ab.ca Administrivia to: rec-radio-request@ve6mgs.ampr.ab.ca * Requests for information do *not* belong in rec.radio.info *