As many people know, I am a student at UVA, and when the fall semester begins I will be entering my final year. At the University of Virginia, all engineering students are required to complete a fourth year thesis project, which I have now begun. My project will focus on the study of VHF antennas and reception, and yesterday I got my graded prospectus back. I received an A for it, and plan on doing the experimentation some time during the upcoming semester.

So if you are interested, you may read my Thesis Prospectus.

I'm sure everyone noticed that I've replaced the huge, tacky menu with a nice neat dropdown menu. Any opinions on the new design?

Hello, all!

Any ham operators participating in Field Day, the UVA radio club is on the air. I had to leave briefly to get a piece of replacement gear for a dead piece, but when I left, we were on 20 meters and we have a 40 meter dipole we'll be moving to later on.

Just listen for W4UVA, that's Whiskey 4 United Victor Alpha, and you'll hear either me or Bert (club VP). =)

I've never been a fan of advertising. Yes, it supports many items that we consider free and I appreciate that and do attempt to watch ads while watching programs on TV to support over-the-air broadcasters. Similarly, I dislike begging for donations. I still do donate to causes I like, but I don't like when people and organizations solicit donations.

As such, I'm in a bit of a box. I'm sure it's not just me, but I imagine many people have noticed that RabbitEars seems to get slower and slower as time goes on and I add more features. I have been tossing around the idea of relocating to another provider or upgrading hosting packages on my current provider. However, my current $11/month for which I'm not even responsible for paying is a very good deal to give up. Any change in hosting plan would require me to begin paying a much heftier hosting bill.

EDIT: To clarify, my problem is not a shortage of storage or bandwidth. My problem is that because of the huge numbers of on-the-fly calculations and database calls the website makes, it chews up RAM and processor time. I've not even used 10% of my allotted storage, and I'm using a tiny fraction of my allotted bandwidth (20GB out of 3TB so far this month).

I've considered adding advertising to RabbitEars off and on over the past several months. In fact, the current header design leaves room for advertising to the left and right of the logo. Any advertising I would put on RabbitEars would probably not be through a third party network like Google due to the recent rumors of malware being inserted into third party advertising. That doesn't mean I've ruled it out entirely, but it's highly unlikely that I would go that route.

Instead, I would do my own ad rotations and sell space directly to advertisers. No Flash advertising of any kind, simple text or image ads only. I know I don't want to see obnoxious ads when I visit a website, so I would certainly not put anything like that on RabbitEars.

I, of course, could not make RabbitEars work without the help of you, the public, who views the website and submits updates to me. So I pose the question to contributors, to potential advertisers, and to viewers and readers: What is your opinion? What would you like me to do? Are you willing to tolerate the lower speed of the site in exchange for a corner of the web without ads, or would you prefer a bit of advertising in exchange for a bit of speed? Feel free to leave a comment here or send me an e-mail.

(Please note that unlike other e-mails you send and comments you leave, I may not respond to these as I'm hoping to get a lot of opinions from a lot of people and with school being what it is, I may have to just listen and not respond.)