Banner

Menu:

What's new

A review of membership fees and cost within batc.

CQ-TV 233 cost £2.73 to print and 64p to post to each UK members. So for 4 issues in the UK the total production cost is £13.48

At £15 a year, this means that UK paper members contribute £1.52 to the running of batc each year, the contribution from European members is about the same, slightly less for the rest of the world.

By comparison Cyber members pay £4 a year and, because the costs of running our own server, including the bandwidth, is paid for mainly by donations to the streaming service, almost all of the £4 goes towards the running of batc.

As the contribution towards the running costs is so unequal, the committee felt that some changes should be made. As a by product of this excercise, we have also been looking at the costs of running batc as a whole.

The committee have therefore made the following changes: Cyber subs will have a reduction of £2 for those that renew for 3 years. For those who have paper CQ-TV, the subs have gone up by £1 to £16 per year and all forward discounts have ceased. We have looked at the cost of overseas postage and adjusted the extra charges for airmail posting to Europe and the rest of the World. Unfortunately these costs are outside of our control.

The better news is the new printer that produced the excellent CQ-TV 234 is being retained. Alas without the colour centre, but this may be an occasional feature in future editions. Also, because of the negligible cyber distribution costs of cyber CQ-TV, a copy will be made available to all members with an email address in the database. So if you do not have an email address in the database, please take this opportunity to obtain a login and update your entry: https://www.batc.org.uk/

One saving we are able to make is to discontinue the credit card payments system by post and over the phone. These are processed by a PayPal virtual terminal which costs us £20 a month. In the past this was an important payment method, but has become less popular and is now uneconomical. It is important to note that safe credit card payments can still be made via the batc website using PayPal even if you do not have a PayPal account. At the appropriate point PayPal will ask you for your card details from their secure site.

This change will not happen until the end of January 2012 so card payments over the phone and by post will be available to process the bulk of the 2012 renewals. This will mean that from the end of January the membership secretary will no longer be able to process membership renewals via credit card, either over the phone or via the post. They will however be pleased to accept UK Cheques, postal orders and even cash in extremis.

Please note, that if you do choose to send cash through post, please ensure it is placed inside a covering letter detailing your full name, address and membership number. Please send only paper Sterling or US dollars - no coins, and note that any cash sent via the postal system is at the senders risk!

Kits and bits

The club is now offering kits of some projects that have appeared in recent issues of CQ-TV. Click here to view what is currently available. This includes the new DigiLite ATV project which will be in CQ-TV 235. If you cannot wait go to www.g8ajn.tv and press the DigiLite button or visit the batc forum http://www.batc.org.uk/forum

BATC.TV

The batc streaming site www.batc.tv is now operational; it is running from its own hardware located on a commercial site

This has been an expensive investment funded by sponsors to avoid a drain on the club resources.

The reason we have our own hardware is to avoid repeating Ustream and Camstream, and increasing the delay they already produce. If cross repeater working is to be successful then this delay must be kept to a minimum.

To this end we invite you to stream your repeater via our site. There is no charge involved and there is no reason why you cannot stream to other sites if you wish, but it is our hope that all UK repeater groups will support the club and use us as their primary streaming provider. Our site will be the place to view repeaters with a minimum of delay, because they are streaming directly to us. If your streaming is being repeated on another site, then this can continue we will provide the necessary link.

It is also not just about repeater streaming, we have an archive of interesting programme's and more will be added soon.

The site also streams live events, and has already streamed the Sheffield’s Microwave weekend, and several AMSAT the Colloquiums which if you missed is available on the film Archive.

Please let your local group know about this event, so they can watch!

Please consider streaming your repeater from our site, contact info@batc.tv

Trevor Brown, BATC Chairman

Data Protection Act

On the 1st March 2000 the Data Protection Act 1998 took effect. The registration scheme established by the 1984 Act has been  replaced by a process called notification.

Under the 1998 Act there are exemptions from notification one of these being a 'Not for profit Organisation.' It has been determined that the  BATC falls under this category and therefore a 'I do not Intend to Notify' form has been returned to the Data Protection Notification  department.

However the BATC will continue to treat the personal data it keeps in strict confidence and the records kept are only used for Membership  records and mailing of CQ-TV Magazine. Your data will not been given to third parties and is only available to the Club's Committee.

Along these lines I do occasionally receive requests from one member requiring the address of another. It has always been Club policy and will  continue to be that even in these circumstances I do not give out this information. I am however quite happy to pass on any letter sent to me  for forwarding onto another member so contact can be made.