Welcome

Welcome to the members area of the REVCOM web site. From here, you have access to extra facilities. As you can see on the navigation bar on the left we have here, a whole host of information that is useful to you the REVCOM member.

News

The new REVCOM NewsDesk will give you a one-stop-shop for all the announcements made by the NEC.

The Library

In the library you will find reference material about REVCOM, such as the Constitution, and the Code of Practice. You will also find blank forms used within REVCOM, such as the PMR1 for submitting change of details about the radios.

All the documents in this section, along with the archives and magazine sections mentioned below are (where possible) available in four different formats, you just have to chose which one you want. The four formats are: plain text, RTF, HTML, and PDF. See the explanation at the bottom of this page for more information about these formats.

The Archives

In the archives you will find copies of periodical documents. These will mainly be copies of meeting minutes and officers reports from NEC meetings and AGM's.

The Magazine

The magazine section will give you access to the current and back issues of the REVCOM magazine. You will be able to access these issues directly from the web site, for as with the other sections, download issues for viewing off-line.

PMR

The PMR section is a mine of information for all things PMR. Here you can get all the latest information form the

Health And Safety

In this section, the NEC hope to provide some help and information in what is increasingly becoming a legally sensitive area. PMR Officer about all things radio. Eventually, it is hoped that members will be able to submit PMR1 forms directly from this page also.

Contacts and Teams

Here you will find a copies of the contacts and teams pages available in the public area. The only difference between the two is that this one may have more information in it. The reason for this being that some members who do not wish their personal details available to the general public, are happy to let other members have access.

Events Calander

The Events section provides a way for members and teams to let each other, and the general public, know what events they have. Here we can show REVCOM off in it's best light, as a healthy active organisation helping other public bodies. If you haven't put your events on yet (why?) then go to here and enter them directly onto the events Calander.

Mailing Lists

In an effort to improve internal communications, and to reduce costs, REVCOM have created a number of mailing lists. This section describes these lists, covering what they do and how to subscribe to them. If you want to join in more in the organisation side of REVCOM, or you simply want to keep better informed, go here and get yourself subscribed.

The NEC

The day to day running of the organisation that is REVCOM is carried out by the various members of the National Executive Committee. To gain an insight into their work, bob along here.

New Sections

If there is anything that you would like to see added to the REVCOM web site, either for the general public, or within the members area, send me some feedback and I will see what I can do.

An explanation of the file formats

As mentioned above, the documents stored on the REVCOM web site are available in four different formats. These formats are

plain text
RTF
HTML (and HTML archive)
PDF

Plain Text

Documents stored in plain text format contain exactly what the name implies. These documents contain no presentation formatting instructions at all - they are exactly as they would have been if someone had sat at a traditional typewriter and types them in. Any person and any program should be able to read these documents with ease, but their use is very limited.

RTF

RTF, or Rich Text Format, is basically plain text on steroids. It is just the same as plain text mentioned above, except that it has embedded in it formatting information called tags. These tags tell programs that understand them how to show (render) the document. It can do things like underline, emphasis, or italicise text. It can change the size that the text is shown as so that titles for example can be bigger.

The main benefits of RTF are that:

Widely Supported
it is probaby the most widely supported format after plain text; the vast majority of editors and printing systems understand RTF to some extent.
Doesn't matter
it doesn't matter if you can't. Even if your computer cannot support RTF files, because they are just plain text files with tags added it is not too diffecult to ignore or remove the tags and end up back with plain text.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is what makes the world go round. To be more acurate, it is what makes the World-Wide-Web go round because HTML is the language that is used to write WWW pages.

HTML is similar to RTF in that it is basically made up of the text that is required, and then tags are added to enhance the presentation. The main differences between HTML and RTF are:

Indended Use
While RTF is intended to enable a plain text file to be rendered nicely HTML's main use is for document browsing - the easy navigation between seperate but related documents quickly.
Presentation
When viewing a document on screen, or printing onto paper, RTF provides much more control over the end product than HTML. HTML depends very much on the browser (the program used to access the HTML) to decide now to show the document.
Ease Of Access
RTF files do not easily enable you to jump to other parts of the document, or to other documents. HTML files enable this facility. With this you can jump from where you are in a document to any other part of the document, to other documents on the same computer, or even any document on another computer.

The documents stored in HTML formaton the web site are split down in to another two types. Firstly, you can access the documents directly, as though they are part of this site. Secondly, they will be available in .ZIP format so that you can download the entire document in one go and view it later. You will however need a program for your computer to un'ZIP' the documents before you can use them.

PDF

Portable Document Format (PDF) files are effectively the combination of RTF and HTML (although technically they are nothing like either). With PDF files you have the same (or better) control over the rendering of the document that you have with RTF, while still having the hyperlink facility to jump about inside and outside the document.

The only real drawback with PDF files is that not very many programs can read PDF files. However, this is not the drawback it could be, because the programs that do exist as a rule are free and run on lots of different computers. For unix computers running X-Windows look for a program called XPDF. For most other systems (as well as some unixen) you want Adobe Acrobat. To get Acrobat go to the Adobe Acrobat site, chose the version you want, download and install the program.