If you're one of the very few people who have ever taken advantage of the ability to read USENET news via AMPRNet and the news.ucsd.edu server, you should be aware that that server is failing from old age and will be taken out of service soon. We don't plan to replace it; Usenet itself is fading away. I co-authored the NNTP protocol some 31 years ago; that's a pretty good run for any internet standard.
I wasn't aware that there was any special service from news.ucsd.edu towards AMPRNet... does it carry any special groups other than rec.radio.amateur.*?
Fortunately my ISP still maintains USENET servers, two separate clusters even, one for what we used to use for news and another one dedicated to moving large blobs of gibberish :-)
Indeed I see your name above RFC977! Great! I once maintained a CNEWS server for a company, which used a UUCP batch feed over a 9600 baud phone modem. The group list had to be trimmed all the time so it would not get behind so much it would never catch up, and the 200MB spool had to be carefully watched as well. Those were the days...