LOS ANGELES AMATEUR RADIO CLUB 40/S9 January 2015

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1 in progress and the format may change as the newsletter matures. Letter from the Editors We begin this New Year by welcoming our newly elected officers. Congratulations and we are looking forward to improving what is already a great organization. We also begin this year with the revival of the 40/S9 newsletter. Everyone is welcome to submit their ideas as to what they would like to see published. We plan to make this a monthly publication so submit your ideas early. The goal is to provide useful information about our organization, amateur radio experiences, as well as keeping you informed about the new radio technologies. We welcome all information pertaining to the Los Angeles Amateur Radio Club and ham radio, so feel free to share your creative ideas with the rest of us. While we might not cover everything, we will do our best to give you something useful in each month s publication. Keep in mind this is a work Here is hoping you and your family have a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year. As we move into 2015, we should bring with it new ideas and attitudes when it comes to amateur radio. While the technologies of past years are the basis of our organization s foundation, old and new technologies combined will help us build a better organization for the future. This year, lets look at old and new technologies and make them both work to our club s benefit. Gone are the days of We ve always done it that way, and now are the times of Let s see what s new that we can use to improve our ability to communicate. Let us not get left behind while waiting for old technologies to make a comeback. T o see how not embracing change can impede progress, take a look at this video on Youtube titled who moved my cheese full movie english. I think you will find it relevant to some of us in amateur radio. Sometimes change is necessary to keep our hobby alive, and new things and ideas might be of interest to our new members. Let us also remember that we should continue to be ready to assist our communities and to move to the frontlines in the event of a disaster if other modes of communications fail. This is a good year to breath new life into the hobby by taking advantage of the opportunity to mentor a new ham, build something radio related from scratch or buy a commercial product and come up with creative new ways to use it to communicate.

2 Monthly Meeting The Los Angeles Amateur Radio Club will meet on January 4, 2015 at the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Youth Activity Center located at Vermont Ave., in Los Angeles Ca This is on 120th and Vermont across from the Ralphs Market parking lot. Applications will be made available for those "Hams" that wish to join this club. Club Net The LAARC holds a radio net on FM simplex at 8 PM pacific time every Saturday nite. Club News L.A.A.R.C. Elects New Officers Stan Thornton W6SMT President Doug Long N6PZK Vice-President Jess Craig W6CKC Secretary La Verne Carter KJ6OSV Secretary Archie Buchana KD6OLH Treasurer Aaron Jones KJ6COI Sgt at Arms Ham Radio News NEW ELEMENT 3 (GENERAL CLASS) QUESTION POOL RELEASED: The Question Pool Committee of the National Conference of Volunteer Examiner Coordinators (NCVEC) has released the Element 3 (General Class) question pool. The new question pool becomes effective for all Element 3 examinations administered on or after July 1, 2015, and it remains valid until June 30, The question pool files are available in PDF, Microsoft Word (.doc), and ASCII text formats. Section G7A requires the use of one illustration, a schematic identified as G7-1. This drawing file is published separately. Further information can be found on the web at, general-class-question-pool-released. January s HF Propagation Summary According to this month CQ magazine the daylight hours for 15 and 17 meters is reported to have some great openings for DXers. Twenty meters is expected to be an excellent band around the clock for both DX and short skip. The best band for DX conditions should be 40 meters after dark. The month of January is also expected to be hot for 80 and 160 meters.

3 Upcoming events January 1 -- ARRL Straight Key Night January 1 -- New Year's Snowball Contest (SSB, CW) January 1 -- SARTG New Year RTTY Contest January 1 -- AGCW Happy New Year Contest (CW) January 2 -- NS Weekly Sprint January PSKFest January 3 -- QRP ARCI New Year's Sprint (CW) January 3 -- EUCW 160 Meter Contest January WW Peace Messenger Cities (SSB, CW) January ARRL RTTY Roundup January 4 -- ARRL Kids Day January 5 -- OK1WC Memorial Contest Classes & VEC Testing None scheduled for January You can find an Amateur License Exam In your area at ARRL.ORG search Free Amateur Radio Practice Testing is available on the Web Practice exams are for those people who would like to study for a new US amateur radio license class. The questions contained within are provided by the Federal Communications Commission and are selected from the same sub-elements that would be used for an official license examination January 6 -- ARS Spartan Sprint January Quartzfest, Quartzsite, Arizona

4 Tech Tips Safety begins with a proper attitude. Make it a habit to plan your work carefully and always consider the safety aspects or your Ham Radio activities. It is also important to learn as much as possible about what could go wrong so we can avoid factors that might result in accidents. Amateur Radio activities are not inherently hazardous, but like many things in modern life, it pays to be informed. Stated another way, while we long to be creative and innovative, there is the need to act responsibly. A good attitude toward safety also requires us to be knowledgeable about common safety guidelines and follow them faithfully. There is no substitute for common sense. RF Safety Although Amateur Radio is basically a safe activity, in recent years there has been considerable discussion and concern about the possible hazards of electromagnetic radiation (EMR), including both RF energy and power frequency (50-60 Hz) electromagnetic fields. Extensive research on this topic is underway in many countries. This section was prepared by members of the ARRL RF Safety Committee and coordinated by Dr. Robert E. Gold, WBØKIZ. It summarizes what is now known and offers safety precautions based on the research to date. All life on Earth has adapted to survive in an environment of weak, natural low-frequency electromagnetic fields (in addition to the Earth's static geomagnetic field). Natural low-frequency EM fields come from two main sources: the sun, and thunderstorm activity. But in the last 100 years, man-made fields at much higher intensities and with a very different spectral distribution have altered this natural EM background in ways that are not yet fully understood. Much more research is needed to assess the biological effects of EMR. Both RF and 60-Hz fields are classified as nonionizing radiation because the frequency is too low for there to be enough photon energy to ionize atoms. Still, at sufficiently high power densities, EMR poses certain health hazards. It has been known since the early days of radio that RF energy can cause injuries by heating body tissue. In extreme cases, RF-induced heating can cause blindness, sterility and other serious health problems. These heat-related health hazards are called thermal effects. In addition, there is evidence that magnetic fields may produce biologic effects at energy levels too low to cause body heating. The proposition that these a-thermal effects may produce harmful health consequences has produced a great deal of research. Preprinted from the Chapter 9 of the 1997 ARRL Handbook for Radio Amateurs, Copyright 1996 American Radio Relay League, Inc. New Technologies In recent year s the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a small inexpensive computer called the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is about the size of a credit card, but yet is a fully functional computer. It has a HDMI monitor output, 2 USB ports, a network interface (optional), SD card slot, audio output jack (no input, but does work with external usb audio interfaces for input). The Pi also has a GPIO interface (General Purpose Input Output), which should be of great interest to hams, because it can be used to interface to external hardware such as relays. All this for a whopping $35 dollars with the network interface (Model B and B+). The Pi uses a 700 MHz ARM processor with a Videocore 4 graphics processor capable of Blu-ray playback. The system runs of 5 volts using

5 a USB power supply that connects via a Micro USB jack. The Raspberry Pi primarily uses Linux kernel-based operating systems. The ARM11 chip at the heart of the Pi is based on version 6 of the ARM. The current releases of several popular versions of Linux, including Ubuntu., [60] will not run on the ARM11. It is not possible to run Windows on the Raspberry Pi. The Pi at this point is a highly experimental device and is not comparable to your quad core desktop PC. So, why should hams be excited about the Pi. Due to it s small size and low power it makes an ideal embed-able computer to be used as a controller. The GPIO makes it ideal for interfacing to hardware like relays or knobs. Maybe interesting for Antenna controllers, repeater controllers, APRS repeaters, D-star hotspot controllers, etc. The implications for SDR use are also interesting. You could potentially couple a Softrock RXTX, Pi, 12v / 5V power supply, usb wifi dongle, and a usb audio dongle in a small case. You could then stick a cheap used Android phone on the front as a color display. The phone could get video via WiFi using VNC and audio out using Skype. So. for less than $200, you could have a self contained SDR radio in a small case with a touchscreen. Stick a PSK31 program on the Pi and then us would have a small portable QRP rig for digital. CS7000 A NEW MULTIPROTOCOL RADIO by CSI USA This radio is defined for the Amateur Market and will have an introductory price of $249. Capable of doing DMR, NXDN, DPMR, P25, ANALOG, D- STAR, AND FUSION Protocols. This radio is built to commercial standards and will cover commercial Frequencies. The first version will ship with Analog, DMR, and D-STAR protocols with future firmware updates allowing other protocols There ll just be firmware upgrades with which you can add features.! On the CS7000 the (firmware) software is open source, that Hams will evolve the kernel to make it increasingly more powerful to add industry standard protocols. The primary microprocessor is a STM32F405VGT6. This is an ARM Cortex M4 32 bit high speed microprocessor The second microprocessor is a DVSI 3000R. This microprocessor uses a TMS320F2811 core and is dedicated to executing the AMBE and AMBE +2 Vocoder formats and other algorithms (!!) CSI planning on is releasing a single radio that will do both modes of analog and digital. New expected Delivery is January 2014 (CSI update

6 28/10/2014) ICOM INC. ANNOUNCES THE IC-7851 ITS NEW FLAGSHIP HF/50MHZ TRANSCEIVER IC-7851 Icom Inc. Japan announces the IC-7851 a new flagship HF/50MHz 200W Transceiver, the series-production version of the IC-7850 (limited edition) which offers a number of improvements over the IC Home Brew Idea Did you know you could make your own 30 ft. pushup pole for less than $40? All that s needed is two stainless steal metal hose clamps and three pieces of 10 ft. EMT Metal Conduit in the diameters listed below: 1 inch, 1 ¼ inch, and 1 ½ inch YAESU FT2DR C4FM/FM 144/430 MHZ DUAL BAND DIGITAL TRANSCEIVER FT2DR Yaesu Introducing a New Digital Portable C4FM FM 144/430 MHz Dual Band Transceiver Easy operation with large touch panel display Built in High Sensitivity 66 channel GPSS Dual watch & Dual Monitor Shipping early 2015! These parts can be found at Lowes or Home Depot For Sale or SWAP This space is reserved for anything amateur related you want to sale, swap trade, buy or get rid of. FT2DR System Fusion compatible FM digital operation with AMS (Automatic Mode Select) New 1.7-inch high resolution touch screen display 700 mw Loud and Clear voice technology Modulation F1D F2D F3E F7W 7.4V Weight 310 g Receiver frequency range = A (Main) Band MHz / MHz / MHz / MHz (GEN1) / MHz (UHF) B (Sub) Band A not SW Band & FM Broadcast. For additional information on the radios mentioned above check out the link below.