Monthly Newsletter of the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club

Transcription

1 September, 2010 Monthly Newsletter of the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club Inside this issue: Per undas ad astra de N4BCD 1 Maximum Permissible Exposure 2 Boatanchor of the Month 2 Program and Project Managers 3 Area Local Nets 3 Huntsville Area Repeaters 4 HARC Calendar 5 Connecting with the Local Ham Community Simulated Emergency Test 6 Club Officers President Mark Brown, N4BCD Vice President Tom Hatter, K4AKC Secretary Tom Duncan, KG4CUY Treasurer Heath Thorson, KC4HRX 6 de N4BCD Antenna hanging days are getting more comfortable from the sweltering summer, but they re also shorter. Are you ready for Fall and the start of contest season? Contesting. In the Ham community the word evokes a range of emotions from disgust, to excitement, to apathy. There s the 75m phone ragchewer who s upset that his frequency is taken over for the weekend. There s excitement for the operator who wants to test his equipment and operating skills against others. There s apathy from operators who simply don t care one way or the other. We re also moving into National Preparedness Month and an upcoming ARES SET drill. More on those in other columns. How does contesting fit with these activities? Simply put, contesting helps operators become better communicators. In a contest, skills such as being able to copy callsigns right the first time are perfected. Operating endurance, or realizing the station layout could be improved with better ergonomics enables one to operate with better efficiency or longer hours in an emergency. Elliott Brown KF5HYZ age 16 bitten by the radio bug during K4BFT Field Day is shown here running stations on 6m as a guest operator at N4BCD in last summer s VHF contest. Equipment is stressed. A contest will put a duty cycle strain on equipment such as power supplies, transmitters, amplifiers, baluns and such which might not be found until, according to Murphy, its needed most. To some it s about the score. To others it s a chance to make progress toward WAS or DXCC. Every individual decides how much effort they ll put into a contest. Some operate every allowable hour while others will devote only a few minutes from a busy weekend schedule. But one result for all of them is this accuracy & speed of communications are sharpened. Contest season runs all year with the most popular time being the fall / winter season we re approaching. To help introduce newcomers, we re going to open the K4BFT shack on those Friday nights where major contests begin at 0000 GMT (7PM CST). Stop by and watch, learn, and get on the air while elmers are there to help. Be prepared. 73, Mark Brown, N4BCD President

2 Page 2 Maximum Permissible Exposure (MPE) An Interesting Post from N7OH on QRZ.COM A while back, when I was dreaming about where to put my antennas safely, I did a lot of research about radio frequency exposure. I poured over OET Bulletin 65, which details the FCC's limits on human exposure to RF electromagnetic fields. They have formulas and tables and forms to fill out. It is all wonderful and fine, if you live in the 1960s. Welcome to the 21st Century. We live in a world of computers to do all that number crunching for you. I looked around for any web-based things that would help, but the closest I could find was the power density calculator written by W4/VP9KF. This is fine if you want to do it for EVERY band on EVERY transmitter each time you make a change to your station. To make a long story short, I decided to write my own web application that would do all the work for me. Because it is a web application, I can share it with everyone else. Here it is: N7OH RFE Calculator. I have gotten a lot of praise for it so far among my friends and was urged to push it out to a wider audience. I hope it does as much for you as it has done for me. It use HTML5's local storage capabilities, so you must be using a fairly new browser (Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 5.?, IE 8, etc.) It saves all your data on your computer so my server doesn't need to save it for you. This means no login so it is even easier to use. The basic premise of the calculator is that you have transmitters, antennas and connections. Transmitters each have one or more bands, defined by power, mode, and usage. Antennas each have one or more bands defined by gain. Connections connect the transmitters to antennas and are the place where losses get factored in: tuner loss, transmission line loss, etc. Add these all together and you get to see some detailed results about your station. radio/rfe/rfe_calc.html Boatanchor of the Month By Tom Duncan, KG4CUY From time to time the stumbles across a vintage piece of electronic equipment which in some way embodies notion of the ham colloquialism boatanchor, and is so deserving that it begs to be named Boatanchor of the Month. There are no fixed criteria for being a boatanchor, much less Boatanchor of the Month all is left to the whimsy of whoever submits the article. Some months there may be no boatanchor at all. This month s entry was last seen in public at a HARC auction, where it appeared a shown to the upper left. The carpentry of the blue wooden case and the assorted knobs (or lack of thereof) gave away its homebrew origin. It turns out this is a regenerative VHF receiver covering portions of 28 MHz through 117 MHz in five bands. It does a great job receiving wideband FM signals, including the erstwhile analog TV sound channels 5 and 6 and the entire FM broadcast band. While the FM phone portion of 10 meters is covered, that seems to be wishful thinking, since narrowband signals generate very little output when the regenerative stage is used as a slope detector. The details of this resurrection might become the topic of a HARC program some Friday. Until then, be content with the preview of the newly-painted front panel of this radio, now sans blue box, to the lower left. It will appear again at a HARC meeting ones of these days.

3 Page 3 Program and Project Managers Madison County Emergency Coordinator Field Day Chairman Fundraising Coordinator K4BFT Club Station Trustee Picnic/Food Coordinator Public Service Event Coordinator Training/Education Coordinator Publisher Website Designer Rolf Goedhart,, K4RGG Tim Williams, K4AEE Tim Williams, K4AEE Tom Duncan, KG4CUY Peggy Bell, K4EGB Charlie Tedder, W1CST Jack Hemby, W5WQQ Tom Duncan, KG4CUY Joshua Babb, KD7HLX Area Weekly Nets Northeast Alabama 6m Net (ragchewing) Weeknights 9:00 pm Madison County Emergency Training Thursday 7:30 pm Lauderdale County Emergency Training pl 100 unknown Lawrence County Emergency Training pl Thursday 7:45 pm Limestone County Emergency Training Thursday 7:00 pm Lincoln, TN County Emergency Training Monday 6:30 pm North AL/Southern Middle TN Training Thursday 8:00 pm Please send any additions or corrections to mark.n4bcd@yahoo.com Upcoming Events Saturday, September 18 - HARC will support the All You Can Eat Century Ride with 2m communications between the Start/Finish, the rest stops, and rescue vehicles. Contact Tom Hatter k4akc@arrl.net if you re interested in helping out. The Huntsville Amateur Radio Club is holding weekly Technician-grade Amateur Radio License Classes beginning Friday, September 24th and ending Friday, November 5th. Classes will be held at the Red Cross Building on 1101 Washington St. in downtown Huntsville, sessions running from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm. Tests will be administered on Saturday, November 6th at 9:00 am at the Red Cross: those passing the test will receive their Amateur Radio License from the Federal Communications Commission promptly thereafter. Classes are free of charge, although a text is suggested. For more information contact Jack Hemby, W5WQQ at jhemby@knology.net.

4 Page 4 Huntsville Area Repeaters Freq PL Call Location Sponsor Notes WB4TUR Monte Sano WB4TUR ACN & local coverage KK4AI Brindley Mtn. MARA W4ATV Monte Sano TVATV /NARA ATV Voice Coordination D539 WA4NPL Monte Sano WA4NPL WA4OUE Green Mtn, WA4OUE W4TCL Elkmont MARA Linked to via Echolink N4HSV Monte Sano NARA Regional Patch/ARES W4VM Weeden Mtn. MARC DX Backup N4AZY Monte Sano N4AZY WD4CPF Brindley Mtn, NARA Regional Patch K4RSB Monte Sano Hsv/Madison Cty EMA RACES KB4CRG Brindley Mtn. KB4CRG Regional Patch/SKYWARN W4QB Monte Sano NADXC DX reporting / KC4HRX Monte Sano KC4HRX N4HSV Monte Sano NARA W4TCL Brindley Mtn MARA Linked to and KB4CRG Drake Mtn. KB4CRG Linked to Albertville KM4ON Capshaw Mtn. KM4ON Temporarily down W4VM South Hsv. W4VM W4HSV Monte Sano NARA Regional Patch, Remote Base KS4NZ Mathis Mtn, NARA South Huntsville KD4TFV Monte Sano KD4TFV Regional W4XE Green Mtn. W4XE Remote base, emergency power (temp. down) W4XE Monte Sano W4XE KB4CRG Drake Mtn. KB4CRG Remote base, regional

5 Page 5 S E P T E M B E R S U N M O N T U E W E D T H U F R I S A T 5 6 Labor Day Hamfest Workers Party with Charlie Emerson, N4OKL Business meeting and short program economics of an SK estate sale N4BCD 4 11 WAE DX Contest ARRL Sept VHF QSO Party 12 WAE DX Contest Hands-on radio with KG4CUY s Icom All-You-Can-Eat Century bike ride ARRL 10GHZ & Up Test QSL Card Night Tech class #1 25 CQ World Wide RTTY Contest 26 CQ WW RTTY Contest O C T O B E R S U N M O N T U E W E D T H U F R I S A T 3 Crow Mountain Hill Climb 1 Business Meeting, Tech Class # Program: Icom 7000 & Ham Radio Deluxe w/k4jch & K4OEY. Tech Class #3. 2 CAVEC License Exams, Red Cross, 9:00 am. Crow Mountain Hill Climb. 9 Scandinavian Activity Contest, SSB Pennsylvania QSO Party Hands On Radio with Flex 5000; Tech Class #4 16 Boy Scout JOTA at Monte Sano 17 Boy Scout JOTA QSL card night; Tech Class #4 23 Stew Perry Topband Challenge Auction Night 30 CQ World Wide SSB Contest 31 CQ WW SSB Contest

6 Page 6 Connecting with the Local Ham Community We ve all probably run into a few local hams that have a time conflict with attending Friday night meetings. We might also be aware of some weekly gatherings of hams for breakfast, lunch, or din- ner ragchews somewhere in the Madison Count y Metroplex. If you re interested in growing your group and helping local hams connect to the community, send us an with your day, location, and meeting time for listing in the monthly. Simulated Emergency Test Hello from your Madison County ARES Assistant Emergency Coordinators! September is National Emergency Preparedness Month. As the weather gets better, let's start prepping our stations for the upcoming severe weather season. That includes testing all battery systems, antennas, and those corrosion-prone coax connections. As we are sometimes needed to help those in times of crisis, let's not let our own family's p l a n n i n g f a l t e r. contains many helpful tools to ensure our families and homes. Remember: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! The 2010 Simulated Emergency Test (SET) will be conducted on Oct We will run an exercise emergency net on the NARA N4HSV FM repeater, with the NARA WD4CPF and EMA W4HMC FM repeaters as back-ups. We will also check into the Alabama SSB net on 75 m and use PSK-31 or MT-63 on 80 m, plus check into the Alabama D-STAR net via the KI4PPF repeater to communicate between the Huntsville-Madison County EOC and the State EOC in Clanton. We will be part of a tri-state exercise involving Georgia, Alabama, and northern Florida, all of which receive major damage from a Category 4 hurricane making landfall near Pensacola. We expect to be handling formal messages for the served agencies that participate. The Huntsville NWS is considering participation, and if so we will activate the SkyWarn net on the WB4CRG repeater. The ARES group conducted training for the SET at their September meeting, practicing handling formal messages and use of the EMA s new D-STAR radios in a D-STAR net and in conjunction with the Madison County Emergency Net. The 2010 SET promises to be a good test of our emergency communications skills. The Madison County VOAD (Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters) is planning a "table-top" earthquake exercise in October as well, which Madison County amateurs will support. Tim L. Holland, KK5H Madison County ARES Assistant Emergency Coordinator Phone # September HARC Business Meeting Minutes The September 10th business meeting was called to order 15 7:30 pm by president Mark Brown, N4BCD, with 19 in attendance, plus a few stragglers later. An from Steve Conklin, AI4QR was read stating that the Bob Jones High School station has received a commitment for $1200 from the Rotary Club of Madison. The installation plan for the station has been signed off, allowing for the installation of antennas and equipment to proceed. Steve will let us know when the final go date arrives. Tom Hatter, K4AKC is heading up the All-You-Can- Eat Century bike ride, and will be in contact shortly with those who have volunteered to man rest stops, sag wagons, and the Madison County High School headquarters station to negotiate assignments.

7 Page 7 September HARC Business Meeting Minutes (cont d from p. 6) Mark announced that ARRL elections for division posts are upcoming, and that league members will be receiving ballots by mail. Paul Balance, KJ4NZM will again coordinate communications for the Crow Mountain Hill Climb October 2-3. Those desiring to help should contact Paul. Work to obtain for the club to a 501(c)(3) non-profit status is back underway. Mark s goal is to have this completed by the end of the year. The first step is to get advice from a CPA on the details necessary to proceed. Fundraising coordinator Tim Williams, K4AEE says money is available for 501 (c)(3) operations, which we might use to improve K4BFT. SAIC has inquired whether HARC could man a table at their upcoming Preparedness Fair scheduled for September 30th between 11 am and 2 pm at SAIC in Research Park. Anyone who wishes to volunteer may contact Ellen Ramsey at Mark brought up for discussion ways HARC might approach local youth as potential hams. Space Camp and Scouts in particular were mentioned. Several members (among them Tom Cash, Paul Balance, John Reynolds, and Steve Conklin) have experience with the Boy Scouts. A membership application was received from David Stephenson, KJ4OKJ, a General-class licensee from Decatur. Those present voted to accept David into HARC membership. Congratulations, David! It was announced by Mark that beginning this month business meeting minutes will appear in the, and will therefore not be read at club meetings. If errors are noted in the minutes published in the, these may be noted at the next business meeting following publication. Tom Hatter announced that he will be attending the TenTec Hamfest in Sevierville in two weeks, and on his way there or back intends to attempt QRP contacts on 70cm SSB from the second highest elevation east of the Mississippi, some 6600 feet. He will be using a 7-element yagi and will call on the SSB calling frequency. The meeting adjourned at 8:00 pm and was followed by a brief presentation by N4BCD on the economics of a silent key estate sale. ============== Submitted by Tom Duncan, KG4CUY, Secretary.