Sparc

At the previous week’s meeting, many people built EFHW kits and untangled some wire to use with them. No one finished the build and brought them back, so I offered a quick demo of tuning such an antenna.

I connected my 49:1 unun that I’ve been using to a new wire we had hanging. We connected a handful of different analyzers to see how they operated.

Joined the Club

My membership was approved, so SPARC now has 146 members. Mark asked if I’m a climber. It sounds like lots of people chicken out about half way up when climbing the tower. When studying for my license, I didn’t commit a lot of the tower stuff to memory, since I didn’t expect to be involved in that sort of thing.

Ham Fest in York

SPARC will be at the Ham Fest in York with some “ham junk” for sale. Ralph, from Radio Shack, bought Souders’ small hardware business, so he’ll have all those small accessories there. Testing will be available at the Ham Fest on a walk-in basis.

Other Programs and Notes

• Breakfast in Manheim, every 2nd Saturday, at City Star Diner.
• Mike is building fox hunt transmitter. Someone else is building a battery for it.
• Tech classes will start again, Maybe on Mondays. Someone suggested conducting a mock net for training.
• UHF repeater is working. Full-time tied to VHF.
• Field day is coming up soon at the club house.
• There may be room for me to help with website maintenance.
• Some people are going to Dayton Ham Fest.
• Trying to use Ham Club Online again to manage membership. It’s a database for ham clubs. Ares is on it.
• Balun Designs is a good source for durable hardware.
• HFQso runs nets for testing propagation.
• There’s an Appalachian Trail APRS Golden Packet event to pass an APRS packet the entire length of the trail.
• Podcast: Ham Radio Workbench
  • An old episode (1 year ago?) had Vance, N3VEM, doing rocket stuff.
  • I’m never going to finish my podcast list.
• I chatted with JJ, KC3QEH. I need to look into his POTA activations.

Club Net

I checked into the club net for the first time tonight.

I visited the K3IR tower site for their Elmer Night. People were configuring cameras and testing an ultra-portable FT8 setup:

• truSDX radio
• ft8cn on a phone
• very lightweight wire antenna and transformer kit
• an inexpensive, but super-long, fishing pole as a mast

(Now I need one of those fishing poles.)

I borrowed a soldering iron and started on my own project: assembling a couple common mode chokes from a short piece of RG174. It got dark quick, so I finished the chokes at home. It was my first time trying to crimp those SMA connectors.

I got a quick tour of all the repeater hardware. There are a lot more services running on these towers than I realized.

I attended the SPARC member meeting tonight and heard about lots of interesting plans. They have some fun events coming up, like a fox hunt, some antenna building to prepare for the fox hunt, and even some POTA outings. They’ll also start planning for field day.

The main presentation was about the recent Dry Tortugas DXpedition.

I went home and sent my member application right away.