ARC Shorts – April 2010
Newsletter and meeting announcement for the Alexandria Radio Club. Club repeaters and detailed info can be found at www.w4hfh.org Club Net: 147.315 (600 KHz, PL107.2) on Thursday’s at 8 PM local time Club Meetings: Second Friday of each month at 7:30PM at the Alexandria Fire Training Center. Minutes of the last meeting. First your VP and Program Collector must apologize to all and to our speakers for rushing them. As we missed our February meeting, I figured that we could host two programs at one meeting. What this did was to: 1 – Make for a very long meeting, 2 – Rush both speakers, 3 – Not leave time for our Field Day planning kick off and 4 – No report on the usiness of the club. Our first program was from Gordon, President of the Sterling Park Amateur Radio Club. SPARC sponsors the Virginia QSO party. Gordon gave us some good insight in to the contest, which plays, how to submit logs, and which clubs perform well and which clubs have not fared so well. I hope many of you took the hint and worked the contest. Don’t forget to submit your logs and make sure that you mark them as part of the Alexandria Radio Club so we get a better score this year. For those who worked the contest PLEASE send in your logs. Note that if you use WINEQF, the Cabrillo format is messed up you will have to port to a .txt file from WINEQF and edit the file to show the correct location identifiers and serials sent to you. Don’t forget to get those bonus points and multipliers’. The club voted to sponsor two awards for this contest this year. Our second speaker was Mr. Bob Bruninga WB4APR. Bob is the inventor of Amateur Position and Reporting System APRS. APRS uses packet radio to send both position and relevant information to provide the user situational awareness. Bob points out that this system is NOT so we can track each other but that we can attach information to that location and know what’s going on. Bob talked about having local repeater beacon information on the APRS 144.39 frequency that may tell travelers that they are welcome to use that repeater. Bob’s main program: however, was his use of solar electric cells to provide power for … Read more