April 98

Greetings

It's really starting to look like Spring, now, so many amateurs thoughts turn to some of the upcoming fun events. A couple that I'm really looking forward to are the Dayton Hamvention in May, and Field Day in June. The Club needs to sit down at the next meeting and think about our Field Day Plans. Any volunteers to be FD Chairman this year? I see via email that there are some changes to the rules this year. A potentially big one is the allowance to work stations on RTTY. Traditionally, RTTY has been lumped in with CW, so you could work a station once per band on Phone and CW or RTTY. Now, we can work the station on all 3 modes. I bet there will be a lot of RTTY activity this year. I don't know how successful we could be on RTTY, as it takes a pretty good signal to the other end and a fairly selective receiver on this end. It should be a lot of fun finding out. We also need to decide on a location for this year. In the past, we have set up at Rock Bridge State Park, Pine Ridge Trail Head, and Ellis Fischell hospital. I prefer CW at sunrise in the woods, myself.

April Meeting

The next Club Meeting will be heldTuesday, April 14th, at the Boone Electric Co-op community room on Range Line Street. We will be starting at 7:00 p.m., and will hold a VE session after the regular meeting if there is anyone interested in taking exams (provided there are enough VE's on hand.) Dewey, WM0H, will be giving a short presentation on repeater ettiquete.

March Meeting

One of the topics of conversation at the last meeting was how the Club might improve attendance at some of the Club functions. It was felt that scheduling conflicts might be responsible for lower attendance at the Club Breakfasts. They have been held on the last Saturday of the month, but that is always a problem in November and December. Also, some of the semi-local hamfests fall on the last Saturday. It was decided to move the date to the second Saturday of the month. Hopefully, this will help attendance. It would also be gratifying to see more folks show up at the meetings and Monday evenings at the Club Station. The K0SI station is a nice resource, and it's a shame it's not put to more use. I was active during the WPX contest from there in March, and got lots of favorable comments on the nice signal it can put out. That beam at 80 feet really does a FB job! I ended up with 400 QSO's for the weekend.

Another topic discussed was the need for a volunteer to help Perry, N0NMC out with the Hamfest this year. John, N0EG, has since offered his help and will be the new Chairman. He has been in contact with Perry and is looking forward to this year's event. Let's all pull together to make this Hamfest as much of a success as the last one ! It also came to our attention at the last meeting that the Boonville Club has formed a Rag Chew Net on their repeater at 8:00 p.m. on Fridays. John, KC0BID, gave a nice program on economical homebrew antennas. He also mentioned that there was an interesting homepage for J-pole antennas on the Web at http://www.sedan.com/jpole . Ben, KB0RNH, also showed us a homebrew quad antenna he has used for Fox-hunting. (Speaking of which, when do we want to put on the next Fox-hunt? Any takers for after the May Breakfast?)

Club Breakfast

Speaking of which, our next Club Breakfast will be Saturday, May 9th, at 8:00 a.m. We meet at Country Kitchens Restaurant on Providence Road. Always great food and better conversation. This will be the second Saturday, as mentioned above. Hope to see you there.

Club Station

The doors to the K0SI Club Station are still getting opened on Monday evenings, thanks to John, N0EG's mastery of keys and combination locks. If you haven't been to the station in a while (or ever), make plans to drop in and have a cup of coffee and an eye-ball QSO.

General Classes

The General Class is well on it's way. We have had 4 out of 5 sessions already. We will not hold class this Tuesday to avoid a conflict with the Meeting. This will give everyone the chance to take exams if they feel ready for a try. We need to be sure we have enough VE's on hand, as I have already heard of a couple of people who want to give it a shot. We will start holding code practice on the '76 repeater in a couple of weeks.

In the Mags

QST had some items of interest this month. I particularly liked the articles on high speed CW and meteor scatter, Volksrtty (this might be useful in Field Day this year), and a nice article about bringing an old Zenith radio back to life. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten through the 73 yet, as I was sidetracked on a book I came across in the library this month. I was surprised to find " The New Shortwave Propagation Handbook", put out by CQ Communications in the stacks. This book was a real eye opener on some of the finer points of HF operation, and was a quick read. The earlier chapters were very informative.

On the Air

It looks like the HF bands will soon be getting a lot more productive. The smoothed sunspot number has really been climbing, lately, and several people have mentioned more favorable conditions on the bands below 30 MHZ. Cycle 23 should start taking off nicely in the near future, and should soon be filling in our log books with DX.

Ten-Tec Offer

In the interest of promoting kit build-ing among amateurs, ( not to mention promoting a few bucks into the old company coffers <g>), Ten-Tec has come up with a special offer for ham clubs on kit purchases. I mentioned this on the air a time or two, and was surprised by the amount of interest expressed. Ten-Tec is offering a %10 discount on all Club orders of $500 or more, and they will pick up the shipping. I'm interested in the 10M-2M Transverter kit for $139. ($125 with discount), which allows you to get on 2 Meters ( 10 watts out) with all the modes, bells and whistles you're favorite HF rig provides. Plus it should be fun to build!

73

Well, that pretty much does it for this time around. Until next time,
73, es CUL OM/YL,

de WY0B ....

P.S. KC0BID is hoping to work MIR,but is having trouble coming up with a suitable rig. He would be interested in borrowing any loaner UHF equipment anyone may have sitting around gathering dust.