Central Missouri Radio

Association

July 1998

Greetings

Is it hot, or what ? Summer is definitely upon us, and looks like it's here to stay. In my opinion, one of the best things about summer is the chance to get outside and play with the radios. We did just that over Field Day weekend. Hope you got the chance to come out and join us. See below for a write up on our Club effort. A good time was had by all. The next major Club event we need to concentrate on is the Hamfest, coming up on the 12th of September. There will be lots for all of us to do, but if we have the same amount of support from the Club as we did for Field Day, it will undoubtedly come off without a hitch.

July Meeting

The next Club Meeting will be held 7:00 p.m., Tuesday, July 14th, at Boone Electric Co-op. There will be a VE license exam session after the meeting, providing we have enough VE's on hand and any takers. I was told what the program would be, but unfortunately I've already forgotten. I also still have some video footage from Dayton, as well as from Field Day, and hope to show it at one of our next get togethers.

June Meeting

The biggest part of our June meeting involved planning for Field Day. Yours truly, WY0B, presided over the meeting, due to scheduling conflicts for KB0TCR and KC0BID. The only thing I forgot was that the " President du Jour" needs to pick up the key, so at 6:30 when I pulled into the lot, it finally dawned on me that we had no key. Two meters to the rescue ... I managed to find the phone number of our contact at Boone Electric, and she was gracious enough to come into town and open the doors for us. Thanks, R.A. ! Also, we had a very productive VE session after the meeting, which probably wouldn't have been as successful if we hadn't been able to get the doors open. It's pretty hard to copy CW or take written exams when your paper keeps blowing away (I know from previous FD's Hi), or when you're too busy swatting mosquitoes.

Club Breakfast

The next Club Breakfast will be held at Country Kitchens Restaurant on Providence Road on Saturday, July 11th, at 8:00 a.m. Hope to see a lot of hungry hams there. If there is enough interest and cooperative weather, we could also get up a FoxHunt, so if you have any direction finding equipment, bring it along. I have heard that several in the area have tried their hands at building up the offset attenuator that was featured in a recent 73. Should be a good chance to put them through their paces.

Club Station

The Club Station is open on Monday evenings (except the Monday preceding the Club Meeting) at 7:00 p.m. We had a great turn out June 22nd. We set up all the pc's and got the networking and keying of the CW station checked out, in an attempt to put off Murphy's affects as much as possible. It seems to have worked, as I think he over-looked us this year. He even forgot to order the annual Field Day storm. It was one of the busiest times I remember at the Club Station, in a while. There were about 12 hams over that night, and so much going on that it was hard to keep a train of thought.

C.M.C.P.N.

The Central Missouri Code Practice Net is still being held on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, at 9:00 p.m., and has been lasting about an hour. We are currently running about 12 WPM, but if you check in and request a different speed, the net will be happy to speed up or slow down. Thursdays net control and some regular check-ins often run a little late, so we may get off to a later start than planned, but if we are able to scare up any check-ins we will hold the net as soon as all are QRV. We are seeing lots of progress from the regular check-ins, so we will plan on continuing the Net for a while longer. If you have been waiting for a little extra incentive to work on the Code, hopefully your experience at Field Day was it. It's hard to decide to work on the Code and upgrade if you've never had a chance to operate on the HF bands. I know lots of people got their first real chance at FD, and it looked to me like all Ops had a FB time. Personally, I find 2 meters useful, but HF FUN ! Probably the biggest benefits of working on your Code with the Net are setting a schedule and keeping it, as well as what you might learn when the text is read back. If you don't have any idea what TNX, QTH, R, UR, QRT, QSY, etc. mean, it makes for a much tougher time passing the Code requirements. I'm sure some of the regular check-ins are truly amazed at the progress they have made. If not, they should be! Keep up the FB work!

Field Day

By all accounts, the 1998 CMRA Field Day effort was a huge success. The log is just waiting on some final touches before it gets sent in to the ARRL. Here are the "semi-final" results:

From the 2A CW and Phone stations:

band CW QSOs CW pts SSB QSOs SSB pts

160 0 0 0 0

80 30 120 0 0

40 89 356 27 54

20 151 604 156 312

15 61 244 75 150

10 38 152 13 26

50 0 0 0 0

144 0 0 0 0

432 0 0 0 0

TOTAL 369 1476 271 542

( 2018 ) QSO points = 2,018 points

And from the Novice Station:

band CW QSOs CW pts SSB QSOs SSB pts

80 0 0 0 0

40 3 12 0 0

15 7 28 0 0

10 1 4 49 98

50 0 0 0 0

144 0 0 0 0

222 0 0 0 0

432 0 0 0 0

903 0 0 0 0

TOTAL 11 44 49 98

( 142 ) QSO points = 142 points

Our total score was

2A QSO POINTS 2018

NOVICE STATION QSO POINTS 142

%100 EMERGENCY POWER 300

(2A + NOVICE STNS)

MEDIA PUBLICITY 100

PUBLIC LOCATION 100

INFORMATION BOOTH 100

SATELLITE QSO(QSO WITH W9JZ) 100

NATURAL POWER QSO'S 100

TOTAL POINTS 2960

More important than the final score is the amount of fun and the chance for learning that we all had. I don't know about you, but I had a blast. A special thanks goes out to the people who were instrumental in putting together such a fine meal for us Saturday evening. The food was great, and the dinner helped get the attendance up to where it needed to be. The Club's hat goes off to Jesse, N0LCW, for his mastery with the grill, Sheila, KC0DSF, for all her pre-Field Day preparations, and Becky Brandt, for all her help, as well. The quote of the day from the kitchen area was "What does it mean when the Corn Sinks ???"

I don't think there was an idle rig throughout the contest, which means we had just about the right number of operators on hand. The Novice rig was taken off the air for a while late in the evening, but that probably had more to do with band conditions than a lack of operators.

40, 20, 15, and 10 Meters seemed to be in pretty good shape, but there wasn't too much happening on 80.

We had a pretty good assortment of antennas to chose from, with 2 beams, 2 verticals, and 2 wire antennas at our disposal. Inter-station interference was tolerable most of the time, but you could certainly tell when there were two stations on the same band.

I thought keeping all the rigs and operators clustered together added a bit to the fun. Seems we have usually kept the stations further separated in the past, but that seemed to isolate the operators too much, in my opinion.

We ended up running all the equipment on one generator after about twelve hours, due to one of the generators having problems with running rough and backfiring quite a bit. The second generator didn't seem to have any trouble under the full load we put on it.

Nathan, KB0NNV, provided two laptops for our logging efforts, and John, KB0PHQ, provided us with a desk-top pc. All logging was done using NA software. That program sure does a FB job. We probably weren't even using %50 of NA's capability. It will key the CW station and includes the networking, which we used, but it will also key the phone station if you have a Sound Card (Admit it, you're throat could tell if you had called CQ Field Day for much longer than an hour or two Hi), it will control the frequency of your rig (which would have prevented one little problem when we had the rig on one band and the software on another for about three Qso's), it will take spots off a packet cluster and put the rig on the frequency of the spot if you tell it to, it will control your rotor and point your beam at the spotted station if your rotor supports RS-232 control, and it even has a contest simulator mode which lets you practice CW contesting, no matter how bad the band conditions or antenna restrictions are. I'm surely leaving lots of neat stuff out. I think it is a great program (excuse the bias <grin>).

Viktor, KC0BYE, made the satellite Qso Bonus points for us, as well as providing some much needed late night operator relief.

Bill, N0MAM, lent his call to the Novice station (FB call, don't you know), as well as getting the media and info booth Bonuses for us.

The Natural Power Qso points came from Roy, AA0B, our very own Mr. QRP, who brought along a beam as well as his homebrew vertical.

Some welcome visitors were Jesse, WM0Y, and John, ND0N, two OM who have been very successful in past Field Day outings (as well as just about any other Club activity.) Glad to see you both! We also had the perennial visit by the KB0CDS / AE0S CW tag team. Always FB to see two operators take a seat and do it to it like Don and Dale do.

The only bad part about any Field Day, in my mind, is the tear down. Lots of fun putting it up; not so much tearing it down (after staying up the full 24 hours, plus change, Hi). Fortunately, we had lots of help this year, so all went well.

Some improvements we could make for next year are:

A.) Put in a 3A effort and use one station for RTTY.

D.) Anything else you can think of.

Renewals

Well, since over half the year has gone by, it is surely time to remind people to renew their membership in the Club. I was surprised to see the number of non-renewals so far. But I guess I haven't been harping on it as much this year as I did last year. If there is a check on your mailing label, that means the Treasurer shows your dues are paid. If there isn't a check, please talk to John, KB0PHQ.

73

Out of space, so better go QRT. This sure was an easy Newsletter to write, since there has been so much to cover.

CUL, de WY0B ...