March 1998

Greetings

Well, it looks like we're just about through the worst part of the winter weather, and heading into Spring. In the past, we have been called out regularly during periods of severe weather to put our amateur radios into Public Service, primarily as weather spotters. We have been lucky in the past year or two, as the thunderstorms have been much less threatening than they usually were. Unfortunately, this has probably made us all more complacent and less prepared than we should be. Everyone is urged to get back into the practice of checking into both the Emergency Net (146.685 / 8:00 p.m.) and the Central Mo. Radio Net (146.760 / 9:00 p.m.), both on Wednesday evenings. This simple task does several things for all of us, such as keeping us all up to date on which machines we can get into, and from where; it allows us to train people to be able to assume the role of Net Control Station (during a crisis is definitely the wrong time for "training"); it helps us keep our equipment up to speed ( saying that battery / antenna / radio worked the last time you tried it is a little more reassuring if the last time you tried it was last week versus last year HI); and it will help us as a Club to work together better as a unit if we are all on a first name basis with each other. These are just a few of the benefits of regular check-ins to the local nets.

March Meeting

The next Club Meeting will be held Tuesday, March 10th, 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.)

February Meeting

There wasn't a lot of business handled at the last meeting. WY0B gave a short (mercifully) talk on the new Maximum Permissible Exposure (MPE) rules that all amateurs are expected to be aware of and comply with.

There was a bit of excitement during the VE session afterwards. Helen Enger passed her Technician written and earned a license, Victor (KC0BYE) passed his Advanced and Extra written exams and up- graded to Extra, and Ben Shelton (KC0BIB) passed his General written and 13 WPM code test, upgrading to General. Congra-tulations to all !

Ararat Hamfest

The Ararat Hamfest is coming up. It will be held March 14. I wasn't able to scrounge up any information on-line other than a contact name and number, so if you need any info, call Steve Dowdy, WJ0I, at 816-941-3208 or send him an email at sdowdy@qni.com . It is usually a pretty nice hamfest.

Also, you can't talk about hamfests at this time of year without mentioning "The Big One". Dayton is just around the corner (OK, it's not till May, but ...), and it's never too early to start dreaming or planning.

Club Breakfast

Our next Club Breakfast will be February 28th, at 8:00 a.m. We meet at the Country Kitchens Restaurant on Providence Road. Always great food and better conver-sation. Hope to see you there !

Also, while on this subject, it seems like there are lots of conflicts with the last Saturday of the month, with several holidays and hamfests falling on these days. Robert, KB0TCR, will be reserving the room for us in the future, and we might have better attendance if we pick a different weekend. Let Robert know if you have any thoughts on this.

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. We are very lucky to have a Club Station, and it's a shame we don't put it to more use.

On the Web

The Club homepage is at http:/www.qsl.net/cmra/ , thanks to Perry, N0NMC. One of the neat things about the page is the link at the bottom to "Amateur Radio Webring", several different ham radio homepages connected in a ring. I like to hit the "Random Links" button and see what page pops up. I check the homepage pretty often, and I'm often surprised at some of the random sites I get to from our page.

The PHD ARC also has a cool page. It is at http://www.tfs.net/~caltman/phdara/phdara.htm

General Classes

The General Classes will start March 17th (the Tuesday after our next meeting). They will be held at Boone Hospital Center in the cafeteria. If you are interested in attending but haven't let me know yet, drop me an email or give me a call (see header for number / address).

On the Air

I had a pretty good time on HF over the weekend, finding several spare hours to put in on the ARRL DX CW contest. I was on about 10 hours and ended up with 162 DX contacts. The SB220 amp seemed to make a big difference, because if I could hear them, I could generally work them. Toward the end of it, it got a little tiring digging one call after another out of the noise only to find I had already worked them. I'm sure this means that I need to improve the WY0B antenna farm. This shouldn't be too hard to do since I only have up a sloper for 20 and an inverted vee for 80/40/15 Meters. Now that I can run a little QRO I need to find a good beam that can handle it. Just wait till next time Hi!

The ARRL DX Phone contest is coming up March 7th & 8th and CQ WW

WPX CW is coming up March 28th & 29th. These would both be good ones to try from K0SI. Let me know if you're interested.

For Sale

Robert, KB0TCR, has for sale a Kenwood TS-850s with an MC-50 micro-phone in mint condition. This is an HF trans-ciever covering 80 - 10 Meters (not sure about WARC bands) and it puts out 100 Watts. He also has the manuals. If interested, give Robert a call at 573-446-2897 or email him at rmcminn@mail.coin.missouri.edu .

73

Well, that pretty much does it for this time around. Until next time, 73, es CUL OM/YL, de WY0B ....