S.O.A.R.C. CLUB MEETING: 7:00 PM, August 22nd at the Fruitdale Grange (corner of Rogue River Highway and Parkdale).

Change of Meeting Location: Starting in June our meetings have changed to the 4th Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Fruitdale Grange, 1440 Parkdale (corner of Rogue River Hwy) in Grants Pass. Our holiday party will also be held at the Fruitdale Grange on Friday, December 22nd. In 2007 we will go back to the 3rd Tuesday at the Fruitdale Grange.

You can list your "for sale or trade" or "wanted" items in the newsletter. Send info to: W7PUP@arrl.net

For info contact Jan Moller, K6FM, Grants Pass, OR, tel. 541-474-5031.

Please help by sharing in the club operations cost by submitting your dues now. Individual dues are $15.00 and additional amateur family members are $7.50 each.

Membership Roster will now be printed quarterly to save cost, but an updated copy will be available on our website: http://www.qsl.net/soar/SOARC/Roster.html

If you do not have Internet access you can call to find out when your club membership due's are due: Call Treasurer John Stubbe, K7VSU, at 479-3718.

The K7LIX QSL Cards have arrived. They will be available at the August club meeting.

Jim W7PUP

SOARC Repeaters, K7LIX with autopatch on 146.640(-) and on 147.300(+)

SOARC ARES/NTS Net: Monday evenings at 7:30 p.m. on 147.300(+) repeater.

ORCA Swapnet - Wednesday evenings at 8 p.m. on the ORCA system.

Unfortunately details for the program at our August meeting were not available at the newsletter deadline. See you all at the meeting.

73, Dennis WA5KTC

2006 Complete ARRL/SOARC Licensing Exams:

The last two sessions will be held in the new SOARC meeting facility - the Fruitdale Grange, 1440 Parkdale Dr & US 99, Grants Pass OR. Sept. 22, 2006 @ 6 p.m. (VE's assemble); 6:30 p.m.

Test Session Dec. 9, 2006 @ 6 p.m. (VE's assemble); 6:30 PM Test Session.

As everyone can see we will serve up quarterly sessions once again. And as in the old days, they are on Fridays except of the last one, which is a Saturday due to room scheduling convenience.

Remember to visit the www.arrl.org website to get the latest information about testing, requirements, new changes that are coming down the pike. The website for Grants Pass exam schedules is http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/examsearch.phtml. If you will notice the right hand side contains lots of hyperlinks covering most of the questions about exam sessions. A copy of this completed schedule has been sent to the VEC and should appear at this site very soon.

73, Bill (WX7U), VE and Liaison.

That's it for August. For additional information on any of the above events contact.

W6IGK Elmer

Swinging to the oldest technology of radio, coincident with the announcement that telegrams no longer handled by Western Union, PaulNA5N wrote a nice historical article on telegraphy and early wireless messaging. It's available on the El Defensor Chieftain's Web site at http://www.dchieftain.com/news/59586-03-04-06.html (Thanks, Bob KI0G)

Free tutorials and info on a wide range of radio and electronics at http://www.radio-electronics.com

Would you like to learn more about radio contesting? Try http://www.arrl.org/contests and http://www.ncjweb.com

Want to get started with EchoLink? http://www.wx1der.com/elk.htm

From the Experts-Exchange (http://www.experts-exchange.com) March15th newsletter - Maybe this is what's wrong with TV weathermen: A new piece of software can tell the difference between colors. Developed by a colorblind electrical engineer, the software not only helps people who have difficulty distinguishing between colors, but also "helps normally-sighted users work more efficiently with complex color-based data representation." There's a beta-download at http://www.colorhelper.com.

When building a new gadget, sometimes you can't get ICs in anything but SMT (surface-mount) packages. When that happens, you'll need special boards to hold the chips or adapt them to convention through-hole boards. Nick WA5BDU likes the SMT proto boards from Futurlec. http://www.futurlec.com/SMD_Adapters.shtml. The "Surfboard" adapter boards and similar items from

Capital Advanced Technologies (http://capitaladvanced.com/products.htm) are available from Digi-Key (http://www.digi-key.com) and ham vendor FAR Circuits (http://www.farcircuits.net) has some similar boards as well.

For those of you that have been stuck in "Phone Tree Purgatory", Tim K3HX contributes this handy site: http://www.gethuman.com. The site has a long list of companies and methods of bypassing the usual phone follies to go straight to a live operator. You can also report your own discoveries and rate companies.

If you have RF noise entering your house (and shack) and being re-radiated on the power lines, Tom W8JI observes that it may be possible to "detune" the lines and stop the re-radiation. "I built a bypass capacitor with two 120VAC rated .01uF capacitors, each one tied from one side of the line to the safety ground, into a plug. I just moved that plug around to different outlets until I found one that detuned the power lines, and made the noise radiating from the lines in my house disappear. The noise virtually vanished even though I'm positive the source of noise several hundred feet away still remained." Make sure you use line-rated capacitors!

Here's an excellent on-line resource on microwave antennas - Paul Wade W1GHZ's online Microwave Antenna Book at http://www.qsl.net/n1bwt/contents.htm. (Thanks, Dave AD6A)

When you are looking for a particular IC, you can browse site after site looking for it or you can try http://www.findchips.com. FindChips will retrieve pricing and availability from several on-line vendors, making your shopping a whole lot easier.

73 W6IGK Elmer