The Illuminator

September Meeting

The next regular meeting of the Carbon Amateur Radio Club will be held on Thursday, September 20, at 7:30 p.m. at the EOC in Nesquehoning.

New Officers

At the August meeting, new officers were elected for the 2001-2002 year. Our new officers are:

President	–	Goody, K3NG
Vice-President	–	Rob, KB3BYT
Secretary	–	Larry, N3CR
Treasurer	–	John, W3MF
At-large Directors	–	Bob, K3PH John, K3CT Bert, W3OWP

From the President’s Desk

By Goody, K3NG

This month we welcome in a new set of officers to lead the club in the coming year. I’d like to thank our outgoing officers, especially Larry, N3CR, and Bob, K3PH, for their hard work.

The Club has a long history of service to the community and brotherhood within the amateur community. I want to continue this tradition and strengthen the club in the coming months. In recent years, attendance at the meetings has dwindled. We’ve been in the typical club Catch 22, you can’t get the members out unless you have a good program and you can’t have a good program if there aren’t members attending. We also have a lot of members or former members who occasionally attend operating events, but don’t attend meetings.

Things are different today. People work longer hours, or so it seems. Free time just isn’t as plentiful as it was in the past. Family should always come first and work comes second. Hobbies, like ham radio, come in third. We all have limited time for doing what we enjoy as hobbies. Clubs are meant to enhance your ham radio experience, teach you new things, and enable you to meet new people. When a club fails to provide these things, it not longer makes sense to devote what limited time you have to something that isn’t providing a return on your time investment.

I have identified several issues with the club and how I think we should address each one in the coming months.

1. Increase Meeting Attendance. There are two simple solutions to this. The first one is continue the “meal and meeting” events that Larry started. These have proven to bring people out. The second is programs, programs, programs. Again, we have the Catch 22 to contend with, but we have to work with what we have.

2. Advertise and “Sell” the Club. We have several local media outlets to let people know what we’re doing. Cable classifieds come to mind. We need to continue newspaper coverage of events. Also, we should take advantage of free newspaper classified advertising where available. Last, every free bulletin board in Carbon County at a restaurant should have a CARC flyer on it. Get the word out.

3. Operating Events. Members love to operate. Instead of talking about what you do in the shack, just do it and do it with other members. Show others what events and activities you like to do, get the new members interested and involved. This doesn’t just have to be limited to contesting? Do you like satellites? PSK31? Invite the club to your QTH for an event!

4. Volunteer. Do whatever you can, no matter how small your contribution is. What you put into this club will be returned to you tenfold in enjoyment of this great hobby. I’d like to open or re-open several positions to encourage this.

Operating Events Chairman – This person will be in charge of identifying things like contests, shack visits, and anything ham radio related that club members could participate in, as a team in competition, or a casual social event.

Communications Chairman – This position, which we’ve had in the past, will be “reinitialized.” The Communications Chairman will be responsible for all media, flyers, and other communications to the public.

Meeting Program Chairman – This chairman would identify and arrange meeting programs.

Public Service Chairman – The Public Service Chairman will be tasked with coordinating events such as the annual March of Dimes Walkathon we participate in.

5. New “Excited” Members. There are potential members lurking out there. They are subscribed to our email reflector. They’re listening in to the net, but don’t check in. There are check-ins who we haven’t heard from in a long time. There are non-hams who are interested and just need to find out about CARC. All of the items I describe above are the key to this. We should not, however, strive to make this a large club. We just need new blood and interested people who want to volunteer. The more people we get, the less everyone has to volunteer. The more volunteers, the more we can do and attract and keep new members. Once we reach a certain number of volunteering active members, we will no longer need to actively pursue new members – the Club will be self-sustaining.

Neither I, nor the officers, can do this alone – we need your ideas and help. Let’s roll up our sleeves and have some fun.

Goody K3NG

Brandenberg Amateur Radio Operator Scholarship

By Rob, KB3BYT

Amateur radio operators learn some hard-core basic training in electronics and communications and computers just to get a ticket into the hobby. This early training is recognized as the exact type of person that colleges want to fill engineering classes and will go as far as paying for FULL scholarships. Check out the Texas Instruments training ground college and their scholarship package.

Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science Scholarship Award. The Brandenburg Amateur Radio Operator Scholarship is being offered as a renewable four (4) year scholarship. The scholarship amount will be $6,500 a year payable at $3,250 a semester. The first use of this scholarship will be to pay all tuition and fees. Any remaining money will be issued as a cash award to cover the cost of books, room and board.

Applicant must be a licensed Amateur Radio Operator. Applicant must be intending to enroll or currently enrolled in one of the following major fields of study: Electrical Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering or Computer Science.

More info can be found at /www.utdallas.edu/dept/eecs/scholarship.html

Congratulations to…

Larry, N3CR, on becoming a grandpa again (they know what causes that now!).

Glenn, K3PP, who came in 9th place in the 2000 CQ Worldwide DX Phone Contest Single Op Assisted.

Bob, K3PH, who came in 10th place in the ARRL DX CW Contest Single Op Low Power.

Another Tool for Your DXing Tool Belt

By Goody, K3NG

HF beacons enable you to tell exactly what propagation is like across the globe in minutes. The Northern California DX Foundation has deployed a network of beacons throughout the world that are synchronized via GPS. Each transmits into a vertical antenna on five bands. The callsign is transmitted, and then four dahs are transmitted, each with different power levels. The first dah is 100 watts, the second is 10 watts, the third 1 W, and the fourth is 100 mW. This allows you to determine the quality of the propagation.

Each beacon is synchronized to UTC. The schedule below shows what beacon transmits at what time; the times are in minutes and seconds. The cycle is continuous; there are no gaps (other than W6WX on 18 and 24 MHz).

Country	Call	Frequency
Country	Call	14100	18110	21150	24930	28200
U.N. New York	4U1UN	00:00	00:10	00:20	00:30	00:40
Northern Canada	VE8AT	00:10	00:20	00:30	00:40	00:50
USA CA	W6WX	00:20	–	00:40	–	01:00
Hawaii	KH6WO	00:30	00:40	00:50	01:00	01:10
New Zealand	ZL6B	00:40	00:50	01:00	01:10	01:20
West Australia	VK6RBP	00:50	01:00	01:10	01:20	01:30
Japan	JA2IGY	01:00	01:10	01:20	01:30	01:40
Siberia	RR9O	01:10	01:20	01:30	01:40	01:50
China	BR2HK	01:20	01:30	01:40	01:50	02:00
Sri Lanka	4S7B	01:30	01:40	01:50	02:00	02:10
South Africa	ZS6DN	01:40	01:50	02:00	02:10	02:20
Kenya	5Z4B	01:50	02:00	02:10	02:20	02:30
Israel	RX6TU	02:00	02:10	02:20	02:30	02:40
Finland	OH2B	02:10	02:20	02:30	02:40	02:50
Madeira	CS3B	02:20	02:30	02:40	02:50	03:00
Argentina	LU4AA	02:30	02:40	02:50	03:00	03:10
Peru	OA4B	02:40	02:50	03:00	03:10	03:20
Venezuela	YV5B	02:50	03:00	03:10	03:20	03:30

A great program I use to track the beacons is DX Monitor available at http://www.benlo.com/dxmon.html. It synchronizes your computer clock to any time server on the Internet and provides a graphical view of what beacon is transmitting at any given moment on an azimuthal or mercator projection map. It also can be used to retrieve and collect DX spots and graphical display them.

For more information on the NCDXF beacons, checkout http://www.ncdxf.org.

ARRL Propagation Forecast Bulletin

Propagation Forecast Bulletin 37 ARLP037
From Tad Cook, K7VVV
Seattle, WA September 7, 2001
To all radio amateurs

Compared to the previous seven days, average solar flux rose Nearly ten points this week, but average sunspot numbers dropped about the same amount. There seems to be quite a bit of new activity emerging. Earth is exiting a solar wind, which brought planetary A indices to 17 and 20 on Monday and Tuesday. There were nine 3-hour periods out of the two days which had a planetary K index of four.

A new sunspot group number 9608 is emerging on the southeastern limb of the solar disk, and this could bring more flare activity and coronal mass ejections. The current outlook calls for solar flux to rise over the next few days, to 225 on Friday, and around 230 on Saturday through Tuesday. This would be a big change, because flux values have not been above this value since April 1. This could be an exiting fall DX season, and since solar activity will be declining, perhaps the best for years to come.

The current forecast shows a planetary A index around ten for the next ten days, but of course this could change.

Shel Shallon has a new version 2.02 of W6ELprop, and you can download it for free from http://www.qsl.net/w6elprop/. The new version has added some nice features, such as continuous scrolling (the spreadsheet doesn't stop at 0000 UTC, but you can now scroll backward and forward continuously).

Sunspot numbers for August 30 through September 5 were 138, 142, 153, 141, 168, 168 and 175 with a mean of 155. 10.7 cm flux was 199.2, 188.7, 184.1, 182.5, 198.7, 218.4 and 218.3, with a mean of 198.6, and estimated planetary A indices were 13, 16, 8, 7, 17, 20 and 10 with a mean of 13.

Carbon Amateur Radio Club

Regular Meeting Minutes

August 16, 2001

President, Larry Lilly, N3CR, called a regular meeting of the Carbon Amateur Radio Club to order at 7:36 p.m. on Thursday, August 16, 2001 at the Emergency Operations Center in Nesquehoning. Ten people attended.

The minutes were read by Bob, K3PH, and approved by the members in attendance.

Larry, N3CR, read the treasurer’s report in John, W3MF’s absence. At the last meeting, we had a balance of $804.94. We had receipts of $30.00 and disbursements of $4.76 for mailing the newsletter, $57.95 for a hardcover ARRL Handbook, plus $98.15 in expenses from our pizza party at Caruso’s in July, leaving a total of $674.08. The members in attendance approved the Treasurer’s report.

The ARRL Handbook that we are donating to the Slatington library in memory of Nancy Marsh, KF4TAA, has arrived. Glenn, K3PP, is doing an insert for the inside front cover, which should be available soon. When it becomes available, we will contact the library, as well as Patti Mihalik, as this should provide a good “photo op” for the club.

Larry, N3CR, reported on the issue of cell towers in Carbon County, noting that there is currently a moratorium on new towers in Jim Thorpe. Goody, K3NG noted that they should try to collocate services as much as possible to minimize the number of towers needed.

Election of officers followed. The following were nominated:

· Goody, K3NG, for President,

· Rob, KB3BYT, for Vice-President,

· Larry, N3CR, for Secretary,

· John, W3MF, for Treasurer, and

· Bob, K3PH, for At-large Director.

In addition, Bruce, N3RXJ, was nominated for Secretary, but he declined the nomination.

September 2001