Please join us on Friday night, September 18th, for the Fort Wayne Radio Club’s general meeting. It starts at 7 p.m. at the Good Shepherd United Methodist Church at 4700 Vance Avenue in Fort Wayne, just south of Snider High School. It will be a busy meeting with the following topics:
1.) FWRC T-Shirts. If you ordered one, it will be there. Plus, we have ordered some extra shirts if you would like to buy one.
2.) There is a lot to discuss on repeater topics. We will be taking a vote on antenna repairs for the Robison Park 146.76 MHz repeater. The top antenna has been acting very poorly, so we would like to replace it and keep the 76 at top performance.
3.) Our high-profile repeater project is being considered. We have decided that the 146.94 MHz machine would be ideal to move to the WLDE Parrot Road site, if the club votes to go ahead with this project. This would give us an ARES machine that has great coverage of northeasternio Indiana. Included would be the D-STAR machine from the Masonic Temple. We would move this to have wide coverage on digital, plus give us much easier access to the system.
4.) On the systems at IPFW, we need to remove the ATV repeater because the school is placing a LPFM radio station on the tower. At the same time, we would like to have the 91 antenna placed onto the extended side mounts that we picked up from the Parkview tower take down. This should give us better coverage for 91. We are also working on a receiver de-sense issue there as well. It has been suggested that we move the ATV system to the Parkview site and make it run with 432 output as well as input, to get away from the 902 MHZ metering system interference and allow easier access to ATV.
5.) We will also have our “Home Brew” contest during the break. If you have an amateur radio item you have built yourself, either recently or in the past, please consider bringing it along to show.
6.) Another important club activity is nominations for club offices. The election is next month at the meeting. It is OK to self nominate if you are interested in serving the club. Please think about it; clubs need a good turnover of officers to keep things interesting!
7.) We will have the Fox Hunt Chronicles, from this weekend’s hunt.
8.) ARES needs more operators for the Fort 4 Fitness events on September 26th. We need about 25 operators to provide good coverage.
9.) We’ll have a report on the INPOTA operation! Good fun, we need to do it next year.
10.) The presentation will be by Charles, KC9MUT, and Jim, KB9IH, on new uses for the those inexpensive SDR (software-defined radio) dongles.
11.) We need to ask for the club’s ideas on fund-raising raffles, etc, for the new high-profile project.
Whew! A lot to do, a lot going on in ham radio for the FWRC. See you at the meeting.