Club meeting to feature preparedness program

FRS radioPlease plan to join us this Friday, April 11th, at the Good Shepherd United Methodist Church, for the April meeting of the Fort Wayne Radio Club. The church is located at 4700 Vance Avenue, just south of Snider High School (see map below). Our program for the evening will be on Neighborhood Emergency Prepardeness and will be presented by Joseph Lawrence, K9RFZ, who has organized his neighborhood to be connected by Family Radio Service (FRS) Radios for communications in the event of an emergency.

We will have a club business meeting as well. We are at 111 members now, the highest level that we have been since the late 80’s!

See you there!


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SDR, vintage radio talks highlight upcoming meetings

We have two noteworthly meetings this month, both of which it will be worth the effort to attend!

The first is the ACARTS meeting on Tuesday, March 18th (tomorrow) at 7:00 pm at the Salvation Army. The presentation will be on MDSR, which stands for Modulation Demodulation Software Receiver. The MDSR is a way to add a SDR or Software Defined Receiver functions to an existing older receiver! In essence, you use an SDR at the IF or Intermediate Frequency of an existing radio. Pretty cool stuff?

The second is the FWRC meeting on Friday, March 21st (this coming Friday) at 7:00 pm at the Good Shepherd United Methodist Church. Our presentation this time will be by Jack Shutt, W9GT, on Vintage Radio. Join us to remember Radio’s past roots, when the real radios glowed in the dark and kept the shack warm through the winter!

Directions and maps to both meeting places can be found in the Allen County Ham News for March, which is a free download at WWW.ACARTS.COM or WWW.FWRC.INFO

March fox hides in Harlan nature preserve

Photo of fox hunters at nature preserve entrance

The March foxhunt kicked-off from the Ft. Wayne Safety Academy parking lot at 13:30 hours on the 9th of the March. This was the first instance of starting hunts from locations other than the Off-Track-Betting Parlor. The weather was cold but clear, and substantially better than the weather the week prior, the originally scheduled date for the March hunt.

Eleven hunters showed up at the Safety Academy site consisting of the team of Jim & Annie Pliett, K9OMA & KA9YYI along with Carole & Al Burke, WB9’s RUS & SSE, the team of Steve & Linda Nardin, W9’s SAN & LAN plus their grandson Alex, the team of Kim & Jim Machamer, KB9’s DOT & DOS, and the team of Charles Ward, KC9MUT, Fred Gengnagel, KC9EZP and new foxhunter Jeff Brady, KC9ZGN.

Dave Spence, K9NDU and Bob Dean, KC9UHU provided the role of the fox for this hunt, and they were ensconced out in the Herman Hammer Wald Nature Preserve, part of the ACRES system of preserves, close to the intersection of Rupert and Hurshtown Roads northeast of Harlan. Dave & Bob utilized a cubical-quad for the high power fox, and microcontroller controlled 30 milliwatt emitter for the hidden (micro) fox. The micro-fox was hidden in tree branches at about six feet off the ground, and both it and the high power fox emitted on 146.430 MHz.

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Joint ACARTS and FWRC board of directors meeting planned

Please be advised that the boards of both ACARTS and FWRC will have a joint meeting this Tuesday night at 7:00 pm at the Salvation Army (location of ACARTS meetings).

73, Steve, W9SAN

PS: March Fox Hunt this Sunday at 1:30 pm starting at the Public Safety Academy on the south side of Fort Wayne. Fox is on 146.430 FM Simplex, intercom on 146.76 repeater.