Fort Wayne Radio Club

Please plan on joining us this coming Friday night, February 21st, for the Fort Wayne Radio Club’s Feb meeting. We will be meeting at 7:00 pm at the Good Shepherd United Methodist Church at 4700 Vance Ave in Fort Wayne, at the intersection of Vance Ave and Reed Road, just south of Snider High School.

Our planned presentation for the evening will be the Fort Wayne Astronomical Society. They are currently working on an ambious project to build their own observatory. History of their club and the project will be discussed, as will interesting facts about our Solar System. (maybe they know what the sunspots will do….)

Before the FW Astronomical Society takes the floor, there will be a short discussion by Bill White, KB9YTR, on plans for the Save Maumee organization to highlight the river with a canoe trip from Fort Wayne to Toledo. Bill is working on an Amateur Radio connection to the trip, and is looking for help!

So if you don’t want to sit around on Friday and watch the rain fall, come on out to the club meeting for some fun and fellowship and possibly some out of this world facts!

If you haven’t paid your dues yet for 2014, the club meeting will be an excellent place to do it!

C U at the meeting!

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Although not too many hams seem to have been aware of it, for several years now repeater councils of many Midwestern states (including the Indiana Repeater Council) have been on a course to require that ALL coordinated repeater systems on all VHF and UHF bands require a CTCSS tone be present on the input to the repeater in order for the repeater to un-squelch and retransmit the received audio.

CTCSS, stands for continuous tone-coded squelch system, often called “tone” or “PL” (i.e. “Private Line,” a Motorola trademark); it is a sub-audible frequency between 67.0 Hz and 254.1 Hz that is added to the audio of the signal that is transmitted to the input of a repeater. In other words, the handheld, base station or mobile rig that is intended to operate through the repeater must have a CTCSS tone encoder installed in it. (Virtually all post-1980 built amateur FM transceivers have the capability built-in.) Detection of the sub-audible tone then satisfies the condition necessary to un-squelch the repeater receiver and cause the detected audio to be retransmitted. Often, the repeater also will transmit the same tone on its output, so that individual receivers, so equipped for CTCSS, will only un-squelch for the local repeater and not be bothered by occasional DX repeaters, spurious signals, noise and so forth.

This move is significant to anyone that operates a repeater system, since coordination is essentially mandatory. Although the FCC does not explicitly require that a repeater be coordinated, it does however always stand behind the coordinated machine if any kind of complaint is received. By virtue of this, if you do not have the blessing of the recognized coordinating body in your state, it is only a matter of time before you’re off the air! This implies that anyone with a current coordinated repeater pair could lose that status and another party could potentially “hijack” the frequency! We would hope that this could never happen, but it pays to be prepared.

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FWRC MEMBERS:

Join us for the February Board Of Directors meeting, this Tuesday, Feb 11, at 7:00 pm on the 146.76 repeater. Due to the crummy driving conditions, we decided that doing the BOD meeting from the comfort of our shacks would be easier on everyone if we just used one of our nice repeaters!

All are welcome to listen in!

The Fort Wayne Radio Club has postponed today’s Fox Hunt, the first of the season, one week to February 9th, due to the uncertain road conditions. Please join us in one week for the Feb Fox Hunt started for the last time from the parking lot of the Off Track Betting site in Fort Wayne, near the intersection of Lima Road and Washington Center Road, opposite the Gander Mountain store.

And don’t forget the BOD meeting on Tuesday the 11th, and the general meeting on Friday the 21st, with a presentation by the Fort Wayne Astronomical Society.

SKYWARN spotter training presented by the Northern Indiana office of the National Weather Service is scheduled to begin Tuesday, Feb. 4, in South Bend, with additional sessions at other locations planned for the following several weeks. The possibility exists that winter weather might force NWS to cancel one or more of the planned sessions. Recently, the NWS sent an email message to those who have pre-resgistered for a training session, to describe plans for communicating such cancelations. If you have not pre-registered for a training session, doing so here will assue that you will receive email notification, should weather force cancelation of that session. Below is an excerpt of the email message that NWS sent to people who have already registered:

The February 2014 Issue of the Allen County HamNews newsletter is now available for download using the link below. This and previous issues are also available for download by clicking the “Files” link in the main menu and then clicking “Newsletters.”

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Mike Powell of Tower Erection and Maintenance, Inc. replaces the antenna for the FWRC 146.91 MHz EchoLink repeater on the campus of IPFW. (WB9SSE photo)

The 20-foot long Cellwave PD-220 antenna atop the tower on Kettler Hall at IPFW was replaced on Wednesday, 22 January. The antenna does its thing launching and absorbing photons for the Fort Wayne Radio Club’s 146.910/.310 MHz EchoLink repeater. The existing antenna had been defective for over a year thus limiting the performance of the EchoLink machine.

It was COLD up there on the roof of Kettler Hall when Mike Powell and his crew of two from Tower Erection and Maintenance, Inc. started work around 10 a.m. They finished at 2:30 p.m. The task had been scheduled on numerous dates starting from right after Christmas until it was finally accomplished on the 22nd. It had to be rescheduled numerous times because of the less than moderate weather we have been experiencing here in Ft. Wayne for the last month or so. The temperature Wednesday morning was around 10 degrees F, but the wind was fairly low and there was no precipitation (at least not until 2 p.m. when we started getting some flurries).

Despite the best laid plans of mice and men (specifically Jim Pliett, K9OMA, and myself), ole Murphy struck. We had planned that the tower climbing task would consist of climbing the tower, removing the existing antenna from the tower leg, lowering it to the ground, removing the PL-259 to type N jumper cable from the base of old antenna, reinstalling it on the replacement antenna, hauling the replacement antenna back up the tower, reinstalling it on the tower leg, reconnecting the jumper to the transmission line at the top of the tower, and then climbing back down the tower. The intent being to minimize the time expended by Tower Erection Maintenance, Inc. since they charge at an hourly rate. Easy-peasy, ehh?

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Bidders at the January, 2014 FWRC auction. Photo by KU8T. See more photos.

This year the annual Fort Wayne Radio Club auction was held on Friday, January 17, 2013. There were 31 attendees who signed for an identifying number for the auction. The seven folks who came to watch and not participate in the auction activity did not need to take an identifying number.

The best news is that the club gained 8 new/renewing members during the auction. This resulted in an income of $130 for the club and $12 for ACARTS. One of those members used a one year free membership for taking a class sponsored by FWRC and passing the ham license test.

A father-son pair came to observe the auction, and left their contact information. They were seeking possible equipment (and ham radio information) for the son.

The auction benefit to the Fort Wayne Radio Club was a miserly $56.25 compared to past years. One of the participants (Dave Van Doorn, W9WEL) owes the club $20, and when that income is received the auction will have provided $76.25. The sum includes donations of $6.00 total from participants Tammy Preble, Scott Badders, and Jack Shutt.

However….

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