Fort Wayne Radio Club

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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A two-page flyer for the 2014 Fort Wayne Hamfest is available for download, printing and distribution. Use the link below.

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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.

Minutes of the February, 2014 FWRC general meeting are available as a PDF file by using the link below. Please note that these minutes contain a correction that did not appear in the March, 2014 issue of Allen County HamNews.

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The March 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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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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