Palatka Amateur Radio Club

We have been asked by Home Depot to return for their Fire Safety Day. This is held the first Saturday in October, which is weekend before Fire Prevention Week. We will plan on a similar setup. I will put more information here as it becomes available.

With the cooperation and support of the American Legion Burt Hodge Post 45, there will be a Technician licensing class April 5th, 6th, and 7th. The hours are Friday 1800-2100, Saturday 0900-1800, and Sunday 0900-1700.

The class cost $40 including the exam fee. The cut-off for registration is March 8, 2019. This allows some time for folks to do the pre-class ‘homework’.

Testing is scheduled to begin about 1500 on Sunday afternoon. If you plan on upgrading, please let me know so I can make sure we have a seat.

The ARRL article, and the SWLing Post blog which contains a link to a petition. You are encouraged to sign this petition if you feel WWV and it’s associated services are worth saving.

146.060+ 123.0
443.900+ 94.8

Vince, N6OA, is generously providing WIRES-X support for the 70-cm machine. WIRES-X access is digital-only. The repeater will still pass analog traffic, so those of you with analog rigs, please check the S-meter before transmitting. Also, because the duty-cycle has become rather high, the output power of the 70-cm machine as been reduced to 25W. This will allow a 100% duty-cycle without power drops.

On the 2-meter side, the new amp is in place. A bit about the new amp is in order.

It is fairly common knowledge that YSF repeaters are unable to maintain 100% duty cycle at full power. They start out at 50 watts, but as they heat up, the power is reduced to 25W. We see this when folks from St. Augustine, for instance, join our net, check in, but as the net goes on they stop hearing us.

We now have a Henry Radio C130AB10R amplifier doing the heavy lifting. Our DR-1X now puts out 5 watts, well within it’s capability. The amplifier is a 10dB system which, while capable of 100W, is only asked to provide 50. The hope, is that through not running anything full-on, we can extend the life of the entire system and have a more consistent operating experience.

This link goes to a FEMA page that contains downloadable, fillable pdf forms. At the bottom is a link to the ICS Forms Booklet which contains the complete collection of forms.

Remember we are particularly interested in

• ICS Form 211, Incident Check-In List
• ICS Form 213, General Message
• ICS Form 213 RR, Resource Request Message
• ICS Form 214, Activity Log

Here are the links from the U.S.N.G. presentation from the April 18th meeting. Each will open up in a new window.

[NB] Google changed the terms of their Map API so that it started costing folks a lot more to use it. As a result GMap4 site which we had previously pointed to shut down for free use. KF4SYZ graciously located another site that provides similar information and I have replaced the link below.

Once you are on the Mission Manager site, there will be a ‘Coords:’ dropdown where you should select ‘USNG’. At the top, make sure the ‘Grid’ checkbox is selected. From that point, you can zoom in up to a 100m grid. The pointer can provide 1m coordinates.

USNG Homepage
Convert Lat/Lon to USNG
Mission Manager mapping site.
General Information
Florida Incident Mapper

If you look in the upper right, there is a link to sign up for the announce mailing list. Anybody can sign up. This list is for upcoming club meeting, events, etc. This list is send-only. To reduce the possibility of spam, all replies go to trash.

We now have an official website! It will take a few days (weeks?(months?)) to get thing up and going so please bear with us.

Please send any content, updates, or corrections to either K1RBY or KF4SYZ.