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PARC Meeting March 19, 2019 19:00 Eastern

The next Palatka Amateur Radio Club meeting will be held on March 19, 2019. We are meeting in the First Baptist Church cafeteria. The entrance is in the side-building (where we used to meet) next to the church.

The door will be locked at 19:05. If you arrive after that, call on 146.52 and somebody will let you in.

See you there at 19:00 Eastern.

 

Month (possible!) Topic
March 19 N3RN – SSTV from the ISS
April 16  
May 21  
June 18 Field Day
July 16  
August 20  
September 17  
October 15 Officer Nomination
November 19 Elections
December 17 Christmas Party
January 21  
February 18

Technician Class April 5-7, 2019

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.

Repeater updates

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.

U.S.N.G Links

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