Category Archives: Club News

Election Night – Home Brew Night – November 16, 2018

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It’s that time again! Time to elect your club officers and board of directors. If you cannot make it to the meeting, and want to vote by absentee ballot, please check out this post for more information. In addition, this will be our Annual Home Brew night. Bring whatever you have that you had a hand in — Designing, Building, Modifying, Ruining — all will count. Put something in writing next to your entry to let us know about what you did. Don’t be embarassed — be proud. Bring it! Our guest speaker this month will be our own Levi Maaia Ph.D – K6LCM. Levi will present an update from his attendance at the annual Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) International Summit held in October in Washington, DC. He will share updates about the repair status of the on-orbit radios aboard the station, new amateur radio technologies being developed for space and information on how you can make contact with the ISS using equipment you probably already have! The ARISS program is the longest-running experiment aboard the ISS. In fact, astronauts have been using amateur radio to contact hams on Earth since the Shuttle program. ARISS provides learning opportunities by connecting students to astronauts aboard the ISS through a partnership between NASA, the American Radio Relay League(ARRL), and the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT) The partnership also includes other amateur radio organizations and space agencies in Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe. ARISS educational outreach programs inspire students in the U.S. and worldwide, to pursue interests and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) through Amateur Radio. Levi’s PhD research at UCSB focused on STEM education in high school settings including student participation in ARISS. He is founding member of the ARISS-US Education Committee. SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, November 16, 2018 at 7:30 PM Goleta Union School District Board Room 401 North Fairview Avenue in Goleta We hope to see you all at the meeting! Post expires at 11:00pm on Friday November 16th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

SBARC Election: November 16, 2018

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At the General Club Meeting on November 16, 2018, the Club membership will have the opportunity to elect the 2019 SBARC Board of Directors.  Members must be in good standing for at least 28 days prior to the election in order to be eligible to vote. Expired memberships may be renewed online. The SBARC Nominating Committee has submitted the following slate of nominees for consideration by the membership. Additional nominations may be made from the floor by any member in good standing prior to the vote being taken at the November 16th General Club Meeting.   Nominees for the Executive Committee These candidates are presently running unopposed. (i) = incumbent candidate President and Chief Executive Officer: Brian Milburn, K6BPM (i) Chief Financial Officer: Tom Saunders, N6YX (i) Secretary: Dorothy Oksner, K6DSO Nominees for Director At Large Members may vote for up to 4 directors. (i) = incumbent candidate (i*) = currently serving on Executive Committee Director At Large: Ken Alker, KA6KEN (i) Director At Large: Wayne Beckman, AF6GX (i*) Director At Large: Michael Taylor, K6RQV (i) Director At Large: Rick Whitaker, KG6VLB Director At Large: Darryl Widman, KF6DI Absentee Voting: The official SBARC ballot is available by clicking here. We hope you can make it to the meeting, but if you can’t for some reason, we still hope you will cast your vote by absentee ballot. Here is the procedure: Download and print the ballot. Make your selections, sign and date it at the bottom of the page. If you have a scanner, please scan the document and save it to a PDF file. if you don’t have a scanner, take a clear digital picture of the completed ballot. Send either the scanned ballot or photo of the ballot by email to the Club Secretary, Wayne, AF6GX at secretary@sbarc.org. Please note, if you are submitting your absentee ballot by email, it must be received by 11:59 PM on November 15, 2018.  Of course, you can also send it by regular mail to the address below. Please make sure your ballot is received by November 15th. Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club, Inc. Post Office Box 3907 Santa Barbara, CA 93130-3907 Submitted to the membership by this duly appointed Nominating Committee in accordance with the SBARC Bylaws: Levi C. Maaia, K6LCM Michael Taylor, K6RQV Post expires at 1:00am on Saturday November 17th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting – October 19th 2018

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Our speaker this month will be Orv Beach W6BI with assistance from Eric KG6WXC. They will bringing us up to date with everything that is going on in mesh networking. There have been a lot of changes in the past year, and while a lot of us have mesh nodes deployed, most of us have not kept up with the latest news. Orv has presented to us before, and he is a good speaker and has good presentations. This will be a very informative meeting. We will also open the nomination period for next months election for club officers and directors. The nominating committee, Levi K6LCM and Michael K6RQV, have put together a slate to fill the seven positions, and we will accept nominations for any additional candidates until next months meeting and we start voting. SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, September 21, 2018 at 7:30 PM Goleta Union School District Board Room 401 North Fairview Avenue in Goleta We hope to see you all at the meeting!   Post expires at 11:56pm on Friday October 19th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting – Friday September 21, 2018

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At this months meeting we will have a presentation on 3D printing. Several club members have developed an interest in this in recent weeks and purchased new (and inexpensive) 3D printers. These printers are great for printing almost anything! Several members have printed items for amateur radio and a few are already into 3D modeling using 3D Cad programs. There are many resources on the internet for learning and lots of tutorials on YouTube. If you are not into designing your own 3D models, there are well over a million drawings available for download, ready for printing! We’ll be bringing samples of our efforts to show and and have a slide presentation. Have you ever needed a knob for a radio or a special part for something? Print it! Come to the meeting and we’ll show you how easy it is to get started.   SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, September 21, 2018 at 7:30 PM Goleta Union School District Board Room 401 North Fairview Avenue in Goleta We hope to see you all at the meeting!   Post expires at 1:08am on Saturday September 22nd, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting August 17, 2018. – DMR Revisited

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SBARC now has numerous members with DMR radios, but many have not yet quite gotten the hang of how DMR works and have not yet been able to enjoy the full capabilities of the DMR network. I have been asked several times recently about the possibility of having DMR be the topic of a club meeting, so I thought this month might be a good time to have one. Now that a lot of members have radios and have had at least some exposure to DMR, I think another meeting to go over the numerous capabilities of DMR might help clear things up for a lot of people, and get a few more people interested in jumping on board. We’ll also demonstrate and explain some different kinds of “hotspots” that you can set up at home and basically operate your own tiny, low powered DMR repeater. So bring your radios, and bring your questions! Post expires at 8:00pm on Friday August 17th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

SBARC Annual Bazaar – This Coming Saturday, July 21, 2018

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The annual SBARC Bazaar will be held this year on Saturday July 21, 2018. Setup will begin at 06:00 to 07:30 with selling to begin at 08:00 and continue to 11:30. Donated equipment that has been collected throughout the year will be sold to raise funds for the club. There will also be a consignment area where you can bring items you want to sell if you like and the club will accept a 10% “commission” from those sales. The Bazaar this year will be held in the parking lot at the Club Station in the Red Cross parking lot. It will be fun to have it “at home” again this year, and the Club Station will be open during the entire time. The Red Cross building is located on the corner of State Street and Alamar. The parking lot behind the main building, and the entrance is on Alamar. We will need help and people with pick-up trucks and/or hand trucks to move the equipment and set things up and clean up afterwards. Sales people are also needed. Please contact Brian K6BPM at k6bpm@sbarc.org if you can spare an hour or two. Your time will be greatly appreciated and it is for a good cause! Post expires at 12:35pm on Saturday July 21st, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

Field Day Report From Ken KA6KEN

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Dear SBARC Members, I would like to thank all those who attended Field Day this year.  The turn-out was fantastic. Elings Park was a bit cold and we never did see the sun, but perhaps that was better than hot and dusty (isn’t it amazing how it went from cold and overcast two weeks ago to 107 degrees last week)? We had two stations running (plus the Get-on-the-Air, or GOTA, station).  We used our K6TZ call for the primary two stations and K6SBZ for the GOTA station.  Our class was “2A” and our section was “SB”. We assembled and installed the massive Force-12 antenna on a rotator atop the 50′ pneumatic mast on the Rover along with an 80-meter dipole, we set up the two-element StepIR on a push-up mast (that was a feat) along with a 40/80 meter dipole, and we erected three fiberglass masts with guy ropes to support a G5RV multi-band center-fed di-pole antenna as an inverted-V at about 30′ at its center-point. Our total score was 2,236, comprised of 553 QSO’s (multiplied by 2 since we used less than 150watts for all QSOs) plus 1,130 bonus points.  For more details (like bonus points break-down), click here and download the file called “ARRL Field Day Entry Form as submitted.pdf” (note you must add the Total Bonus Points to the Claimed Score for the final score).  If you want to find out more about comparative scores check out the ARRL web site for last year’s scores; this year’s scores will not be published until November.  Also, check out the ARRL Contest Soapbox by clicking on and selecting “2018 ARRL Field Day” in the Event drop-down for pictures and comments people have posted regarding Field Day – they are still streaming in. The band conditions were not as bad as predicted.  We actually had some pretty solid runs.  In fact, the team of Dennis WB6OBB and Jim N6SXB managed a rate of 128 QSOs per hour, at their peak!  While Dennis is a seasoned contestor, this was Jim’s first; Jim was logging for Dennis.  Congrats to the dynamic duo!  Now if we could only sustain that rate, we would have scored 12,288 points in 24 hours across the two stations (including our 2x multiplier for running on emergency power).  We all have something to work toward next year! We made 273 QSOs on 20 meters, 214 on 40 meters, and… Continue reading →