Category Archives: Club News

February 2016 General Club Meeting: Amateur Radio Mesh Networking

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Orville Beach, W6BI spoke at SBARC’s February General Club Meeting. Orville is a member of the Simi Settlers Amateur Radio Club of Simi Valley, Calif. who says he is now All Digital, All the Time! Orville spoke to the group about the success of digital mesh networking in Ventura County and encouraged Santa Barbara-area hams to join in the the fun of using 0ff-the-shelf wireless networking gear to create private IP networks using the exclusive ham allocation in the 2.4 GHz band. Listen to audio from his presentation below and learn more about the software his is using that is coming out of the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) Project.  

General Club Meeting – January 15th 2016

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Our January meeting featured a presentation from Theo, KK6YYZ. Theo’s presentation included a slideshow that illustrated the installation of a home emergency power generator and he went over all the various considerations necessary for proper installation. His presentation was also punctuated by some lively discussion on electrical equipment grounding, electrical codes, and other good questions. You can listen to the audio part of the presentation below: Post expires at 11:12am on Friday February 12th, 2016 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting Coming Up January 15th

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For the first Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club meeting of the year, the January 15, 2016 meeting will be a good one! One of our own members, in fact one of our Board members, Theo Howe, KK6YYZ, a local electrician by trade, will be giving us a wonderful presentation on “Installing a Home Generator system.”     Theo will be explaining: How to choose a system with features that are right for you Correctly sizing your Generator Permitting and Covenants Can I install this myself or do I need an electrician mckinney texas to sort this out? Choosing fuel type Interconnecting with your home electrical system There will be a Question and Answer period with Theo and Al Soenke, WA6VNN, a Past President of SBARC and one of Theo’s customers, who can speak from experience and will give valuable insight from the owner’s perspective. Our Club meetings are held at the Goleta Union School District, 401 N. Fairview Ave. in Goleta, right across the street from the Goleta Library. Doors open at 7:00 PM and the meeting starts at 7:30 PM. Bring a guest. Join SBARC or re-join SBARC. If your membership expired at the end of the year, this is the time to renew it for another full year of Amateur Radio fun! You may join or re-join SBARC by downloading the Membership Application or by filling one out at the meeting. Our annual dues are still only $24 per year. Post expires at 11:51pm on Friday January 15th, 2016 but will still be available in the archives.

Play Like the Big Guns – With Little Money

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Hello All, I decided to share the details of my HF station here on the SBARC website for a couple of reasons.  The primary reason is that maybe someone out there would find my setup useful in building their own station.  I am very limited by budget and space so I have to figure out ways of making the most of a little bit of everything.  For you HAMS that have $10,000 or more invested in your station, my little station will not compare to your capabilities.  Of primary interest in this article is my all-mode HF radio and the Pan-adapter setup. The first piece of the puzzle came into place about 2 years ago when I purchased the SDRPlay SDR (Software Defined Radio).  I got this before I even got my first ham license.  The radio itself is a marvelous piece of engineering.  It is a receiver that covers the range 100 KHz to 2 GHz continuously.  It has a great front end filter bank for anti aliasing. It samples at rates between 2.0 and 10.66 MSPS.  It has a 12 bit native ADC with a 60 dB SNR. Impressive specs for $150.  I originally was using this radio as a super scanner.  Its great for being able to browse around and see an 8 MHz band at a time.  It works well with all the popular SDR software packages out there, but it is married well with HDSDR.  The free HDSDR software can control the radio and performs all the demodulation you can imagine.  It handles AM, FM, SSB and Digital modes all in software.  It provides some impressive filtering capabilities including point and click notch filters.   You can read more about both by clicking on the following links;      http://www.sdrplay.com/           and         http://www.hdsdr.de/ After being a ham for about a year, I decided I wanted to play with HF.  Needing to stay small, in money and footprint, and after some missteps, I finally ended up with a neat little radio in the form of a Yaesu FT-857D.  This little radio does it all.  It is an all mode ham band 160 meter to 6 meter transceiver with 2 meter and 70 cm thrown in for good measure.  It puts out 100 watts on 160 to 6 meters and 50 watts on VHF/UHF.  Its small footprint made it an ideal choice for my needs. So, having these radios meant… Continue reading →

Chino Hills Swap Meet Changing Venues

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The old Chino Hills Swap meet is being replaced with other venues. The first one will be held at: Granite Creek Community Church 1580 N Claremont Blvd Claremont, CA 91711 The swap meet will be held in the parking lot adjacent to the Church, and the sole sponsor is the Claremont Amateur Radio Society. Please be respectful of your surroundings because this swap meet is in a residential location. Date: Saturday, January 16, 2016 Time: 6AM – 11AM NO Entry Before 6AM $10.00/space All Participants must have vacated the area no later than 11:00AM, No Exceptions.

The Birth of FrankenHT

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As a result of the retirement of Dave – K6HWN, I recently volunteered to take on the Wednesday night Swap Net duties.  The Swap Net comes on every Wednesday night at 8:00 pm after the Club Net. Then Hayden – KK6OYV, expressed an interest in helping with the nets, so now I share this responsibility with him.  We trade off every other week.  I get to the 146.79 K6TZ repeater using the remote link through the 224.08 repeater on La Cumbre peak. My only 1.25 meter radio is a 5 watt HT from Wouxon, model KG-UVD1P.  Ok, so why this article? If you were listening to my net control debut last November 25, 2015 you would have heard a very well prepared novice net control operator.  For about 20 minutes.  Unlike most other nets, the Swap Net is a net that has the control operator reading for 30 minutes, with occasional breaks for other traffic.  That means I was asking my little hand held to do the job of a base station with all its heat sinks and fans and the like.  It did not like that one bit and expressed its displeasure by shutting down due to overheating.  I was frantic trying to figure out what to do.  To those listening, I just went silent in mid sentence. So, I had a choice.  I could go out and buy another mobile radio that covers 1.25 meters for about $150 to $250 or figure out a way to cool my little HT.  Since I’m trying to scrape up the money for a decent antenna analyzer, I decided to try to stretch my radio’s capacity for handling excess heat. I had a “battery saver” device from Wouxun that allows me to plug the radio into a cigarette lighter socket.  It was already becoming unusable because overheating caused warping of the plastic that supports the contacts.  This device supplies 12 volts to a circuit that converts 12 volts to 8 volts as well as conditioning to protect the radio.  Computer CPU fans use 12 volts DC to run them.  When I remove the battery from the radio there is a big magnesium body with two power connectors and several labels.  So, I thought a big heat sink and fan stuck on the back might do the job.  So, off to the local computer repair store to look for parts. CompuWest on Hollister,… Continue reading →