What’s happening at SBARC? Here you will find the latest club news, events, projects, net activities, and news from our special interest groups (SIGS).
Be sure to check in frequently so you don’t miss out on any of the interesting things going on with the club and its members!
We have moved content for the Technical Mentoring and Elmering Net here, and content for the Digital Modes Net here.
This year our Annual Bazaar will be hosted by Santa Barbara Electronics Supply.
Come look at all the cool electronics gear and accessories your local amateur radio club is selling! Support our public service efforts and emergency communications infrastructure!
When: 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM, July 22 2017
Where: Santa Barbara Electronics Supply, 1503 Cook Place, Santa Barbara, CA
Located behind the Airport Control tower, on the ocean side of Hollister
All proceeds benefit the Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club, a 501(c)(3) non-profit public benefit corporation which operates solely on member dues and contributions from the community. We are a wonderful community of helpful people, and we (and Santa Barbara Electronics Supply) appreciate everything you can do to support us!
Post expires at 12:00pm on Saturday July 22nd, 2017 but will still be available in the archives.
SBARC General Club Meeting
Friday, July 21, 2017 @ 7:30 PM
401 N. Fairview Ave. in Goleta
Imagine sitting in your living room using an inexpensive hand-held radio and making crystal-clear, static-free contacts throughout California, the United States, and the WORLD! This is not only possible, but it’s easy to do using Digital Mobile Radio (DMR). And, we’re doing this now, right here in Santa Barbara!
This month, SBARC hosts a special presentation by Michael Rickey, AF6FB on the new and quickly growing DMR digital voice mode. Michael will give us a demonstration on how DMR works and explain how the PAPA system is supporting a build-out of DMR repeaters in Southern California, making it easy to stay connected to the network throughout our region.
DMR is unlike most other digital voice modes used on VHF/UHF FM in amateur radio as it is supported by several major radio manufacturers including several low-cost imports commonly used by amateurs. You can click here for quality industrial products at fair rates to ease your manufacturing process. DMR networks can be accessed from repeaters here in Santa Barbara and also through home-brew and professionally built hotspots. You can get on the air with DMR with a Tytera MD-380 HT for as little as $80 and access thousands of talk-groups around the world and even chat with fellow SB hams dabbling in digital on our very own SBARC DMR talk-group.
Win a new TYT MD-380 DMR radio!
Most DMR repeaters can access the same talk-groups available on any other repeater. So no mater where you travel, you can radio
home. DMR also uses TDMA to support multiple users per FM repeater pair and at 12.5 kHz wide, it is far more efficient than traditional analog wide-band FM.
We will be raffling off a BRAND NEW TYT MD-380 DMR radio. Someone will go home with this on meeting night, so come early and buy your tickets!
SBARC General 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. Put the date on your calendar and bring a guest!
Live camera view from UC San Diego’s High Performance Wireless Research & Education Network (HPWREN) looking west from Santa Ynez Peak
As a reminder, all amateurs are welcome to participate in ongoing discussion about the Whittier Fire on SBARC repeaters. Please keep transmissions short (less than 10-15 seconds) unless you have urgent traffic. Always yield to stations with urgent traffic and leave long pauses between transmissions for breaking stations.
The County of Santa Barbara is posting official updates on the Whittier Fire on its website.
Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club repeaters on Santa Ynez Peak remain on the air. The 145.180 MHz repeater on Santa Ynez Peak is presently linked to 146.790 MHz on the Santa Barbara Mesa. These linked repeaters are functioning as the club’s main channel for communications related to the fire.
For live updates from radio amateurs observing the fire and monitoring emergency frequencies around the county, listen to a live audio stream of SBARC’s linked repeaters.
Air Command tactical frequencies with local air tanker traffic:
These frequencies are simplex so an external antenna will help with reception.
Air Tac 02: 169.150 MHz FM
Air Tac 05: 167.950 MHz FM
– Levi, K6LCM
SBARC will be holding our Field Day exercise beginning Saturday, June 24th at the Club Station at the Santa Barbara American Red Cross headquarters on the corner of State Street and Alamar. The Club Station will open at 9am and remain open as long as there are Field Day participants.
We have various capabilities available including HF and digital modes. If there are enough participants, we may also set up the Rover and add some additional capabilities there too. Please come by, stay awhile and make some contacts.
If you haven’t been to the Club Station before, it is on the parking lot level in the rear of the main building. You enter the parking lot on Alamar.
Post expires at 12:00pm on Sunday June 25th, 2017 but will still be available in the archives.
We’ve had difficulty getting presenter this month because of vacations etc, so we’re going to have a couple of demonstrations of new things we have added to our repeaters and infrastructure. We’ll also have plenty of time for general Q&A, suggestions, ideas, whatever. So come and be heard!
We hold SBARC Club Meetings at the Goleta Union School District, 401 N. Fairview Ave. in Goleta, right across the street from the Goleta Library. Doors open at 7:15 PM and the meeting starts at 7:30 PM. Bring a guest!
Post expires at 11:00pm on Friday June 16th, 2017 but will still be available in the archives.
Image from W3PGA.
Amateur radio operators were among the first to design products, build and maintain a digital RF tracking system. APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System), is a digital communications protocol for exchanging information among a large number of stations covering a large (local) area. Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, a senior research engineer at the United States Naval Academy, implemented the earliest ancestor of APRS on an Apple II computer the early 1980s. The first use of APRS was in 1984, when Bruninga developed a more advanced version on a Commodore VIC-20 for reporting the position and status of horses in a 100-mile (160 km) endurance run.
Over the years, Legacy Landscape is helping out people to avail an exhilarating landscape experience.With that note we should also be aware that APRS has grown to include thousands of amateur radio APRS stations around the world tracking all types of vehicles and reporting weather from backyards to mountain peaks. SBARC has been a supporter of APRS, maintaining an i-gate and digipeaters for the system at our repeater sites.
Today, commercial systems that function similarly to APRS are tracking many types of assets around the globe. The SBARC Telecommunications Services Committee also collects data from some of these systems including AIS for ships at sea and ADS-B for aircraft.
Check out SBARC’s mapping and tracking systems:
This page contains information from Wikipedia.
The SBARC Telecommunications Services Committee has been hard at work rebuilding the club’s Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) repeater systems. As part of the completion of the second phase of this project, the 70cm repeater VoIP playground is now open!
Both AllStar Link and EchoLink systems are supported for incoming and outgoing link connections on the K6TZ 446.400 repeater. Local amateur stations can control the node over using DTMF commands to link to repeaters around the globe.
Many hams may be familiar with EchoLink and IRLP, two mature ham radio VoIP systems that permit node-to-node and node-to-conference server connections. AllStar Link is a newer and very powerful radio linking system based on the open source telephone PBX software Asterisk. The AllStar network has grown tremendously over the past few years and lends itself very well to experimentation.
There is a new section on this website with a short primer on the new VoIP system including complete documentation of the DTMF commands used to control the 70cm node. Read more and start experimenting in SBARC VoIP playground!
Thanks in particular to Ludo, K6LUD for his work to become our resident AllStar Link and Asterisk guru!
