Franklin County Amateur Radio Club The home page is now also the place to find the latest club news. Click here for general information about the FCARC. News items below are posted with newest items at top of page. Old items will be moved to the News Archive page.

There will be a VE Exam Session this Saturday, May 19 at 2:30 p.m., held at 52 Old Depot Rd. in Putney. All are welcome to take exams at all levels, but please pre-register by calling Frank Hagerty, WK1L, at (802) 387-5639.

Note, the next regular FCARC-sponsored VE session will be in Northfield, MA, on Monday, May 28. More info on this one is posted below.

Phill, N1YPS, describes his "rigpod" invention in the Hints & Kinks column of QST for June 2012. Look on page 63.

The next club breakfast will take place starting at 8 a.m. Saturday, May 12, at Denny's Pantry, 469 Bernardston Rd in Greenfield. (Click here for a map.)

All are welcome, but please let Betty, KB1DCG, know by Friday whether you are coming so she can alert the restaurant about how many of us to expect.

The Club's annual spring picnic will be at the Smead's home in Hadley on May 19th at 1 PM. We need a head count by the 13th of May in order to purchase food, drink and etc. for the picnic. If you are not going to be at the May 12th club breakfast please contact Howard, N1LUP, or Chris, KB1NEK (for contact info click here).

For more information download the picnic announcment (pdf file).

The May picnic is also our May meeting, come to learn more about Field Day (we hope to have a Field Day-type station set up).

Because of the lack of snow days this year the Greenfield school year will be over before the traditional 3rd Monday of June when we would normally have our annual Business and Elections Meeting. Greenfield High School will not be available for a meeting on June 18. So this year the June meeting will be on the second Monday, June 11, starting at 7:15 p.m. (coffee and snacks at 7 p.m.)

Traditionally the E-Board met on a Monday, but in recent months it was moved to Tuesdays because one member had a conflict with meetings of another organization. However, that conflict has ended, and board meetings have been moved back to Mondays. The June E-board meeting will be held before the Business Meeting, at 6 p.m. in the usual room at GHS. All members are always welcome to attend E-board meetings.

Nominations and Elections: If you are an active member of the club (dues paid or a new ham enjoying a complementary membership year) you should have received a nomination form in the US mail recently, with a return envelope. The offices of President, Secretary, and one Director are elected in even-numbered years. The incumbents are Chris Myers, Bob Dickerman, and Belle Dyer, respectively. Nominations received early enough will be announced at the June picnic, but nominations can be made later by returning the nomination form you received by June 1st.

Officers and Members: Current officers are listed on the club website at www.fcarc.org/clubofficers.htm. Current members are also listed on the website at www.fcarc.org/members.htm.

Skywarn training sessions in our area are coming up:

Thursday May 31st, 2012: 7-10 PM:
22News WWLP-TV
1 Broadcast Center
Chicopee, Mass.
Taught by: NWS Taunton Forecaster
Registration: None Required

Saturday June 2, 2012: 12 Noon - 3PM
Hitchcock Free Academy
2 Brookfield Rd.
Brimfield, MA
Registration: Required. Email william.babcock@noaa.gov to pre-register.

There will also be a Skywarn training session at the site of the Boxboro Hamfest and New England ARRL Division Convention, Friday August 24th, 1 to 4 p.m. This is being done prior to the opening of the Hamfest and no admission will be charged on Friday for those interested in attending this SKYWARN Training session.

The SKYWARN Training Schedule for 2012 can be seen on the WX1BOX Southern New England Amateur Radio Skywarn website, www.wx1box.org/node/36.

The FCARC VE (Volunteer Examiner) team will hold an Amateur Radio License exam session on Monday, May 28. The session begins at 7:00 p.m., downstairs at the Unitarian Church on Main Street in Northfield (Routes 10 & 63).

The fee is $15 cash or check. Bring 2 forms of ID (one photographic), Social Security number, any current CSCEs & photocopies, any amateur radio license & copy, pens & pencils. A calculator is OK if it is cleared.

Walk-ins are OK, pre-registration is not required. However, it is helpful if we have an idea of how many candidates to expect and what exams they plan to attempt. Contact Al Woodhull, N1AW, phone 413-773-3522, e-mail n1aw@arrl.net if you expect to attend or if you have any questions.

For more information, including the schedule of future FCARC VE Sessions, please see the Amateur Radio License Exams page on this website.

* Yes we know May 28th is Memorial Day, but what a nice way to finish off your holiday weekend. Use part of your day off to review and get ready to get your Technician Class Amateur Radio License, or, if you are already licensed, upgrade to General or Extra Class license.

At the breakfasts, the picnic, and the annual meeting you may be asked to volunteer to help with coming activities. Please think about what you can do and sign up when the clipboard comes around.

Field Day: All are welcome to drop by at any time during the Field Day weekend, June 23-24 just to visit or to operate one of our stations. We will have a cw station, an ssb station, a vhf station, and a GOTA (Get On The Air) station for new hams or non-hams. But if you can give a little more time, volunteers are needed. We need help before the event planning and organizing to feed Saturday lunch and dinner, as well as Sunday breakfast and lunch. We need help putting up antennas and setting up stations on Saturday morning, and packing it all up again on Sunday afternoon. We need someone who can tow our trailer from its storage place to Poets Seat early Saturday, and back again on Sunday afternoon.

Triathlon: We will be providing communications for the Greenfield Triathlon again this year, on Sunday August 5. Because the covered bridge at Eunice Williams Rd was damaged by Hurricane Irene, the route will be very different this year, with runners following a loop course on the west side of the Green River and bicyclists following a different route on the east side. We expect to need more volunteers than in past years, and we may want to do some preliminary work to see how well our repeaters can be accessed from key locations. Start thinking about it!

Bridge of Flowers: The weekend after the triathlon is the Bridge of Flowers race in Shelburne Falls, and we'll be working this one too. You'll be hearing more about this one as the time gets closer.

The May FCARC Communicator is online here and in your e-mailbox now, coming soon if you get it by snail mail.

Now online here is the M.A.R.C. Frequency List. This is a VHF/UHF channel guide to be used for emergency communications in Franklin County. It lists all local amateur radio repeater and simplex frequencies.

The word has come from the FCC that licenses have been issued for two people who passed their exams at the VE session conducted by our club in Northfield on February 27.

Bill Horsch of Hinsdale, NH, passed both the Technician and General level exams. His new call is KB1WUZ.

Nina Martin-Anzuoni of Colrain, MA, is a new Technician: KB1WVA.

FCARC policy is to waive membership dues for the first year for anyone newly licensed through one of our exam sessions. Please welcome Bill and Nina if you hear them on the air or see them at a club event.

The FCC report released on Saturday February 25 lists the callsigns of the four local people who passed their Technician tests at the last session of the class conducted by FCARC members recently:

Julie Page KB1WTP
Caroline Shores Ness KB1WTQ
Gary Bunker KB1WTR
Tom Fydenkevez KB1WTS

The upgrade of Bruce Fuller, KB1TLX, to a General license is also now official.

Update Monday February 27th: At our regular VE session class participant Nina Martin-Anzuoni earned a new Technician license. And Bill Horsch of Hinsdale, NH, passed both the Technician and General tests for a new General License. Call signs will be posted when known.

Congratulations to all!

Belle, KB1NOG, and Miner, KB1NQK, both took and passed the exams for the General Class license last Saturday at the session sponsored by the MTARA and HCRA groups in Chicopee.

We also recently learned that Dan, KB1WEK, who upgraded to General in our November VE session, took the final step and upgraded to Extra at a VE session in Amherst last month.

Links to Internet information sources about software defined radio (SDR), the subject of Bob Solosko's presentation at the January meeting, are now online here. The link is ./Files/SoftwareDefinedRadioRefs.pdf.

This is a reminder that FCARC activities for the entire September-August club year are posted on the FCARC website Activities page.

You should check this page once in a while for updates about meetings and other activities. For 2012 the page now has information about the Technician license class beginning January 12th, the program meetings January 23rd and February 13th, and the Sleigh Bell Race on February 4th.

Also note that our "regular" monthly plan of meeting on the third Monday of the month gets disrupted by holidays and other events - for instance, the January and February 2012 meetings are not on third Mondays because Greenfield High School is closed on the Martin Luther King Day and Presidents' Day holidays in these months. We have also learned that, unless we have an unusual number of snow days this year, school will end before the 18th of June, and thus our Annual Meeting and Election of Officers has been scheduled for June 11th.

Changes made since the original schedule was published in the Fall are printed in red on the activities page to draw attention to the changes.

The KB1BSS 448.875 MHz repeater has had a problem of not passing audio to the transmitter for several weeks. The nature of the problem is such that you wouldn't notice it unless you could listen to the repeater while transmitting at the same time. Since the repeater is not heavily used it's not known when the malfunction started. As of 12/13 it is off the air - control components have been removed for testing.

December QST is out, and Field Day 2011 results are posted. Our entry under the call AC1L is listed on page 76. By your webmaster's count our entry is 178th of 344 entries in class 2A -- almost exactly in the middle. Apparently no errors were detected in our submitted logs, we are credited with 531 QSOs and 2,296 points, exactly as posted on this web page in July (note this is now in the news archive).

You can access a database of Field Day results on the ARRL website and select many different ways of seeing the results. For instance, you can see all entries in all classes from Western Massachusetts. Here you can see that the top entry in Western Massachusetts was the effort of the Hampden County Radio Association, in class 7A, and that the only other WMA class 2A entry was the combined effort of the M.I.T. and Harvard Radio Clubs, who have been at this far longer than the FCARC.

There is an interesting article on Ham Radio in the 21st Century in EDN (Electronic Design News): http://www.edn.com/article/519742-Ham_radio_in_the_21st_century.php. (Thanks to Yankee Clipper Contest Club mailing list for this info).

I'm hearing voices
They're all so soft and distant
but logged as five nine.
  -- Scott Andersen, NE1RD

(We don't normally steal items from the newsletter for the web page, but this one was irrestible.)