SEKARC In The Park

The August meeting of the Southeast Kansas Amateur Radio Club was held today in Lincoln Park. It was a beautiful day and we had 4 stations set up and on the air! The park was busy and the weather was cloudy and about 72 degrees. There was BBQ smoke in the air and we almost got some free Chicken Mary's chicken!

Thanks for coming out !!

SEKARC at the JARC Hamfest 2015

This past weekend was the annual Joplin Amateur Radio Club Hamfest. Once again JARC put on a fantastic show that provided thousands of shoppers, vendors everyone a great couple of days of ham radio swapping and shopping! The SEKARC sold pretty much all of it's donated gear for a very nice total proceed that will be donated to the club treasury!

Leon N3LRH had some gear from a ham in Fort Scott and did very well as he moved most of that equipment on to new owners. Joe WØMQY, Jack WDØCFH, Steve WDØDTS, Bill WBØLXZ and a few others and myself, Jeff KAØEGE were there and/or helped with the booth. I was about 30 seconds too late on my hunt to buy a good HF rig for a back up when it was sold right before I was about to offer.

Portable Go Bag - Nice Setup

Randy K7AGE always does great work, check out this setup for the Yaesu 817, or similar sized radio. I know several of our members have one so this might be interesting for you!

Simple Tape Measure DIY Antenna

I ran scross this on Romel's KEØAKO facebook page and I thought many of us would have been looking for something like this! I think we should explore building some of these at a meeting. We probably should not do any soldering but I bet we can come up with a method of doing some pre soldering before the meeting.

The club could use some of it's resources to obtain the materials. We would need to find out how many are interested in making one so we know what quantities we would need. The antenna would be great for foxhuning which is on our list of todo's for 2015. It might also be a fun participation activity at Field Day out at Big Brutus! This site lays it out pretty well. There are a lot of ideas and projects for building tape measure antennas so if you know of another good one then send it our way!

Check out the article at the link below....

The Tape Measure Antenna

Field Day 2015 - Big Brutus

Field Day 2015 is here! This Saturday and Sunday SEKARC will be on site and on the air from historic Big Brutus! This will be the 3rd annual SEKARC Field Day at the site and we hope to see all of you stop by and even stay for the weekend!

All are welcome, you can bring your own portable station out to setup or we will have stations setup for you to operate if you prefer! Last year we had to fight some thunder, lightning and heavy rain but the forecast for this weekend is spectacular!

New Activity for Amateur Radio - WSPR

The Weak Signal Propagation Reporter Network is a group of amateur radio operators using K1JT's MEPT_JT digital mode to probe radio frequency propagation conditions using very low power (QRP/QRPp) transmissions. The software is open source, and the data collected are available to the public through this site.

This looks like a fun new activity for hams. Even non licensed folks can listen? You will need a radio and USB type of soundcard like the Signalink USB. I set mine up with the FT-857 and with this software it has CAT ablility so it's pretty much hands free and let it run! The first day was a Satirday afternoon and I had good results. Several DX stations heard me and I heard them! I attached below a screenshot from day 1. After this screen grab I also reached 2 in Italy.

Technicians & 10 Meters - Build an Antenna

This is an excellent video, especially for new hams and Technician Class license holders because it shows you how to build and test an HF antenna for 10 meters and particularly the 10m portion where Techs can operate using CW, digital like PSK and phone (voice). The 2nd video shows you how to tune the intenna and a nifty formula for calculating how much to take off of length!

Interesting story, my first HF contact was on 10 meters, voice and I had a QSO with a ham near Chicopee Kansas. WØKEU Keith Retzer so my first HF QSO was about 3 miles in distance!! This is a great video for making and testing various componenets and can be used for other bands just by changing the length of the wire!