SATERN Visits SEKARC

Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network was our guest today at the January meeting of SEKARC! Henry WØIR and Anna WØAJM Monton from Wichita, and Steve Lester KDØEKS and Mike Asselta KDØCDQ from the Kansas City area gave the group an informative presentation and tour of the Communication Vehicle. Loren KDØRTX and I KAØEGE are fairly new members of SATERN and a few at the meeting either signed up or expressed interest in the organization.

My SDR Adventure

CLICK to ENLARGE

Let's start with the good stuff... It WORKS great!

I ordered the SDR Bundle from NooElec and with the custom enclosure for the Ham It Up upconverter board and the adapter it was a little over $100. Careful because when you choose the bundle, it defaults to buying ALL of the extras which I did not need. But it's easy enough to unselect the extras. Bottom line price for the USB Dongle, Upconverter and Cable to connect the two is $79 I believe. Shipping was pretty cheap via USPS and I received the shipment in less than a week.

Very happy with NooElec, with my only complaint being that there are very little instructions or help on their site as most of my info was gathered elsewhere. The enclosure is nice, A little tricky to put together but looking back it was the easiest piece of this puzzle. I only had to switch 2 of the spacer nuts to get it to line up correctly in the enclosure and from what I hear on the interwebs, the case does a nice job of shielding the upconverter board. Next time I have the case apart I might test those web stories. Not sure why because we can all believe everything we read on the www's right?

Meeting Reminder Sat Jan 31

REMINDER - SEKARC Meeting Sat Jan 31 @ 9am

We will have a special visitor coming down from Kansas City for our meeting. The Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network or SATERN will be bringing down their newly revamped Communication Vehicle for the club to look at. Some of us are involved with the group and you can learn more and possibly find out how you can get involved!

Last year we had the Kansas RACES group visit and speak to us, and we are reaching out to ARES. SATERN is another option for those operators that would like to get in community service. So stop by, check out the radio truck! One new tradition is that we will start with the Pledge of Allegience! We are lucky to be living in the United States of America! We will be discussing some of our plans for upcoming meetings and overall plans for 2015.

Like past meetings we will have coffee, donuts and new this month... we are fixing up an egg/cheese/sausage/hashbrown casserole... so there will be plenty to eat! And the price is better than Hardee's!

CW Practice Night Jan 25 2015

SEKARC on Soundcloud

We had 3 Hams at the RT tonight.  There was some noise on the freq that we were using but we all had a good time with the dots and dashes.  There was Loren KDØRTX,  Joe WØMQY and Jack WDØCFH.  We were on the air for about 45 min exchanging a verity of information.  We invite everyone to our next RT next Sunday and if you just want to listen that's good practice too.
Thanks to those who joined in ..... 73 everyone.

Jack ... WD0CFH

If you are wondering why the KDØRTX signal is so loud it's because the antenna she was sending on is only a few feet from the receiving antenna that I recorded this on! Great job everyone and everyone that wants to is welcome to join!

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SEKARC CW Night !!

If you missed the first CW Night for SEKARC, then be sure and listen next week. And even better, feel free to jump in! I used Ham Radio Deluxe to decode some of it. Machine decoding of a human generated CW signal is not good at all. I did catch some of it. If you would like to see what I captured go to the YouTube page for the video and check the info section.

SW Randon Wire vs Beverage Antenna

I thought this might be an interesting comparison for our use in SDR receiving...... what a difference !!

Published on Jan 3, 2015

This video is a comparison of a 64ft random wire antenna and a 240ft beverage antenna. I used my classic Hallicrafters S-20R Sky Champion Shortwave receiver. You can clearly hear the difference in the noise floor and with the beverage you can hear a couple more stations. I knew the beverage was great for my Yaesu FT-101, but it rocks for SWL as well.

YL 33: The First Female Ham Radio Operators

...and their Awesome Legacy

by Ashley Hennefer

I found this great article about some of the early women amateur radio operators. Very interesting stories and details. You can find the entire article here TheMarySue.com but below is the intro...

...Female hams are called “YLs,” which is short for “Young Lady,” regardless of the operator’s age. While that seems simultaneously antiquated, cute, and patronizing, keep in mind that the ham radio subset of men is referred to as “OMs,” or “Old Man.”

Photo from TheMarySue.com

300 Foot Tower Demo

This video is the demolition of a 300′ cable head end tower in Jackson, MN. Built in 1953, it did not want to fall over. Great view, and I love the sound of the fall and then the dogs barking....

NEW YEAR for SEKARC - 2015 !!

Happy New Year... Welcome to 2015 !!

2015 should be a great year for the SEKARC as we have plans for many new activities and better meeting content with our new meeting facility and it will be exciting. Here is a summary of some of the thoughts we have on our agenda for 2015.

The first item on our list is a local CW practice night. Many in the club and the SEK area are learning CW or need a brush up so David NØWKZ suggested a local CW net or similar weekly activity. At the coffee QSO Jack WDØCFH mentioned maybe not an organized net but maybe an hour set aside each week for local CW practice sessions. Look for info on these to be announced very soon! Any suggestions for a night and time?

To begin with, the January meeting on 1/31/15 will feature the Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network ( SATERN ) communication vehicle from Kansas City.  We will get a look around the truck and discuss what SATERN does and how we can get involved. Here is a link to the national webpage SATERN.

March, or the the first sign of warm Wednesday weather we will head to a park after the Coffee QSO for some field work! This is always fun and this year we will be trying new locations for our Wed park days so stay tuned for that.