AmateurRadio.com

in South Plainfield!

Field Day is two days away and the weather here is supposed to be gorgeous! Psyched!

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

I attended the Town Council meeting in South Plainfield, NJ. Our mayor issued a proclamation declaring June 23rd through June 29th as Amateur Radio Week in South Plainfield. Most of the members of the South Plainfield Amateur Radio Club were on hand, and we had our picture taken with the mayor.

One of our members, Wayne N2LRE has the actual printed proclamation, and he is going to scan it, and when I get an image, I will post it here. (Got it! You can see it below ……)

Here is an aerial view of the park:

Marv K2VHW and I met this afternoon to scope out the two parks we have in mind for Field Day. As I had mentioned before, our first choice is Spring Lake Park, which is the property of Middlesex County. That gazebo is huge! It can easily accommodate two large tables for operating, as well as supply space for observers and guests. In addition, there are trees that are close enough to support a full sized G5RV and another to support the EARCHI end fed (more about that later).

The other venue possibility, Putnam Street Park, is another excellent site. There is plenty of space, it has high visibility and plenty of traffic. Trees are plentiful and there are restroom facilities on hand. There’s only one drawback – a lack of shelter. We would have to borrow or rent a multi-person tent, to have a place to operate in the case of inclement weather.

After I got home from our scouting trip, I decided to play for a bit, and try out that 53 foot radiator for the EARCHI antenna. I was hoping that if all worked out, this would be our CW Field Day antenna, as well as what I would use for FOBB and the Skeeter Hunt.

My experience today shows that that chart published by Balun Designs was spot on! I quickly got excellent matches with the KX3’s auotuner on all the bands almost instantly. 17 Meters was the hardest band to match and that only took about two seconds to accomplish.

I made contact with Josh 6Y5WJ and CO0SS on 15 Meters and a PY2 station on 10 Meters. These were made with the antenna at a less than optimal height too, as I used my Jackite pole as the support. Once I get this baby up properly in a tree, it should perform even better.

After that, I worked on a design for a banner that we will use on Field Day. This is what I have come up with so far:

This is an 8 X 3 foot banner made from heavy outdoor vinyl, with grommets and wind slits. If I get approval from the rest of the Field Day Committee, I will place the order tomorrow evening.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

I guess you could say that tonight was the first, formal meeting of a new Amateur Radio club. The newly formed South Plainfield Amateur Radio Club (SPARC) now lives.  Up until now, we were an “informal’ club, a loosely knitted confederation of Amateur Radio operators who gathered under the CERT umbrella to provide community service to our town.

But now we have a formal constitution and by-laws and we now fall under the banner and protection of the South Plainfield Office of Emergency Management.  Our major purpose is to provide communications and service to the OEM and the town of South Plainfield, NJ. The club documents were signed by the charter members, of which yours truly, is one.  I was appointed to be Trustee of our Club Callsign NJ2SP., which really is just a continuation of what I had been doing.

Our secondary purpose is to highlight Amateur Radio to the public, as well as to try and introduce Amateur Radio to the youth of our town and the surrounding area.  One of the ways we hope to do that is by sponsoring a prominent Field Day effort in a very public park in town.  Since time is short, it was decided to put forth as simple an effort as possible, so we will be doing a two station QRP setup – one station SSB and one station CW.  Since I seem to be the “QRP Guy” in town, I was made Field Day Committee Chairman. Yikes!

It looks like we’ll be using my two KX3s and some simple wire antennas.  While South Plainfield has its share of parks, there are two in particular that have very high visibility. The first is Spring Lake Park, which is actually part of the Middlesex County parks system.

That gazebo to the left in the picture would offer a nice shelter in the even of inclement weather.  The other possibility is Putnam Park,  a municipal  park which has the advantage of being at the intersection of two major roads in town. It sees a lot of traffic and has lots of tall trees, also. The only disadvantage is the lack of a shelter. We would have to procure some kind of tent, canopy, or other portable shelter.

Time is short, and this is definitely going to be a “fly by the seat of the pants” effort at this point.  The main goals will be to have fun and garner some publicity for SPARC and Amateur Radio in general. Since this looks like it’s going to be a QRP expedition on steroids, maybe I can get the other guys in town to be bitten by the “QRP Bug”.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!

• No music this episode.

Welcome, everyone, to a special installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we catch up with two fellow podcasters and friends: Rich, KD0RG, and Brady, AC0XR of the Low SWR podcast. During the course of our interview, the guys talk about Field Day, contesting, logging software, Point Linux, HamOS, their recent home activities and much, much more. This episode was a lot of fun, and we think you’ll enjoy the informative and interesting discussion as well. Thanks for tuning in, and thanks for being a listener of the show.

73 de The LHS Guys

Back in December of 2011 I got this email from my dad, Larry (KD6EUG) about the severe storm damage to his cabin in Mi-Wuk, California – located in the Sierra Nevadas:

The big pine tree that is located at the corner of the back deck, the one that we used as the center for all our antennas, split in two and about 90 ft of it landed on the back deck and cabin/garage. All the dining room windows and sliding doors are blown out. There is a 6″ separation between the garage and the kitchen. The PG&E power meter and feed lines to the power pole are ripped out. The wind had gusts of over 35mph.

Dad

Here are a few of the picture I received over the next few days showing the destruction:

My dad and I had a great field day from the cabin back in 2009. It was quite a blow to see what nature had delivered.

It has been a long path since December 2011. Through diligence and perseverance, my dad was able to revive the cabin. The work was finally completed this past summer.

We had another scare with the Rim Fire back in August and September. The fire actually came within a few miles of the cabin but fortunately the firefighters were successful in stopping it before it could do any damage.

My dad is now up there enjoying the California QSO Party from the cabin in Tuolumne County (…sometimes a pretty hard-to-get county in the CQP).

We have tried on several occasions to attempt HF QSOs while he has been at the cabin and I have either been here in Kansas or when I was stationed in Virginia. We never had much luck and have primarily used my EchoIRLP node as the best way to chat (IRLP Node 3553/EchoLink Node: KI4ODI-L 518994). Well, our luck changed today. We decided to give it a go prior to the CQP and started at 10Ms and worked down until we got to the 15M band. On 21.400 MHz we had brilliant success in carrying on an HF QSO. I’ve already send out the QSL card to confirm the contact.

With my coming retirement from the Army, I am going to have the opportunity to head back out to the California Sierra Nevadas this next June for Field Day 2014. I am looking forward to that!