Metrocrest Amateur Radio Society
Archives
Updated August 14, 2020
At the July meeting, Perry Schrag, N0PAS, shared the results of his vertical array deployed for Winter Field Day 2020. Perry said he was quite happy with the performance, which was confirmed by using data from the Reverse Beacon Network. “Some folks thought I was crazy for designing and building a ‘portable’ 40m array thinking it would take all day to deploy and tune. Actually, it only took three of us an easy-going hour to put up and about 45 minutes to tear down.”
N0PAS Vertical Array for Winter Field Day
Winmor R I P
The Amateur Radio Safety Foundation has decided to deprecate the WINMOR HF mode in the Winlink system. With dropping support for WINMOR, the Winlink team encourages using ARDOP, VARA HF, or Pactor 3 or 4 where permitted. You can read the full announcement here: https://winlink.org/content/winmor_deprecated
Field Day Afterglow
Field Day 2020 was successful despite COVID-19. There may have been as many as 17 KB5A participants operating in isolation together. We won’t know the aggregate KB5A club score until later in the year.
Contacts were made on 80m through 2m; 6m and 10m made several guest appearances; 15m and 20m were hopping; 40m and 80m varied between lots of clear RF and lots of RF noise.
This was a different Field Day in many aspects. We were unable to operate at a group site but each of us experienced running our own little Field Day. Many of us learned how to use Winlink to send Radiograms. We each learned some things to improve future group Field Day operations. If you have ideas for next year, email them to me and I’ll add them to my massive Field Day planning file. I’ve already started a list for next year.
President’s Corner
July 2020
Howdy again, friends and neighbors!
This is David Gilpin, K5GIL, and I’m happy to be your humble servant once again.
I’d like to say “thank you” to all the candidates who ran for election. It shows commitment and loyalty to MARS. At the MARS virtual meeting on Thursday July 9 we will have the results of the re-vote for the Director position.
Yes, we live in strange times. COVID-19 is a very unwelcome fiend. It has caused us to change so many of our routines.
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Many of us look forward to Hams & Eggs every Saturday morning (including Denise, the General Manager of our Whataburger) but we haven’t been able to do that since the lockdown started.
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We didn’t have an opportunity to spend lots of money at Ham-Com this year.
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Field Day at home was fun but it didn’t feel like a “real” Field Day.
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And we have been doing web conferences instead of face-to-face meetings.
The leadership of MARS will strive to make MARS as comfortable and familiar as possible – while keeping our members safe. Eventually we’ll be able to have our usual meetings in the usual places.