Metrocrest Amateur Radio Society
Archives
Updated October 12, 2020
Balun-cing Act
At the September 10 meeting, Tony Mendina, NT5TM, explained the general concepts about baluns—the good, the bad, the ugly. You can download Tony’s presentation as a video here.
(Note that the file is about 300 MB)
Making WIRES-X Connections
David Cappello, KG5EIU, enlightened members with a talk about Yaesu’s WIRES-X system during the August virtual meeting. WIRES (Wide-coverage Internet Repeater Enhancement System) is a proprietary internet linking network that offers high-quality audio, digital information exchange and world-wide coverage. The system supports analog audio as well.
More details are in David’s slide deck: https://davidcappello.com/2019/09/02/getting-started-with-wires-x/. If you have a specific question, his contact information is on QRZ, https://www.qrz.com/db/kg5eiu.
President’s Corner
August 2020
Well it’s the “dog days” of summer. After a relatively tolerable summer (weather wise), Mother Nature has cranked up the heat. NWS does not expect us to hit 100 every day this first full week of August, but pretty darn close. And there’s no real relief in sight. We sure will enjoy that first real cold front aka “norther” when it gets here sometime in September.
The heat is yet another excuse to stay in your air-conditioned shack and fire up a radio! The N0NBI HF Propagation tool shows that 30M and 20M have improved slightly over the past few weeks. PSK Reporter, using FT8 as a propagation analysis tool showed some 10M activity at the time of this writing (Sunday evening 8/9) and 20M is still wide open across both the Atlantic and Pacific. Even some 6M gray line activity was evident!
Grab the Owner’s Manual for your rig and read it! You might find something you did not find the last time you cracked it open (when you were in a hurry looking for that certain menu command…)
Maybe do some armchair shopping. Browsing doesn’t cost anything, right? Research these new (or coming soon) Rigs:
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Icom ID-52A (not yet FCC approved) – A high end dual band HT with D-STAR, GPS, and a beautiful color display. Estimated price around $450.
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Icom IC-705 – A new QRP “Shack in a box”. HF/6M/VHF/UHF, D-Star, big beautiful touch screen with spectrum scope and waterfall, Internal battery pack, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. 10W/5W/0.5W output power. Apparent street price around $1300
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Yaesu FTM-300DR – Dual band, dual receive 50w mobile. Color display, Bluetooth, C4FM, GPS, voice recording, detachable face. Price about $470
There are YouTube videos about these rigs, merely a Google search away. Check out the YouTube “Signal Search” channel. W5KV just posted a nice review of the incredible Flex Radio 6400.
With COVID-19 still around and our meeting rooms not yet available we will be meeting by Zoom in August.
Stay cool and stay safe, and we’ll “see you on the radio” (with a nod to Charles Osgood).
73 David Gilpin, K5GIL