Month: September 2018

40 Meters

Wow! The little chart you see everywhere that shows band conditions and solar activity says everything is “poor”, but you wouldn’t know it on forty meters. I just worked W9IMS, a commemorative station at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway … he gave me a 59 and he was an indicated 59+20 on the S-meter. Lots of other stations, mostly up and down the east coast with booming signals … CW, SSB, whatever! Just goes to show you, don’t believe everything you read! Get on and see for yourself.

Wow is right!

Still on a hurricane watch here in coastal Virginia. Still uncertain landfall for Florence, but not looking real great. I think we’re in for a wild ride no matter where it hits. I’m charging batteries and getting things together.

73 de Dick N4BC (Battening down the hatches)

Hamfest and Weather

Saturday was the Virginia Beach Hamfest, and I made the annual trek to the Convention Center. The crowd was smallish, and there were a few vendors, and several tailgaters at inside tables. I ran into a lot of friends and acquaintances, and generally had a good time.

I attended the Mesh Networking talk (two hours) and found it interesting and informative. They talked about the implementation in Hampton and some of the issues with installation and operation. Good forum and well worth the time spent.

This past weekend, we had a pretty strong storm event … lots of thunder and lightning and several inches of rain, causing a lot of flooding. We’re under the gun for a hurricane watch as well … all waiting to see just what hurricane Florence is going to do. The storm has the potential to tear us up and we’ll surely get flooding and rain, but just how bad it will be remains to be seen. I’m charging everything up, just in case.

I’ve already been informed that I’ll be on call for the duration of the storm. When you’re involved with public safety communications, your time is not your own. My family doesn’t appreciate that philosophy, but you “gotta do what you gotta do”.

So we’re doing pre-storm checks at work, and just waiting for the forecast to become more refined. We should know more by mid-week.

73 de Dick N4BC

Updates

Last night, we had our monthly radio club meeting. We had a good turnout, with some old friends we hadn’t seen for a while, and some new ones. We even picked up a few new members … HOORAY!

Our Treasurer, who has held that position for over fifteen years tendered his resignation as treasurer due to health and family issues, and I was elected to take his place. I’ve really got some big shoes to fill, don’t I?

We had a good meeting, and the presentation was on mobile radio installation. Well done and very interesting. It’s my turn next month, and my tentative subject will be portable operation … Radios in the Wild.

There were ten checkins to the Tidewater 31515 DMR Net this evening. Topics of discussion were the upcoming Virginia Beach Hamfest and IDing on DMR to comply with FCC Regulations … Section 97.119, to be specific. As I’ve said before, it’s more of a casual gathering than a formal net, and it’ll be nice to put some faces to the calls at the hamfest Saturday. I noticed that a couple of new calls showed up as unknown, so I updated the user database in my MD-380. I hadn’t done that for a while.

I also went into my new DStar radio and added some local non-digital simplex channels. The programming in that radio is still a work in progress, but truthfully, with the GPS and built-in repeater database, not much pre-programming is needed for repeater use.

73 de Dick N4BC