Despite some significantly bad weather throughout the month the GCARC had significant member participation in a number of events and activities. Saturdays were busy at the Clubhouse with the team of Jim Wright N2GXJ and Marc Federici WM2Y organizing fox hunting activities using both the original tiny “fox” transmitter and a larger unit built by Marc and connected to HT. Marc describes those activities on the Fox Hunt 30 page so be sure to read about them if you weren’t there (and WHY weren’t you there???).
April Tech Saturday is POTA-Related
The Tech Saturday Forum event on April 6, 2024 will follow John Zaruba Jr K2ZA’s presentation at the April 3, 2024 Wednesday Night General Membership Meeting on operating a Parks-On-The-Air station. John will bring his POTA station to the Clubhouse and describe the logistics of setting it up and operating. Many members have expressed interest in POTA so be sure to attend both of these sessions.
Antenna Building in May and June
Because of the interest expressed by many Club members, especially those new to the hobby, in building antennas the May and June General Membership Meetings and Tech Saturday sessions will be dedicated to this topic. On the May 4th Tech Saturday Forum, participants will build a small 70 cm ground plane antenna and then trim it to size using a vector network analyzer (VNA), a tools that should be familiar to anyone building antennas. The May session is free but will require signing up as described below. Participants may also want to purchase a VNA before the session and may want to reference the excellent article by Chris Prioli AD2CS on VNA selection on the Elmer's Shack/Equipment page
At the June 8th Tech Saturday, we’ll be building a 2-band twinlead collinear antenna that can be used as a permanent installation for 2 meters and 70 cm. Cost of this session for materials will be about $25 and signups will be needed since demand may require additional subsequent sessions to allow those interested to participate. If you’re interested in either session please email Chris at [email protected] indicating your interest.
GOES Satellite Reception
Significant progress was made on the GOES satellite image receiving station that captures high-resolution images of the earth 48 times each day and stitches them together into a MP4 video that will be displayed on the “Skunkworks” team website (https://skunkworks.w2mmd.org) once the server transition is completed. Mike Thompson KG4JYA worked out some issues with the programming code that caused some images to be skipped and we replaced an older network switch that was significantly slowing the image transfer from the Raspberry Pi that collects the image from the SDR radio to the Pi that processes the video. The GOES receiver downloads many different types of visible-light, infrared and temperature images from the satellite, all of which are cataloged and captured. If you’re interested in weather data there’s plenty of it at the Clubhouse. In particular, we should be able to capture outstanding pix of the solar eclipse as it passes over the US this month.
Meshtastic Network Development
Activity on the Meshtastic network also increased with more than a dozen different users now having nodes on the network. Many Club members have conquered the first step, which is setting up a node that is recognized on the network, and are looking at their next steps which are outlined in an article on the Meshtastic page. Meshtastic creates a lot of diverse projects in radio, electronics, microcontrollers, and programming to keep the typical ham experimenter busy for months.
On the W2MMD node at the Clubhouse we’ve installed one of these (https://bit.ly/3PFlCkP) 1-watt amp/preamp packages that Al Arrison KB2AYU found on Amazon and have noted that this station’s signals have significantly increased at several remote locations. These units may be useful for distant stations that need more power to get into the network, or for several high-elevation stations to allow them to extend the network.
We’ve also installed a larger solar-powered node using an 8 inch square solar panel and two 18650 batteries powering a WisBlock LoRa radio. This station has been operational for about three weeks and after a couple more weeks of testing it may be moved higher on one of the towers to give more range. Currently the W2MMD node’s antenna is at the top of the “half-VHF” tower but feedline loss from the Clubhouse will be significant. Placing the entire node up there may enhance the network.
STEM Opportunity with Woodruff Middle School
Several weeks ago we were contacted by Club member Joseph Lee N2BNJ who’s a school board member for this school asking for Club assistance in preparing and presenting a STEM-oriented program for the school’s students. Discussions with the school are still very preliminary but it appears that we may be able to create a project to build, launch, and track a pico-type of earth-circumnavigating balloon carrying APRS and WSPR transmitters. Timing and other details are yet to be established but if this works out we’ll need several teams to deal with different aspects of balloon logistics, radio and power design, tracking, curriculum, and safety, and hopefully Club members will respond to this important initiative.
Interesting Radio-Related Articles
The online resource Hackaday (https://hackaday.com) occasionally contains articles related to ham radio along with other electronics and technical topics. Below are links to a few that caught my eye this month :
Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr)
This is an excellent reference to anyone who hasn’t delved into SDR radio, using SDR Angel and several other programs to receive and decode radio signals. Some are very familiar to hams such as listening to ham SSB or CW transmissions, but a few attracted my interest to check out whenever spare time appears in my life :
- 7 : Receive road traffic information
- 9 : Listen to digital radio
- 11 : Read your neighbors’ sensors
- 30 : Assess the propagation of radio waves using beacons
- 39 : Read data from utility meters
- 40 : “Watch” TV, and
- 44 : Detect when a smartphone is turned on
CATS : A New Communication And Telemetry System | Hackaday (https://bit.ly/4auIHib)
CATS (https://cats.radio) is a new communication and telemetry standard intended to surpass the current Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) standard by leveraging modern, super-cheap Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) transceivers rather than standard FM units. The project is in the early stages, but as of this writing, there is a full open source software stack and reference hardware for both Raspberry Pi-based gateway devices and an STM32-based mobile device.
Super-Portable, Tunable VHF Antenna | Hackaday (https://bit.ly/3TCM009) :
The antenna uses mostly common household parts which keeps the cost down tremendously. The structure of the antenna is replacement webbing for old lawn chairs, and the conductive elements for the antenna are made out of metallic HVAC tape which is fixed onto the chair webbing after being cut to shape. The only specialized parts needed for this is a 3D printed bracket which not only holds the hookup for the coax cable feeding the antenna, but is also capable of sliding up and down the lower section of the “J” to allow the antenna to be easily tuned.
73 de Jon WB2MNF
Full Pink Moon - Tuesday, April 23, 2024 @ 1951 Hours
This Moon heralded the appearance of the “moss pink” (Phlox subulata), also called wild ground phlox or creeping phlox—one of the first spring wildflowers. With spring thaws come the Algonquin Breaking Ice Moon and the Dakota Moon When the Streams are Again Navigable. When spring growth appears, so does the Budding Moon of Plants and Shrubs (Tlingit) and Moon of the Red Grass Appearing (Oglala). Animals returning to the area inspired the Lakota name Moon When the Ducks Come Back. Certain Dakota peoples chose the name Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs. Other names are Broken Snowshoe Moon (Anishinaabe), Frog Moon (Cree), and Sugar Maker Moon (Western Abenaki). Appearing either in April or May, Sucker Moon (Anishinaabe) refers to a time to harvest sucker fish, which return to streams or lake shallows to spawn. According to legend, now is the time when this fish comes back from the spirit world to purify bodies of water and the creatures living in them. (This name may also be applied to the February Moon, to honor the sacrifice of the sucker fish in order to feed the Anishinaabe peoples, helping them to survive the winter.)
Old Farmer’s Almanac - www.almanac.com