San Antonio Hams

Hill Country REACT Team 4804 will be holding their monthly  meeting on Tuesday,  22 September 2015 @ 1900 hrs.  The meeting is held at Picadillo’s  Restaurant in Bulverde.

Anyone interested in purchasing service and/or emergency communications is invited to attend.   Our team is very diverse and active with many benefit and community service activities in the region that require additional communication  via radio.

Looking forward to seeing some new faces.

Thank You,

Louis Upton – Hill Country REACT President

Technician classes are being offered free of charge to anyone interested in becoming an amateur radio operator or seeking a refresher; supervised children are welcome. This session consists of eight 2-hour classes to be held every Wednesday beginning at 7:00 p.m. on September 9, 2015,
at Schneider Engineering in Boerne, TX. For more details or to sign up, please email Ken Nichols KD3VK at classes@kb5tx.org

Hams from the AARO and the San Antonio area are being asked to help with a ground search in a city park on Saturday, August 29th from 9am til 11am(?).

We will be meeting at the Bee Tree Soccer Field Parking lot. It is located 1 mile in from the entrance at Wurzbach Pkwy or .9 from the entrance at Jones Maltsberger.

If you get lost just call 210-422-5304 or on simplex 146.420.

Andrew Watson, K5NNN, is a private investigator who has been assigned to this case. He is requesting help from area ham volunteers with a search for a body in McAllister Park. The body is of the 25 year old girl is the one that was stolen from Mission Park Mortuary on the North Side.

Hams are needed to help search McAllister Park for signs of a possible shallow grave.

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It’s time to dust off those radios, go-kits, antennas and get signed up to volunteer for the public service events that will be starting up in September and October 2915.  I’ll make another post later to cover the events happening in November (Veterans Day Parade, Tour de Gruene) and December (Skywarn

September 12-13th – Central Texas American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure (Austin) – This will be a two-day event starting at the Oak Hill Freescale campus on Saturday, overnight at Jellystone near Fredericksburg, then back to Freescale on Sunday. Also on Sunday, there are other lower-mileage rides on Sunday, basically orbiting Freescale. Contact is Jeff Schmidt N5MNW and Lee Besing N5NTG. Repeater and APRS coverage is still be coordinated. More information about the ride can be found online at this site.

September 12th – La Vernia Wildwest Hammerfest – The San Antonio Ham Support Team will NOT be working this ride this  year due to a disagreement with event organizers over something that occurred during the 2014 ride.  Other hams from Wilson County may be involved, but the usual crew from San Antonio will not be coordinating.

September 13th – HEB 110th Anniversary Bike Fest in Boerne – This is a brand new ride celebrating HEB’s 110th anniversary, benefiting the Junior Diabetes Research Foundation.  Lead Ham Club on this event will naturally be Kendall Amateur Radio Society (KARS) since it is their backyard.  Looks so far like we’ll need to cover 9 break points and 6 SAG vehicles with ham operators, so KARS needs our support to keep this event safer.   Contact David Moore N7RF  (KARS) or Mary Anne Horn N5MYN (SARO) to volunteer ASAP.

October 3-4th – Valero BikeMS Ride To The River – This is our annual 2-day event that was changed from the 2nd weekend to the 1st weekend of October this  year.  On Saturday, the ride goes from the east side of San Antonio (near Houston St and IH-10), out thru Seguin (lunch stop) and back west to New Braunfels, ending at the Comal County Fairgrounds.   Route includes an option to tour River Road if the rider gets past the cut-off point prior to 3:30pm.   Both of Sunday’s routes will start and ends at the Fairgrounds, with courses remaining in the Canyon Lake area.

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Funeral Arrangements for Jack Renwick, KB5IQI who passed away on Thursday, July 2, 2015.

Viewing Thursday July 16 beginning 11:00 A.M. at Trinity Baptist Church located at 319 E Mulberry, San Antonio, TX. Funeral Services will be from 12:00 to 1:00 P.M. at Trinity Baptist Church. A grave site service with full military honors will be at the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery after the Funeral Service.

73
Eric
WB5ZJQ

As some may not have heard, Gordon Dial, K5SUZ, passed away last weekend. The cause appears to be health related, perhaps complications with diabetes. Gordon was very active in the HAM community and volunteering his time and resources to many worthy causes.  He will be missed.

\LOCATION:  Porter Loring Funeral Home downtown,  1101 McCullough Ave. (This is on the corner of McCullough Ave. and southbound IH-35 access Road.   From IH-35 south (upper level), take the Brooklyn / McCullough exit ramp. It will drop you right where you need to be.  From IH-35 north (upper level) take the same exit, but turn left under the overpass to get to the southbound direction.)

VIEWING:  On Thursday, July 2, 2015 from 6pm-8pm.

Funeral Service:  Friday, July 3, 2015 at 1:00pm at the Porter Loring Mortuary Chapel at the same location. He will be buried at Mission Park Cemetery. An obituary will be posted on the Porter Loring Mortuary web site http://porterloring.tributes.com/funeral_homes/obituaries/  as soon as one has been received from the family.

If you need more directions or other information, Porter Loring has a representative to answer your questions any time at (210) 227-8221. Please feel free to share this information with anyone who may have an acquaintance with Gordon or his family.

We have a couple of older Ham’s {Licensed in the mid 70’s} having what is a typical conversation of how the “newbies” have destroyed Amateur Radio, and the hobby is dying. The claim that “newbies” ruined the hobby by using computers to track propagation, useful tools such as DX Summit and these new fangled things called Grid Squares.

I started to think about this, do they have a point? A lot has changed since I got into the hobby, and we will see many more changes in the future, but the honest truth is that the hobby is not dying, it is growing and is in fact larger than it has been any time through out history.

The simple truth is that “older hams” have been complaining about the “newbies” killing the hobby since the first Ham was licensed back in the spark gap days.

When AM first started to come on the scene, Spark Gap Operators complained about this new fangled mode of operating and how it was going to destroy the hobby, then few years later as SSB operating started to enter the picture those old AM operators complained about the Donald Duck Operators and how it was destroying the hobby and who can forget the day that CW was no longer required to gain a license, to hear from some old timers the planet Earth itself was going to stop rotating.

The simple truth it is the evolution of Amateur Radio that keeps us growing and the excitement and the WOW factor.

Yes, it is true that today very few Hams build his or her own radio, the simple truth is that we no longer need too with more modern transceivers on the market today and it is also beyond the capability of home technicians today with modern advancements such as surface mount devices, etc.

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The Skywarn Operators at the Austin-San Antonio NWO are in the process of updating our files and call-up list. Recently we have found the EC’s, Skywarn Coordinators and Net Controls have changed drastically in the various counties we serve.
It has also been found that several repeaters used in the past to contact and monitor Skywarn operations have changed or are no longer functioning.
If someone from each county could please e-mail me the contact information, frequencies and other pertinent information for ARES and Skywarn it would be greatly appreciated.
Also be advised that we have created a Facebook page and Twitter account to help get the word out. Feel free to like or follow to stay up to date with our operations.
Thank You, Louis – K5STX
e-mail to wx5exw at gmail dot com

05/22/2015 from ARRL

The FCC is eliminating the regulatory fee to apply for an Amateur Radio vanity call sign. The change will not go into effect, however, until required congressional notice has been given. This will take at least 90 days. As the Commission explained in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Report and Order, and Order (MD Docket 14-92 and others), released May 21, it’s a matter of simple economics.

“The Commission spends more resources on processing the regulatory fees and issuing refunds than the amount of the regulatory fee payment,” the FCC said. “As our costs now exceed the regulatory fee, we are eliminating this regulatory fee category.” The current vanity call sign regulatory fee is $21.40, the highest in several years. The FCC reported there were 11,500 “payment units” in FY 2014 and estimated that it would collect nearly $246,100.

In its 2014 Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) regarding the assessment and collection of regulatory fees for FY 2014, the FCC had sought comment on eliminating several smaller regulatory fee categories, such as those for vanity call signs and GMRS. It concluded in the subsequent Report and Order (R&O) last summer, however, that it did not have “adequate support to determine whether the cost of recovery and burden on small entities outweighed the collected revenue or whether eliminating the fee would adversely affect the licensing process.

See full article at….

http://www.arrl.org/news/view/fcc-eliminates-amateur-radio-vanity-call-sign-regulatory-fee

W2IK