San Antonio Hams

Five members of the Hill Country REACT Team made the trek north to the 2009 Austin Summerfest, a few went up for Friday and Saturday, others just for the big day, Saturday.   Those members included myself N5NTG, Gary K5GST, Joe W4CTH, Shane NS5D, and Wade W5ERX.     I took a few photos, but to make it easier on me while writing this blog post, I’ll wait and post most of them at the bottom of this article instead of embedding them as I go along.  I also won’t try to list all the names and call signs of everyone I met, for fear of leaving out someone accidently and causing them to think I didn’t care enough to mention them.

We saw members from most of the various San Antonio Area Ham Radio Clubs, including SARO, AARO, SARC, BOG, ROOST, REACT, ARES, and GVARC.  We probably had enough Bexar County ARES members present to hold a meeting. 🙂   

We found ham friends from the Austin area, Houston area, and the great folks from the Hayes / Caldwell ARES group who like to come south and help REACT with some of our public service events on a regular basis.

I drove up along with Gary K5GST in my van on Saturday morning, checked in at registration and then toured the rather modest tailgating area outside the Austin Marriot Airport South Hotel until the main exhibit hall opened at 8am. I didn’t find much to spend my $$ on, although apparently Gary found a few essentials that needed transport back to San Antonio.
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We received the following report from Shane NS5D covering one of the more important seminars held at this year’s Austin Summerfest, the ARES meeting with a briefing about Texas’ new disaster recovery / response teams.  

Here is Shane’s report… 
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The Austin Summerfest event actually starts on Friday evening, 08/07, with outdoor tailgating in the parking lot, and lots of social interaction.    Admission is $10/person at the door on Saturday. No admission charge for the outdoor portion of the event.   Website is found at http://www.austinsummerfest.info/ .  

Talk-in will be done on the Austin 146.94 repeater, negative offset as normal. Please note that it uses a tone of 107.2, but tone is not required.

Location is on the south side of Austin, TX, in a new hotel (not same location as previous year), the Austin Marriott Airport South at 4415 South IH 35, on the northbound side of IH-35, just before you get to St. Elmo.  There are 5 hotels in a row, but this is the hotel on the north end of that grouping.  Here is a MapQuest map to the new location.

New info: Posted on 11 June 09.
The double sided, Summerfest 2009 Flyer is posted here.  Read the rest of this entry »

I watched this video and thought “Wow, KC3VO is like W2IK on steroids”, but after second thought, decided that even though W2IK likes to invent stuff like this that works better than the ordinary store bought stufff, but he wouldn’t be dumb enough run something like this so close to his own body.

At 1kW power, Bob Curry KC3VO (the inventor) says he gets 1 hour of transmit time, and about 15 minutes at the full 2kW power level. The antenna used for the demo was restricted to 500watts.  I checked out KC3VO on www.qrz.com and found that he lives only about 3 miles north of Washington, DC, in Adelphi, Maryland, and has a Honda Goldwing motorcycle set up for HF operations also.  He works as the full time commercial transmitter engineer for a high power UHF TV station, which might explain some of his need doses of high power RF signals in his body. 🙂

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Bexar County ARES holds its monthly meetings on the 1st Tuesday of the month, and rotates the location between the American Red Cross HQ (Houston St & Commerce St), and the SA City EOC down at Brooks City Base.   This month, about 18 members of the local ARES group met in the American Red Cross HQ and later toured the radio room. One member (Shane NS5D) was out supporting a brush fire that SAFD had rolled out to support with their command bus, and another member ( Ray AE5HN) responded to a Red Cross support call and had to leave the meeting early.

Focus for tonight’s meeting, led by Bexar County ARES EC David K5OLE, was the subject of Hurricane Preparedness, how much advance time to expect, how accurate of a guess re landfall center to expect, when to expect to be deployed back down on the coast for the recovery phase. The second focus was a planned antenna party for the morning of August 29th to take down and repair the dipole antennas at the Red Cross, then reinstall them on the roof.  Contact any ARES AEC for details if you want to volunteer to help.

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RadioShack is getting a marketing makeover. Starting August 6, the venerable electronics retailer will change its name to “The Shack,” a rebranding move designed to shed the last-century association with creaky radio technology and embrace today’s digital wireless world.

To celebrate the name change, RadioShack will conduct a “Shack Summer Netogether,” a live event featuring two 17-foot laptop computers in New York and San Francisco. Equipped with Webcams, the gargantuan notebooks will allow live video and audio exchanges between the two cities.

Wow, a 17-foot laptop? That’s bigger than some RadioShack stores I’ve been in. <rimshot>

Read full PCWORLD.COM article here

I got up early this morning to check the status of a remote restore that I was doing for one of my company’s clients.   Everything was wonderful until about 8am when my computer started making a strange humming sound.   The hard drive light lit up even though nothing was actively accessing the drives (that I had initiated), the light stayed lit like something was really going to town.

Then the light went off, and the noise stopped.  Whew!

Except when I clicked the link to my email program, it said “searching for program…”   What the heck?    And when I opened Windows Explorer, it told me that my “D”, “E” and “F” drives were missing.    Now I know I hadn’t approved any vacation time for my hard drives, and that 500gb drive was probably less than a year or two old,  but it was gone!

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There was a software bug detected whereby hackers can illegally access an unpatched iPhone (prior to 3.0.1) by simply sending a loaded SMS message. The SMS message migiht appear to be blank, or have a small square character, but in reality it could have contained anything and appeared to have come from anyone.

If your iPhone got infected, your phone became a zombie. The attacker could take over your camera and microphone to watch / listen in live without your knowing, have access to any private information stored on your iPhone, and could then use your phone to contact and infect other iPhone users.   Until now, you had no protection, and if infected, your only option was to turn off your iPhone and take it in to the Apple Store or an Apple Tech to get it restored back to factory spec, risking the loss your data.

All the crook needed to know was the phone # of your iPhone.

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I was updating some of my wiring harness for my ham radio emergency go-kit, and needed to unsolder some wires from a LED switch to that I could try to reuse it.  I succeeded in getting the older wires removed and cleaned the solder off the terminals so that I could later reattach the connectors of my choice.

But something happened (this was 3am in the morning) and the soldering pencil (all 12 watts of it) decided to roll off the table and land on the inside of my left forearm.  

Ouch!   Those things are hot enough to melt solder, and hot enough to start burning their way thru my skin, especially the more tender skin on the inside of my arm rather than the weather beaten outer side. 🙂

Kids, don’t try this without adult supervision, and adults, don’t try it without adult supervision. 

I should have used my soldering station to put the pencil in while hot, but that was outside in my van from when we were installing the antenna and power lines for the radio, and (did I mention it was 3am?) so I didn’t feel like going out side to fetch it back inside just for a quicky task. 

Shame on me for taking short cuts and using my spare soldering pencil without taking proper precautions to ensure it didn’t get knocked off and start a fire or other hazard (like hitting my arm).

Six days later (8/5), and burn mark still very noticeable.  Not hurting as much, still keeping neosporin applied, plus those spray on bandages instead of tape on bandages.  Here’s a current photo.

I may have mentioned to some of you that I had switched 100% over to using Anderson Power Pole connectors a few years back. But unless you wanted to shell out some big $$ to buy those power blocks from West Mountain Radio to the tune of $55-$100+ each, you had to build your own power block splitters.

Local Ham Operator, Grumpy, WF5Y, has a home-brew flat panel with 8 Anderson Power Pole connectors, each with their own fuse, similar to the WMR version, and he was asking $50 each at the Austin Summerfest. 

But after visiting with the DC Power folks from Beaverton, Oregon, www.dcpwr.com, during the Plano Hamcom last June, I went to Wes Allen K7WWG’s web site to see what he had available.  I found an affordable solution in the form of a Red-Dee-2 8 port connector block (Model PS-8) that would allow me to feed power to 7 other devices.  The price?  $28 plus shipping.  

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