I was contacted by phone yesterday by a local non-ham who was interested in talking further with the ham operator who drives a full sized white panel van which had ham license plates on it. Of course, he didn’t remember the call sign (what’s a call sign?) that would have been on the plates, but he remembered the “Radio Opr” wording.
Teri says that more hams are needed for this Sunday’s event. She’s got 4 slots left open for Hams to drive 15 passenger SAG Vans to pick up runners and deliver them back to the south end of the Alamo Dome. Shift hours are from 6:30am until no later than 3pm on Sunday, November 16th. Passes, t-shirts, and “stuff” can be picked up Friday evening at 6:30pm at the Alamo Dome, but if you are already a volunteer, you already knew that.
The SARC Board of Directors announced the 2009 Dues schedule which includes the “Early Bird Special” effective immediately. All members may renew their registration, or New hams may register as a new member, by paying only $12 for their 2009 dues. Deadline for this special time limited offer is the date of the Radio Fiesta, January 10, 2009. Regular dues rate is $15/household per year. (Flat rate for all hams in same household.) A PDF copy of their membership application can be downloaded here.
The SARC Board of Directors also set an “advanced admision price” for the Radio Fiesta of $4/person. No deadline was stated in the announcement, but obviously you need to pay up before the date of the event. Check out their website at www.w5sc.org for details.
Alamo Area Radio Organization (AARO) will hold their next monthly meeting on Wednesday, November 12th, at a new location, Martha’s Mexican Restaurant, located at the corner of Huebner and Babcock Rd. Meeting starts at 7pm, dining is optional, but at your own expense. See their website at www.aa5ro.org for details.
San Antonio Radio Club (SARC)will hold their next meeting on Thursday, November 13th 2008 at K-COMM The HAM Store. Meetings start at 7:00pm. This month’s meeting will have a special program featuring the recent DX trip to Belize by Tom O’Brien. Three radio operators from this area made the trip. November is also the month to elect officers for the 2009 year.The address for K-COMM is 10815 Gulfdale and is located near the intersection of US HWY 281 and Isom Rd. See their website at www.w5sc.org for details.
Radio Operators of South Texas (ROOST) hold their meetings on the 2nd Friday of the month, which would make that November 14th at 7:00pm. They serve a meal, so the club suggests bringing a donation of $5 and a side dish to help out. Visit their website at www.w5ros.org for more details..
Hill County REACT Team (REACT) has changed their monthly meeting date from the 3rd Monday to the 3rd Wednesday, same location, the Bulverde Volunteer Fire Dept on Cougar Bend Rd and FM1863. This month, that would set their date as November 19th, starting at 7pm. They will be holding elections for various officer positions during this meeting. All voting is done in person, not by mail-in ballot, must be present to vote. Visit website for details www.HillCountryREACT.org
For the November meeting times for other ham clubs in the area, visit the Area Clubs Web Page Here.
Fresh off the e-mail press from Jeff N5MNW…
The [Austin Amateur Radio Club’s] W5KA ’94 repeater has been exhibiting long/hanging squelch tails recently, most likely due to terrific VHF band openings and the decision to keep the Austin ’94 an old-fashioned carrier-access machine. The antenna at ~1500′ ASL hears things we at ~700′ ASL can’t. Near-threshold co-channel (Brownwood, HOU, SA, DFW) signals cause the hysteresis in the squelch circuit to keep the repeater keyed even though no audible signal is getting thru.
The [Austin] Technical Team is working on adding multiple, S/N voted 107.2Hz PL-tone-access remote receive site(s) that will help mitigate this effect.
Make sure you are encoding 107.2Hz to take full advantage of the planned upgrades!
I received the following letter today in the mail from the Universal City Police Department, thanking ALL of the volunteers who worked the 2008 Veterans Day Parade on November 1st. While he mentions by name, “REACT” and “Motorcycle Marshals”, he was aware that there were non-affiliated hams working the event, but considered them all to still be volunteers with REACT since REACT had coordinated the event for the past 20+ years. REACT wishes to thank those who volunteered for this event, for without your support, it would not have been the same. Lt. Denton asked that we share this letter as widely as possible, so I’m posting it to this blog, with a link to let you download the scanned PDF version of the original paper letter for confirmation. – Lee N5NTG
Note: I received the original email on this topic, with headers intact showing that it truly did originate at an email address coming from the Ft. Worth PD. – Lee
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 06:39:52 -0600
Hi Everyone,
One of my Officers in Ft. Worth found a radio in a pawn shop, the pawner has made some suspicious pawns and he is not a licensed radio operator.
The radio is a Yaesu FT-817 QRP Transceiver, the serial is 0N150301. All the 0’s in the serial are numbers not o as in ocean. Could you ask them to see if one of these radios was stolen during October?
W2IK | 
Antenna Design, ARES, Disaster Response, General Ham Radio, JOTA, W2IK | 
11 3rd, 2008| 
No Comments »ARRL WEST COAST CONVENTION – “With A Little Texas Touch”
In mid July, Bob Hejl, W2IK, was approached via email by Per Brashers, KI6JJS, requesting permission to reprint several of his Emcomm and antenna building web sites to assist in presenting a RACES forum at “PACIFICON 2008”, which is also known as the “Dayton Of The West”. It is the major ARRL West Coast convention held in mid October and offers dozens of lectures, a swap meet, exhibits, demonstrations and even an operational JOTA station. To learn more, see:
http://www.pacificon.org/index.html
Emails were exchanged and the request soon escalated into more than simple reprint permission. KI6JJS also requested assistance with creating his actual presentation script.
Saturday and Sunday, as the readers of this blog already knew, was the annual Tour de Gruene tour and competition races. See story posted to the MySanAntonio website here…
I couldn’t work the Saturday events, although we did divert a couple of our REACT members from the parade over to the Tour de Gruene to help out GVARC after finding out they might be short handed on Saturday morning. According to news reports, Lance Armstrong finished Saturday with a time of 33 minutes, 8 seconds to win the race along the Guadalupe River on the breezy Hill Country afternoon.
Four members of Hill Country REACT got up early Sunday morning before the sun was up, to meet for breakfast and move into our assigned locations prior to the start of the 8 am team time trial races. Due to this morning’s daylight savings time change, we appreciated that extra hour of sleep.
There were about a dozen or so ham radio operators out on the course that morning, including Mike WQ5C who served as net control of this annual event. The sponsors of the Tour de Gruene reportedly donated $500 to the GVARC club afterward, to help them fund a new amateur radio repeater polling receiver in the northern part of Comal County. (For those of you who aren’t hams, a polling receiver is just a receiving point connected back to the primary radio transmitter, and that increases the coverage area to allow more hams to use the 147.000 repeater.)
November 1st was the 38th Annual Veterans Day Parade in Universal City, Texas. (Universal City is on the NE edge of San Antonio, near IH-35 and Loop 1604.) Normally, this parade is over in about 90 minutes or less, but this year it went for over 2 hours. There were only about 50 registered entries this year, but it was still a very nice parade. 
It started around 10:30am and ended after 12:30pm. Pat Booker Road was shut down, almost military law or forced evacuation except for everyone lining the streets on foot.
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