San Antonio Hams

Hill Country REACT will be coordinating the annual 4th of July parade up at Startzville, TX, on the south side of Canyon Lake again this year.    Hams from any club are welcome to participate, you do not need to be a REACT member in order to volunteer to work this event.  Some members of REACT, GVARC and Hayes Caldwell ARES are already scheduled for this event.  

Parade line-up starts around 9am, but we need to be in place before then. The parade usually starts at 11am, once the Confederate Air Force completes their traditional annual fly-over.  Clean your car / truck / suv / RV / mini-van / motorcycle and be ready to jump in line at the back of the parade after the staging area clears. 

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The Guadalupe Valley Amateur Radio Club will be again holding Field Day at WQ5C’s QTH on River Road. We’re planning on running a home station on emergency power, along with a temporary station, and possibly a “Get On The Air” station reserved for inactive hams. The highlight will be a cookout on Saturday evening. All area hams & their families are encouraged to attend.

The specifics:

Saturday, Jun 27:

• 07:30am breakfast/coffee @ Los Gallos ( as usual )
• 09:00am setup begins
• 01:00pm Field Day begins
• 06:00pm cookout

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Meeting has been POSTPONED – Stay Tuned for New Date.   April 16th was suggested, but has not been confirmed.

The next meeting of the Guadalupe Valley Amateur Radio Club is coming up:

Thursday, April 9 @ 6:30pm
Northwoods Apartments #602 ( model apartment )

We will be planning Field Day and discussing the current projects.

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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.)

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Just got off the phone earlier today with Mike WQ5C with GVARC.   Lance Armstrong has registered to compete in Sunday’s Team Trial Rides, and registration has been capped at 240 teams.  This means it will take 2 hours from starting the first pair of riders and then sending another pair of riders out every 30 seconds from the starting gate.

Mike told me that they will be using the 147.000 repeater (negative offset, 103.5 tone).  Some positions may need push-up pole and external antennas down in the river road area, but most will let you get by with a mobile radio and antenna, and a few might let you use your HT.  Come loaded for bear and you won’t be down in the mush when net control calls you.   Bring a folding chair to sit in, Bring a cooler, sunscreen & a hat as you will be there for 2-3 hours or longer, depending on assignment.  

– Lee N5NTG

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From Noon Saturday thru Noon Sunday by N5NTG – Lee Besing

I made a tour of three FD locations this year… I used to do this in previous years, but with fuel prices increasing, I had sort of slowed down a bit. But this year, I decided to spend the bux and go visit some of my friends. I had planned to visit two others, but one shut down earlier than planned on Saturday, and around 1am I decided I was too tired to safely drive all the way out to Boerne to visit Kendall County, so I headed home to get some sleep instead.

I started this with compiling a list of known locations around San Antonio, then we received contact from other clubs in Central and South Texas asking that we list their FD site, so we ended up with 13 locations. Click Here for a full list of 13 sites in or around San Antonio, as far west as Ulvade, north to Austin, South to Laredo and Southeast to Corpus Christi.

This report will contain photos from the three locations I managed to visit (GVARC, SARC, AARO) plus photos that were sent to me from other operators. Band conditions this year were sort of weak, so contacts appeared to be less than in some previous years, but the weather cooperated with us locally. The Bexar Operators Group set up down on Mustang Island, “roughing it” with a portable A/C unit sitting on the edge of his picnic table sticking out thru the sides of his pop-up shelter that they rigged around the table. His pop-up was the only one that didn’t blow away in the high winds that hit the gulf coast during that weekend because he rigged for the possibility of high winds at the start.

Photos are embedded in the 2008 Field Day Page here.