San Antonio Hams

It’s almost that time of year again, the annual trek north up IH-35 to Plano, to attend the largest Hamfest in Texas.  

HamCom 2010 will be Friday, June 11th and Saturday, June 12th.  But if you want the best deals from the flea market areas, you best be there on Friday morning when they open.   The event is more crowded on Saturday, for obvious reasons, but most of the vendors arrive on Thursday  night, or Friday morning, ready to wheel and deal. 

Parking is free, admission is $10 at the door.    Hotel room info is available from the event website, www.hamcom.org by clicking on the Hotels link.

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Wade KE5ZUO on Talk-in, JC Smith N5RXS, wanting to resell empty tables

San Antonio Radio Club’s event chairman, JC Smith N5RXS, reported on the air, Saturday morning at 6:15am, prior to opening the doors, that all vendor tables had been sold out already!

Wow!  In fact, JC placed several calls were placed on the air searching for hams who had rented tables, but hadn’t yet shown up to claim them, so that he could resell those empty tables to folks who forgot to advance register!  Amazingly enough, it seems that some hams will pay to rent a vendor table, just to get in the door before the general admission, so they can scout out the better deals and buy before the crowd starts rolling in.  This practice is discouraged, but it happens, and then it leaves empty tables that could have been used by another ham.

One of the challenges we faced this year, was the SARO 146.94 repeater being used for talk-in, failed around 6:20am, just after we had started making announcements.    We were actually then hitting the Austin’s .94 repeater, so we changed to simplex and kept on going.    Bob K5AUW set up his mobile for crossband on simplex in the beginning, then we changed over to using my radios (as discussed later).  The .94 San Antonio repeater stayed down the rest of the day.

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For all of you that live in other parts of the country or who could not attend the Huntsville Hamfest, QSO will be broadcasting live from 12pm to 4pm CDT or 1pm to 5pm EDT on 9330 KC WBCQ.

The broadcast can also be heard live streaming at the link below. Click Here to Listen Live

Please note this link will be dead prior to and after the broadcast.  Or go to www.tedrandall.com  and click the live link.

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Hamfest this weekend live broadcast on the internet!

Live broadcast starts Friday Aug 14 at 0800 CDT or 1300 UTC as we drive the 200 miles to Huntsville, AL.   Just as we did on our Dayton hamvention event, we will be giving prizes to lucky viewer this year. See details on the website at http://wa5kub.com 

We will be broadcasting live video and audio of the 2009 Huntsville, AL hamfest this year via the internet.  The live broadcast begins on Friday morning, Aug 14 at 0800 CDT (1300 UTC) as we depart Memphis, TN and drive to Huntsville.  Just as we have done before, we will be broadcasting our drive live from the car. Then we will broadcast the hamfest all day Saturday Aug 15 and Sunday Aug 16.  We expect hams to be taking part in the Huntsville hamfest from all over the world. We have had viewers in over 150 countries.  

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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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Friday, June 12th was Day 1 of the 2009 HamCom event in Plano, TX.    www.HamCom.org is their web site.  

Al KE6LGE and Lee N5NTG rode up and stayed there in the comfort of Al’s RV, parked outside the conference center in the shaded area of the parking lot.

This is the same RV we used last month for Net Control of the American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure bicycle event from San Antonio to San Marcos to Austin on May 30th and 31st.

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Title: Smithville Hamfest
Location: Bastrop TX
Link out: Click here
Description: Smithville Hamfest – Riverbend Park @ Bastrop
145.350(-)114.8Hz
443.750(+)114.8Hz

Start Time: 08:00
Date: 2009-05-16
End Time: 12:00

Apparently the 7290 Traffic Net also hold their event there, and they had a better map and directions on their site. Here is image of map.