San Antonio Hams

44th  Cowboy Homecoming – Saturday Aug. 15  starting at 9AM till—??

Pleasanton, TX at the city park located off of Business HWY 281 at the Atascosa River just North of downtown Pleasanton.  Bob – K5AUW

Several San Antonio Hams, including myself (Lee N5NTG), apparently made the 100 mile round trip down to visit our fellow hams from the Atascosa County Amateur Radio Club, only to find out it was just as hot and dusty down there as it was up here in San Antonio.  🙂   after finding the place (without any exterior signage on the main road) by using my GPS, then trying to find the main entrance with the parking lot by following a couple of large pickups (did I say it was out in the rural country area?), paying my $5 admission fee, and then walking what felt like 2 miles to find the ham station located almost at the rear of the country fair event, I found smiling faces and a cold bottle of water awaiting me.  The way I first spotted their “booth” was due to a couple of antennas stuck up in the air about 25-30 feet with colorful surveyor’s tape stretched around the area.

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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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As the drought continues down here in South Texas, I thought I’d take time to remind hams to double check their grounding systems (if they have any), because the ground is so dry and getting cracked, and you might not as well grounded now as you thought you ought to be. You might have to water around your grounding rods, or around your tower base to prevent shifting / cracking ot that. Of course if you’re having that much of a problem, you need to have soaker hoses around your house’s foundation as well.

I took these photos at a customer’s front yard this afternoon, thought it was ironic that a yard care company would leave a sign in this desolate dry yard, warning folks to not walk on the grass until it dried.

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The Bexar Operators Group (W5BOG) is in the final stages of acquiring a 1994 Chevy Van/Bus for their use as a general communications and/or emergency communications vehicle. This 18 passenger bus will be converted into a go-anywhere communications van which will also be used for casual outings and “in the field” communications experiments. This “green” bus runs on propane. It will be fitted with complete VHF and HF  operating areas, propane stove, sleeping accommodations and “bathroom”. Special antennas will be used and a portable generator and solar panels will supply energy.    It is hoped to have the vehicle “up and ready” in a few weeks.

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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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