San Antonio Hams

This year, Hams Rule!  Yep, ALL communications go by  ham radio, other than some internal event staff communications using commercial radios at the start/finish line.   The 2012’s event is a 1-day event, starting & ending in Boerne Texas.  The routes are changed 100% from last year.

We’ll have eight (8) White 15-Passenger SAG Vans to staff with Hams, Eight (8) Rest Stops to staff with Hams, and two (2) repeaters to coordinate with.    All communications will be on 2 meters radio, using the 145.19 Boerne (KARS) repeater and the 146.98 Kerrville (Hill Country Amateur Radio Club) repeater.   Dual band radios are suggested to enable local SAG to SAG or SAG to Rest Stop communications off-net.

Contact Lee Besing at tdc@sanantoniohams.org or call him at 210-771-7075 to volunteer!  Don’t wait, assignments are going fast!   Lee will be attending the HCARC meeting on April 5th up in Kerrville to sign up their volunteers.

Actually, the exact title is “South Texas Tour de Cure”, and it’s starting / ending in Boerne, Texas, not San Antonio. But it will happen this year on Saturday, May 19th, as a one day event with 4 routes to choose from. There will be an 18 mile & 30 mile routes going south from Boerne into the Fair Oaks Ranch area, and the 60 & 104 mile routes go north from Boerne thru Sisterdale and Comfort, before the 104 goes NW to Kerrville and back around down past Camp Vista, Center Point and thru Comfort on the way back to Boerne.

We’ve suggested a new slogan for the new Tour de Cure routes…  “If you’re tired of flat, whimpy, boring rides, change over to the Tour de Cure for the hilliest ride you can ask for…” LOL   In other words… The ride is extremely hilly, with a need for extreme caution on the part of our Ham drivers and Motorcyle Marshals.   Roads are mostly narrow 2 lane paved roads with double yellow lines and no shoulders for the riders.  Speed limits are usually near 60mph on the open roads.   Cell phone coverage is very spotty in some areas!  I suspect we may be busier than last year in the SAG and communications venue.

This will NOT be a flat boring ride.

There will be some challenges caused by the hilly terrain. We’ve got APRS radios to install in all of our SAG vans, plus key supply trucks, courtesy of Austin Amateur Radio Club (Paul Fenrich KA5FZU is returning to run APRS). Mike Perez W5ZAP will be leading our valuable Motorcycle Safety Marshals and Curtis Rabenhalt N5QPN will be our route safety officer. Yup, we snagged up Curtis to volunteer this year!   I’ve driven the entire 104 mile route, and found we had solid APRS coverage on most of the course.  I was using my own 25 watt APRS unit with a full sized higher gain antenna, more power & antenna than our borrowed tracking units will have.

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We just had a conversation with Steve & Susan Shirk, the force behind the scenes of the BPMS150 BikeMS event from Houston to Austin later this month.   They still have a few empty slots to fill, mostly SAG Van Drivers & Navigators.    Our training date for Central Texas Hams will be this next Saturday, April 7th, from 10am-Noon, followed by a “free lunch”, up in San Marcos.  Contact Lee Besing by phone 210-771-7075 or email if you want to volunteer before that meeting.  After that meeting, they will be unable to accept volunteers due to the need to run DMV and background checks (on drivers only) and to reserve rooms for overnight accomodations.

Hams who are planning to work this event, are asked to attend this training / orientation event to learn about the changes in this year’s route & rest stops.  Yup, changes are in the winds, especially after the wildfires up near Bastrop.

If you prefer a more stable assignment, i.e. a fixed location or roaming “communications only” assignment, we can arrange for that as well.  We’ll put you in contact with Mike Hardwick, N5VCX, who is the head pooh-bah for ham communications.

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A few weeks ago, we were quietly told that Craig Kennedy, owner of  KComm The Ham Store, would likely be closing his doors at the end of March. 

 March 31st was to be the last parking lot tail-gate sale.   We were asked to keep the news quiet until all the final arrangemens had been made with the employees, etc., before publicizing the news. 

During the past couple of weeks, the word was spread by rumor, by email, by phone calls, during Ham Breakfasts, etc. that the store was closing. 

The San Antonio Radio Club, W5SC, has been holding their monthly meetings in the store, and had their club station setup for visiting hams to use while at KComm.  That era has also come to an end, with the club needing to move their equipment & trailer (in back parking lot) to another location, and to find a new meeting location.   I was told today, that April’s SARC meeting will still be at KComm, but starting in the month of May, the meetings are moving to Jim’s Restaurant on San Pedro & Ramsey.

Store on Gulfdale

Yesterday, we stopped by the store around 9am to find that it was the most crowded that we’ve ever seen it, including during a SARC Club meeting night.  

Craig was playing “lets make a deal” with old equipment, furnishings, anything that wasn’t nailed down to the floor or wall it seemed. 

It was our opinion that he likely did more sales that day in a few hours, than he had likely done all month.  Several folks commented that if Kcomm had seen this much business every weekend, we wouldn’t be there for the closing today.

When I got my ham license back in the late 80’s, Kcomm The Ham Store was located over on the NW side of town, on Mobud Street, just off Loop 410, between Evers & Bandera, in a small industrial complex. 

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From QRZ.Com comes the following information about another balloon launch that happened on March 29th.  This balloon isn’t using APRS, but has a QRP 10 meters CW beacon.   Thanks Greg N5XO for bringing it to our attention – Lee N5NTG

A long duration balloon mission that is using 6 Party Balloons to carry a 50 gram amateur radio 28.223 MHz CW beacon, is hoping to go around the world.  The ballon was released at 2330 UT (1930 EDT) March 29, from Annapolis in Maryland and started it’s journey heading SE at 6 knots. By 0300 UT, March 30, it had reached a speed of 60 MPH (96 km/h).  It has no APRS, just the 28.223 MHz CW telemetry system and it is hoped to locate it by signal strength and beam headings only. 

Note: Wind projections show the balloon heading east over the Atlantic Ocean, but with band openings, who knows? Even Greg N5XO might luck out and hear it… LOL

The mission is to give an insight into constant-pressure balloons and especially the use of common mylar party balloons as a fixed volume envelope. Unfortunately, these balloons have a high mass and so the theoretical maximum altitude no matter how many balloons are used is only about 26,000 feet and that is with no payload other than the fixed balloon mass.

The payload weighs about 50 grams. The team are targeting 6 party balloons 3′ in diameter which should give a float altitude around 16,000 feet. The Telemetry will be in CW on 28.223 MHz (USB DIAL) and will contain Battery voltage, inside and outside temperatures, and surface luminosity of the ocean/clouds. It has no GPS. The team will rely entirely on DF bearings and signal reports.

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Yesterday morning, Saturday, March 31st, Hams helped students & teachers from the Lehman High School Radio Club  launch a small weather balloon from the school, about 2 miles ENE of Kyle, Texas, running APRS using the Call Sign of NN5RR-11.   (Track it here online)  It landed a few hours later at 1.3 miles East bearing 76° from Martindale, in  Caldwell County, Texas.  Raw tracking info can be viewed here.

The weather cooperated for an 9am launch of a small test balloon on Saturday morning. It was picked up by digipeaters and I-Gates and appeared on aprs.fi. Ross Russell, NN5RR, was the instigator of the flight, and pre-flight planning was shared via the HCHams Yahoo group.

Because of the risk of losing the payload for this test flight, they kept the cost down by using the Byonics MT-RTG TNC/2m transmitter combo and a cheap HD camcorder.

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