San Antonio Hams

Late this afternoon, heavy rains decided to visit San Antonio, heavy enough that the National Weather service issued a Flood Advisory until 9pm, due to the slow moving storm that was dropping 1″ to 2″ of rain in some areas. It’s now 8:30pm and still sprinkling, but the strongest storms have moved off to the SE side of Bexar County. 

 At my house on the NW side of San Antonio, near Seaworld so to speak, we’ve had 0.97 inches of rain since the storm began around 6pm.   Guess I won’t be needing to water my lawn tonight. 🙂

Source: This is forwarded to you by the State of Texas State Operations Center (SOC).
Date: August 11, 2009
Subject: New traffic, criminal laws set to go into effect Sept. 1

HB 2730 is the DPS’s Sunset Legislation, and many of the DPS-related bills this session were included in HB 2730.

Notable traffic and criminal laws that go into effect on Sept. 1 (unless otherwise indicated) include*:

Seatbelts:

HB 537 requires all occupants of a vehicle, no matter their age, to be secured by a safety belt, no matter where they are seated in the vehicle; changes the definition of a passenger vehicle to include a passenger van designed to transport 15 or fewer passengers including the driver; removes the current exemption for third-party Medicaid transportation provisions regarding the use of child passenger safety seats; and prohibits a motorcycle operator from carrying a passenger under the age of 5 unless the child is seated in a sidecar attached to the motorcycle.

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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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Bexar County ARES holds its monthly meetings on the 1st Tuesday of the month, and rotates the location between the American Red Cross HQ (Houston St & Commerce St), and the SA City EOC down at Brooks City Base.   This month, about 18 members of the local ARES group met in the American Red Cross HQ and later toured the radio room. One member (Shane NS5D) was out supporting a brush fire that SAFD had rolled out to support with their command bus, and another member ( Ray AE5HN) responded to a Red Cross support call and had to leave the meeting early.

Focus for tonight’s meeting, led by Bexar County ARES EC David K5OLE, was the subject of Hurricane Preparedness, how much advance time to expect, how accurate of a guess re landfall center to expect, when to expect to be deployed back down on the coast for the recovery phase. The second focus was a planned antenna party for the morning of August 29th to take down and repair the dipole antennas at the Red Cross, then reinstall them on the roof.  Contact any ARES AEC for details if you want to volunteer to help.

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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