San Antonio Hams

Fresh off the e-mail press from Jeff N5MNW…

The [Austin Amateur Radio Club’s] W5KA ’94 repeater has been exhibiting long/hanging squelch tails recently, most likely due to terrific VHF band openings and the decision to keep the Austin ’94 an old-fashioned carrier-access machine.  The antenna at ~1500′ ASL hears things we at ~700′ ASL can’t.  Near-threshold co-channel (Brownwood, HOU, SA, DFW) signals cause the hysteresis in the squelch circuit to keep the repeater keyed even though no audible signal is getting thru.

The [Austin] Technical Team is working on adding multiple, S/N voted 107.2Hz PL-tone-access remote receive site(s) that will help mitigate this effect.

Make sure you are encoding 107.2Hz to take full advantage of the planned upgrades!

I received the following letter today in the mail from the Universal City Police Department, thanking ALL of the volunteers who worked the 2008 Veterans Day Parade on November 1st.  While he mentions by name, “REACT” and “Motorcycle Marshals”, he was aware that there were non-affiliated hams working the event, but considered them all to still be volunteers with REACT since REACT had coordinated the event for the past 20+ years.  REACT wishes to thank those who volunteered for this event, for without your support, it would not have been the same. Lt. Denton asked that we share this letter as widely as possible, so I’m posting it to this blog, with a link to let you download the scanned PDF version of the original paper letter for confirmation. – Lee N5NTG

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Note: I received the original email on this topic, with headers intact showing that it truly did originate at an email address coming from the Ft. Worth PD. – Lee

Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 06:39:52 -0600

Hi Everyone,

One of my Officers in Ft. Worth found a radio in a pawn shop, the pawner has made some suspicious pawns and he is not a licensed radio operator.

The radio is a Yaesu FT-817 QRP Transceiver, the serial is 0N150301. All the 0’s in the serial are numbers not o as in ocean.  Could you ask them to see if one of these radios was stolen during October?

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ARRL WEST COAST CONVENTION – “With A Little Texas Touch”

In mid July, Bob Hejl, W2IK, was approached via email by Per Brashers, KI6JJS, requesting permission to reprint several of his Emcomm and antenna building web sites to assist in presenting a RACES forum at “PACIFICON 2008”, which is also known as the “Dayton Of The West”. It is the major ARRL West Coast convention held in mid October and offers dozens of lectures, a swap meet, exhibits, demonstrations and even an operational JOTA station. To learn more, see:

http://www.pacificon.org/index.html

Emails were exchanged and the request soon escalated into more than simple reprint permission. KI6JJS also requested assistance with creating his actual presentation script.

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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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November 1st was the 38th Annual Veterans Day Parade in Universal City, Texas. (Universal City  is on the NE edge of San Antonio, near IH-35 and Loop 1604.) Normally, this parade is over in about 90 minutes or less, but this year it went for over 2 hours.  There were only about 50 registered entries this year, but it was still a very nice parade.

It started around 10:30am and ended after 12:30pm.  Pat Booker Road was shut down, almost military law or forced evacuation except for everyone lining the streets on foot.

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One of the annual events that the Hill Country REACT Team does each year, is the Halloween Trick-or-Treat in Sattler, Texas, just east of Canyon Lake on FM2673.  The entire town turns out for this event, with businesses and various groups setting up tables or booths and passing out candy or other snacks to the kids (and adults) who walk by in their costumes.

REACT has been doing this for many years, and the Canyon Lake Chamber of Commerce donates around 10 huge bags of candy to the Team for distribution in REACT’s name.  This year was no different.  We passed out about 40-50 pounds of candy in just three hours, from 5pm-8pm tonight.

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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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As of November 1st, AOL is closing down all of their web page services so as a result, W2IK’s 45 ham-related web pages will no longer be available through AOL. To keep most of these pages intact, they are being moved to a new address: W2IK.com    Please visit them often as they are sorted, upgraded and posted. Currently posted are the older antenna building pages, Ecom and family preparedness pages. Totally new pages will be added as time allows.

Hey Group,

Saturday (November 1st) is approaching fast and I would like to take a chance to Thank everyone that has stepped forward and volunteered.  We have approximately 18 volunteers plus 13 motorcycle marshals coming and it looks like we will have great coverage.

I have briefed Steve Denton at the U.C. Police Department and he is quite pleased.  They really look forward to our help each year and it sure looks like we are going to make a good impression again this year.

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