San Antonio Hams

During tonight’s Bexar County ARES  Training Net,  Lothar briefly mentioned the garage door problems those of us living near the intersection of 151 and Potranco Road (San Antonio, TX) are having.    As Lothar correctly stated, the issue is a conflict between a new radio communications tower put up at the NSA facility being built on Military Drive and garage door openers in the vicinity.

The NSA tower works on the LMR 390 Mhz frequency, which is shared with older garage door openers, including, as it turns out, my own. As NSA has stated in public, they believe they have the legal basis for operating on this frequency, and do not intend to stop operating on this frequency.   So, for those of us with garage door openers operating at that frequency, it means that your remote may not open your garage door until you are very close to it. In my case, I actually had to park in my driveway, get out of my car, and activate the remote standing two feet from the garage door. A bit of an inconvenience.

The Genie GIRUD-1T Universal Dual Frequency Conversion Kit alleviates frequency issues from the recently implemented Land Mobile Radio (LMR) communications system. The LMR system is used by military bases across the U.S. and was implemented as part of the nation’s Homeland Security efforts.

Most newer garage door openers operate on the 315 Mhz frequency to avoid this conflict. So if you are having these issues and would like some resolution, you can do one of two things: 1.) Purchase a new garage door opener that operates at that frequency, or 2.) Install a converter which will allow your existing garage door opener to operate on the new frequency.

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During the March 12-13th 2010 REACT International Annual Board Meeting, we tried something new and radical. 

Take a cheap webcam with built in microphone, extend the cables another 15′ so you can stick the camera off in the corner someplace, and now you have the next best thing to being that spider on the wall, not only listening in to the meeting, but watching it live as well.    

I used my CLEAR Wimax modem for part of the meeting, but changed over to the Drury Inn’s wi-fi because they had a slightly faster upload speed.  The 2 day annual board meeting was held in Irving Texas (DFW Airport area) at the Drury Inn.

Watch the meeting (recorded) at http://ustream.tv/reactsecretary for all 16 hours if you need help sleeping. 🙂 

These videos were recorded live, and have not been edited.

If you haven’t been to ARRL’s website lately, you don’t know about it’s new look and feel.  They have spent some serious effort (read that as paid a bunch of money to somebody other than me)  to build a site that lets visitors sign up for a free trial before joining ARRL.

http://www.arrl.org is the direct  link.

Your membership dollars at work… 

We’ve heard of a few glitches in their system, but that is to be expected on any new major redesign like what was involved here.   

As a webmaster who manages over 80 website / domain names, and has been designing webites since 1995, we say to ARRL “Job well done!”.

Of course if they had let me help… 🙂