San Antonio Hams

I spent about 8 hours at the AARO Field Day at Raymond Russell Park, where they almost ended up with a Marachi Band for entertainment (band went to the wrong pavilion), then moved on to visit the KARS Ham Club in Boerne before swinging back down south around midnight to the SARC Ham Club in Shavano Park.

By the time I left SARC, still running on those 5 hour energy drinks, I started to head south to ROOST, knowing they would be still running full steam ahead even in the middle of the night, but sanity prevailed, and I advised my “extra” wife that I’d be heading home soon instead of visiting more FD sites this weekend.

I used my cell phone to make some videos and take some pics, but the phone battery died & had to be recharged after I left AARO, so no middle of the night pics from KARS or SARC to be shared.  I’ve been promised pics from other hams who were at those locations, however.

AARO did a 1 day only FD event, starting setup around 10am when the park opened (county park hours restricted how long they could stay there), and shutting down & leaving before midnight when the county park turned into a pumpkin one more.  They were running 6 stations in different modes (voice / digital / cw / satellite) on various bands, and had more antennas and generators than I’ve seen in a long time.

Most of the actual radio operators were taking it very seriously, but the bulk of the 50+ hams were just there for the workshops, free food & fellowship.  A few were experimenting with different antennas, mostly home brew, and learning new modes.  There were a handful of brand new hams show up, and AARO took extra time to show them the operations and get them talking on the air to make a contact or two.

Workshops also were conducted on various topics:

• Proper Soldering Techniques
• Building DiPole Antennas
• Quadrafillic (sp?) Antennas
• Anderson Power Pole

Click the link below to continue this article & see some of the pics I took.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m putting out a request here for area 2012 Field Day reports, complete with photos.

If you visited or hosted a Field Day event, and want to share your photos and stories, or even your results, feel free to post them here. Just register on this site (see link to the right) if you haven’t already done so, then send an email to info@sanantoniohams.org to request a status upgrade to allow you to post stories.

I won’t allow personal flames or attacks, so every new author gets moderated until I know they are doing okay.  I can also offer you assistance and advice if you are having problems uploading photos, or whatever.  One trick it to write up your story in MS Word, or another processor, then copy / paste it into the “Add new post” window online.  Add your title, pick a topic category or two (like Field Day, or club name), upload some photos from your computer to show either one by one, or as a gallery at the bottom of your article, and tada!

If you are a ham operator, already registered on this site, you may be already setup to do that.  Just login and add a new post. If you forgot your password, no worry, just click the link to say “forgot my password” and you will get a link emailed to you to create a new password.  I don’t know your password and don’t want to.  The software will automatically handle that for you without my manual intervention.

Registration for being an author on this site, is NOT the same as subscribing to the newsletter.  That’s a separate registration process.  Send your subscription request to subscribe@sanantoniohams.org to be automatically added to the list.  I’ve got about 450 hams already on that list, after dropping about a dozen that bounced from the last mailing.

Hope to see you here soon!

Lee Besing N5NTG
210-771-7075 cell (voice / text okay)