"Show and Tell" always needs you to bring something from your shack to show those attending, while you tell about it. Instead of a Guest Speaker this month, we will use the valuable time to discuss our many activities.
Len's Funeral was June 5th, at Hawaiian Memorial Park, and his burial in the Veteran's Section of the park, following the service.
Len's contribution of time, energy and spirit to KARC for decades is legendary. He was a gentleman in many ways, and will be greatly missed by all his friends at KARC. Our sympathy and prayers are with his family, he will be missed. -Editor- Greg,WB6FZH
The set-up time will be 08:00 AM with general admission at O8:30 AM with a $2.00 entry fee. Many activities will be tightly scheduled into the next 3.5 hours, ending at about 12:00 PM, with clean-up lasting until 1:00 PM.
There is plenty of parking ajacent to the Pearl Harbor Yacht Club and Community Center. It is located at the end of the road that leads away from the Arizona Memorial, to the right and past the Submarine Museum.
Sid, AH6HH, held a W5YI VEC test after the KARC meeting. There were about a half dozen taking varios tests. The attendance was about 25 members and guests.
The guest speake, Dan Spears, NL7UW gave a great presentation on what an Official Observer does.
Mike, AH7R, did show and tell with his new SG-2020 which raised some interest in this unique portable transceiver.
There was lots of discussion of the date setting for the swap meet.
Discussion of the Field Day at our usual place. Possibly a second QRP station may be set-up. Planning continues. Possible use of a Beam if a good support is availiable.
Smokie with a pickup truck of stuff for people to rummage through in the parking lot.
Some information on the Richard LeChance funeral was available too.
Sid and his group tested at the 20 May HARC meeting at the Columbia Inn. This test had originally been scheduled by Richard LaChance,WH6T(SK). There were 5 upgrades to General Class, and 1 new Technician Class. John, K1ER, and Fred, KH6BI, were the credentialed VE's helping Sid in Honolulu. Many Technician license holders that were licensed prior to 1987, have up-graded to General in recent weeks.
The other incidentals like equipment, antennas, operators, computers, spares, tents, sunshade, batteries, power, etc. will be attended to also.
The FD 2000 location will be the same as the last several years in Ho'omaluhia Botanical Garden in Kaneohe. You just drive past our meeting place (Visitor's Center), to the NUI section of the park. It is a short flat walk from your car to the radio operating area, picnic area or rest rooms.
Bring the family, visit, operate, supervise, feed the operators, bring a friend that might enjoy seeing what Amateur Radio can do. This is one of the few public events that showcases KARC and it's special capabilities to serve the community in time of emergency. We will have booklets on Ham Radio to give to the public and obtain Bonus points with the score.
The set-up time, possibly on Friday will be coordinated at the June meeting. Please! someone bring a video camera and a still camera so we can have some pictures for the paper, website and our club video archive. Besides the newsletter Editor would like to see what is going on, he will be looking for you on the air!
Greg will continue to Edit the KARC News and contribute to the KARC Website as long as he is able, appropriate or replaced.
Seriously, this is an important time at KARC, we need all of the talents of our membership involved with the club. It is not Rocket Science and you are part of a team. Consider volunteering to work in an area of interest, or even suggest an activity that interests you to develop for the club.
There are many tasks that have been started already, AH6OZ, Walt our KARC president has already started the groundwork for the improvement of the legal, political and institutional aspects of KARC to insure that we continue to be a generalist type Amateur Radio Club that will support all kinds of Ham Activities. This will allow KARC to qualify for various grants and awards, and more easily assist it's members in making donations or rememberances. The ARRL affiliation is also in the works again.
Just getting Crox to talk about his achievements is very difficult. He is a very quiet modest man, that I suspect knows many things that would be of interest to us, many perhaps that he may not be able to discuss. Did I mention that he was part of the beginnings of the "Electronics" Division of Hughes Aircraft? Anyone familiar with the history of that era, can only imagine the possibilites of being involved with anything that Howard Hughes or the firm had to do with.
Crox is not feeling as well as he would like these days, and has not been able to attend as many KARC activites as he might like. When I came to KARC a few years ago, I met Crox and associate him with those who I have often called the "KARC Faithful", one of those who for years has held the club together by his attendance and many contributions. Those of us that know him certainly appreciate the friendship and achievements of this quiet modest man.
I remember speaking to him at his house one day, about a topic near and dear to my heart, "QRP". I started to ramble on, as I often do when I get excited about something. I was talking about this "new" NorCal QRP Group that had been doing so much,etc. Crox just nodded at the right places and listening approvingly. As I spoke my eyes landed on a familiar sight, some copies of "QRPp" the Journal of that very same club, with a partially completed NorCal "Sierra", a complicated multiband CW Transceiver project, sitting on top. Something that is not exactly a beginner's project.
I quickly changed the conversation (in mid-sentence) , to my interest in Classic and Military tube-type radios without losing a beat. Crox is a "Classic" who has been involved with radio communications for more years than most of us have been alive. It was wonderful to hear his thoughts on a radio or two that was "new" to him, when it was "new" and "new" to me when it became "classic" now. These days he operates a radio that is more computer than radio, and is experimenting with PSK, and other computer based modes that are state-of-the-art.
For 7 years, during my residence on Oahu it was my pleasure to live a couple of houses down the block at the edge of Kaneohe Bay from Crox. From there his QRP or QRO signals are well received around the world via his vertical, and around the islands with his NVIS antenna.
As many of us know, it is just part of the magic of radio, to have your radio signal travel to new places and people, but it is even more magic to have your signal find your favorite places and special people. I will look forward to my next QSO with AH6CS, Crox one of KARC's own.
Thanks to Sid, AH6HH, for bring this to my attention, we certainly would never have heard about it from Crox. When you consider that most of us may have cellphones in pocket or purse, and have handi-talkies that regularly talk via repeaters throughout the state, or even to satellites as they fly by overhead, imagine what it was like in 1937...and what Crox did!
The treasury has plumped up a fair amount due to some contributions of the sale of equipment that was passed on to Sid, AH6HH from an anonymous deceased ham and some other donated equipment from a member that moved to the mainland.
KH6AAA and WH6AAA are close neighbors. In fact they are so close that the top guy wire for each one's tower reaches from the top of their tower to the base of the neighbor's tower (they must be good friends hi).
KH6AAA's tower is 50 feet tall, with the guy point at the top. The guy wires cross each other 20 feet above the ground.
How tall is WH6AAA's tower ?
First it uses the keyboard for input. Thus you practice not only copying code, but copying code on a keyboard. Very nice practice for using logging/contest programs.
Second, it is set up kind of like the game of Jacks. You first do the characters one at a time and the program gives you as much time as you want to answer. You focus on being exactly right with no time pressure.
Then it does one at a time, but it moves along and you have to keep up. Then it does pairs of letters, then threes, then fours and then five letter groups. Finally it does random length groups.
After this it adds a letter and starts the process over again. It is very effective. It is set up to take in small doses, which is just right for learning and improving CW. It features "Morse the Cat" who encourages you.
You can customize lesson plans as to the order in which the letters are introduced, where in the sequence it starts and how fast and how much time is allowed between groups of letters. It does Farnsworth as well.
You can really make life hard by starting the list with:
1 J 2 3 4 V 5 H 6 B 7 Z 8 9 0 / X
If you can flawlessly copy cipher groups of that combination at 20 wpm, you are definately starting to learn CW.
It also has a strange game called Pentode. This is a great little piece of trickery that rewards you for being able to "copy behind" an essential skill for faster code. It rewards you greatly for holding off on using what you have copied and saving up letters in your head as part of the strategy.
Morse University II seems to be particularly good for increasing CW speed. It is by Timewave and they have a web page at: http://www.timewave.com.
As the "Old Geezer" sits typing on a keyboard across his knees for this issue of KARC News he is half-listening to a 20 meter SSB contact spaning the globe through the speaker on his left. Well, that is certainly not exactly anything new to most of us! However, he suddenly realized which radio it was coming from... and that he had owned that same Sideband Engineers Model 34 Single Sideband Transceiver for more than 35 years. It seemed strange that now because it is over 25 years old, it qualifies in most circles to be called "Classic". He reminded himself that the last car he sold was a "Classic", he did not pause to draw any conclusions relating to the fact that he spent almost twice what that '69 Eldorado cost new just to drive around in a luxury time warp.
Aparently, there was something bothering him... it was that this radio has some trans..some..ah,er a trans..some.. tran-sis-tors in it (23 transistors & 21 diodes), but he was very quick to recall that it had also dial lights and 3, count them "three", vaccuum tubes inside. A 12DQ7 "driver" tube to amplify the ..."solid state" SSB signal to a level that the "TUBE TYPE" RF AMPLIFIER, two 6GB5 tubes in Paralell output with "High Voltage" that might even kill you if you came in contact with it! You had to be a licensed and skilled Amateur Radio Operator to possibly understand how to operate this sort of equipment! Well, with those real tubes inside it certainly must qualify as a "Classic".
He paused at his keyboard and began to visualize in his mind's eye the Sideband Engineers (SBE/Raytheon) announcement of the new SBE-34 SSB transceiver in the '60's QST magazine. He had seen advertisements showing that the radio had dual internal 12VDC/110AC power supplies ,they were inside? the radio, you just plugged-in with the appropriate power cord. He thought it could not be much of a radio..it only weighed 18 pounds, and is only 5" x 9" x 11" with it's steel cabinet with a luggage type handle on the side. Besides, it was only 125 PEP watts input (40-60w out), he had receivers that needed more power than that to just hear a signal!
The "Old Geezer" wondered back then, why would anyone want to turn the tube heaters "off" while mobile from the front panel anyway?. Besides, it did not even have a transmit-receive relay, and why would anyone put a Collins Mechanical Filter in a "transistor" radio anyway? Who cared if the DC current draw was less than 500ma on receive(keeping in mind that a third of that was the dial lamps).
He grudgingly realized that Portable and Mobile operation could not be easier! (The fact he was not old enough to drive then was only a minor detail.) All that was needed was a microphone, antenna and power source and you were "on-the-air"! The SBE-34 radio covered all the Phone, and parts of the CW portion of 80, 40, 20, and 15 meters.
He remembered a few special QSOs in a time long past, even a couple hotel fire alarms he received very strong signal reports from as the bells began to ring....There was ofcourse learning the value of a break-away antenna connection when dangling wires down several stories at hotels, and counterpoises under the bed. He remembered leaving some of his clothes home in favor of coax cable, tuner, and other accessories in his suitcase as he carried the SBE-34 onboad the aircraft with him as hand luggage through the years.
A rapid change in propagation, had raised the volume of one of the distant signals and returned the "Old Geezer" back to reality.. He he looked up and saw the familiar SBE front panel that he had viewed from the dark interior of highway travel, the flickering light of many a campfire, and in recent years through dark glasses in the tropical sun at the edge of Kaneohe Bay. His eyes strayed above the SBE-34 to the tube type Navy radio with plug-in coils that first energized it's speakers in WW2, then to the laptop & TNC, and a new two meter fm transceiver that is more computer than radio sitting nearby. I just almost hear the "Old Geezer" say what he is thinking.."I can not imagine anyone ever considering the radios of today as 'Classic', besides, like many modern electronic equipment, it will be 'Disposable', long before it would have been 'Classic'.
Consider building yourself a "Classic" Crystal Set, or a single tube CW transmitter, or purchasing a used "classic radio" it is not too late...keep the Magic in Amateur Radio, and then pass it on...72/73 de WB6FZH- Greg
MEMBERSHIP CHAIRMAN- Jerry Mulherin, WH6BKQ, 235-3042,
email:jerham@aloha.net
MAILING ADDRESS- KARC c/o J.Mulherin, 45-145 Mikihilina St., Kaneohe, HI 96744
KARC WEBSITE & INTERNET INFORMATION