July Club Meeting

Once again we had a full house at the club meeting this month. Another successful VE session with one new ham and one upgrade, and 2 new club members!

Jeff Kerr, KC0VGC, updated us on EchoLink. The interface at the site has some type of problem which requires it to be reset about once a month. So, he went to the site and hooked the power up to the remote reset device so we can remotely reset it. We will look into getting a new pic chip for it, and a second IC, cost of about $15 as opposed to $144 for a new one. This unit was given to the club by John Kreymer, N5LKM, so we don't have anything invested in it.

James Adkins, KB0NHX, had a conference call with Bryon and Mike of Mercury Towers in Kansas City about the East TRS install. The original quote from PDQ Towers of $2825 is a good price, but we feel we can do better. We hope to have a formal quote from them in the next couple of weeks.

James also had e-mail correspondence with officials from the Missouri Highway Patrol communications division reference remote receivers at Granby and Milo for the 53.270 repeater. Though we do not have the okay to move forward with an install, they re-affirmed their position that when the new Motorola statewide radio system tower work is complete, we will draft up an MOU (Memorandum of understanding) which will allow us to install the receivers at those locations. Granby (by Joplin) will be our Southwest receiver, and Milo (near Nevada, MO), will be our Northwest receiver.

Jeremy Tannehill, KC0UJZ, and James Adkins, KB0NHX, traversed to Cox Hospital to find out what is causing the severe interference to our 224.280 and 442.275 repeaters. They determined that the hospitals clock synchronization transmitter on 72.720 MHz is the culprit. The 50-watt amplifier's 3rd harmonic is on 218.160, close to our input of 222.680. We are getting at least 40-watts INDUCED into our 224.280 repeater antenna! The 6th harmonic is on 436.320, and it's signal is at 0 dBm! When the unit begins modulation, the amplifier goes spurious. Since this is also affecting Verizon's reception of mobile phones at the site between 825 and 835 MHz, they will be contacting the hospital and pushing for the unit to be replaced or fixed.

We also discussed Field Day, which was probably our most successful and fun Field Day to date! With almost 1700 contacts, we had 18 people set up, and 31 different people operate. And, for the first time ever, we had all 3 stations running for 24 consecutive hours thanks to several dedicated people that stayed and operated all night. Next year, we will add a 3rd tri-band beam by using the Mosely TA-33 donated by Dick Higinbotham, K0GL. Kent Doucey, N0IRM, will be looking at the beam and re-building it for FD next year. This will allow us to work digital on a band besides 40-meters this year.



Next month, John Rayfield, N0EUG, will be doing his presentation on proper station grounding. You will all want to come out to this presentation and learn about grounding, it will be a very good presentation. We will also be planning an antenna party for the club's HF station. We had some wind damage to the HF dipole, and need to get it straightened back up, so you'll be hearing about that upcoming event soon.

73 & see you in August!