CVARS Newsletter – April 1, 2020
CONTENTS
NEXT MONTH’S MEETING
CVARS WA7UHD Sunday Night Net Controller Schedule
April BOARD MEETING NOTES
April PROGRAM NOTES
NEXT MONTH’S MEETING
When: |
Wednesday, May 6, 2020 |
| 6:30 PM Board Meeting ZOOM Meeting |
| 7:30 PM Program ZOOM Meeting |
Where: | Lewis County Fire District 6 Training Room |
| corner of SW 21st St & Jackson Highway |
| Chehalis, WA |
Program: | TBD |
CVARS WA7UHD Sunday Night Net Controller Schedule
The CVARS WA7UHD Net meets Sunday at 8 PM local time on
145.430 MHz, – offset, 110.9 Hz tone. Preamble is at:
http://cvars.org/net_ctrl_form.html .
Net controllers are:
April | 5 | James |
AE7TF |
April | 12 | ─ |
|
April | 19 | ─ |
|
April | 26 | ─ |
|
|
May | 3 | ─ |
|
May | 10 | ─ |
|
April 1, 2020 BOARD MEETING NOTES
ZOOM VIDEO MEETING CALLED TO ORDER: 1830
MEMBERS PRESENT:
Bill Harwell, Chuck Verdon, Bill Knepper,
Jim Pace.
FINANCIAL REPORT:
Bank Balance: $7,670.
VE TESTING:
Jim Pace reported that some VECs, for example W5YI, are trying
remote testing. As of now, the ARRL VEC does not have procedures
for remote testing. So the CVARS test session scheduled for April 25
is cancelled.
PROPOSED PROGRAM:
Dale Tongue, AC7NP, has offered to talk at a CVARS meeting about "prepping,"
preparing for disasters. It has been a few years since we have had a talk
about prepping. Jim Pace will talk with Dale about the details of his talk.
K7PG:
Bill Harwell is ready to start the process to change the club's call sign
to Gary Litteer's call sign. Jim Pace suggested contacting Maria Somma
at ARRL headquarters for information on how to do that.
REPEATER:
+ James Van Ornum said the BawFaw.org domain name is due for its yearly renewal
on May 20, 2020. Renewal fee last year was $16.95. The site has a historic
connection with the Baw Faw repeater and the site does have a link to the
PayPal portal for receiving donations. Jim Pace moved, and Bill Knepper seconded,
that James renew the BawFaw.org domain name for another year.
+ Jim Pace reported that it is legal to repeat ham podcasts over repeaters.
Repeater ID still needs to be transmitted every 10 minutes during a sustained
transmitted.
+ Chuck Verdon reported that Chuck Tifft, W6RD, who recently moved to Rochester
and has a commercial communication background,
would like to help with the maintenance of the CVARS repeaters.
We will share that information with Mike Payne and Eugene O'Neill.
TRASURER's REPORT:
Bill Knepper reported that the annual Washington State Corporation fee has been paid.
Also, the IRS Form 990-N has not been filed yet.
MEETING CLOSED: 1901.
April 1, 2020 PROGRAM NOTES
The April 1, 2020 ZOOM Video General Meeting was called to order by Bill Harwell at
7:30 PM with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.
James Van Ornum highlighted the CVARS.org Nets tab which lists radio nets of
interest in our area.
Leads and Needs:
Bill Harwell shared that he was able to get his station configured for
digital on the HF bands.
Program:
Mike Ritz, W7VO, ARRL Northwestern Division Director, talked about HF Noise Mitigation.
Topics included noise sources, finding those noise sources and mitigating
their harmful RF noise. He used an inexpensive SDR dongle with a small loop antenna
and HDSDR software (http://www.hdsdr.de/)
to sniff out noise sources. The difference between small wall warts and larger ones
that use a transformer was displayed.
With the goal of keeping RF noise out of the radio shack,
Mike presented his grounding system. He uses Type 31 toroid chokes on his
antenna feedlines. Introduced were several commercial noise cancellers:
MFJ 1025, MFJ 1026, JPS/Timewave ANC-4, DX Engineering NCC-1 and NCC-2.
A couple of good website references are:
http://k9yc.com/publish.htm and https://www.nk7z.net/ .
The meeting adjourned at 9:00 PM. There were more than 21 people attending.