Clubs

You are invited to the next Framingham Amateur Radio Association meeting to be held on November 3, 2022 from 7 p.m. until 8:45 p.m. via Zoom and at the at the Costin Room in the main Framingham Library, located on Lexington Street. There is a parking lot next to the building. 

• • a 2m voice repeater
  • 2m DMR repeater
  • a 220 repeater
  • a 440 repeater
  • a general purpose digipeater
  • an APRS digipeater
  • a Winlink RMS Packet node, and 
  • an APRS Igate

Members will receive a zoom invitation.  Non-members may request an invitation by sending an email to John president@w1fy.org.

Bruce Anderson, W1LUS, writes on the Billerica ARS mailing list:

Topic: Speaker Dr. Bob Heil, K9EID of Heil Sound

Time: Nov 2, 2022, 07:00 PM Eastern Time

This month’s guest speaker will be Dr. Bob Heil K9EID. He is CEO Emeritus and Founder of Heil Sound, which has provided many microphones, headsets, booms, shock mounts, and radio accessories. This talk is sure to be a great one that you won’t want to miss.

BARS leadership elections are held at the November meeting. Be sure to take a look at the newsletter for the list of candidates. There’s still time to get your name in the running if you’d like to run for office in 2023. Nominations will be accepted during the November meeting. Voting is for the leadership for the upcoming year. Be sure to join us to make your vote.

On October 22, 2022, members of the New England Sci-Tech Amateur Radio Society and the Wellesley Amateur Radio Society went on a field trip to the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center (CMMC). 

According to its website, the “CMMC is a 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2002. The Center occupies two buildings on the 11.3-acre, ten-building campus which comprised the former Marconi-RCA Wireless Receiving Station, once the busiest ship-to-shore station in the United States and a significant military installation during World War II.”

The New England Sci-Tech Amateur Radio Society (NEST) will meet on-line and in-person on October 25, 2022 at 7 PM and feature: “Overview of FT8” by Yuri Botnar, KC1LNQ. 

Description: This presentation will provide an overview of FT8 with a focus on Yuri’s experience setting it up on a Windows computer with two radios, the IC7300 and the µBITX.  FT8 can be an extremely effective mode for operating for individuals in housing situations with limited options for antennas, such as condominiums, as is the case for Yuri. FT8 is one of eleven different protocols of modes offered by WSJT-X V2.5.  WSJT-X is a popular computer program designed to facilitate basic amateur radio communication using very weak signals. The first four letters in the program name stand for “Weak Signal communication by K1JT,” Joseph H Taylor, Jr. while the suffix “-X” indicates that WSJT-X started as an extended branch of an earlier program, WSJT, first released in 2001. Bill Somerville, G4WJS, Steve Franke, K9AN, and Nico Palermo, IV3NWV, have been major contributors to development of WSJT-X.

Bio: Yuri became interested in radio at age 13 in the city of Orgeev, Moldova.  His interests were in building/repairing receivers and transmitters rather than in QSOs. Yuri graduated with a Master’s in Radio Communication in Odessa, Ukraine. He started his career as an electrical engineer at a power distribution company in Chisinau and worked his way up to senior positions there.  Since 1994 Yuri has worked as an Electrical Design Engineer for a company in Beverly, MA designing power supplies for numerous industrial/scientific applications.  Yuri was granted a patent for developing a “Precision Voltage Regulator for Capacitor-Charging Power Supply.”

The next Wellesley Amateur Radio Society Zoom meeting on Tuesday, October 18, 2022 at 7:30 PM will feature Derek, AK1WI, who will introduce us to filters! STARS folks will join us too!

[WARS President Dan Brown, W1DAN, will email a Zoom meeting invite link before the meeting.]

The next general meeting [of the Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club] will be held on October 20, 2022, in person at the Pepperell Community Center, 2 Hollis Street, Pepperell, MA 01463. No Zoom simulcast is scheduled.

The guest speaker will be Thaire Bryant, W2APF. The title of presentation will be “DXing from the Other Side of the Pile-up”. You are cordially invited.

The New England Sci-Tech Amateur Radio Society (NEST) will meet on-line and in-person on October 11, 2022 at 7 PM and feature “Cybersecurity for the Radio Amateur” by John Tarbox, WA1KLI. 

Cybersecurity is a hot topic with many companies being hacked and personal data being exposed. Hams can help protect themselves by taking simple precautions and being diligent. Particular concerns for hams are radios that they put on the internet for remote operation and Wi-Fi enabled devices. The unique needs of hams will be addressed. STARS members are encouraged to share their own approaches to ham cybersecurity in the meeting and to come prepared with questions about ham-specific cybersecurity.

John has been a ham since the 1960s and holds an Amateur Extra license. He has an MS in Computer Information Systems with a concentration in Cybersecurity from BU and has been Adjunct Faculty at York County Community College. John’s email address is WA1KLI@arrl.net.

The next [Algonquin Amateur Radio Club] meeting will be held in­ person on October 13 at 7:30 pm in the library of the 1st Lt. Charles W. Whitcomb Middle School, 25 Union Ave, Marlboro, MA. Enter from Agoritsas Drive next to police station and use Door #1 at rear of building.

The speaker for the October 2022 meeting will be Dennis, W1UE, on the topic “A Contesting Intro.” The presentation will cover :

• What is Contesting?
• What do you need to contest?
• How can you contest?
• Strategies for Contesting

The next BARS Zoom meeting on Wednesday, October 5 will feature Bob Phinney, K5TEC, President of Sci-Tech Amateur Radio Society (STARS). Join Bob Phinney, K5TEC, as he describes his STEM program at New England Sci-Tech in Natick.

Bob and his team just sponsored a highly successful ARISS Space Station contact at The BIG E multi-state fair in Springfield, MA on September 27. The event garnered much news and television coverage at the venue which attracts 1.5 million people during its 17-day run.

A dozen lucky students in Bob’s program got to ask questions of International Space Station pilot Bob Hines, KI5RQT, via a ground station in Belgium. Along with “Space Chat,” NESci-Tech is conducting a 12-month educational space science program that includes: 

• Amateur Radio License Course
• Model Rocketry workshops
• Air-Powered Rocketry
• Introduction to Basic Electronics
• Introduction to Arduinos Electronics
• Public Telescope Nights
• Morse Code Introduction
• Elementary Mathematics for Modeling Rocket Flight

Bob Phinney has a winning formula for engaging young people—and their parents—in an exciting program that has seen youths design payloads for high-altitude balloons and even NASA rockets! Come and hear how he does it.

BARS will announce the link to join the Zoom meeting before the meeting, but it will be posted to the BARS email list and should not be shared outside our Club. Are you on the email list? If not, please send an email to bars-subscribe@w1hh.org and then simply reply to the robot response from the server and you will be subscribed. Observing our Zoom meeting requires only a web browser and headphones/speakers. You do not need a webcam or microphone unless you want to speak or be seen. Before our meeting date, please go to https://zoom.us/test and see if it will function for you. If you have problems, we can try to assist – feel free to ask questions on the BARS email list. We are looking forward to “seeing” many of you on Wednesday 10/5 here at 1900 ET.

The Barnstable Amateur Radio Club will meet  in-person on October 3, 2022 at 7:00 PM at the Brewster Police Department Community Room, 631 Harwich Road (Rt 124), Brewster, MA 02631. In addition we will provide a Zoom link to the meeting. This month, Andy, KB1OIQ, will present “Linux in your Ham Shack.”

Northeastern University Wireless Club President Marty Sulloway, NN1C, writes on the NUWC mailing list:

Hi Folks!

The semester is really rolling.

This week we kick off our third workshop, and for the first time this semester, we’re having a technical speaker for our Thursday night meeting.

I’d like to share a bit about our club meeting this coming Thursday. The topic of the presentation will be an Introduction to SDR for Experimentation. David Goncalves, a former president of NU Wireless, will be the speaker. 

David Goncalves (NU BSEE ’04, W1EUJ) has been a ham and a wireless communications experimenter for 20 years – including work on satellites, radar, and software-defined and all-digital radio. During the day he is a Research Electrical Engineer working on a wide range of problems, from antenna development to autonomous vehicles, and wearable systems.

Software-defined radio (SDR) is the way forward in RF experimentation. Instead of physical circuits, expensive test equipment, and bench space, you can build and iterate with a single piece of equipment and open-source software. In this presentation, he’ll go through how SDRs work, the GNURadio SDR development environment, and run through an example of ‘hacking’ a remote control.

Last week over twenty-five students joined us for an introduction to schematic design using KiCAD. Our workshops are designed so you can participate in any of them without participating in a previous one. If you are interested in attending our PCB Design Workshop this Monday (9/26) at 7 pm in Dodge 470, please fill out the form here to sign up.

I hope to see you.