The traffic handlers picnic and HamXpo 2026 have now gone by. The weather was perfect for the picnic and we welcomed traffic handlers from Connecticut and New Hampshire in addition to Massachusetts. Ray, AA1SE, Western Mass Section Manager announced the appointment of Eric Wilhelm, W1RVY as Section Traffic Manager for Western Mass, effective August 1. Congratulations to Eric and thanks for taking on this position. Eric can be found on MARI CW, MARIPN, CM2MN and HHTN. Those of you in the WMA section should now send any reports to him. We also welcomed Steve Ewald, WV1X, from ARRL Headquarters who brought along a selection of ARRL books to be awarded in a raffle drawing. Many thanks to Steve who has been our NTS support at ARRL over many years.
HamXpo also provided an opportunity to see many friends. Thanks to all who stopped by the NTS table and who attended the Meet and Greet to say hello. There were good crowds on both Friday and Saturday and there were many presentations given on a variety of interesting topics.
So what is next? As you know, this has been a celebratory year for W1AW during our country’s 250th anniversary, and Massachusetts amateurs made many contacts in February as well as August as W1AW/1. Phil Temples, K9HI, our New England Division Vice Director has suggested sending radiograms to those who contacted W1AW/1, thanking them for the contact.
HELP NEEDED: We would like to support their efforts and send a radiogram to each one. However, after all duplicates and contacts with no known email addresses were filtered out, there were still around 3,600 confirmed contacts! I believe we can do this, but spread out over a period of time of at least a month or two or more. They can be handled by voice, digital or CW. We are looking for traffic handlers in both Eastern and Western Massachusetts to help send these out. The preamble, text and signature would be:
R HXG 15 LONGMEADOW MA [DATE]
BT
THANK YOU FOR CONTACTING W1AW/1
MASSACHUSETTS DURING THE AMERICA 250
OPERATION X PLEASE SUPPORT ARRL
BT
LARRY KRAINSON W1AST
W1AW/1 MA COORDINATOR
You would add your call sign as the station of origin as well as your message number. I would also suggest an op note at the end to service to your call sign since many seem to forget that service messages go to the station of origin and not the signatory. You would also be eligible to count these third party messages for origination points on your SAR. Any number would be helpful, but 50 or 100 or so even better.
Please contact Marcia, KW1U by radiogram or email if you are willing to take a batch of addresses from the list. Thanks.
The July STM report is below. Thanks to all for your participation and support.
73, Marcia KW1U
STM EMA and RI, and formerly WMA