Franklin County Amateur Radio Club The home page is now also the place to find the latest club news. Click here for general information about the FCARC. News items below are posted with newest items at top of page. Old items will be moved to the News Archive page.

Links to Internet information sources about software defined radio (SDR), the subject of Bob Solosko's presentation at the January meeting, are now online here. The link is ./Files/SoftwareDefinedRadioRefs.pdf.

Greenfield's 2012 Winter Carnival will include numerous events from Friday, February 3, through Sunday, February 5. Click here for the complete Winter Carnival schedule.

The FCARC will be helping out, as we have done in past years, by providing communications for the Sleigh Bell Run, a four mile road race, on Saturday, February 6. Volunteers should report for assignments at 9 a.m.. Race time will be 10 a.m. Click here for a map of the race route.

Net control will be set up in the Greenfield Public Library in the LeVanway meeting room, where runners register for the event. This is good visibility for us. Radio communication will use the KB1BSS 2 meter repeater (146.985, negative offset, PL 136.5). Net control will be on the air starting after 8.30 am.

Radio volunteers are asked to be present at 9:00 a.m. for assignment to race route sites. Enter from the back of the library (on Main St).

Parking for ham radio operators can be found beside the Greenfield Fire Department, in the lot of the businesses behind the Firehouse or in the YMCA parking lot on Hope Street.

Chris, KB1NEK, is coordinating FCARC volunteers. Please contact him so he will know how many people he'll have. There will be tee shirts for volunteers. When you sign up please note your shirt size.

FCARC members will be teaching a Technician Amateur Radio License class starting on Thursday, January 12. There will be six weekly sessions. Classes will begin at 7 p.m. at Greenfield High School.

We need to know who will be attending in order to order materials. Contact Chris Myers, KB1NEK, at camyers_1@verizon.net for more information.

A Technician class web page will be used to share information with participants (or anyone else who would like to look).

The West River Radio Club is sponsoring a General Class Course to be held at: Vermont Yankee-Entergy Offices, 185 Old Ferry Rd., Brattleboro, VT 05301 Tuesday evenings from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

We will begin on January 31, 2012 with a Technician-level review.

The General-level course will begin on February 7 and end on April 3 with a review and Volunteer Examiner Test Session.

The cost for the course is $ 50.00, which includes the text, CD-ROM, and VE Exam fee.

To enroll or for more information, please contact: Bro. Frank Hagerty, S.S.E. WK1L; call (802) 387-5639; or email hagertysse@myfairpoint.net

This is a reminder that FCARC activities for the entire September-August club year are posted on the FCARC website Activities page.

You should check this page once in a while for updates about meetings and other activities. For 2012 the page now has information about the Technician license class beginning January 12th, the program meetings January 23rd and February 13th, and the Sleigh Bell Race on February 4th.

Also note that our "regular" monthly plan of meeting on the third Monday of the month gets disrupted by holidays and other events - for instance, the January and February 2012 meetings are not on third Mondays because Greenfield High School is closed on the Martin Luther King Day and Presidents' Day holidays in these months. We have also learned that, unless we have an unusual number of snow days this year, school will end before the 18th of June, and thus our Annual Meeting and Election of Officers has been scheduled for June 11th.

Changes made since the original schedule was published in the Fall are printed in red on the activities page to draw attention to the changes.

The January 2012 Communicator is out. If you get it by-e-mail you should have received it by now. If you get it by Postal Mail you'll get it soon. If you want to look at it right now just click here.

Webmaster's note: I made a mistake last month on the Communicator directory page. The link for the December issue was entered as if the issue was a Word (.doc) file instead of correctly, as an Adobe (.pdf) file. That's bad enough, but what's worse is that nobody pointed it out by writing to webmaster@fcarc.org. Please, if you see an error, let us know. It's actually nice to hear that someone reads these pages!

The KB1BSS 448.875 MHz repeater has had a problem of not passing audio to the transmitter for several weeks. The nature of the problem is such that you wouldn't notice it unless you could listen to the repeater while transmitting at the same time. Since the repeater is not heavily used it's not known when the malfunction started. As of 12/13 it is off the air - control components have been removed for testing.

At the November 28th Amateur Radio License exam session we had two candidates. Dan Miller from Rowe, KB1WEK, took and passed the Element 3 test to upgrade from Technician to General Class. Joe Steim from Royalston passed Elements 2, 3, and 4 to jump from no license to Extra Class in one session. He had previously held a license which lapsed many years ago. Joe is now AB1PY.

If you encounter Dan or Joe on the air or at an FCARC event please welcome them.

The Volunteer Examiners were Chris, KB1NEK, Ron, K8HSF, Bob, W1SRB, and Al, N1AW.

The next scheduled FCARC VE session is scheduled for February 27, 2012. More information is available on the FCARC website VE News page.

Amateur Radio License Classes: The FCARC is planning to present a Technician Class License course early in 2012. Details will be posted here soon.

December QST is out, and Field Day 2011 results are posted. Our entry under the call AC1L is listed on page 76. By your webmaster's count our entry is 178th of 344 entries in class 2A -- almost exactly in the middle. Apparently no errors were detected in our submitted logs, we are credited with 531 QSOs and 2,296 points, exactly as posted on this web page in July.

You can access a database of Field Day results on the ARRL website and select many different ways of seeing the results. For instance, you can see all entries in all classes from Western Massachusetts. Here you can see that the top entry in Western Massachusetts was the effort of the Hampden County Radio Association, in class 7A, and that the only other WMA class 2A entry was the combined effort of the M.I.T. and Harvard Radio Clubs, who have been at this far longer than the FCARC.

There is an interesting article on Ham Radio in the 21st Century in EDN (Electronic Design News): http://www.edn.com/article/519742-Ham_radio_in_the_21st_century.php. (Thanks to Yankee Clipper Contest Club mailing list for this info).

The For Sale page here has new items added. (Sorry, the free things went fast).

The 2011-2012 Club Calendar has been posted. Click here or on "Activities" in the menu on the left side of this page.

We are returning to program and business meetings every month for two reasons:

• Having months without meetings has not led to better attendance.
• Breakfast at a crowded restaurant is not a good time and place for membership discussions of club business.

Another change for 2011-2012 will be the meeting room. This year we plan to make our usual meeting place the Faculty Dining Room at Greenfield High School. We can have coffee or other refreshments here, and we can sit around tables for hands-on activities or connect to antennas ouside a window here. This room is easy to find, just turn left inside the main entrance of the school. The Small Auditorium (room 59) will still be available for us to adjourn to if a program can benefit from the nice audio-visual facilities there.

For reference the 2010-2011 calendar can be seen on the website.

Logs have been scrutinized, a few unnoticed dupes were expunged, some corrections made, all data and documentation has been sent off to ARRL.

2011 ARRL Field Day Results for FCARC (as submitted)
  Call	Score	Class	QSOs	Mult	GOTA	Sec	# participants
  AC1L	2,296	2A	531	2	KB1MSU	WMA	25
  QSOs: c.w. 192 (3 at GOTA station), phone: 339 (30 at GOTA, 23 on 6 meters)
  QSO points: 1446, bonus points: 850

Some participants were saying, well, we may not have done all that well, but we learned a lot. But actually when the score was calculated we did better than we had done in recent years. Here are scores for the previous five years as reported in the ARRL Contest Results archives (yes, we know, "Field Day is not a contest").

2010 ARRL Field Day
Call	Score	Class	QSOs	Mult	GOTA	Sec	#	Club
AC1L	2,078	2A	438	2	KB1MSU	WMA	25	Franklin Co ARC

2009 ARRL Field Day
Call	Score	Class	QSOs	Mult	GOTA	Sec	#	Club
AC1L	1,770	2A	319	2	KB1MSU	WMA	25	Franklin Co ARC

2008 ARRL Field Day
Call	Score	Class	QSOs	Mult	GOTA	Sec	#	Club
AC1L	2,066	2A	334	2	N1AW	WMA	25	Franklin Co ARC

2007 ARRL Field Day
Call	Score	Class	QSOs	Mult	GOTA	Sec	#	Club
AC1L	2,128	2A	339	2	N1AW	WMA	22	Franklin Co ARC

2006 ARRL Field Day
Call	Score	Class	QSOs	Mult	GOTA	Sec	#	Club
AC1L	3,620	2AB	288	5	 	WMA	30	Franklin CTY ARC

Note that the high score in 2006 came about because both stations were operated QRP -- the actual number of QSOs was low, and by all accounts it was a disappointing experience for the ssb operators who had a hard time being heard with only 5 watts.

Of our 25 participants, thirteen licensed hams operated the cw, ssb, and 6 meter stations, four unlicensed operators made 30 supervised QSOs at the GOTA station, and eight others participated in various ways including helping with setup and takedown, moving the trailer, and supervising the GOTA station.

I'm hearing voices
They're all so soft and distant
but logged as five nine.
  -- Scott Andersen, NE1RD

(We don't normally steal items from the newsletter for the web page, but this one was irrestible.)

For some time the FCARC 2 meter repeater in Leyden has actually been our backup portable repeater, while Bill Boutwell, N1EWK, and Gerry Lempicki, KA1STZ, analyzed and then repaired the damage done by lightning or power surges in the summer or fall -- nobody seems to have noticed exactly when the damage occurred. One of the effects of this damage was to disable the CTCSS tone control, which led to repeating of noise or distant users trying to access another repeater.

On Friday, December 10, the backup repeater was replaced with the main machine, with all control functions restored. CTCSS is operating properly, using the 136.5 Hz tone. Also, we can now exercise control functions such as temporarily disabling CTCSS if a net or an emergency operation requires opening up access. We can also reset the repeater controller remotely if necessary. As required by FCC regulations the repeater can be reset remotely using a frequency different from the repeater input channel.

There are still some parts needed to restore all of the functions of the weather station at the repeater site.