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.

The February FCARC meeting is scheduled for Monday the 13th. Because of school vacation we are meeting a week early this month.

The E-Board will meet at 6 p.m., before the program meeting.

Our speaker will be Ellis Rud, N1MWJ, who will be talking about living off the grid. Ellis got started with solar energy by our own Walt, W1ZPB. Ellis is also the president of the North Berkshire Amateur Radio Club which operates several repeaters on Mt. Greylock.

The general meeting will begin at 7:00 p.m. with coffee and goodies in the Faculty Lounge at Greenfield High School. The meeting space is easy to find: go in the main door of the High School (left end of the building). Turn left immediately, go past the cafeteria and vending machines. The room is marked "Faculty Dining Room".

Directions to Greenfield High School: From the center of Greenfield go north on Federal St. (Rtes 5 and 10) about 1.5 miles, at Silver St. (stop light) turn left. (From the north, the Silver St. intersection is about 0.3 mile south of Rte 2 on Rtes 5 and 10, turn right). On Silver St. look for a sign for the High School on the left, about 0.3 mile from Federal St. (Click here for a map.)

For dates of future meetings see the FCARC Activities page.

FCARC members have been teaching a Technician Amateur Radio License class for several weeks now. The sixth and final class meeting on Thursday, February 16th will begin with a review session at 7:00 p.m., and at approximately 7:45 p.m we will conduct a Volunteer Examiner license exam session, all in room 91 of Greenfield High School.

Since our VE team will be there, we have decided to open the session to anyone who wants to take an exam for any class of amateur radio license. However, we ask that anyone not a member of the class should contact Al Woodhull, N1AW, (413-773-3522 or n1aw@arrl.net) to let us know of your intention to attend the VE session.

Please see the Amateur Radio License Exams page for more information.

The FCARC's regular quarterly VE session, as listed on the ARRL website and in the FCARC club calendar will be held in Northfield, as scheduled, on Monday February 27. See the following article.

Our Technician class web page has information for class participants (or anyone else who would like to look).

The FCARC VE (Volunteer Examiner) team will hold an Amateur Radio License exam session on Monday February 27th. The session begins at 7:00 p.m., downstairs at the Unitarian Church on Main Street in Northfield (Routes 10 & 63).

The fee is $15 cash or check. Bring 2 forms of ID (one photographic), Social Security number, any current CSCEs & photocopies, any amateur radio license & copy, pens & pencils. A calculator is OK if it is cleared.

Walk-ins are OK, pre-registration is not required. However, it is helpful if we have an idea of how many candidates to expect and what exams they plan to attempt. Contact Al Woodhull, N1AW, phone 413-773-3522, e-mail n1aw@arrl.net if you expect to attend or if you have any questions.

For more information, including the schedule of future FCARC VE Sessions, please see the Amateur Radio License Exams page on this website.

Belle, KB1NOG, and Miner, KB1NQK, both took and passed the exams for the General Class license last Saturday at the session sponsored by the MTARA and HCRA groups in Chicopee.

We also recently learned that Dan, KB1WEK, who upgraded to General in our November VE session, took the final step and upgraded to Extra at a VE session in Amherst last month.

The February 2012 Communicator has gone out by e-mail. If you get it by Postal Mail watch your mailbox this week. You can see it right now on the website, just click here. Older issues are archived on the website, click here.

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.

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 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 (note this is now in the news archive).

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).

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.)