On Friday, June 12, four of us met down at the station for lunch and then to work on the K3. The K3 that the club uses is a radio that was used in the WRTC-2014 contest held in New England last summer. As contest radios don’t really need a second receiver or a digital voice recorder (DVR), this K3 was not fitted with these options. As we also like to DX with the radios at SPARC, NY4I procured the parts for the radio to add the second receiver, upgrade … Click for more
SPARC
Field Day preparation by the Antenna, Radio and Computer teams took place on Saturday. In the photo below, John, KI4UIP, Hal, W1EES; Tom, NY4I; Dave, KR4U and Johnnie, W4TSP work on two HF radios.
Below, the CW station gets tweaked by Tom, W4CU and Ron, KP2N.
Below, Ron has identified a problem with the CW configuration.
We will be setting up antennas on Friday, June 26 at 10:00 AM. All help is appreciated. Field Day setup will begin at 9:00AM on Saturday, June 27th. Lunch for those arriving early and … Click for more
A million points, that is… As a tune-up for the CW contest part of Field Day, several operators of the SPARC Contest Group fired up the W4GAC station to have some fun in the CQ WPX CW contest. This is a 48 hour event where we try to contact as many other stations anywhere in the world. In this contest, the goal is to work as many unique prefixes as possible. To make ourselves sought after in this contest, we opted to use NY4I as the club call (there are … Click for more
SPARC Field Day 2015
Field Day is an ARRL operating event where amateurs setup portable stations using temporary (non-fixed) antennas and radios. Field Day is a test to allow us to establish emergency communications. The contest part of Field Day helps train operators on handling a high volume of messages that would be required during an actual communications emergency. It is also a time to have fun, socialize and learn something new about amateur radio.
This year SPARC will conduct Field Day at the DMI Facility where SPARC normally holds … Click for more
Doug Mills, AG5I says hi from his new MI QTH. Click on card to enlarge.
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Due to the severe intermodulation problem experienced by our 440MHz repeater, the engineering team has determined we need to add a Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System (CTCSS) to the repeater input. CTCSS, also knows as a Private Line (PL) tone will prevent the repeater from re-transmitting signals that do not contain this tone.
Once activated, all radios desiring to access the SPARC 440MHz repeater MUST transmit a 146.2Hz tone to activate the repeater.
Repeater tone access will be added in the near future, so program your radios now to be ready … Click for more