July 19 Installation of the CARS 146.700 Repeater

On July 19, 2008 a handful of local HAMS from the CARS club gathered to assist in the installation of the 146.700 repeater. The repeater is located at the WSAV transmitter site in Savannah, GA. Special thanks to Lowell Beckner(N4ZLJ) who is the Regional Director of Engineering for WSAV and to Ed Bigbie(W4MMQ) who is the patriarch of the local HAM community. Ed's son, Don Bigbie of Savannah Communications and his crew did a truly profession installation! More to follow when the new 70cm repeater and the new dual band antenna are installed.

Operators participating in this effort were: Lowell-N4ZLJ, Ed-W4MMQ, Steve-K4SDJ, Bill-K4WP, Ra-N4RVM, Mark-KA4CID, Guy-K4GTM

Aug 9, 2008 K4MUM Station Testing

On Saturday, Aug 9th, several Chatham County ARES members met to test the Ham station of one of our served agencies. We met for breakfast at 0700 as we usually do on Saturday mornings then it was over to Memorial Health University Medical Center for the second session of station familiarization training and operational testing. We had a good turnout with 12 operators in attendance. We tested our VHF and HF antenna for SWR before operating the radios. We had an SWR of almost 4 on the HF side so we decided to do some more investigating before bringing the HF rig online at the next session. Got good 2 Meter comm checks on a couple of the local repeaters with several local operators. We plan to do periodic testing like this monthly at our various served agencies. If you would like to volunteer to become a member of ARES and use your radio skills to serve our community please contact me at k4gtm@arrl.net.

Those participating in this months testing were, Steve-K4SDJ, Ed-W4MMQ, Mark-KA4CID, Lester-KF4JBQ, Carl-KC4UHM, Russ-K4YGD, Lynn-KD4POC, Ed-KI4DZD, Andrew-KI4WHN, Ken-W4JKG, Ray-WA4ZXJ, Guy-K4GTM.