We had a great time today out at Fort McAllister running a Special Event Station with the Amateur Radio Club of Savannah. We used the club call sign of W4HBB. Had maybe a dozen HAMs in attendance and made approximately 40 or 50 contacts. Worked mostly 20 Meters with contacts in Jamaica, Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, British Columbia Canada, Alaska, Oregon, California, and all throughout the Midwest. Great job to Andy and Beth Ann and the rest of the club for coordinating a great event! Here's a link to a short video of Dan, KF4MND, operating on 20 meters. The video was taken by Dan's daughter Maggie.http://hamradiotube.com/Vidiscript/play/Main_Category/Special_Event_Station__W4HBB
I got a nice new toy for Christmas this year. I've been wanting to get a scanner and couldn't pass up a deal at the local Radio Shack over the holidays. They had the Pro-96 Scanner at a significant discount for a few remaining in inventory. The Pro-96 is a Digital Trunking Scanner and will allow me to monitor all the local public safety traffic as well as just about anything else you can think of. I also purchased the DC power adapter and the serial cable (USB interface) to configure the scanner via software. This is a great time saver. I'm using the ARC96 software from Bu-Tel which I downloaded from thier site. I also registered on the Radio Reference website with has just an enormous amount of scanning and monitoring information. The cool thing is that the ARC-96 software will pull the local (or any other) frequencies/talkgroup information directly from the Radio Reference website and and move it into the scanner. Wow, what a great tool. I have the scanner audio jack outputting to the input of one of my computers and that in turn is outputting to my Bose Waveradio so I have greata audio here in the shack. Thanks to Mac (KF4LMT) for all of his input and expertise in the selection, configuration, and operation of my new toy. Here are a couple of relevant weblinks. 
