Military Crossband QSL Card

Received my first QSL card from the recent Military to Amateur Crossband exercise back on May 9th. This one is from Station WUG-231, the Memphis District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who were operating from the W.G. Huxtable Pumping Plant in Marianna, Arkansas.

New Call Sign for Kevin

Kevin Bell, formerly WD0GFG, has been issued a brand new call sign effective today. Kevin's new call is KW4B. Congratulations Kevin. It'll take us some getting used to.

I think this is the picture you never wanted anyone to see!

CARS Club Station Work Day #2

A group of us met at the Southside Fire Station again today to continue our work in the radio room. We got quite a bit done again and should be ready for this to be the GOTA (Get On The Air) station for Field Day. We finished the work station surfaces by bracing them and securing them. We then installed a very nice electrical ground bus designed by Steve-K4SDJ. This bus is made of copper pipe with nuts and bolts providing nice ground points for various radios and other equipment. See pictures below. Paul-KJ4FAV did a very fine job of drilling the holes with his drill press. Nicholas, son of Mark-KA4CID, soldered the elbo joint together. Good job Nicholas! After the radios were set up, we got good comm checks on 2m, 70cm and 20m. Bill Solomon-K4WCS contributed a very nice Yaesu FT-840 for use in the radio room. Thanks Bill!! This will be a great assett to the club station. We just need to get an RF switch so we can toggle between the two HF rigs. Everyone did a great job today and we are almost finished with our "station makeover". Thanks to the following HAMs who came out to participate today.

Steve-K4SDJ

Guy-K4GTM

Kevin - KW4B (formerly WD0GFG)

Mark - KA4CID

Nicholas

Paul - KJ4FAV

Bill - K4WCS

Russ - K4YGD

Lynn - KD4POC

Matthew - KG4NKE

Jeff - KJ4HAF

Lester - KF4JBQ

STARS Club Meeting Tonight

Had a great time at the Statesboro Amateur Radio Society monthly club meeting tonight. Always good food at RJ's. Lyndy-ND4XE gave a nice presentation on how he uses his laptop to remotely control his FT-857D. Very interesting. It was great to spend some time with all the gang in Statesboro. Thanks to Bob-W4WTO for picking up Net Control for the Chatham County ARES Net in my absense.

Pembroke D-Star Gateway KJ4GGV Back Up and Running

Well, we made another trip out to the WVAN Transmitter site in Pembroke this afternoon to try and determine why the KJ4GGV D-Star gateway can be seen as active on the Internet but not allow for any linking. I picked up Mac-KF4LMT and we met Bob-KI4YRY and Larry-W4RA at the site around 1630. I connected the laptop to the router to double check all of our port forwarding settings to the gateway and found everything was just fine. However, I noticed that on the bottom of the page there are three tabs.....ADD, SAVE, APPLY. Well, I quickly determined that when we were out there last Friday I clicked SAVE but never did click APPLY. So all the setting were correct but I hadn't applied them to the active config of the router. Geez. And I'm in the technology business! Of course, after I clicked APPLY and we got someone to trigger the link to the reflector, boom we were good to go. Gateway connectivity back up and running! Mac had his IC-91AD with him and was able to verify the connection to the reflector. I'm glad it was a simple fix. Now let's see how long things continue to run. I think we're in good shape now. I sure appreciate the STARS Club (of which I am a proud member) for hosting and maintaining this D-Star system.

VE Session Held in Savannah Today

The Coastal Amateur Radio Society held a VE Session today at the Memorial Hospital. This was on the heels of a General Class that we just completed on Thursday. We had three operators test for General and three test for Technician. Unfortunately one of our Techs from the class was not able to make it to the test session so he might try it on Field Day. We had two folks pass the Technician exam and one pass the General exam. Congratulations to John Finn-KJ4KOF for his upgrade to General!

D-Star Work at the Pembroke KJ4GGV Repeater Site

We are very fortunate to have a D-Star system located fairly close to Savannah at the WVAN transmitter site in Pembroke. The Statesboro Amateur Radio Society has done a great job of learning and maintaining the system since it was installed last year. There have been some issues over the past few months with the Internet connectivity, which of course is what enables all of the D-Star systems to connect to one another. The guys suspected it might be a bad router this time so I volunteered to go out there with them to take a look since I had a spare router that I wasn't using. So I met Bob-KI4YRY and Larry-W4RA out at the WVAN tower Friday afternoon to take a look. We quickly found that the Internet router was dead. As in, won't even power up dead. I connected my router and began to program it to connect to the Internet via the Pembroke Telephone Company DSL modem. No joy. Called the help desk folks at the phone company to determine what type of authentication we need to configure for. Found out it was PPPoE which uses a telco provided username and password. She gave them to me and I configed the router accordingly. Still not syncing up to the Internet. Couldn't connect directly with the laptop either so we began to suspect the modem. The rep on the helpdesk dispatched a tech to come out and take a look. He was onsite with a new modem in about an hour. Don't expect that kind of response in Savannah! Gotta love small towns. Well, we installed the new modem, recycled the router and boom, we're on the Internet. Good stuff. While we were waiting on the tech to arrive we got the go ahead to run an ethernet cable from the DSL modem directly to the D-Star gateway. This is huge as it eliminates the need to connect from the modem to the gateway using Wireless LAN with two routers needed. Plus this would take away one more potential point of failure. We found about a 100 foot cable and began to plan how we would route it thru the facility. Easier said than done. In a totally different room about 50 feet apart in a building with cinder block walls! Well, I managed to find a suitable route after climbing around a little. We ran the cable and connected the gateway directly to the Internet router. Next, we ran into another problem. Whatever had killed the DSL modem and the #1 router also scrambled the brains of the #2 router which was connected to the gateway. Great. So Bob called his contact in Atlanta and he told me all the settings that I needed to re-configure the router for the D-Star gateway to connect to the network. Once I got it all configured and ready to go I made sure to save the config file to my laptop so that we'll have it in the future in case we ever need to re-program the router again. That will save alot of time. Once the config was complete we verified that the gateway could be seen as active via the Internet. We weren't able to get a good link established to another node or to the reflector cause no one was available that knows how to do that. So we packed everything up and decided that was enough for one day. Got alot accomplished and we should be better positioned going forward. We'll see how it goes. I sure enjoyed visiting the repeater site and getting a chance to play around with things a little. Thanks to Bob-KI4YRY and Larry-W4RA for letting me tag along.

General Class Session #4

Well we finished up our General Class License Course tonight with Session #4. I really had a great time teaching the class and learned a few things along the way. Kevin-WD0GFG and I have already discussed how we can tweek a few things in the course for next time. Overall, I think the ARRL prepared course was adequate. The students all seem well prepared for the exam and have been studying regularly on thier own between classes. They will take the exam this coming Saturday morning, June 6th at 0900. Steve-K4SDJ has assembled a group of Volunteer Examiners to administer the test.

Kevin and I will get a break now and plan to teach another Technician Class Course to begin in late August. Which means we may not get to start another General Class course until January. Plus we have plans to offer an Amateur Extra Class course in the future.