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.