Mar. 31, 2010 B-17 Radio Work

Spent a few hours at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum this afternoon with Carroll-WX4Y and Steve-K4SDJ servicing (cleaning, burnishing contacts, greasing bearings) the DM-28 dynamotor from the 65 year old BC-348 Reciever for the B-17 restoration project. Hope to apply power and test next week. Wish us luck.

http://www.mightyeighth.org/b17_restoration.htm

St. Joseph's Hospital HAM Station Test

Kevin-KW4B and I met over at St. Joseph's Hospital today to install and test the new Dual Band VHF/UHF radio and antenna.  St. Joseph's is one our served agencies here in Chatham County and relies on the local ARES operators to provide backup communications in the event of emergencies or disaster in the area.  First thing we did today was to connect the analyzer to the feed line and test the antenna SWR.  1.2 to 1 all the way across the 2 meter and 70 cm bands.  Nice.  Then we set up the new Alinco power supply and Kenwood dual bander and began to test all of the local repeaters.  We gave Steve-K4SDJ a call and he gave us comm checks on all of the local repeaters.  We were also able to hit the repeaters in Jesup, Whitehall, Pembroke, and Rockledge (just east of Dublin).  Not too bad.  Now we just have to wait for the new HF radio and antenna to come in and get it installed and tested.  Productive day.

Mar 27, 2010 Pancake Breakfast

Had a good time and a good breakfast at the Masonic Lodge in Richmond Hill this morning with my friend and fellow radio operator, Greg-N4VAD.  Greg and a couple of his buddies setup three "go kit" style radio stations to demonstrate to the public in conjunction with thier fund raiser.  I enjoyed meeting Larry-AF4MI and David-KD4NUE.  Also had one of our newest HAMs, Charles-KJ4SMZ there to check out the operation.

Mar 25th License Upgrades

Congratulations to Linda Eagan-KI4WHO who upgraded to Extra Class and to Will Griffin-KJ4PSU who upgraded to General Class at today's VE Session.

Thanks to our Volunteer Examiners, Steve-K4SDJ, Sue-W4SWJ, and Mac-AF4KL.

Mar 24, 2010 Radio Work on the B-17 Restoration Project

Spent a few hours at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum today working on the BC-348 reciever.  Carroll-WX4Y and I showed up about 2:00pm and opened the reciever on the workbench and tested the tubes and some of the capacitors and resisters.  Seven of the eight tube are all still good!  The eighth needs to be replaced.  Pretty good.  Capacitors and resitors are looking good as well.  I took out the dynamotor which takes a 28 volt input and delivers 227 volts to power the tubes and we inspected the armature, the bushings, and the bearings.  The bearings still have grease!  Awesome.  Next visit we will service the dynamotor and test it with a 28 volt power supply.  Carroll will bring his service monitor and we will do some initial testing of the circuitry.  The restoration team has set us up with a very nice workstation.

Later in the day several other HAMs that are also going to be working on the project arrived for the restoration team "All Hands" meeting to get a project update from Jerry McLaughlin who is the project manager.  Steve-K4SDJ, Mark-KA4CID, and Al-KJ4SMY and myself enjoyed the company of other restoration volunteers as we had drinks and pizza.

Chatham County ARES Meeting

Had a great ARES meeting on Monday evening with over 20 operators from four counties.  Particularly awesome was the fact that we had four new operators from our most recent Technician class and we registered nine new members into the ARES program!   Here was our agenda.  Next meeting in June or July.

• Welcome and Introductions
• Served Agencies Overview
• Activity Summary
• Things To Accomplish This Year
• Training Requirements
• Upcoming Activities
• Next Meeting Date
• Adjournment

Mar 20th 100th Anniversary Scouting Event

On Saturday, Mar 20th about a dozen local area Hams gathered at the Taro Drop Zone on Fort Stewart to teach scouts about amateur radio and to help them earn thier radio merit badge.  What a great time and the weather was absolutely beautiful!  We had a couple of HF stations and a 2 meter station set up operating with the Special Event Callsign W4S which stands for We're 4 Scouting.  Clever, huh?  This is the callsign that Philip-KA4KOE always gets for scout related radio events like this and like the annual Jamboree on the Air (JOTA).  As an added bit of fun, Kevin-KW4B brought out a couple of his telescopes and everyone was able to get great views of the sun, the moon, Saturn, a nebula, and a couple of distant galaxies.  What a big hit the star gazing turned out to be.

ARES St. Patrick's Day Support

On Wed, Mar 17th our local ARES program activated to support a couple of our served agencies during the St. Patrick's Day parade and festivities.  St. Patrick's Day in Savannah is a big event and significant enough for both the Chatham EMA and Memorial Medical Center to activate thier respective Emergency Operations Centers.  At 0600 Steve-K4SDJ arrived at the CEMA EOC to bring up the amateur radio station and ensure the EOC staff that we have backup communcations established in the event it is needed.  Steve began to take checkins from local ARES members to establish a network of available operators around the city. 

Guy-K4GTM arrived at Memorial Medical Center at 0830 and and reported to Jimmy Gordon who is the Safety Officer for the hospital and to Ra Meguier-N4RVM who was the executive in charge of the hospital EOC activation.  Guy brought up the amateur radio station and established communication with Steve at the CEMA EOC. 

Throughout the day, we transferred the Net Control duties back and forth between the CEMA station N4CEM and the Memorial station K4MUM based on the situation.  We used the Red Cross repeater, 146.850, as our primary repeater for the based on it's proximately to the downtown area.  It worked great.  We maintained a "resource net" of sorts on the primary Chatham County ARES repeater where folks that wanted to be part of the "Parade Net" could be redirected to the Red Cross repeater.  Once again this year we had a number of radio operators in and along the parade route which provided us with great coverage for the event.

Throughout the course of the day we had operators arrive to support the activities at the CEMA EOC and the Memorial EOC.  John-N2DRL worked with Steve at CEMA and Lester-KF4JBQ and Ted-KJ4EGZ worked with Guy at Memorial.  We also had Carl-KC4UHM, who is an employee of Memorial, spend some time with us.

We maintained the net and the active EOC until about 1500 when both CEMA and Memorial de-activated thier respective EOCs and we stood down our ARES activation.  We closed the net and secured our respective amateur radio stations.  These activations give us great opportunities to train and show's our close relationship with our served agencies and the public that we are ultimately in place to support. 

March 10th B-17 Radio Work

On March 10th, Carroll-WX4Y, Mac-KF4LMT, and I went over to the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum to do a closer inspection of some of the radio gear that came with the B-17 that is currently undergoing restoration.  We met Jerry, Marshall, and Jim and got our official "City of Savannah" t-shirts and volunteer name tags.  We're now official!  We only had a couple of hours so we went over to the equipment store room and got right to work.  We opened up the case on the BC-348 Receiver and were pleasantly surprised at just how clean and well preserved everything looked.  Wow, what a beautiful piece of equipment!  No sign of damage or age whatsoever.  Amazing how well this 65+ year old radio looks!  Carroll seems to think that this radio will be no problem at all to get running.  After some photos and documenting, we closed the case and moved on to an RT-18/ARC-1 VHF transceiver.  This particular radio was not in quite the condition that the reciever is in.  But, everything appears to be in place and "fixable".  Took some more photos and made some more notes then put the case back on this one.  After we cleaned things back up a bit we talked about some next steps.  Carroll is going to try to find a service manual and schematic diagrams of the radios.  Mac is going to find some articles on BC-348 restorations for future reference, and I'm going to research the RT-18 and find out the best way to clean the exterior cases and control panels.  On our next visit we plan to bring some of Carroll's test equipment to test the tubes and capacitors.  It was a great visit and we are on our way!

Mar 5-7 ARRL International DX Contest

Boy did we have a great time as a club participating in the ARRL International DX Contest as a club entry this year.  We operated our very fine club station at the Southside Fire Department with the new addition of a Icom 756 ProIII transciever that once belonged to Mr. Ed Bigbie-W4MMQ.  I was honored to operate his radio.  At about 4:30, Kevin-KW4B, John-N2DRL, and I arrive at the station to put up dipoles for 80 and 40 meters.  We used Kevin's air powered line launcher "canon" to get the lines up in the tress and used the pulleys on our tower for the other ends.  Got the antennas up, feed line run, and tested with the analyzer before dark.  Jere-KT4ZB arrived about 5:30 and setup the logging program on the computer and made sure everything was good to go.  Steve-K4SDJ arrived and helped with the final touches.  When 7:00pm rolled around we were on the air.  Jere made the first run of contacts and Kevin, John, Steve, and I ran out to grab some some dinner.  Once we had our strength back, we began to take turns on the radio.  Several operators began to show up as the evening wore on and many got an opportunity to operate the station.  Ken-W4JKG showed up at about midnight and operated till about 0400 making quite a few contacts on 40 meters.  I decided to stay overnight and worked a seperate radio on 80 meters under my callsign.  I made about 30 contacts till Ken left at 0400.  Then I jumped on the club station till 0530 when Kevin came back in.  Kevin relieved me and I ran home to shower and change then went over and met the normal crownd for breakfast at SunnySide Up.  After breakfast we went back to the station and many more HAMs began to show up.  I had the opportunity to give some "new operator training" to one of our new HAMs, Fred Kuhn-KJ4PST.  Helped Fred setup his handheld for all of the local repeaters and tested it.  Fred got to make his first radio contact with his friend, Ra-N4RVM, and was quite thrilled.  Operateors came and went throughout the day and we have a total of 10 HAMs that made contacts in the contest.  Once dinner time came around, Ra-N4RVM had pizza delievered for us all.  Thanks Ra!  As the nght wore on we were really racking up the contacts.  The bands were in really good shape and our very nice rotatable beam antenna was doing a great job.  We even had a handful of contacts on 10 meters.  Going on 40 hours with no sleep I decided to stay as loong as I could Saturday night to keep the station in operation.  I finally called it quits at around 0200 and locked things up and headed home for a few hours of sleep.  Steve and Kevin were back at the station at around 0700 and things were rolling again.  We only had about 5 hours out of the 48 where the station was not in operation!  Nice feat!  Once again we operated with several HAMs throughout the day on Sunday.  Kevin really had some nice runs and had well over half of our total of 451 contacts.  Great job Kevin!  Kevin made contact number 451 with about 30 seconds left in the contest.  What great fun.  At about 1800, Steve and I started getting things ready to stow and took down the 40 and 80 meter antennas.  Byt he time Kevin and completed the final contact, we had things just about packed away.  What a sense of accomplishment when 1900 arrived and we looked at our final tally!  I want to personally thank Jere-KT4ZB for his idea and for his guidance and expertise in the contest.  What a tresure he is.  And to Steve for his logistics and coordination support.  To Ra for the pizza.  And of course to all of the HAMs who operated and assisted with this effort.  Here is a list of those who operated the station followed by an list of all who participated in some way.

OPERATORS
- KT4ZB, Jere
- KW4B, Kevin
- N2DRL, John
- K4GTM, Guy
- KJ4EGZ, Ted
- W4JKG, Ken
- N4RVM, Ra
- KA4CID, Mark
- KG3Z, Tom
- K4WP, Bill

OTHER HAMs in ATTENDANCE
- K4SDJ, Steve
- KI4DZD, Edward
- KF4JBQ, Lester
- W4REQ, Ralph
- KJ4PTP, Kirk
- KJ4FAV, Paul
- KJ4PSU, Will
- KJ4HAI, Melissa
- KJ4PST, Fred
- KD4LUG, Andy
- KJ4SMW, Arthur
- KG4NKE, Matthew
- W4SWJ, Sue

Mar 3rd CARS Club Mtg at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum

On Mar 3rd we held our monthly club meeting at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum where we are assisting with the restoration of the radio compartment of the B-17 "City of Savannah".  With almost 30 club members in attendance, we held a short club meeting in one of the very nice conference rooms then we heard from Jerry McLaughlin who is the Project Manager for the B-17 restoration.  Jerry gave us a short history of the aircraft and how it came to become part of this fine museum.  Next we went downstairs to actually get an up close and personal look at the aircraft.  Jerry introduced us to the Wed night crew of volunteers who were working on the aircraft and we were able to actually climb into the plane and look at the bomb bay, cockpit, and of course the radio compartment.  What a treat.  We spent a good hour in awe over this mighty machine.  Took alot of pictures and talked about our plans for the radio gear.  What a huge success the meeting was and what a great group of hosts that Jerry and his team were.  We are looking forward to getting started!