News from the Sterling Park Amateur Radio Club (SPARC)

Hi,

Reminder of the SPARC meeting tomorrow.  Wednesday at 7PM.

Also wrt Field Day, Marty, NV3H, set up a twitter account for SPARC. See https://twitter.com/sparcradio.

This gets us bonus points for Field Day and maybe we will use it for routine SPARC stuff also.  We have not thought through that yet.

73, Gordon, NQ4K

Hi,

It is time for our June meeting already.  The month of May has gone by very fast.  This coming Wednesday, 1 June, at 7PM.

Refreshments will be provided by Duane, K4UW.

The presentation for this month will by Rob, W4VRD, on D-Star.  I have never worked D-Star and am not sure what is, so I am looking forward to this introduction about this technology.

We have several items of club business for this meeting.

Herndon Festival is the first weekend in June, 4-5 June.  We will run a booth on Saturday, 4 June and support the 5/10K races on Sunday, 5 June. Plans are on our website.

The awards ceremony for the Virginia QSO party is on Sunday, 19 June, at 0900 at the Manassas Hamfest.  We held the paper log scoring party on Saturday, 23 April, with Shiva, KM4NPL; Henry, K2BFY; Monte, KV4KS; Gordon, NQ4K: and Dick, W2YE, present.  The electronic logs have been scored by Eric, AJ4LN, and Henry, K2BFY. Bill, KJ4VTH, has completed coordinating for plaque sponsorships.  Bill, KJ4LN, John, KX4O, and I have tentatively designated plaque winners.  We will finish that this weekend. The awards ceremony is next.

Field Day is the last weekend in June.  The plan is on our website and as you can see we still need volunteers to provide equipment and their help with setup and teardown and most importantly, operating the radios.

Finally, we need to discuss club officers for next year.  If anyone wants to assume the role of president or any other position, please let me know.

See you at the meeting,
73, Gordon, NQ4K

Gordon, et al:

In many instances, the Police and Fire "Alarm Boxes" were telegraph, rather than telephone.  I use the term telegraph in the broader sense.  It was generally not manually sent and may or may not have been Morse Code.

Most were a spring wound drive with a code wheel that had a sequence of some sort.  I am not very familiar with the different systems,but I believe the most common were a series of numbers that could be read by the "Desk Sergeant" and checked against a list or book.  In most cases it was a bell, rather than a klacker.  The sgt might hear  "ding,  ding-ding,  ding-ding-ding" followed by the sequence repeated.  He would look up "123' in the list and see, "Corner of Sterling Blvd and Route 7".

There may have been more complex systems, but that is the type that I have come across.

73,  Dave

Can't make the meeting but I found this on the street in Savannah. 






Bill, KJ4VTH