News from the Sterling Park Amateur Radio Club (SPARC)

Hi,

It is time for the May SPARC monthly meeting.  Wednesday, 3 May 2017, at 7PM at the Sheriff station in Sterling.

The presentation this month will be from Jeff Dahn, KB3ZUK, on "Experience in NPOTA, Communications at NPS during the Inauguration, and the World Wide Flora and Fauna Parks on the Air."  That is a lot of topics to cover and I am looking forward to it.  Fro some interesting background, see

https://www.qrz.com/db/kb3zuk and

http://www.arrl.org/news/npota-participation-leads-to-inaugural-communication-detail-for-national-park-service  and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V568bB78EiM

Jeff is traveling down from Rockville, MD to visit our meeting, so please come out and give him a big welcome.

Marty, KV3H, emailed that on page 94 of the April 2017 QST our speaker from November, John, KM4KMU, was mentioned.  John Young, who set up his antennas in the parking lot, won the Roanoke Division, Single Operator FM Only of the 2016 ARRL VHF Contest with an impressive 4,221 points.

We have some other club business to discuss.

Herndon Fest and Race is coming up on Saturday and Sunday, 3-4 June.  We will send out a separate email on this. We do need some more operators to support the races on Sunday morning.  This is an excellent opportunity for new hams to bring out their handhelds and try them out.

We also have the awards ceremony for the Virginia QSO Party on Sunday, 4 June, at the Manassas hamfest.  We have almost finalized the scoring (with help from Eric, AJ4LN, and Henry, K2BFY) and plaque selection.  We should be ordering the plaques in about a week.

Field Day is coming up on 24-25 June.  All should mark their calendars for this event.  We will need lots of help and operators.  We will be sending out a separate email on this activity.  In addition, we will devote the June monthly meeting to a discussion of field day and its activities.  We have a lot of new members who hove not been to one before and this is a good time to bring all up to speed.

Finally, the end of the SPARC year is coming up fast.  Time to elect new officers.  We can discuss this at the meeting.

See you at the meeting,
73, Gordon, NQ4K

Hi,

We have received 386 logs so far in the Virginia QSO party.  20 are paper and the remainer are electronic.  We expect to get additional paper logs when Dick, W2YE, picks up the mail next time.

SPARC will have the Virginia QSO Party paper log rescoring party at the QTH of Gordon, NQ4K, at 0900 on Saturday, 22 April.  We usually get 4-6 people out and it usually takes about 2 hours to rescore all the paper logs.

Most of the logs from the Virginia QSO party are emailed to us in cabrillo format.  Eric, AJ4LN, rescores these using the software developed by Henry, K2BFY.

However, we still get 30-40 logs done on paper.  These need to rescored manually.  We rescore them because hams make mistakes in calculating their scores.  So we quickly check the paper log scoring to ensure there are no obvious mistakes.

There is no need to RSVP.  Please come if you can.

We will have coffee, tea, and soda available.

73, Gordon, NQ4K

Hi,

It is time for the April monthly meeting.  Wednesday, 5 April, at 7PM at the Sheriff Substation in Sterling.

Refreshments will be provided by Duane, K4UW.

Gary Memory, N7BRJ, volunteered to give a presentation on "Radio Communications both at home and at work."  He is a retired federal employee who spent most of his career in HF systems engineering, and rounded it all out working with other systems from DC to Daylight. He and his XYL, Carla, N7EVN, have spent 18 years living overseas where they were reciprocally licensed in every country they lived in. Gary is currently a Harris Corp Sales Manager, who sells and supports Tactical Radios for various US Government offices and agencies. He plans on bringing a couple generations of Harris Tactical radios for us to admire.

Many thanks to Dave, K7HMP/4, for making the connection with Gary to be at our meeting.

Henry, K2BFY, will bring his laptop and programming cable. Henry has a database of local repeaters which he can load onto onto your handheld radio (assuming the cable fits OK).

Finally, we have a few items of business to discuss.

The Virginia QSO Party is over. We have over 300 logs already and we still have until 15 April for more logs to come in. Eric, AJ4LN, and Henry, K2BFY, will probable rescore the electronic logs in a few days.

Herndon Festival is coming up in early June.  We normally operate a booth on Saturday, 3 June, and support the 5/10K races on 4 June with radio support.  We use our handhelds.  Thus Henry, K2BFY, updating the preset frequencies in your handhelds is very timely.

Finally, Field Day is coming up in on 24-25 June.  We are planning to set up a field site at Parkview High School.  We hope to devote the June meeting to planning and explaining what we do at field day.

I think that is all.

See you at the meeting,
73, Gordon, NQ4K