Eastern Ozarks Amateur Radio Club

February’s meeting was a great success, with good attendance, and a great testing session.

We opened the meeting with 12 members, and 3 visitors (which, I believe all three joined the club!).

The repeater has been working fine, Frank reported, other than echolink being down for a time due to a computer issue.

Ben reported that he did operate during Winter Field Day, and got a certificate!

Ben will be talking to the new Parks director, and reserving the shelter at Engler Park again for Field day, June 28/29

Warren explained hamclock – a budget alternative to a Geochron. https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/HamClock/

Jefferson County club has a couple of excercises planned on the .075 repeater this spring: Tornado Drill on March 5, and Earthquake Drill on April 1st

Frank brought up the fact that the ARRL VEC is planning on transitioning to paperless testing, and we had some discussion about that. Arthur will be finding donated equipment to use. Arthur and Warren are exploring ExamTools (https://examtools.org/) as this is the software we’d be using. More discussion to come.

Howard voiced concerns about unlicensed operators flooding the frequencies during an emergency event. Some discussion on that.

Net Control operators were scheduled for the following weeks:

0210 Arthur

0217 Ben

0224 Brandon (need to confirm)

0303 Arthur

0310 Ben

Congratulations to Chris and Derek, who both passed their Tech! Looking forward to hearing you on the air soon.

ARES Portion of meeting:

Discussion of how repeaters work – specifically, if the repeater can “hear” somebody, then everyone else on the repeater can also hear them at the same signal level.

Discussion of the ARES net:

• Using local landmarks to describe location is good – someone probably knows exactly where that is
• We will not log short time contacts. We need to know that you are available if called.
• Site reports: report what is going on around you
• Phonetics – use them. Amateur radio generally uses the NATO alphabet, but ANY Phonetics is better than none
• Discussion of changing repeaters/frequencies for and/or during the net.
• Discussion of programming all local ARES frequencies, including surrounding counties, into your radios

ARES Net Control Operators:

• 13th Ben
• 20th Arthur
• 27thFrank
• 3/6 Frank