Month: August 2006

W7 QSL Bureau

The Willamette Valley DX Club is also home to the ARRL 7th District Incoming QSL Bureau (http://www.wvdxc.org/buro.php). The Bureau’s manager Ken, K7IFG, brings thousands of cards to our club meeting every other month where they are distributed to the individual letter sorters. Card sorting begins at 6:30, one hour prior to the general meeting.

Note: cards are only sorted in January, March, May, July, September, and November during the low in the sunspot cycle due to fewer cards.

For more information, contact the sorter for your section. The first letter after your call area determines your section. For example, ‘W7AC’ would be in the ‘A’ section.

Unfortunately, not all of the section managers have email addresses. To contact section managers without email addresses, send a letter using the US Mail to the bureau, with a SASE. The address is at the bottom of this page.

Please do not send applications, SASE’s or cash directly to the sorters, please send that via the WVDXC main address.

http://www.wvdxc.org/orderfrm.html

This weekend….

Got to do a recon up to the Misty Mountain Campground where I’ll be headed over Labor Day. The journey should not be too difficult. The campground looks nice. Tucked at the base of the Blue Ridge, it is a shady, quiet place – small pool and shaded areas where the RVs are tethered to their power and water supplies. There was a ham RV in the camp, but I can’t remember his callsign. Nice Class A motorhome with a small vertical antenna mounted on the back.

I got another envelope from the QSL bureau! It had about 4 or 5 QSL cards from Belgium. One had the special “OO” callsign from last year’s anniversary celebration.

Received a letter from Tom, AA4TB, in South Carolina that I asked about setting up a CW sked. A regular CW sked would really help me out and get me on the air practicing CW. I need to reply to him.

Been sampling the Samuel Adams Brewer Patriot Collection. Four 12oz beers come in a box. The flavors are interesting: Traditional Ginger Honey Ale, James Madison™ Dark Wheat Ale, George Washington Porter® and 1790 Root Beer Brew™. Now, understand that I am usually an adventurous beer drinker… but the Root Beer Brew was not good. Tasted like a juniper bush and licorious placed in a vat of otherwise unimpressive beer. The George Washington Porter was pretty good, although I’m not a huge porter fan. I haven’t got to the other two flavors yet… we’ll see.

The rest of today – I need to clean up the shack (… and the rest of the house!).

Radio club provides Boy Scout camp with electronics building

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
http://www.gtherald.com/

This summer, W8BSC was on the air.

Thanks to volunteers from the Cherryland Amateur Radio Club, Boy Scouts and Webelos camping at Camp Greilick this summer can earn merit badges in amateur radio, computers and electronics.

A new 384-square-foot building — dubbed the Radio Shack — houses a host of amateur radio, computer and electronics equipment. Over the past four weeks of Boy Scout camp, this equipment has kept interested Boy Scouts nearby, earning some the designation of Shack Lizard after they receive all three badges.

Using the radio equipment on one side of the building, Scouts have contacted HAMs both locally and around the country or practiced their Morse code skills. Workbenches along the other side of the building are filled with circuit boards, chips, soldering irons and other electronics paraphernalia.

“I’ve learned how to do QSOs and make the signal efficient,” said Alex Dewitt, a member of Troop 119 from Bay City. “I’m just getting into amateur radio. I’m still waiting to see if I can get anybody from Canada yet.”

Jill Raymer, a scout mom, volunteer staff member with the Scenic Trails Council and a volunteer with the Cherryland Amateur Radio Club, supervises the Radio Shack. Seemingly everywhere at once and with a great passion for both scouting and amateur radio, the Radio Shack is a slice of nirvana.

“What I like about the station is that we’re real busy: we went through 100 badges in a week,” said Raymer, a Manton resident who is also a member of the Wexaukee Amateur Radio Club. “Everybody is at least learning about radio even if they’re not earning a badge.”

Before the Radio Shack was completed in July, scouts interested in amateur radio previously used a Cherryland Amateur Radio Club emergency communications trailer. Raymer and club volunteers brought this trailer to the camp for a number of years. Then two summers ago, they moved equipment into a 100-square-foot building, whose frequent use demonstrated that there was interest in a permanent facility.

Members of the club worked out an agreement with the Scenic Trails Council to build an amateur radio, electronics and computer facility. They began gathering contributions for the shack in December of 2004 and finished building the structure last month.

“What happened was that some of the guys were out there for an open house or some darn thing and they said, ‘Wait a minute, let’s make this a little bit larger,'” said Chuck Mellberg, project coordinator of the Cherryland Amateur Radio Club, about the small building used two summers ago. “The scouting program has been very supportive of this.”

Club volunteers built the shack over the past year, aided by in-kind donations from area businesses. Members funded most of the cost, though they also received small grants from the Biederman Foundation, the Oleson Foundation, the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation and the Rotary Club Good Works Committee.

“I was surprised by the amount of funding we did receive,” Mellberg noted.

“We’re constantly looking for ways to get people interested in amateur radio and we took on this project as a way to get scouts interested through the merit badge program,” he added of the club’s commitment to the Radio Shack.

During the first half of the four-week Boy Scout camp that just ended, counselor-in-training Gus MacNeal, 14, taught an average of 30 scouts a day, about evenly divided between radio and electronics.

“A lot of the boys like taking these merit badges,” said MacNeal.

Raymer did note that boys are still boys: even with the new Radio Shack online, swimming is more enticing in the afternoons for all but the most devoted future amateur radio operators.

“We are very quiet in the afternoons during swim time so the kids interested can do the radio,” she said.