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An informational newsletter for the Hampton Roads Amateur Radio Community. To subscribe, unsubscribe or contribute, please email HRHams. All local club/event information welcome! Just send the details!
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If you can read this, then you are either not registered or not logged in! VBARC Membership is NOT required to register at this website, but if you are not registered you will be missing about half of the options available to registered users. Please take the time to register and gain access to all of the features available at the VBARC website!
January VBARC Meeting
Don't forget that the January VBARC Meeting will be held on the second Thursday in January (the 8th), vice the first! This is the annual election meeting, so please come and be counted!
If you cannot make the meeting, you can vote by proxy, by giving your written proxy to a club officer.
Friday 02 January 2009
Local Repeater Listings
Local Repeater Listings
In an effort to make it easier for our new Hams to find the local repeaters, I have posted local repeater information to the site. I am sure one or two of these repeaters may be defunct, and that I may be missing one or two; so please help me by taking a look and posting a comment if you find errors!
I posted two identical listings, one sorted by City and the other by frequency. Hopefully you will find them of good use. I have added a new link to the menu (Local Repeaters), but only registered site members that are logged in will be able to see it (or access the pages for that matter).
Well it's that time of year again! Once your New Year's merrymaking wears off, the annual VBARC Election will be ready to begin at the next meeting (January 8th). One more important aspect of the January meeting is also the fact that our annual dues are required for 2009.
VBARC could not exist without your continued support, so please renew promptly. In an effort to make dues paying a little easier this year (if no less painless), Bob K4NTO (our treasurer) has set up the club with a PayPal account.
We have three types of memberships and the following is right out of the By-Laws...
Section 1. MEMBERSHIP
There shall be three types of membership:
a. Full membership.
b. Family membership.
c. Associate membership.
Section 2. PRIVILEGES
The membership shall be accorded privileges as follows:
a. Full membership with voting privileges shall be available to those holding a current amateur license.
b. Family membership is available to two or more related persons living at the same address. Family members that are licensed amateurs will enjoy the same privileges as Full members.
c. Associate membership is available to those licensed amateurs unable to participate actively, to those interested in becoming licensed amateurs, and to those who are unlicensed and would enjoy the fraternity and fellowship of the Club. Associate members do not have voting privileges.
Full or "Single" membership is $12, Family Membership is $15 and Associate Membership is $12 for 2009. Not bad considering the price of just about everything else has gone up!
If you decide to renew online, you will notice that an application will pop up. Please take the time to fill it out, as it helps us keep our records straight and will document if anything changed over the last year. If you have any questions or concerns please don't hesitate to shoot me an email. So go ahead and join or renew now, and save yourself from the line at the club meeting...
In early November, Steve W4XQ, shot me an email about the ARRL CW Sweepstakes he had recently participated in and asked if it might be something of interest for the VBARC site. I looked at the photos he posted on his website and thought, OK, I'll get these up in short order...
Well, at least I copied the email into a folder I created specifically so I could put things off! Apparently it worked though, as I just ran across it this morning in my email while poking around for something else!
The photos are awesome (especially Steve's station) and it looks as though his contesting co-conspirators (Ron W8RJL, David KF4NMK, Mark KI4VB & Chris AI4MI) and he had a terrific time working and logging. It would seem that they took at least one break for some fun. You can view all of the photos here, and also at Steve's website. Steve also passed along the report to the 3830 reflector.
Top 25 things vanishing from America: #16 -- Ham radio
Tom Barlow was an avid bicyclist and motorcyclist, turned writer in 2004. A prolific freelance writer, he has sold numerous short stories and is lead writer for AOL's WalletPop.com, where he posts daily. Additionally, he is a Technician Class Amateur since 2002.
This series explores aspects of America that may soon be just a memory -- some to be missed, some gladly left behind. From the least impactful to the most, here are 25 bits of vanishing America.
An easy way to prolong a disaster is to have the respondents use dozens of different, incompatible communications systems, or operate them with no protocol. Yes, I'm thinking about Katrina. I'm also thinking about a vanishing American treasure, the amateur radio operator. In the past five years alone, the number of people holding active licenses has dropped by 50,000, even though Morse Code is not longer a requirement.
Many think of a ham radio operator as a tubes-and-wires geek, and there is a certain truth to that stereotype, although today's ham is more likely to be computer-savvy and involved in cutting-edge technologies. However, from my personal experience, I know them to be among our nation's best trained and most capable respondents to disasters. In the hands of the amateur radio volunteers, disaster communications become orderly and prioritized, as they employ the protocols and training received in gaining their licenses. As director of one of the nation's largest week-long bicycle tours, I watched the ham community deal with countless challenges with imagination and expertise, whether it was assembling a portable tower and repeater in the field, coordinating emergency medical transport, or organizing the search for a lost child. I saw them sit for countless hours patiently looking out for the safety of thousands of people that would never know of their efforts.
When amateur radio as we know it disappears, it won't be the radios we'll miss. We'll miss the operators. 73's to a national treasure.
Tom Barlow, N8NLO
I cannot say that I find Tom Barlow's lament of Amateur Radio entirely accurate and I actually was going to respond to this blog post with some comments of my own, but the first response posted (below) touched on everything that I would have pointed out (and then some)! See the entire Blog at WalletPop. If you're interested in "counting the beans" yourself, please visit Joe Speroni's (AH0A) awesome web site!
Thanks to Tom KI4IRH and one of our "newly minted" Technicians, Doug Duggan, for passing along the story. Doug is still waiting for the FCC to get around to granting his license this Holiday Season, from VBARC's December 20th test session!
John, WT4M
Allen Pitts is the League's Media and Public Relations Manager since 2004. A radio amateur since 1999, he's no stranger to the ARRL Field Organization, having served as an ARES District Emergency Coordinator and later as Connecticut's Section Emergency Coordinator and an ARRL Assistant Section Manager.
Allen Pitts' (W1AGP) response, posted at WalletPop on July 15th, 2008:
While I fully agree that Amateur Radio is a national treasure, I disagree with many of those who would eulogize it prematurely. Amateur Radio is alive and well and far more active than ever before. A few specifics:
The AH0A site shows 684,000 hams in 2003 and 658,000 for 2008. That's a drop of 26k, -half of the 50k claimed above. But also look deeper and note the numbers of higher class licensees. There's a much greater percentage of hams going beyond just the entry levels of learning. So while there's slightly fewer hams, they are much more active hams.
As for the age of hams, I can find no citation for the claims made. The FCC does not keep birthdates or age information. There's a lot of twenty-something people becoming Amateur Radio operators to join in the emergency response work that the Amateur Radio Emergency Service does throughout the country. Without hard data, it's anecdotal either way.
But probably most important is that even now, in the lowest part of a very low sunspot cycle, Amateur Radio is active and engaging. Hams are being included in more and more emergency planning (and needed in those roles too!), contest activity is up, there's new digital capabilities announced almost weekly.
Maybe the majority of the cellphone generation is content being simple "users" of a technology. But there will always be those other bright, curious people who want to open the box and see what makes it work. Amateur Radio is for those people who not only want to use a technology, but to understand it and even develop it further. It never was a mainstream pastime. But the technological developments hams have devised in every decade have changed mainstream communications for us all. They're far from "vanishing."
Nearly 50 members and guests turned out to see John Heimerl's (W4HRO) awesome presentation of the construction of the humungous antenna tower in Driver. Additionally, the November meeting featured the club's annual auction! Needless to say the meeting ran a little longer than most.
John W4HRO did his best to squeeze his presentation down to accommodate the annual auction. Unfortunately I had forgotten about auction when I was planning the end of year events for VBARC. At several Board of Director's meetings, we had perplexed over how and when to get the auction into one of the meetings, despite my "overbooking" the end of the year programming.
I spoke with John just prior to the meeting in an attempt to get him to consolidate his presentation a bit to give time to facilitate the auction. John did a fabulous job with the presentation and it was as I remembered seeing it at CARS about a year prior. A great tale of the intricacies of constructing a very large antenna tower, that could only be relayed by someone that had been intimate to that task and all of its details.
I think we went about a half hour past what I was shooting for, but I believe that everyone was so enthralled with the presentation that they lost track of time as well! Despite the length of the presentation, it didn't stop the flood of questions that came from the members at its conclusion. A great bit of insight to some grand scale engineering from one of our own! Thanks for the great show John!
After a short break we slid right into the annual auction. I was lucky enough to have Ron W8RJL volunteer to fill the auctioneer seat! Ron did a great job and VBARC managed to make a few dollars off the sale of quite a few of the items brought by members. The club kept 10% of the sale price, if a sale was made. Only a few of the items available ended up going home with the original owner. Some items sold for a dollar and at least one of the items sold for more than $50. Members brought everything that you could want at a Ham auction; old radios, books, antennas, a couple of handhelds and more wires than you could shake a stick at!
Yes, I realize I am more than a little overdue with this meeting report, but I will try to play catch up over the next couple of weeks and get the web site back up to snuff.
Our esteemed Training & Licensing Coordinator has, once again, put together a superb opportunity to get your first Amateur "ticket" or upgrade to the next level. The current class, which has been running since the first of December, will culminate with a test session on Saturday, December 20th.
The class is free, but the exam on the 20th will cost the obligatory $14 for the session. If upgrading, don't forget to bring your original license and a copy.
The classes are being held at the Virginia Beach Fire Training Center and are open to all. If you would like to attend the remaining classes on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 7:30 PM, just shoot Jim a line.
As most of you know, "Si" Simons KF4ZAC is a SK. The day of his funeral was proclaimed Si Simons Day by the mayor of Virginia Beach. But here's another side story: Did you know that he rode in the Veterans Day Parade?
Si was a member of the National Sojourners Chapter 6, which is a Military Freemasonry organization. Si's 2008 Ford Expedition with call letter license plates was in the parade driven by a Sojourner! To honor Si, his ashes were riding in the back of his SUV! What better way to honor "Si" Simons, an Honorable Boy Scout, Military Man and Citizen, than to ride with him in his last parade.
The Election Meeting in January will be held on the second Thursday, as the first Thursday is a Holiday.
The VBARC Annual Election Meeting will be on Thursday, January 8th (second Thursday), 7:30 PM at Saint Andrew's United Methodist Church. Please come out and cast your ballot! Be sure to check our calendar for more important events!
You can now join or renew your VBARC Membership online, utilizing the security provided by PayPal! Please see the By-Laws if you wish to review Membership Types.
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Posted by KI4VCR I know one person right off that still loves to bu[more ...] 22 Sep : 07:04
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Posted by KJ4FRL Looking for a good condition Icom 756 PRO II ... I[more ...] 18 Sep : 00:03
Posted by WT4M AD5IY wrote ...Is there anyone interested in the "[more ...] 11 Sep : 17:05
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Posted by K4NTO Jim is selling his Drake lineup!Drake R-4B Receive[more ...] 21 Jul : 11:25
Posted by AI4ME The first order for VBARC club shirts has come in![more ...] 17 Jul : 08:53
Posted by WT4M Hey, did anyone else go to the Buffalo Wild Wings [more ...] 16 Jul : 17:47
Posted by W8NLZ False alarm. I visited Ms. Bashford Today and vie[more ...] 14 May : 15:35
Posted by W8NLZ Through a chance conversation with an elderly lady[more ...] 08 May : 16:53
In an effort to make it easier for our new Hams to find the local repeaters, I have posted local repeater information to the site. I am sure one or two of these repeaters may be defunct, and that I may be missing one or two; so please help me by taking a look and posting a comment if you find errors!
Well it's that time of year again! Once your New Year's merrymaking wears off, the annual VBARC Election will be ready to begin at the next meeting (January 8th). One more important aspect of the January meeting is also the fact that our annual dues are required for 2009.
In early November, Steve W4XQ, shot me an email about the 
Many think of a ham radio operator as a tubes-and-wires geek, and there is a certain truth to that stereotype, although today's ham is more likely to be computer-savvy and involved in cutting-edge technologies. However, from my personal experience, I know them to be among our nation's best trained and most capable respondents to disasters. In the hands of the amateur radio volunteers, disaster communications become orderly and prioritized, as they employ the protocols and training received in gaining their licenses. As director of one of the nation's largest week-long bicycle tours, I watched the ham community deal with countless challenges with imagination and expertise, whether it was assembling a portable tower and repeater in the field, coordinating emergency medical transport, or organizing the search for a lost child. I saw them sit for countless hours patiently looking out for the safety of thousands of people that would never know of their efforts.
I cannot say that I find Tom Barlow's lament of Amateur Radio entirely accurate and I actually was going to respond to this blog post with some comments of my own, but the first response posted (below) touched on everything that I would have pointed out (and then some)! See the entire Blog at 
John W4HRO did his best to squeeze his presentation down to accommodate the annual auction. Unfortunately I had forgotten about auction when I was planning the end of year events for VBARC. At several Board of Director's meetings, we had perplexed over how and when to get the auction into one of the meetings, despite my "overbooking" the end of the year programming.
I think we went about a half hour past what I was shooting for, but I believe that everyone was so enthralled with the presentation that they lost track of time as well! Despite the length of the presentation, it didn't stop the flood of questions that came from the members at its conclusion. A great bit of insight to some grand scale engineering from one of our own! Thanks for the great show John!
After a short break we slid right into the annual auction. I was lucky enough to have Ron W8RJL volunteer to fill the auctioneer seat! Ron did a great job and VBARC managed to make a few dollars off the sale of quite a few of the items brought by members. The club kept 10% of the sale price, if a sale was made. Only a few of the items available ended up going home with the original owner. Some items sold for a dollar and at least one of the items sold for more than $50. Members brought everything that you could want at a Ham auction; old radios, books, antennas, a couple of handhelds and more wires than you could shake a stick at!
Our esteemed Training & Licensing Coordinator has, once again, put together a superb opportunity to get your first Amateur "ticket" or upgrade to the next level. The current class, which has been running since the first of December, will culminate with a test session on Saturday, December 20th.
