Does your ham group have a website?  Is it a non-profit? [Then, sign up for] Google Grants for Nonprofit Group Advertising.

Steve, W5SMP, spotted this option.  While I can’t use it with the main ARRL website (due to advertising – “Your website cannot display revenue generating ads, such as Google AdSense or affiliate advertising links, while participating in Google Grants.”)  many of the section and divisions have their own sites that should fit the requirements.

Being listed high up and getting free ads on Google is a definite plus.

You should have your Public Information Officer (PIO) look into this. It takes some work, but  this program is free, so why not take advantage of it?

And, finally, if your club doesn’t have a PIO, you should appoint one. Not having one limits you. The ARRL has many resources for PIOs, making the job easier.

A record 150 electrical engineering freshman students from Cal Poly will take their FCC amateur radio technician-class license exam this November in the largest amateur radio licensing event ever held in San Luis Obispo County.

Hosted by the Cal Poly Amateur Radio Club (CPARC), this session may be the largest Amateur Radio License Testing Session ever held at the collegiate level. These 150 potential amateur radio operators will join over 700,000 other hams in the U.S. in providing volunteer and emergency communications support for everything from local bike rides and parades to global disaster relief, including the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Dennis Derickson (AC0P), Cal Poly Electrical Engineering (EE) department chair, conceived the Freshman Licensing Initiative which gives every EE 111 student a chance to get their radio license. As part of the EE 111 curriculum, this test session will be administered during the 50-minute class period and count as one of the midterm exams for the freshmen students.

“CPARC members have been hosting review sessions to help students prepare to pass their exam and get introductory knowledge on a wide variety of electrical engineering topics,” said CPARC member Javen O’Neal. “Getting an amateur radio license is the first step towards many career opportunities in the communications industry, from engineering UAVs and integrating Wi-Fi on the Amazon Kindle, to creating 4G cell phone networks and designing communication subsystems on DirecTV satellites.”

CPARC members learn about radios by retuning filters on radios, building directional antennas for transmitter hunts, and putting together an emergency vehicle tracking network for Wildflower Triathlon using two dozen radios and GPS units, digital repeaters, and internet gateways.

Founded in 1947, the Cal Poly Amateur Radio Club has a long tradition of communications service on campus and in the San Luis Obispo community. The club maintains Emergency Communications Station No. 16 on the Cal Poly Campus for the San Luis Obispo Emergency Communications Council (SLOECC) which is equipped with emergency power and radio equipment to support various public safety agencies in the event of a disaster. More information about the club can be found at www.w6bhz.org.

I’m happy to say that that tradition continues today. This month’s meeting, which took place on Wednesday evening, was the 2011 episode of construction night. This year, we built the Sure PS-LP11111 5~16 VDC Linear DC Voltage Power Supply Kit.

The Sure PS-LP11111 5~16 VDC Linear DC Voltage Power Supply Kit isn't a complete power supply, but the addition of a cheap AC wall wart makes it one.

This kit met all my criteria for a club construction project:

• It was inexpensive. PartExpress sold me 15 of them for $9 each.
• It was easy to build. As you can see from the photo above, the kit has less than 20 parts. It took me less than a half hour to build, and most of the club members had theirs put together in less than 45 minutes.
• Those that built it have something useful that they can actually use in their shacks.  I plan to use mine to power the little QRP radio kits that I’ve built over the years. This thing should easily supply an amp at 9 V or 12 V.

As I said, this was a real success. So much so, that several of our club members said that we should do this more often. We even discussed other projects that might we might want to tackle.

One final note: Only one of our kit builders had any problem with his kit. Despite pointing out that the electrolytic capacitor, full-wave bridge, and the LED were polarized and had to be inserted properly, this fellow managed to insert his electrolytic capacitor in backwards. It worked for about two minutes before the capacitor exploded with a loud bang. We all got a big kick out of this because this fellow happened to be one of most experienced hams. :)

Teaching radio in the digital age. This is a great article on the Denver school district’s Inside/Out program, which offers additional learning to gifted and talented students. As part of this program, Bob Sterner, the district’s senior telecom engineer, introduced them to amateur radio.

I really liked this article. It makes me wish that I had better skills for working with kids. All of my attempts at implementing kids’ programs have so far fallen flat, but it’s good to know that there are others out there who seem to be able to get kids interested and motivated.

Ham radio users still play vital role in communications. Just one example of the dozens of articles on Field Day activities.

The Sky is Not the Limit for the Fethiye Radio Amateurs Club. A member of the recently-formed club FARAD discusses ham radio and club activities. Even though this interview is in a Turkish newspaper, the article is in English.

I talk up this idea whenever I can, most recently in an e-mail exchange with my friend, Ralph, AA8RK. He challenged me, “What, in simple terms, would be the mission of this nonprofit? What would the money be used for?”

I replied, “A simple mission statement might be ‘to provide opportunities for people to become amateur radio operators and to become better amateur radio operators.’” Thinking about this some more, I think a good mission statement could be crafted around the five bases of amateur radio as spelled out in Part 97.1, “Basis and Purpose.” Each of those are great goals to strive for.

As for how we would use the money, I came up with the following list off the top of my head:

• Provide more training than just quarterly one-day Tech classes, such as General and Extra classes, basic electronics and antenna classes, and emergency communication training.
• Provide leadership training and perhaps other types of support services to ham radio clubs.
• Operate publicly-accessible ham radio stations and workspaces, such as our station at the Hands-On Museum.
• Run a “lending library” of equipment, such as beginner transceivers, antenna analyzers, and other test equipment.

These are things that clubs or the sections could do, but rarely do because they’re all-volunteer organizations. All-volunteer organizations can only do so much.

Anyone have any thoughts about this? Anyone good at fund raising that might want to join with me and start raising some dough?

Our first idea was to set up outside the museum. That seemed like it was going to work out until Quentin, KD8IPF, informed me that he couldn’t attend, as his wife was going to be out of town, and he needed to take care of his kids. I was concerned that without Quentin that we wouldn’t have enough operators to have two people there at all times.

Then, Quentin volunteered his backyard. This turned out to be a great venue. He has a fairly large, with a couple of big trees. Not only that, he lives next door to his mother-in-law, and she’s volunteered her trees as antenna supports. You gotta love a mother-in-law like that!

One of the advantages of downsizing is that you don’t have to spend so much time setting up. Instead of setting up antennas for five HF stations, a GOTA station, and a VHF/UHF station, all we had to do was set up antennas for our two HF stations. And, since we planned on using Quentin’s already-installed, multi-band dipole, we only really had one antenna to worry about.

That being the case, we decided that we really didn’t need to start setting up until noon on Saturday. Jim, K8ELR, and I actually arrived about 11:30 am, and that proved to be more than enough time. Jim brought with him a 40m dipole and a 30m, end-fed half-wave antenna, while I brought my BuddiStick. We quickly decided to put up the 40m dipole, and by 1pm, we were already on the air.

A Tale of Two Antennas
Of course, it wasn’t really as simple as all that. When we started operating, the two stations interfered with one another something terrible. So much so that my KX-1 was even causing Quentin’s LDG autotuner to retune itself when I transmitted.

The problem was that the 40m dipole and the multi-band dipole were running nearly parallel to one another. I should have known that this would occur, having been involved with more than a few Field Days by now, but it never even crossed my mind.

Fortunately, the solution was relatively simple. All we had to do was to take down the multi-band dipole and hang it from two different trees, one of them in the adjoining yard. After we did this, the two antennas were nearly perpendicular to one another, and the interference just went away. The phone station could not hear my little peanut whistle signal at all, and while I could hear the phone station transmit, it really didn’t affect my ability to make contacts.

I really didn’t think that this was going to work, but Ovide, K8EV, was quite confident that it would. I was the one that ate crow.

Did You Really Use a KX-1?
So, I can hear a lot of you asking, “Did you really use a KX-1 for Field Day?” Yes, I did. Our original idea was to run all QRP. The thinking behind this is that if you run all QRP, then you get 5 points for each QSO.

The other reason for doing this is so that we could run off batteries. Quentin had access to two, 66 Ahr batteries, and we’d planned to use these two batteries as our power source. I figured that with the 12V gel cell that I have for my KX-1, that would be plenty of power.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. Quentin and Ovide were just not having any luck making any contact at 5W—and consequently not having much fun—so they decided to increase power. That blew our QRP multiplier, but what the heck, it multiplied our fun factor.

Plenty of Power
As it turned out, just one battery provided plenty of power for the phone station, even at 100W. Granted the station was off the air from about midnight Saturday through 9 am Sunday morning, but there was apparently plenty of juice to power that station throughout the entire 24 hours.

Likewise, my little gel cell provided enough power for the KX-1 over the 12 hours that I had it on the air, and I’d guess that the charge would have been good for the entire 24 hours. I have yet to run down that battery so low that it failed to power the radio.

What Did We Learn?
We learned several things from this Field Day:

1. A downsized Field Day can be as much or more fun than a full-blown operation. Without a big crowd vying for just a few positions, everyone got a chance to operate. Plus, setup and teardown times were a lot shorter.
2. You still have to pay attention to your antennas. If we’d done a little more planning and thinking about our antennas, we would have avoided the interference we experienced and possibly even been able to run QRP on phone.
   How, you might ask? Well, if I’d thought about rigging up some kind of wire beam or a Moxon beam for the phone station, they may have been able to run QRP and still make contacts. This is certainly something to think about for next year.
3. The batteries worked great. Not only did they provide enough power for a 100W rig for more than 12  hours, they were quiet. The noise of a gas-powered generator can really get on your nerves over the course of a Field Day.
4. While I probably wouldn’t want to run the KX-1 in a big DX contest, it worked pretty well for Field Day. I made more than 160 QSOs with it in about 12 hours of contesting.

So, What About Next Year?
Since it’s never too early to plan for next year’s Field Day, we’re already kicking around a few ideas:

1. Find a campground to have Field Day at next year. The upside is that the scenery might be nicer. The downside is that we might not have the nice antenna supports, errrr trees, that Quentin has in his backyard.
2. Be more competitive. Joe, N8OY, came by late Saturday evening, and racked up a bunch of points for us on 20m CW. He suggested that we organize some of the local hot-shot CW operators around here and set up a real competitive operation. The upside is that scoring a lot of points is fun. The downside is that being competitive excludes the less-experienced operators.

One thing is for sure. Running a smaller Field Day event in no way diminishes it as the “quintessential” amateur radio event. We still enjoyed all the camaraderie as well as all the technical aspects of  Field Day. Now, I can’t wait until next year.

A couple of weeks ago, a guy offered to donate a bunch of stuff to donate “many thousands of dollars worth of 99% new electronic parts” to WA2HOM, our club station at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. This almost sounded too good to be true, and as it turned out, it was too good to be true. He did graciously donate quite a few parts, but the current value is nowhere near the thousand dollar mark.

That got Jim, K8ELR, and I thinking about what we might do to raise more funds for our station. One thing I’m going to do is to not just suggest a donation when I teach a class there, but require a $10 donation. Some other things we’ve come up with include:

• solicit donations directly, on a continuing basis, like that club station in New York or New Jersey does,
• have more fund-raising kinds of things down at the museum, like kit-building or soldering lessons
• do a simple “trunk sale” hamfest, charging perhaps $5/car for every seller. I’ve been to one of these, and it seemed to work out pretty well.

At that point, we kind of exhausted our thought process, so I thought I’d throw it out to my blog readers. What other ways have you or your clubs raised funds?

• There is a bit more material to cover in this version of the question pool, but it’s still doable in a day. My class runs from 9am – 3pm, with a half-hour break for lunch. I’m considering adding a half hour next time, but the problem with that is that is student fatigue. There really is only so much that you can cover no matter how long the class is. After I think about this for about ten minutes, I’ll probably decide not to do it.

  Another option would be to hold two three- or four-hour sessions, say one on Saturday and one on Sunday. Or, just brainstorming a bit, maybe you could do two hours on Friday evening, and then five or six hours on Saturday, followed by the test. That would allow for a more leisurely pace, but require that students make time to attend the class on two separate days. That might not be so easy for some people.

• The key to success with this format is getting the students to at least read through the study guide a couple of times and take some online practice tests before coming to class. I stress this in every e-mail that I send students and prospective students. In nine out of ten cases, those that fail the test after the class do so because they came to the class cold. It’s just too much to absorb all at once. If they pre-study, it’s more of a review session than a class.
• 20 people pre-registered for the class, but only 14 showed up. I was very disappointed with this turnout, especially as I e-mailed folks a couple of days before the class and asked them to tell me if they couldn’t make it. I don’t mind if they have to cancel for some reason, but it’s just good manners to actually cancel.

  Anyone have any ideas as to how to encourage people to actually show up? I’ve thought about requiring payment beforehand, but that might discourage people from even signing up. Maybe I could require the payment and then have coffee and donuts when they arrive

• 11 students passed the test. When I asked if they had read through the study guide, those that failed said that they hadn’t had time to do that. Well, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing that I can do about that. They can’t say that they weren’t warned.
• Two of the students that failed the test were kids—one 10 or 11, the other 13. What I find is that kids have a harder time with this format than do adults. Heck, it’s hard enough getting adults to sit still for six hours, much less kids. :) On the other hand, some kids have successfully taken the class and passed the test. Maybe it’s a question of motivation. Some kids are there because their parents want them to get a license, not necessarily because they want to get a license.

One more thing. One of the students told me that he got serious about getting his license about a month or so ago. He went to the ARRL website and searched for clubs in this area. The search returned 22 clubs within a 25-mile radius of his zip code. He said that he tried contacting every single one of them, but I was the only one who replied to his inquiry.

I think you’ll agree that it doesn’t say much for amateur radio. Your club is hopefully a better job of responding to inquiries from non-hams, but it might be worth checking on the procedure just to make sure.

I’d always meant to get to one of their monthly breakfasts (held the first Saturday of each month), but they normally take place in Flint, which is about an hour away. Only when they decided to hold one here in Ann Arbor did I actually make it. Now, I’m sorry I didn’t make one earlier. A great time was had by all.

One aspect of the breakfast that I enjoyed was the “show and tell.” One of the things that sets most QRPers apart is that they’re builders, and the breakfast gives them a chance to show off their handiwork. This Saturday, there was a fellow who had built a sideswiper key and another who brought in his end-fed, halfwave antenna tuner. A couple of other folks also brought in things they’d been working on, but I don’t remember them.

After eating, there was the “junk box swap.” Everyone brings stuff from their junk boxes to swap for stuff from others’ junk boxes. I brought some GE222 light bulbs that I doubt I’ll ever use, some relays, and a bunch of pots. In return, I got some crimp terminals, a bunch of 10 uF electrolytics, and a half dozen or so panel-mount BNC connectors. Everyone was very generous, and I felt a little guilty about leaving with more than I brought.

The Michigan QRP Club is what ham radio is all about. I had so much fun at breakfast that I joined the club! It’s only $10/year ($12 for new members for the first year), and that includes a quarterly newsletter. They also sponsor several CW sprints each year.

I’m looking forward to going to breakfast again sometime soon, meeting more members, and showing off some of my projects. If you’re in Michigan, you might want to consider joining, too.

• It provides contact with local radio amateurs.
• You can get help building a station.
• Clubs often sponsor license exam classes.
• Clubs make ham radio more visible in the community.
• Clubs organize activities such as hamfests, scout radio merit badge sessions, and Field Day.
• You can often borrow infrequently used test equipment instead of buying it.
• It’s fun!