Category Archives: Club News

Pres Says May 2025 AI6VX Weather Station Temperature History for April 2025 Welcome to the month of May!  Okay, I’m late – we’re already 1 week into the new month.  From my weather station, barely 10 of the days in April were solidly in the 70’s, but it is refreshing that the sun is finally out.  We’ve got VERY warm temperatures on tap for the weekend and then back to mid 60’s next week.  As usual the year is zipping by, though looking back, the club events in April feel like they were so long ago. How is it that time goes by quickly and slowly for the same period? AI6VX FT8 Log on a Particularly Good Evening Just like above where I perceived time to move both quickly and slowly, my personal ham radio activities in April seem few, but now that I’m really thinking about it, the month… Continue reading →

This month, during our May 9th meeting, we will have two guest speakers, John Kitchens (N6SX) and Pat Anglum (N6XTM); both are members of our club. Our first speaker, John Kitchens (NS6X), will present “ARRL Happenings”. John was first licensed in 1966 as WN6UYJ through the Robert E Peary Junior High School’s TRXster radio club, WA6VUA, taught by electric shop teacher Don Ulrey, WA6TRX. John built a 5-watt transistor radio (not tubes-transistors were new) from a schematic in a book, he thinks was titled weekend solid state projects. It worked. That was about 1967. John was licensed as KZ5JS in the Panama Canal Zone, in 1975-76, while in the USAF. He became an Amateur Extra about 1983 for those “extra 25 KCs” for CW contesting. John has been Section Manager for about 10 years and a member of K6MEP since 1981. He is also a member of CVARC, Simi Settlers,… Continue reading →

Our guest speaker for the April 11th meeting will be Dave Schmidt (AI6VX), our club’s President, who will present “Meshtastic”. What is Meshtastic? A short description from Meshtastic.org: Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source! A longer description teaser from Dave AI6VX: Meshtastic is open-source software that is installed onto an inexpensive microcontroller board which, using an on-board radio module, becomes a node that can pass text messages to another node.  A direct RF path between the two nodes does not need to exist!  Intermediate nodes will relay the message, using a routing table each node builds, based on the stations it can hear. This ‘mesh’ arrangement is wholly crowd built, and does not rely on any existing communication infrastructure.  Only… Continue reading →

 Our guest speaker for the March 14th meeting was Dr. Ed Fong (WB6IQN). As many of you may know, he is the inventor of the DBJ-1 and DBJ-2 antenna that was featured in the February 2003 and March 2007 QST. His most recent antenna was the TBJ-1 – a triband base antenna that was published in March 2017 QST. His DBJ-1 is a highly effective dual band VHF/UHF base station antenna and the DBJ-2 is the portable roll-up version. The DBJ-2 won the QST Plaque of the Month Award. Both of these antennas are featured in the ARRL VHF Antenna Handbook and also in the ARRL Antenna Classic Handbook. There are over 40,000 of these antennas in use today. About half are used by hams and the other half by government and commercial agencies. Dr. Fong has extensive knowledge of RF design and teaches at UC-Santa Cruz. His students learn… Continue reading →