North American QSO Party, CW
Members: WD9GET, NZ5A, N8MTV, and W5OC all rolled up their sleeves and participated in over 10 hours of morse code contesting this weekend. Over 400 contacts were made across 80, 40, 20 and 15 meters. This represented our single largest club CW effort of the year and will give a boost to our CW NASA-On-The-Air metric count. We installed a new piece of contesting software, N1MM, which gave all of us an opportunity to hone our skills not only with CW, but a new type of software logging and sending. We also made contact with our sister station at Marshall Space Flight Center, NN4SA while operating on 40m. Thanks to all that participated.
NASA 60th anniversary event (last weekend)
Vintage Station
Ken, K5RG, has generously allow the club to hang onto his vintage station for a bit longer. Because of a crystal filter issue on the receiver, we’ll swap out his receiver with another one this week. This vintage station will be only used for CW ops in continuing celebration of the 60th anniversary of NASA.
JSC Roundup Article
We have an editor from the JSC external affairs office drafting up a short story about our club’s participation of the NASA 60th anniversary. A draft article is expected to be provided this week for review. Stay tuned.
Calendar of Events
August 18 North American QSO Party Single Side Band
Nobody has indicated formal interest yet, but we expect some of our Single Side Band operators to consider working this contest. This will be a very popular and fun event for SSB operators. The contest will run a consecutive 12 hours from 1:00 noon on Saturday to 1:00AM on Sunday early morning. Only 2 stations will be allowed to operate, so we will post a signup sheet online to organize shifts to ensure all participates have a chance to operate. No experience required, just signup and someone will give you a hand.
August 25th The south Texas Balloon Launch Team will be inflating and launching another large balloon; BLT-50. Any individual, groups, teams and/or clubs can build and launch their payloads on these balloons. This one will carty a variety of payload radios including FM and DMR repeaters, Digital TV, and Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS). The JSCARC is interested in members who are willing to build a fly a payload on some future balloon transports. This upcoming event is highly recommended for all members because we will undertake designing, building, flying and tracking some club payloads next year. See AB5SS for more information.
September 29-30 Texas QSO Party
This year we will surprise the South Texas Region by a full out, full force effort to dominate the local region. If there’s enough interest, we may operate simultaneous modes on all bands. Logistically this may require us to gain some physical separation like we had at Field Day. Standby for more planning details.
Shack status
The shack is currently not in full operating condition because two of the radio stations were disassembled in order to outfit for last weekend’s CW contest. We’re expecting to get it back to normal no later than Friday.
More than half of the photos and award certificates and plaques have been rehung on the walls. We’ll likely defer hanging the remaining photos on one of the walls until we determine how much wall space is needed to hang the large screen TV
The 2017 Phone Sweepstakes Division certificate is now in the shack. We’ll get a nice frame and hang this up along our entry hall, where other achievements are displayed. By the way, the entry hall is extremely dark without any lighting and our proud certificates and plaques are always in the dark and hard to see. We’re looking for any creative ideas to hang a battery powered spotlight or area lighting to brighten up and highlight our awards.
Welcome new members:
Chuck Bennett KG5ZVM
Kristine Ferrone KI5AMM
Bob Logan NZ5A
Milt Heflin K5KRM
Reminder
JSCARC monthly meeting is this Thursday 6:30 in the Inspiration Room at the Gilruth.