W5RRR Field Day 2024

  June 22-23, 2024.  Wow, it’ was another fun, wild and wooly Field Day for the JSCARC and CLARC team who diligently put 12 radios stations on the air (12F STX) within the SSB/Digital/CW villages at the Gilruth Center location. This year was a bit different than previous years.  With limited pre-planning across clubs, key … Read more…

Radio Support… Montana style

Dan, KG5PVP is a QTH hopper.  He rotates his stays between Houston and a remote QTH in the Kootenai national forest area of northwest Montana.  Dan splits his ham participation between three clubs:  K5HOU/CLARC, W5RRR/JSCARC and KLBY/LCARG.  LCARG is the Lincoln County Amateur Radio Group located in Libby Montana. This past weekend Dan participated with … Read more…

Spring 2024 Student Interns

On Thursday, April 24, Kelvin K5KGH and Jeff AB4ME conducted an Handi-Talkie (HT) orientation overview for 2 of our JSC Student Interns. This was an important lesson covering the use of their HTs and how to navigate the operational radio protocols in support of a directed net.  In this case, it was an essential preparation … Read more…

Texas State Parks On The Air (TSPOTA) 2024

Wow, what a fun weekend. TSPOTA (Texas State Parks On The Air) received lots of activity from the JSCARC as we operated April 20-21 across 5 state parks on SSB and CW. Truth be told… initially Dan KG5PVP and I (W5OC), were the only crazy ones who were willing to embark on an adventurous car … Read more…

Belton Hamfest April 2024

Belton- The biggest Hamfest in Texas didn’t disappoint. It’s been interesting to observe the ebb and flow of this Hamfest each year as different hams and vendors seem to have seasonal inventory and predilections!  For example, over a given event, I’ve seen periodic abundances of amps, or vintage gear, or HT’s and mobiles, or antennas, … Read more…

3-500Z Arcing

A bit off topic for the general group, but I wanted to share a video of an arcing 3-500Z tube and a tip in troubleshooting with shorted radios/amps.(Note: the 3-500Z is a very popular compact power triode used in many older tube KW amps.)This defective tube, was inside a Kenwood TL-922 linear amp that I … Read more…

Fox Hunt for JSC Student Intern Group

With a break in the weather, 4 intrepid student interns, Zane, Issac, Arthur, and Eric participated in a special JSCARC Fox Hunt held a the JSC Gilruth center on Sunday March 24. For this event, we decided to deploy 6 hidden foxes, across the 2m and 80m bands. For 2m, we handed out the Handi-Finder … Read more…

Lone Wolf JSCARC POTA #19 @ GISP

Due to sketchy weather and not much advance promotion/notice, the JSCARC POTA #19 was a one-person show by myself, W5OC. However, the weather behaved in spite of the harrowing thunderstorms earlier in the morning at my home in League City around 5-6AM.  The thunderstorms kept me in bed, while I was thinking, “this event will … Read more…