Amateur Radio From Loudoun County VA

Notes from Our April Meeting

Tom, KF4FXT reported on the RACES meeting that he attended last month and advised that he would be unable to attend future meetings. Chris, KK4GD volunteered to represent LARG at the next RACES meeting. Paul, N4PD reported that he had received information from the ARRL on giving training for Amateur licenses. At a meeting of club members interesting in helping with the classes held on April 29, it was decided that we would hold 8 weekly classes at Ida Lee Recreation Center in Leesburg starting in September. We decided to teach a novice/no-code technician course. Paul, N4PD will look into the logistics of using the Ida Lee facility. The high point of the April meeting was a viewing of a video taken of the recently completed Heard Island Dxpedition. It was especially interesting to those club members, who worked VK0IR only a few months ago, to see the Dxpedition operators in action on that remote island so close to Antarctica. See the Field Day section below for more news from the April meeting and subsequent reports from Field Day committees.

May Meeting - Another Mini-Hamfest!

The May Meeting will be dedicated to a discussion of this year’s Field Day arrangements. We will try to finalize all of the equipment that we will need and other logistic details. At last November’s club meeting we held the first LARG Mini-Hamfest. We have decided to repeat this event for the May meeting, so go through all of your ham-related items that are just lying around and gathering dust and bring them to the May meeting! The same ground rules as before: try to keep the maximum price per item to around $5.00, and, remember, it’s all right to sell something that you bought at the last Mini-Fest; and don’t forget that the main idea is for everyone to have fun.

Field Day at Ida Lee - June 28 & 29

We would like to invite anyone interested in participating to join us during the event. This would be a great time to introduce a friend or relative to our hobby, so feel free to invite them to visit us at the site. We are closing in on the final arrangements. Just like last year, we will try to get all of our antennas set up on the Friday evening before that start of Field Day; that’s when we will need a lot of man (and women) power, so show up if you can. Temp, W4HZV and Nancy, KE4RTP will be providing food and drink for everyone helping out on Friday. We will operate again as class 3A, which means that we will have three separate HF stations set up in addition to one VHF station and maybe a packet or satellite station, too. The antenna committee has done a survey of our site and decided to use a setup similar to last year’s. The one exception will be that the third HF station will operate out of Tom, WB3AKD’s mobile shack and will have a long wire as its primary antenna. We will also attempt to set up a second tri-band beam. Our main emphasis is to be able to have all three stations on the air at the same time and to be able to work CW and SSB on the same band, if necessary. Because there has been a lot of interest in operating CW as much as possible, we will need rigs with narrow (~500Hz) filters for the operating positions at two of the three stations.

A Bonus for the May Newsletter

As a bonus for this edition of the LARG Newsletter, we have included an up-to-date listing of DX prefixes to help you identify any strange sounding callsigns when you hear them on the air.

[continued…]

And now for some words from our Club bard:

Oh for the good ole days of low flux
When any DX working was tough.
Ten and fifteen seemed dead to the world
And the few QSOs were enough.

With the increase in numbers of spots
And world-wide DX jamming the bands,
A CBer with a quarter watt
No doubt could work all far away lands.

In the days gone by, DXers were known
By the 866 tanned in one cheek,
From DX in the eerie blue glow
QRMed by some autodyne squeak.

The DX shack with walled QSLs
Was a sanctum to visit with awe.
All this was prior to solid state,
And seeming prior to Ohms Law.

         Otto, W4QDP - March 26, 1978

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