Zero Beat 09 2014

The meeting this month will be at the Pool Clubhouse at 2417 Lacosta Dr. This is on the south east side of Bartlett just east of the intersection of Elmore and Bartlett Blvd.

Park in back and walk down to the pool area. Directions are on the web site.

Program

The program is a demonstration of one of the new Kenwood repeaters recently purchased by the club. We will have a complete set up with a power supply, repeater, power amp, and duplexer. We will demonstrate the programming software and show a typical set up. We cannot power up to full power at the meeting because we will be too close to the radiator.

This is also an eating meeting and we will have pizza and cokes.

Club Repeater Sell Off

As part of our repeater upgrade program we are selling off a lot of our older hardware. We sold the Icom desk top repeaters at Huntsville but still have the Motorola MSR and MSF machines alone with a UHF duplexer and an Arcom controller. We also have a Motorola wall mount R100 repeaters. This is a synthesized unit and would be an excellent starter unit for someone to play with. I will have a list of the stuff for sale and some photos at the meeting.

Huntsville Hamfest

Huntsville hamfest was a good time. We sold a small amount of stuff but thankfully we did not buy any new stuff so the net effect was a decrease in inventory.

Repeater News

We have replaced the MSR2000 repeater at WKNO with one of the new Kenwoods. We did not have the amplifiers when we changed it out so it is running at around 30 watts vs the MSR at 70 watts. The repeater does appear to be working be working better. Hopefully we will add one of the new amps in the near future as soon as we get one ready. We have to turn the power down on the repeaters to not overload the input of the amp. Best guess is that with 30 watts out of the repeater into the amp we should get in the 90-100 Watt range out.

Major News

Pat Lane is retiring from WKNO. This is the end of an era at KNO. Pat recently celebrated 50 years service with WKNO. This is phenomenal!!!! Pat became interested in radio when he was a young guy delivering news papers. One of his customers was an Italian guy named Marconi who was experimenting with wireless radio at the time.

Let’s all wish Pat good luck in his retirement. I hope his goes better than mine. I am considering getting a job so I can get some rest.