Zero Beat 08 2016

August 12 Get Together/Cookout at the Pool

Field Day was our July meeting and our August meeting will be a cookout at the pool. It is for adults only. This is a purely social meeting. We will call to order and adjourn immediately.

The cookout is open to all hams and significant others. You do not have to be a member of any group or club – all are welcome. Please pass the word. We would like a rough head count to make sure we have enough food so if you can email me at abrigno@comcast.net with a head count it would be appreciated.

We plan to have burgers, dogs, chips, Cokes, wine, beer and junk food in general.

If you want to swim fine, bring a suit. If not, there is plenty of room in the screen porch to sit and visit. There are overhead and floor fans to help keep us cool from this summer heat.

Heliax

Last call for 1 5/8” Heliax. I would like to get it out of my yard. If you want a piece contact me and we can fix you up. It has commercial flanged fittings and our current plan is to remove these, clean them up, and sell them on Ebay. To use the Heliax you would need to get N fittings and these are a little pricey but available on Ebay. We will take it to a metal recycler if there are no takers. There are several pieces in the 150 ft. range.

Field Day

It looked like everybody had a good time. We had the cookout for the young folks at our homeowner's association and me being the president, I needed to make an appearance so I was only able to come out to Field Day for a couple hours. It looked like all was going well. It was great this year not having to host it at the clubhouse. It is a lot of work and the folks at Neshoba are to be commended for taking on the work.

One sour note was that someone got out of band and we got an Official Observer [OO] notice of violation. Since they were using the MARA call sign of W4EM Pat Lane got the notice. This is possible when you have folks that lack technical acuity coordinating Field Day. When we were at the clubhouse I went around and kept an eye on things but there really wasn’t much need to watch Pat Lane, Hugh Wardlaw, or John Galarno. These guys knew what they were doing. When you have a bunch of new folks or folks that come in once a year it is hard to know just how competent they are. It was obvious from the notice that at least one was lacking.

When we got our licences we were “amateurs” only in the sense that we didn’t do radio as a profession or have a monetary interest in it. We were expected to be near the minimum professional operational standards. I am fearful that is not the case anymore.

In any case we will work on this for next year.

Official Observer Notice Below.

It was good the bands were dead because the guy who picked this up was in New Castle, CA. William Costa WV6J.