SCR 2010

Hi Everyone,

It’s that time of year again — time for the School Club Roundup! Recently, the mid-atlantic region has been hit with several snow storms, but that didn’t stop Tom and I from making some contacts today during the SCR! We made most of our contacts via PSK, but we also snuck in a few voice contacts. We worked 20m today, but we will try 40m tomorrow for both PSK and voice.

You can check our website for a list of the states and schools that we have contacted as well as our current score. I’m not sure how we rank compared to other schools, but compared to our progress last year, we are ahead of schedule. There are also a few pictures of the shack and the 2 feet of snow that we had to trek through to get to the shack.

We were planning on having a club wide operating event on Thursday, but from the looks of the weather and the fact that our parking lot is not plowed, the event might be canceled. But keep checking your email and our website for updated info.

If you are from another school, please let us know via a comment if you will be on the air in the coming days. 73 and hope to see you all on the air!

–

Josh KB3QNA

Spring Semester 2010

Tonight was our first meeting of the Spring semester and it looks like there is a lot planned! Here’s a quick run down of things that were decided at the meeting:

-We are going to keep the same meeting times as last semester – 7PM Thursdays at the shack

-We will be participating in the School Club Roundup next week, 2/8-2/12. We will have an open house type event again on Thursday from 1-7. Everyone is invited.

-Involvement Fest is this Weds in the Commons Mainstreet. Stop by and see our table and learn a little more about amateur radio. We are also looking for people to help staff the table. Email Tom if you are interested.

So far that’s all we have going on. We tested the radios and antennas for the SCR tonite, and everything is in working order. If all goes as planned, we will have another successful contest and might even earn more points than last time. Well, that’s all for now.

73,

Josh KB3QNA

Back from Winter Break

Hey everyone! We’re back from Winter break and ready to get back into the swing of things! Tom and I have been busy lately, but we’re working on some exciting things for the club for the Spring Semester. Here’s a preview of some upcoming events. If you want to help us plan events, send an email to Tom or Josh. Coming up this semester:

Feb. 1 – First Meeting of the Semester

Feb. 3 – Involvment Fest on Maintstreet in the Commons from 11-2pm. We need people to help man our table and talk to interested students.

Feb. 8-12 – ARRL School Club Roundup. We will be doing something similar to last semester with pizza, etc.

March – possible inter-club event. Details still pending.

If you have any suggestions for activities, leave a comment below. The UMBC ARC is always looking for ways to get involved with other groups and organizations, so drop us a line if you have ideas!

73,

Josh KB3QNA

SCR 2010

Hey all!

Last week was the last meeting of the Fall 2009 semester! I wasn’t able to attend the meeting, so I’ll have Tom fill me in or have him write a post later this week. But one thing I wanted to let you know about is that we will be participating in the School Club Roundup contest again next semester. The dates are Feb. 8-12. Our club will be having an event on that Weds, Feb. 10th from 4-8pm to see how many contacts we can log. There will be pizza again, and everyone is encouraged to attend, even if it’s only for part of the time! We were really happy with how the contest turned out this semester and hopefully we’ll have more working radios come February.

If you want more info on the contest, you can visit www.arrl.org/SCR. In the mean time, enjoy the holidays and we’ll see you back in 2010!

73,

Josh KB3QNA
Treasurer and Webmaster

W2W Special Event

This weekend our club President, Tom, and I had the chance to participate in a special event at the National Electronics Museum in Linthicum, MD (K3NEM). The club was holding a special event to commemorate the anniversary of Pearl Harbor and was using the call sign W2W. Tom’s dad invited us to help him operate. The club was operating on 20 and 40m, but Tom and I worked 20m. We were pulling in contacts from all over the country, but mostly towards the west. We made contacts with California, North and South Dakota, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Washington state. I even made a DX long spot contact with someone in Australia!

I have to admit that I almost didn’t operate today because I felt kind of intimidated. I watched Tom’s dad work a few contacts on 20m and I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to try making any contacts. It all seemed to happen so quickly, and it was hard to hear what people were saying on the radio. But after I got on the air, I had a lot of fun talking to people – albeit all of my contacts involved short exchanges. All in all, it was a great way to get experience using HF and showed me that I need to work harder at earning my General class license.

This entire event was kind of last minute notice for our club – that’s why only Tom and I went. Hopefully next year we can schedule it so that more of our members can attend. It was definitely a great opportunity to get your feet wet without having the pressures of participating in an actual contest. We snapped a few pictures of Tom and I operating. I’ve posted one below and I’ll put the rest up on our website.

Tom and Josh at the W2W Event

Till next week,

73

–
Josh KB3QNA

Weekly Meeting – Dec. 3

Hello Everyone!

This past week we had our second to last meeting for the semester. Here are a few topics we discussed at the meeting:

• Our last meeting for the Fall semester will be next week, Dec. 10th. We will resume meetings after winter break, probably a the same date and time (Thurs @ 7pm). If anything changes, we’ll send an email to the list-proc.
• This weekend there is a special event at the Historical Electronics Museum. Details were not available at the meeting, but both Tom and I may attend this event to represent the club. I’ll post a story on our blog if we go.
• Our new website is up! Please check it out and send any comments to the webmaster.
• We re-registered the club for the Spring Semester and secured a spot at Involvement Fest Spring 2009. Hopefully we can recruit more members next semester.
• There was also talk of holding a “radio demo” outside of the Commons to drum up interest in the club. This is something that will require a lot of planning, but is an easy way to get the UMBC Radio Club’s name out there. More info will be forthcoming about this event.

That’s all for now. Keep reading the blog over the next few weeks. We’ll try to post articles of interest and keep you informed of any ideas that we come up with for events next semester. Enjoy the holidays and good luck on finals!

73,

Josh KB3QNA

DX spotting website

I was over a friend’s house this weekend and I learned of an interesting website. My friend’s dad, who is an active ham, recently got a new HF radio and found a website that shows who is active on specific HF bands. The website is www.dxwatch.com. I’m sure many of you have heard of this site, but I thought I’d post it here in case there are any clubs that do a lot of HF work. I haven’t spent much time on the site, but it seems interesting. If you find this site helpful, comment and let the rest of us know.

–
Josh KB3QNA

Newly Redesigned Website

It’s finally up – the new website! It’s been a long process to finally get a new site designed but I think we may have finally finished. A new site has been in the works ever since we lost our old website when our server crashed during a power outage. The new site has been rewritten using CSS and PHP. It looks best when viewed in Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome. The site looks fine when viewed in IE, but a few of the fonts don’t get translated quite correctly. I’ll try to work out a fix to ensure continuity between browsers.

In the mean time, I hope you enjoy our new site. It’s set up the same as our old one except for a few pages. We’ve decided to use Picasa as our photo organizing software and have linked to a few of our albums from the Photos page. The pictures may not be of superior quality, but we’re getting a new camera this week to fix that issue. You’ll also notice on our homepage a feed from our blog. The feed updates with our newest blog posts so you can stay up to date.

In the future we will be incorporating more PHP elements, like forms and surveys, but for now you can contact the webmaster via email if you have comments or suggestions: jknep1 at umbc dot edu .

So I hope you enjoy our  new website and check back weekly for updates, blog posts, and hopefully some more pictures!

73,

Josh KB3QNA
Treasurer UMBC Amateur Radio Club

SCR Results

Sorry that it has been a while, but the results for the School Club Roundup are up on our website. Click here to see the results. We sent our official results in last week to be tallied, so I guess we’ll find out later how the club did compared with other schools. I know www.collegearc.com has some good articles about the SCR and I believe some schools have posted info about how the contest went for them. If you are from a school club that participated in the contest, feel free to comment on this post about how the contest played out for your club.

73,

Josh KB3QNA

What’s been happening…

So, it’s been a long time since we’ve posted what’s been going on with the club. Our last few meetings have not been too eventful. We’ve tried some PSK-31 with one of our radios, but we haven’t had much luck. Since most of our meetings are in the evenings, we don’t have the most ideal conditions for PSK-31. We’re going to try to meet on a Saturday to see if we can make some contacts. We may even participate in the November contest. We’ll see how things play out.

We’ve all been busy these past few weeks with school work, but we’ll try to do a better job at keeping our blog updated. And by the way, we sent out our School Club Roundup results, so we’ll see how we rank with other schools. I’ll get the results from our President and post them as soon as I can.

73,

Josh KB3QNA, Treasurer