Delaware Valley Radio Association

TRENTON, NJ – April 26, 2010 The May 12th meeting of the Delaware Valley Radio Association will feature a talk on the history of the Lawrenceville AT&T shortwave radio station that was located at what is now part of Mercer County Park Northwest. Developed to facilitate international radio communication, the facility was known to local residents as the “pole farm” due to the numerous wooden antenna supports that appeared to be growing from the ground. Dennis Waters of the Lawrence Historical Society will be making the presentation.

The public is invited to attend. The DVRA meets the second Wednesday of each month at 7:30 PM at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, 137 West Upper Ferry Road, West Trenton, NJ. The church is located one-quarter mile west of the intersection of routes 634 and 579, and is just south of Mercer County Airport.

With over fifty active members and a fully equipped radio station, the Delaware Valley Radio Association is one of the nation’s oldest radio clubs, having been founded in 1930. Persons interested in learning more about wireless, electronic technology, or Amateur Radio are encouraged to visit the club’s website at www.w2zq.com or attend any regular meeting of the club.

For more information, contact Gary Wilson at 609-890-3370.

So it’s been said before, but it bears repeating: Send in content!  Maintaining the club’s Internet presence is easy for me, while some might find the notion of handling software updates and server registrations about as foreign as Morse code (okay, bad example :> ).  However there is one thing which I am no good at all at doing, and that’s writing stories.  I read Bob’s column every month in the Beacon, and often times wonder where he gets inspiration to write and how he seems to do it with ease.  That is where all of you come in.

I’m sure that Bob’s not the only person who can put words together on a page and make them look good, and that’s something which any website needs – CONTENT!  It’s one thing to have it tell you the history of the club and mention an upcoming event, but without a steady stream of stories, articles and content the website will look stagnant.

People always assume for some reason that I want/need help running the site itself.  Just the contrary, the site is fine, but I need articles to go on it!  How can you help, then?  Sign up for an account here if you haven’t already, and drop me an email to say you want your account to be able to submit stories.  Then write, write, write!  Once you’ve written a story or two, send me a note to say it’s ready and you want it published, and I’ll put it up on the front page.  If we get enough stories that there’s a surplus, I may delay some of them so that we have a steady stream of new articles instead of a burst.  But first we need new content.  So put on your berets, pour a glass of wine, play some soft jazz (or whatever inspires you) and submit an article or two!

Thanks!

The 35th annual Trenton Computer Festival, to be held April 24 -25, will also be the venue for the ARRL New Jersey State Convention!

The 2010 ARRL New Jersey State Convention, sponsored by the Delaware Valley Radio Association (www.w2zq.com), will be held on Sunday, April 25th, at the same venue as the Trenton Computer Festival and admission to one event gets you access to both.

As part of the NJ ARRL Convention, multiple “tracks” of ham radio presentations are scheduled including:

• ARRL National Traffic System Digital Messaging
• Marketing Ham Radio – How You Can Help it Thrive Today
• A Brief History of the International Telegraph Code
• Contributions made to Wireless Communication by G. Marconi
• Weird Antenna Projects of New Jersey
• The Modular Rover
• Getting Started in VHF & VHF Contesting
• WSPR-ing on the HF Bands
• Automatic Packet Reporting System
• From Zone 2, Canada, This is VE2DXY — A Ham Radio Contest DXpedition
• AMSAT – Computer History in Satellite Tracking
• AMSAT – Open Source Software Defined Radio
• ARRL Forum
• EMP & Emergency Communications – Article winner of QST’s 2009 “Bill Orr Award”
• VE Testing Sessions

And, of course, there will be many other technical sessions on computers and electronics. See www.tcf-nj.org for them all and the Saturday evening banquet.

There will be a large indoor and outdoor (rain or shine) flea market / vendor area for you to pick up goodies for your shack and your computer. The flea market will host both commercial and non-commercial sellers so if you’d like to convert some of the technical “treasures” in your attic or basement into cash for new rigs (or dinner out) bring them down and pass it on.

In addition we’re offering VE sessions for initial licenses or license upgrades. A ham radio “boot camp” is planned for Saturday for those who are not yet licensed. If you apply yourself, it’s possible to get a Technician class ham license in one day! You can bring along a friend who’s expressed some interest in ham radio and there’s a good chance he or she will be going home a new ham!

The site for the TCF / ARRL NJ State Convention is The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, NJ. The event runs 10 AM – 4PM both days. Talk-in 146.67 PL131.8. Admission for Sunday only is $10. Two day tickets are $15 at the gate or $12 advance purchase. Indoor Vendor area tables are $150; buy 5 tables and 6th is free. Commercial vendor Flea Market Spots are $70 for 9’x16’ or $100 for tent-sized 14’x16’. Non-commercial Flea Market spots are $35 for both days.

For additional vendor information, email email hidden; JavaScript is required. For Advanced Ticket Sales, go to www.tcf-nj.org. For additional info, email email hidden; JavaScript is required or contact Mark Bespalko, N2KIV at 215-359-7025.

Thanks & 73

Speakers Solicited for the New Jersey ARRL State Convention

Sunday April 25, 2010

For many years, dating back to before World War II, the Delaware Valley Radio Association sponsored a very large hamfest in Trenton that also served as the New Jersey State ARRL Convention.  We are happy to announce that we have now joined forces with the popular Trenton Computer Festival to again offer such an event to the hams of New Jersey on Sunday April 25^th, 2010 at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, NJ.

The ARRL has designated the Sunday of that event as the ARRL New Jersey State Convention.  As a result, a reduced $10 single day Sunday admission will be offered.  Of course, persons purchasing the TCF $15 ($12 if purchased in advance at http://www.tcf-nj.org/) entire weekend admissions ticket will be permitted to join in the Amateur Radio related activities on Sunday as well.  This should prove a boon to promoting Amateur Radio to tech savvy non-hams as well.

As we all know, hamfests that serve as simple electronic flea markets have suffered ups and downs recently.   This non-profit festival runs a whole weekend and has numerous presentations and speakers, commercial electronics vendors, large attendance, and an electronics flea market.   Details of past events are at http://www.tcf-nj.org/

We’re now soliciting speakers on radio related topics for the ARRL State Convention on Sunday.  We envision having at least three classrooms dedicated solely to Amateur Radio topics, such as contesting, DXing, homebrewing, EmComm, Youth Activities, etc. A VE session is planned as well. Speakers are customarily offered free admission.  If you’re interested in making a presentation, please register at http://www.tcf-nj.org/

Finally, a half-price $35 non-commercial, single tailgate selling space will be available to hams. Commercial dealer spaces are $70 for 9′x16′ and $100 for 14′x16′.  Each tailgate or dealer space is good for two days and includes one admission ticket.   Inquiries on commercial vendor, tailgate and flea market spaces should be sent to email hidden; JavaScript is required

Thanks & 73

Gary Wilson, K2GW

Radio Speaker Coordinator

2010 NJ State ARRL Convention

www.w2zq.com

email hidden; JavaScript is required

The October meeting (and preceding Directors meeting at 6:30 PM) will be held at a different location on Wednesday, October 14th at 7:30 PM. It will be held at the Central New Jersey Chapter of the American Red Cross, 707 Alexander Road, in Princeton, NJ 08540. This is just south of Route 1 going towards Princeton Junction.

The presentation speaker will be Mark Smith, KC2SMS, who will offer a tour of the facility, the N2ARC Radio Station, a demo of the communications trailer, and discuss plans to upgrade the communications trailer with Amateur Radio Equipment.

Google Map Link to Red Cross Chapter

The September meeting of the DVRA (on September 9th) has a show and tell theme to it, “What I Did on my Summer Vacation”.  Come by and bring in any new toys you received or projects you started (or photos if the project is a little too large to transport).  The meeting will be at the same time and location as usual, which is also viewable in the “Meetings” link at the top of the page.  All are welcome!

“Radio Hams” from  Mercer County join in National Deployment

Public Demo of Emergency Communications June 27 – 28

The DVRA’s “hams” will join with thousands of Amateur Radio operators who will be showing off their emergency capabilities June 27-28. Over the past year, the news has been full of reports of ham radio operators providing critical communications during unexpected emergencies in towns across America including the California wildfires, winter storms, tornadoes and other events world-wide. During Hurricane Katrina, Amateur Radio – often called “Ham radio” – was often the ONLY way people could communicate, and hundreds of volunteer “hams” traveled south to save lives and property. When trouble is brewing, Amateur Radio’s people are often the first to provide rescuers with critical information and communications. On the weekend of June 27 – 28, the public will have a chance to meet and talk with Mercer County’s ham radio operators and see for themselves what the Amateur Radio Service is about. Showing the newest digital and satellite capabilities, voice communications and even historical Morse code, hams from across the USA will be holding public demonstrations of emergency communications abilities.

This annual exercise, called “Field Day” is the climax of the week long “Amateur Radio Week” sponsored by the ARRL, the national association for Amateur Radio. Using only emergency power supplies, ham operators will construct emergency stations in parks, shopping malls, schools and back yards around the country. Their slogan, “Ham radio works when other systems don’t! ” is more than just words to the hams as they prove they can send messages in many forms without the use of phone systems, internet or any other infrastructure that can be compromised in a crisis. More than 30,000 amateur radio operators across the country participated in last year’s event.

“We hope that people will come and see for themselves, this is not your grandfather’s radio anymore,” said Mark Bespalko of the DVRA. “The communications that ham radio people can quickly create have saved many lives when other systems failed or were overloaded. And besides that – it’s fun!”

In the Mercer County area, the Delaware Valley Radio Association will be demonstrating Amateur Radio at Soccer Fields 3-9 In Mercer County Central Park on June 27-28. They invite the public to come and see ham radio’s new capabilities and learn how to get their own FCC radio license before the next disaster strikes.

By going to http://www.arrl.org/contests/announcements/fd/locator.php and entering the callsign W2ZQ, a map showing the location of the station can be found.

There are over 650,000 Amateur Radio licensees in the US, and more than 2.5 million around the world. Through the ARRL’s Amateur Radio Emergency Services program, ham volunteers provide emergency communications for thousands of state and local emergency response agencies, all for free.

To learn more about Amateur Radio, go to www.emergency-radio.org. The public is most cordially invited to come, meet and talk with the hams. See what modern Amateur Radio can do. They can even help you get on the air!

Every year the Armed Forces Day Crossband Test is a fun event which tests ones ability to have crossband conversations – where you transmit on one frequency and receive on another, with a considerable difference between the two.  Stations in the US military transmit on military frequencies and listen on the amateur bands, while ham operators do the opposite.  This year, the test date is May 9th (though Armed Forces Day is later in May, it’s the same weekend as the Dayton Hamvention, so the test date was moved to avoid a conflict).

This is not only a fun event, but when I’ve participated in the past I’ve used it as an excuse to dust off the portable gear and go participate from a park somewhere – making it also a test of my batteries and portable setup!

A few updates to brag about:

• The DVRA is joining forces with the Trenton Computer Fest!  The Hamfest page has been updated with all the information (for some time now, but thanks in part to the new theme it doesn’t look horrble anymore) so visit there if you’d like to learn more about the event.
• The licensing page has also been updated with the correct dates for 2009 (now that someone reminded me that the old dates were still there.. from 2007!)

The logo still needs to be fixed, mostly because I need to find a hi-res version of it to scale down (the one that I have doesn’t look decent due to the backgorund in the image).

Unfortunately my hand was forced in this case, but I had wanted to look into doing a redesign of the website.  I say my hand was forced because upon inspection I found a lot of crap on here that didn’t belong – during one of the times between Wordpress upgrades, the site was broken into and a bunch of redirect sites were put in place.  These are put up by spammers so they can try to drive their search engine page rankings higher.

The crap has been cleaned off, and I’ll be spending a chunk of the evening picking a nice theme and layout for the site again (the one we were using had some other difficulties, which made formatting look horrible more often than not).  So if you refresh the page and the design changes, you’ll know why.