Delaware Valley Radio Association

“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.

W2R Special Event

Mar 14-Mar 15, 2009 1400Z-2300Z, Robbinsville, NJ. Robbinsville Twp, NJ, W2R. Robbinsville, NJ 150 Year Anniversary. 14.270 7.200. QSL. Michael Moreken, 55 Sharon Rd, Apt. E-22, Robbinsville, NJ 08691. www.qrz.com/ab2io

We are celebrating the 150 year of Robbinsville.  http://www.robbinsville-twp.org/

The town is located about 10 miles East of Trenton, NJ the capital of the state.

We may be on more bands and modes.

++++++++++

Still working out details on location and possible ops.

73,

Mike, AB2IO

Confused About Digital TV Conversion?

January14,2009 meeting of the Delaware Valley Radio Association will feature a talk on the upcoming conversion to Digital TV. Robert Schroeder, Communications & Warning Officer at NJOEM, will be making the presentation. Mr. Schroeder will be explaining the ins and outs of the upcoming changes to how you receive your favorite broadcasts and where to go for your discount coupons that take you to the next milennia

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 a hundred 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 1931. Persons interested in learning more about wireless electronics 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 Tom Bagdas at 609-585-2001

The DVRA December 10th program is the annual Holiday Party run by the Membership Director. Note that it starts at 6:30 PM instead of the normal 7:30 PM meeting time. Please let Tim Reeg know what food item you’re bringing.

The December 13th “Second Saturday” event will be a tour of the newly renovated N2ARC base station, the Red Cross comm trailer with VSAT capability, and a demo of the new Red Cross Shelter Radio kit. We’ll meet at the Central New Jersey Chapter of the American Red Cross at 9AM. If we can get access to the other building, we’ll try to show the Disaster Operation Center as well.

The Red Cross is located at 707 Alexander Road (just south of Route 1) in Princeton Junction. You park just behind the building with the antenna tower. Talk-in will be on 146.67 or 146.46.

The October 8 meeting of the Delaware Valley Radio Association will feature a talk by Doug Dixon on electronic devices to please the techno geek in everyone. Doug is a regular contributor to the Route One Newspaper, an established author in the field of technology, a former Sarnoff and Intel technology lead, and a regular attendee of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Please check out his site at Manifest Technology.

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 a hundred 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 1931. Persons interested in learning more about wireless electronics 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 Tomas M Bagdas at 609-585-2001.

Since September is Back to School month, the DVRA meeting on Wednesday September 10th will feature an assignment for all club members to be prepared to speak for 5 or 10 minutes on “What I Did on my Summer Vacation”. While Ham radio topics are best, things such as travels and DXepeditions are also appropriate. So, the guest speaker is you!

The Delaware Valley Radio Association meets on the 2nd Wednesday of each month at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church 137 West Upper Ferry Road in West Trenton, NJ. Meetings begin at 7:30pm and are open to the public. Refreshments are served following the meeting.

73

Gary Wilson, K2GW
DVRA Program Director

Just to clarify timing, the regular August monthly meeting of the DVRA is held during the club’s Annual Picnic for members and their families. The picnic begins at 6:30 PM (note this is one hour earlier than the actual meeting itself) on Wednesday, Aug 13th. The club provides the hotdogs and hamburgers to grill, but everyone attending should bring a side dish, desert, drinks or picnic supplies (plates, charcoal, etc.) to share. Please e-mail the Club President at email hidden; JavaScript is required with what you are planning to bring so he can coordinate things.

This year the picnic will be held at the pavilion at Ewing Township’s Watson Park, (formerly called Rambling Creek Park) located just off Scotch Road just east of the airport. A covered pavilion, grills and picnic tables are there but you might want to bring a lawn chair if that makes you more comfortable. Although the weather forecast looks good, we can hold the picnic even if it rains due to the large pavilion. This site is easy to reach from I-95.

DIRECTIONS:

• Take I-95 to Exit 3 (Scotch Road) South. Note this is NOT the I-95 exit by the DVRA Shack!
• Follow Scotch Road south to the Glenn Rock Shopping Center. The airport runways will be on your right). At the traffic light at Scotch and Upper Ferry Road, make a left onto Upper Ferry Road. Just past the Ewing municipal building (which is on the left) you’ll see the entrance to the park on your right. There’s a sign out front by the driveway for the park.

Here’s a link to the park location on Google maps.

Talk-in will be available on the 146.67 (PL 131.8) and 442.65 repeaters. See you there!

Thanks

Gary Wilson, K2GW

Program Director