The Prez Sez:

May is just about behind us now. I want to say thanks to Darwin K5DOA and everyone who helped out at the CenTex Air Show. It was a fun event for the general public and I think the volunteers also en-joyed the show from the cozy nook of the command & control center !

June, which is also National Amateur Radio

Month, is just around the corner! I want to re-mind everyone that we will be needing 8 to 10 hams with 2m mobile capabilities to help out on June 2nd with the annual Kiwanis Club s Tour d Temple. For more information you can check out the web site at <www.templekiwanis.org/tour_d'_temple.htm>.

This fun bike race will cover various distances up to 50 miles out to Mother Neff State Park and back. We will meet at the Mayborn Center at 7 a.m. that morning to get organized. If you don t

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Summer Fun for TARC

Prez Sez: TARC s Summer Plans Ham-Com at Plano At Our Next Meeting 1

Pix of the Usual Suspects Key Clicks from the Armadillo 2

D-Star Digital Repeater On-the-Air Ham License Surge Continues 3

Meeting Info 4

In this issue

W5LM Repeaters: 146.820- MHz (PL 123.0) 444.700 MHz (PL 123.0)

www.tarc.org June 2007

With too many speak-ers to count, we will matriculate in Field Day 101 at our June 7 club meeting. That is Thursday, June 7 at 7 p.m. at the Church of Christ in Western Hills, 210 N. General Bruce Dr. in Temple. Join us. Refreshments served and guests welcome.

At Our Next Meeting Ham- Com 0 7 is June 8 and 9

OFFICERS

President: Tom Olsen, AE5AP, (254) 791-5470, tomolsen@sbcglobal.net

Vice President: Eddie Hunts-man, KB5UBP, eddiehunts-man@sbcglobal.net

Secretary: Larry Fuhs, K5LAR, (254) 947-9402, mesquite@vvm.com

Treasurer: Darwin Geisel-brecht, K5DOA, (254) 487-3167, k5doa@vvm.com

BOARD MEMBERS

Myron Mesecke, N5TFK, (254) 770-0529, meseckem@vvm.com

John Dvoracek, KE5C, (254) 774-8376, john@ke5c.net

Mike LeFan WA5EQQ, (254)773-3590, mlefan@vvm.com

Steve Bosshard, NU5D, bosshard@gmail.com

COMMITTEES

Programs: John Dvoracek, KE5C

W5LM Trustee: Ron Thomp-son, W5WRE, (254) 859-3000, rwthompson@clear wire.net

Technical Director: Charlie Schlieper N5TD, 773-0608, n5td@vvm.com

Name Badges at Meetings: Ken Baker KD5UAT

Education: Charlie Schlieper, N5TD

Membership: Darwin Geisel-brecht, K5DOA, (254) 487-3167, k5doa@aol.com

RACES: Charlie Schlieper N5TD, District Radio Officer

Bulletin Editor: Mike LeFan, WA5EQQ

Webmaster: John Dvoracek, KE5C

Ham-Com 07 is June 8 and 9 at Plano Centre in Plano, TX. The grand prizes are an ICOM IC706 MkIIG and a Yaesu 857D. They will give away $100.00 in door prizes each hour during the event $25 every 15 minutes, a total of $1,800. Winners can use the cash as they please. Recipients of cash prizes will be included in the grand prize drawings. There are over 80 hours of speakers, workshops, and special interest group meetings scheduled. Parking is free and on-site. Eight hotels near the venue are providing special dis-counts. The tailgate market has been moved closer to the build-ing. The commercial area and the indoor flea market are sold out. For complete information visit the web site at www.hamcom.org/ and download the full-color "Ham-Com Flyer." The first National D-Star Users Meeting will be held Saturday evening from 6 -10 p.m. System administrators and users will meet to discuss the uses and applications of this rap-idly growing digital technology. Attendees are expected from world-wide locations as well as from across the US.

June 2007

By Tom Olsen, AE5AP

TARC Bulletin June 2007

page 2

...Medical Report: the word is that Frankie Baugh, KA5IHY had knee replacement on May 22 and is now re-cuperating nicely.

...Field Day 07 is on the way the weekend of June 23-24. Details at the club meeting and on the Monday Night Net. Share the adven-ture.

...Most weekdays and Saturdays, a handful of Temple area hams meet for coffee at the McDonalds at IH35 and Adams Avenue around 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. Everyone is in-vited and welcome to join in. Come on by. A few of the usual sus-pects are pictured at left in photos by Steve NU5D. ...Remember the TARC Net

Mondays at 7:00 p.m. on 146.820- MHz (PL 123.0). Your smiling face is needed on our Monday Night Net. Get the net habit. Try ityou ll like it!

...See you at the club meeting on June 7, 2007.

KEY CLICKS

FROM THE

ARMADILLO

have 2m mobile capabilities, come on out any-way. We ll match you up with someone who does and get you on the air. This should be a particularly fun event for some of the newer hams in the area.

I want to mention also that TARC will be providing the display at the Temple Public Library during the month of June. The large display area will let us really show the pubic just what Ham Radio is, and show a little of the history of how this fun hobby has been enjoyed over the years by the Temple Amateur Radio Club. There will be special displays focusing on Kids in Ham Radio as well as a general invitation for all to come out and be part of the TARC Field Day. If you have memorabilia or something that you would like to have displayed, please let us know. We need radios, keys, or pretty much anything that would help illustrate Amateur Radio to the general public.

I don t think I need to, but I want to remind everyone that the ARRL Field Day will be held the weekend of June 24th. What more can you say? The best of all ham worlds: DXing, EmComm, and hanging out with some pretty nice guys and gals. TARC will again have FD at the Early Day Tractor Festival Site Pavilion off Eberhardt Road. The TARC FD group has put a lot of effort into finding just the right equipment that will make FD both fun and competitive for all of us.

Every TARC mem-ber should stop out if just for a minute to say hello, get on the radio, or just hang out a little. We will have breakfast in the morning, burgers and dogs during the day, and a dinner on Saturday night. We especially encourage the old timers to join us for dinner. For the newer hams and the general public, the GOTA [Get On The Air] station will be up and going! You will learn a lot, socialize a lot, and eat a lot! Guaranteed!

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The Prez Sez... Mugshots of the Usual Suspects

Dale Duke, AD5QQ David Stevens, N5XKV

Cindy Pagel Larry Fuhs, K5LAR

Frank Baugh, KA5IHY Jerry Heitman, KA5AIE

Eddie Huntsman, Kay Schlieper, KB5UBP KB5DC

Photos by NU5D

There is a new experimental digital re-peater now being tested on-the-air in Temple, thanks to Steve NU5D. The fre-quency is 442.000/447.000 MHz (D-Star digital compatible). Most radios would setup 442.000 + 5 MHz TX offset. While analog radios will pass through this re-peater, the deviation is not optimized for other than digital voice mode. The repeater is running 10 watts into a 7.5 db omnidirectional antenna at 175 ft, lo-cated at 25th street and the Santa Fe tracks. Ground elevation is 720 ft. The feedline is LMR 500 with a set of Wacom Products 4-cavity BpBr duplex-ers. The 442.000 fre-quency is also the D-Sttar frequency in Dal-las. The repeater is built from a couple of GE Phoenix SX ra-dios. These are moder-ate spec radios, syn-thesized vehicular rigs that make pretty good building blocks. Years ago there was a pseudo-digital scheme used in signaling mobile radios that consisted of a 132-bit serial data stream. This, for many years, was a pro-prietary thing called Digital Private Line. NU5D says that Ferretronics of Canada developed an after-market con-troller that would detect and regenerate the digital information.

This is sort of what he is doing with the digital repeater testing. He does not

detect the data stream but rather the pres-ence of carrier. Any carrier (no sub tone) turns on the transmitter. The injection side of the local oscillator in the receiver causes a data inversion so that after de-modulating (not decoding) the data stream the signal goes through an inverter (single stage common emitter transistor) and gets applied to the data stream directly to the modulator of the radio after the pre-

emphasis circuits. More work is needed on data shap-ing and squaring, like a Schmidt trigger cir-cuit and also a CCD array. They would be nice to help delay the data so the preamble would not be cut off during repeat. The D-Star radio sends a burst of tone followed by bipolar data at roughly +/- 1 kHz instantaneous transmitter deviation, hence the limiting action in the repeater. So, right now any

digital signal will pass as long as it can open the carrier squelch circuit. Steve did not alter the IF filters in the radio. The whole project is to support a few folks who were willing so do something outside the box.

It is a simple experiment, and Steve says there are plenty of faults to criti-cize no ID, not dual mode, no 2M. He invites anyone else who wants to do a better job to get after it. If there is interest, he may invest in a real D-Star decoder

board to prevent non-D-Star signals from bumping the repeater, maybe even the Icom controller. This is something differ-ent than we have been doing. By the way, the AOR dv system beats D-Star hands down in audio quality/fidelity. A small handful of Temple folks have purchased D-Star radios. D-Star is more than just digital voice. It can include low speed data com over digital voice, routing for wide area networks, selective calling, and more. Here is a list of places with D-Star systems: http://www.dstarusers.org/d-starall.php

http://www.k5tit.org http://www.icomamerica.com/support/forums/

Charlie N5TD has programmed many radios via computer, but the new ICOM IC-2820, with the Digital D-Star board installed, gave presented him with a few problems at first. Here are a few tips that he says may help others: 1. Don't leave external speakers plugged into the rear jacks while you are trying to program this radio from the front DATA jack. It won't work. 2. In trying to read Data from the radio to computer, or in the "Clone Out" mode, the slower default cloning speed may cause an Error near the end of the process. Changing the Clone speed to Fast in the program should cure the problem.

3. If your CS-2820 computer program says that you're trying to read "Illegal Data" from your radio, it may simply be looking at changes you ve put into each VFO band. When you restore the default "146.100" and "440.000" in each VFO, it should accept all the data.

TARC Bulletin June 2007

page 3

New D-Star Digital Repeater On- the-Air in Temple

APPLICATION SURGE CONTINUES UNDER NEW AMATEUR RULES

It's been just a little more than two months since the FCC dropped the requirement that Amateur Radio applicants pass a Morse code test to earn operating privileges below 30 MHz. While the initial avalanche of applications immediately follow-ing February 23, when the no-Morse testing regime went into effect, has abated somewhat, business remains brisk for the ARRL Volunteer Examiner Coordinator staff.

"It's slowing down a little bit, but it's still substantially above what we usually see," observed ARRL VEC Manager Maria Somma, AB1FM. She estimated that new Amateur Radio applications were up by 35 percent, while upgrade applications were up by 150 percent over last year's volume. In a typical pre-February 23 week, Somma said, ARRL

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TARC Bulletin June 2007

page 4

Temple Amateur Radio Club, Inc. P.O. Box 616 Temple, TX 76503

First Class Mail

Address Label

Temple Amateur Radio Club meets the first Thursday of each month from 7:00-9:00 p.m., at the Church of Christ in Western Hills, 210 N. General Bruce Dr., in Templeacross I-35 from La Quinta Motel. Refreshments are served, and guests are invited and welcome!

APPLICATION SURGE CONTINUES Speroni's figures also show that the grand total of Amateur Radio station licenses has declined by more than 12,800 over the past two years to 655,048 at the end of March. The still-heavy volume has stretched the amount of time it takes for an application to proceed from examination session to license grant. "I think we're looking at eight to ten days from the test date," Somma allowed. By and large, those on the waiting end have been patient and understanding, she added. A staff of seven full-time and three part-time employ-ees handle the "incoming" from Amateur Radio exam sessions across the US and from other sites where US Amateur Radio examinations are administered through ARRL VEC.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel just yet. Somma and her staff are looking ahead to 450 examination sessions registered for May, another 400 in June and 320 apiece during July and August. And summer is "the slow season," she re-marked. Another 900 test sessions already are on the calendar for the rest of 2007. The ARRL Letter, April 27, 2007

VEC would receive paperwork from approximately 115 test sessions. "It's on the order of 150 to 200 sessions per week now!" she exclaimed. Somma and ARRL VEC staffers con-curred that applications were roughly evenly split between new-comers and upgraders. She said she's also seen a spike in the number of applications from General and higher class radio amateurs to serve as volunteer examiners.

To satisfy his own curiosity, ARRL member Tommy Gober, N5DUX, compiled some FCC statistics on the number of new Technician, General and Extra licensees before and after the Morse code requirement was deleted. His numbers show the FCC issued nearly 700 more Amateur Extra, 3625 more General and 454 more Technician licenses in March 2007 than in the same month last year. Figures from ARRL member and ham radio statistician Joe Speroni, AHØA, indicate the total number of Amateur Extra licensees is up 1649 from March 2006 to March 2007, while the General population grew by 2668. The total number of Techni-cian licensees dropped by 1632 during the same period, how-ever and it continues to drop going into April.

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