The LED The newsletter of the Livingston Amateur Radio Klub (LARK) Howell, Michigan November 2018 Who 8 Darrell’s Spicy Bacon W8DSB Well, I hate to say it but that four-letter word is coming. Most likely sooner than later. Listen to the repeater on meetings days to make sure it has not been canceled due to a weather event. Welcome everyone to November when hunting and antenna work is at its peak. Below are Darrell’s random thoughts of the month. The 146.680 repeater controller is installed and running. It has many cool features, some yet to turn on. It also has one quark, that is it shuts off the incoming audio during ID’s. I am working with the manufacture to resolve this. The perfect fix is to have the “W8LRK” blend in with your voice during the 3 second ID. I am trying to stay away from any CW ID’s as this is so 1960’s. As for all the other messages, just key up over them and start talking, they will stop and go away. The digital repeater is up and running. It currently has DStar, DMR and Fusion turned on. We can turn on P25 if someone was to buy a few radios and wanted to try it. As of now, the drive home time (3 to 4) has been mostly DStar and the evening has been mostly DMR. There are more than a few users that have two or more modes listening all the time. Give it a try. The internet link for the digital repeater is so/so at best. It works but the connection gets backed up or drops under heavy load. We are still working on a better solution. Over the next few months I plan and making very simple CodePlugs for all the radio types I have helped create. The codeplug will only have one hotspot and one repeater installed both pointing to the W8LRK talkgroup. This will get any new comer started in DMR. As for the DStar users, we won’t normally be connected to any reflector unless you demand it to one. If you do this, please unlink when done. If your out of town I think you can connect to “W8LRK B” from anywhere to jump back on the repeater. I have not had time to try this, but it should work. I want everyone to thank Rod Clay as he has put in as many hours as I have getting this repeater running and he is a special kind of ham willing to always help when asked. Hotspots. Many members have asked about hotspots. Which one to buy, how to configure, how to use. I was thinking if we have enough interested users we can buy in bulk, build as a group and all leave with a working hotspot. The cost of which is about $85 (or less) and it would take a group about 3 hours to build their own device and program it. Power Supply for PI ($10) PI zero W ($11) MMDVM tophat with headers ($35) Clear Case for PI with hat ($15) SD CARD ($10) If you’re interested, please let us know at [email protected]. If we get at least 5 requests I will have one of the board member take charge of this. The requirements would be to pay upfront and have a digital radio to use with your hotspot. It does not matter if it’s a Fusion, DStar and DMR but you must own one of them for this to be useful. Who in the group knows anything about allstar? Did you know that all allstar nodes can contain Echolink nodes? My goal for the winter is to build an allstar node. Learn how to link and unlink the node to other nodes. Learn how to activatee the Echolink and replace my stand-a-lone Echolink with allstar. Our new controller can be setup to dial preprogrammed nodes on schedule if desired. 73 de W8DSB A Nice QSL Card—But From Where? When I was 16 years old, I got my first ham radio license, a Novice class license, limiting my transmitting to a crystal-controlled 75 watts. What that means for you youngsters is that you could twirl your VFO knob all you wanted, but that was for receiving only. To transmit, you were locked into your crystal frequency. Anyway, several months after I got on the air from home with my Heathkit HW-16 transceiver and my 15 meter dipole antenna strung up in the attic of my house. I would come home from school at about 3:30 PM and run up to my third floor shack (my bedroom) and fire up the rig. Sometimes I would stay there for hours, which must have been the case on November 22, 1968. I was listening around on 15 CW when this guy sending a callsign of VR1P showed up, and I managed to work him. I didn't know where VR1 was, so I had to look up the prefix in my callsign prefix index. But he wasn't there. So, I had to really dig around to find out just who I had worked. Turns out that it was a DXpedition to the British Phoenix islands, which I had never heard of before. Two Canadians from Calgary, Alberta, were out there having DX fun in the South Pacific. I remember having some difficulty tracking down VR1P's QSL information but somehow I succeeded. There is quite a complicated history of the various islands in this neck of the South Pacific—one of which is Nikumaroro, where some believe Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan crash-landed in 1937. Anyway, now the islands, formerly known as the Gilbert Islands, have become part of Central Kiribati (pronounced keer-a-bas) for DXCC purposes. One of the Canadians, Don Hilman VE6AJT, became VA7KX, and passed away in 2016. The other, George Viertelhausen VE6APV, became VE6VA but passed away in 2017. Submitted by Tom KT8Y 1974 Kingman Reef DXpedition Reprinted with permission of the ARRL from the November 1974 QST On June 30, 1974, 4 members of the Northern California DX Club retained the motor-sailer Caroline, and sailed from Honolulu to find Kingman Reef. They spent 2 days sailing around the area where their navigation instruments showed it to be located, but just couldn't find it, and the captain was about to call it quits and head back, when, miraculously, there it was! The group kept listeners on 14.250 MHz informed of their progress, the first time a DXpedition kept the DX world aware of just how things were going from the onboard station W6WX/MM3. The story can be found in the November 1974 QST, p. 57. The first day the sun set, the anchor dropped, the champagne was opened and the ship's lights were turned on. It was decided, however, to turn off the lights since they were attracting 10 foot sharks. The next day, the dinghy took in the equipment, including a card table, a Yaesu FT 101B, an outboard VFO and a FL 2100 linear amplifier. A Hy-gain 18AVT vertical was installed. A Dayton 1500 watt generator was fired up 75 feet away, and the fun was on! In less than 30 hours of operation, KP6KR worked 5,535 QSO's. 66% were from the Continental USA, and a little over 13% was from Japan. Bad winds and rain cut the DXpedition short, and to top it off, the Caroline's anchor got stuck on the reef, and the anchor rope had to be cut. Since the boat did not have enough fuel left to return to Honolulu, the skipper headed to Johnston Island, 720 miles away. Read it all at the ARRL QST Archives, November 1974 issue. Of the four Dxpeditioners, Bob Ferrero became W6RJ; Rusty Epps is still W6OAT; Peter Grabosky became W6OOL; and Jim Rafferty became N6RJ but passed away in 1993. Submitted by Tom KT8Y Reprinted from the January 1970 QST, with permission of the ARRL. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock was a career criminal who was eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison for his third bank robbery, but he escaped from prison in 1969, and the FBI placed him on its Most Wanted list. He became one of the people who remained on the list the longest, almost 8 years. After being caught, he went back to prison and he eventually was paroled, but then was charged again with racketeering and fraud, but avoided more prison time by paying a reported $100,000 fine. This is all according to Wikipedia. He is reported to have died in 1998 of a heart attack. And, according to Wikipedia, he reportedly did not raise his 4 children, their mother telling them that their father was dead. One of his children, Stephen, was the 2017 Las Vegas Mass Murderer. A check on QRZ.com shows that the callsign K7JIH is not currently assigned. Submitted by Tom KT8Y The First Ham Radio Event on a Spacecraft It seems today as if Ham Radio from space is almost regarded as an everyday event. But I can assure you that it wasn't always so common. In 1983, Owen Garriott W5LFL, became the first ham radio operator from a spacecraft. He operated from the Space Shuttle Columbia, on STS-9, which launched on November 28 and landed at Edwards Air Force Base on December 8. He used a transceiver hand-built by members of the Motorola Amateur Radio Club with a whopping 4.5 watts.