Category Archives: Club News

General Club Meeting – October 19th 2018

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Our speaker this month will be Orv Beach W6BI with assistance from Eric KG6WXC. They will bringing us up to date with everything that is going on in mesh networking. There have been a lot of changes in the past year, and while a lot of us have mesh nodes deployed, most of us have not kept up with the latest news. Orv has presented to us before, and he is a good speaker and has good presentations. This will be a very informative meeting. We will also open the nomination period for next months election for club officers and directors. The nominating committee, Levi K6LCM and Michael K6RQV, have put together a slate to fill the seven positions, and we will accept nominations for any additional candidates until next months meeting and we start voting. SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, September 21, 2018 at 7:30 PM Goleta Union School District Board Room 401 North Fairview Avenue in Goleta We hope to see you all at the meeting!   Post expires at 11:56pm on Friday October 19th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting – Friday September 21, 2018

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At this months meeting we will have a presentation on 3D printing. Several club members have developed an interest in this in recent weeks and purchased new (and inexpensive) 3D printers. These printers are great for printing almost anything! Several members have printed items for amateur radio and a few are already into 3D modeling using 3D Cad programs. There are many resources on the internet for learning and lots of tutorials on YouTube. If you are not into designing your own 3D models, there are well over a million drawings available for download, ready for printing! We’ll be bringing samples of our efforts to show and and have a slide presentation. Have you ever needed a knob for a radio or a special part for something? Print it! Come to the meeting and we’ll show you how easy it is to get started.   SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, September 21, 2018 at 7:30 PM Goleta Union School District Board Room 401 North Fairview Avenue in Goleta We hope to see you all at the meeting!   Post expires at 1:08am on Saturday September 22nd, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting August 17, 2018. – DMR Revisited

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SBARC now has numerous members with DMR radios, but many have not yet quite gotten the hang of how DMR works and have not yet been able to enjoy the full capabilities of the DMR network. I have been asked several times recently about the possibility of having DMR be the topic of a club meeting, so I thought this month might be a good time to have one. Now that a lot of members have radios and have had at least some exposure to DMR, I think another meeting to go over the numerous capabilities of DMR might help clear things up for a lot of people, and get a few more people interested in jumping on board. We’ll also demonstrate and explain some different kinds of “hotspots” that you can set up at home and basically operate your own tiny, low powered DMR repeater. So bring your radios, and bring your questions! Post expires at 8:00pm on Friday August 17th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

SBARC Annual Bazaar – This Coming Saturday, July 21, 2018

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The annual SBARC Bazaar will be held this year on Saturday July 21, 2018. Setup will begin at 06:00 to 07:30 with selling to begin at 08:00 and continue to 11:30. Donated equipment that has been collected throughout the year will be sold to raise funds for the club. There will also be a consignment area where you can bring items you want to sell if you like and the club will accept a 10% “commission” from those sales. The Bazaar this year will be held in the parking lot at the Club Station in the Red Cross parking lot. It will be fun to have it “at home” again this year, and the Club Station will be open during the entire time. The Red Cross building is located on the corner of State Street and Alamar. The parking lot behind the main building, and the entrance is on Alamar. We will need help and people with pick-up trucks and/or hand trucks to move the equipment and set things up and clean up afterwards. Sales people are also needed. Please contact Brian K6BPM at k6bpm@sbarc.org if you can spare an hour or two. Your time will be greatly appreciated and it is for a good cause! Post expires at 12:35pm on Saturday July 21st, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

Field Day Report From Ken KA6KEN

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Dear SBARC Members, I would like to thank all those who attended Field Day this year.  The turn-out was fantastic. Elings Park was a bit cold and we never did see the sun, but perhaps that was better than hot and dusty (isn’t it amazing how it went from cold and overcast two weeks ago to 107 degrees last week)? We had two stations running (plus the Get-on-the-Air, or GOTA, station).  We used our K6TZ call for the primary two stations and K6SBZ for the GOTA station.  Our class was “2A” and our section was “SB”. We assembled and installed the massive Force-12 antenna on a rotator atop the 50′ pneumatic mast on the Rover along with an 80-meter dipole, we set up the two-element StepIR on a push-up mast (that was a feat) along with a 40/80 meter dipole, and we erected three fiberglass masts with guy ropes to support a G5RV multi-band center-fed di-pole antenna as an inverted-V at about 30′ at its center-point. Our total score was 2,236, comprised of 553 QSO’s (multiplied by 2 since we used less than 150watts for all QSOs) plus 1,130 bonus points.  For more details (like bonus points break-down), click here and download the file called “ARRL Field Day Entry Form as submitted.pdf” (note you must add the Total Bonus Points to the Claimed Score for the final score).  If you want to find out more about comparative scores check out the ARRL web site for last year’s scores; this year’s scores will not be published until November.  Also, check out the ARRL Contest Soapbox by clicking on and selecting “2018 ARRL Field Day” in the Event drop-down for pictures and comments people have posted regarding Field Day – they are still streaming in. The band conditions were not as bad as predicted.  We actually had some pretty solid runs.  In fact, the team of Dennis WB6OBB and Jim N6SXB managed a rate of 128 QSOs per hour, at their peak!  While Dennis is a seasoned contestor, this was Jim’s first; Jim was logging for Dennis.  Congrats to the dynamic duo!  Now if we could only sustain that rate, we would have scored 12,288 points in 24 hours across the two stations (including our 2x multiplier for running on emergency power).  We all have something to work toward next year! We made 273 QSOs on 20 meters, 214 on 40 meters, and… Continue reading →

Silent Key – Bud Allain AC6WR

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Our friend and fellow ham Bud Allain AC6WR passed away on Friday, June 22 2018. Any visitor to the club station on Saturdays knew Bud. He was our “Assistant Shackmaster” for a few years and would drive all the way down from Buellton just to open the shack at 9am and close at 12pm. He would make the coffee, clean the room and take out the trash thanklessly every week. If you had a problem with a radio, Bud would take it home and fix it. He never complained, never late, and rarely missed a Saturday. He was a great guy, and we’ll miss him. Bud’s obituary, written by his daughter Kathy, Bud Allain passed away unexpectedly surrounded by family, Friday, June 22, 2018. He was born July 10, 1930, in Marshfield, Wisconsin. Bud was preceded in death by his wife Gini Allain. He is survived by his daughters Kathy Allain, Sandra (Cheryl Chyla) Allain and his son Buddy (Kelley) Allain; four grandchildren, Zackary, Travis, Megan (Nick Davy), Austin, and four great grandchildren, Brayden, Lyla, Grayson and Emersyn; his sister Delores Knight of Stillwater, OK, and brother James (Kay) Allain of Clinton, IA. In 1972 Bud and family moved from Wisconsin to Goleta as part of a job transfer with Delco Electronics, his employer until he retired as an engineer in 1993. For the next 10 years, he volunteered for Habitat for Humanity working tirelessly on several projects in the Santa Barbara community. In 2003, Bud and Gini moved to Buellton where his passion for ham radios rekindled. He was an active member in the Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club and would drive to SB each Saturday to participate in meetings, assist with club business and just hang out with club members. Word also spread in the valley that there was an expert tube radio repairman who could fix any radio, no matter the condition or age! You were a rare soul and you will be missed, dad. A funeral mass will be held Friday, July 6, 10:00am, at Old Mission Santa Ines in Solvang. A committal service will follow at Calvary Cemetery in Santa Barbara. From Darryl KF6DI On March 16, 1998, this tall, quiet, kindly fellow named ‘Bud’ Allain came to the third session of the Technician classes I was teaching at the Goleta Valley Community Hospital and asked if he could join the class. Of course I threw him… Continue reading →

General Club Meeting – Friday June 15th 2018

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Join us for an interesting presentation from Michael – K6RQV titles “The NAS in a nutshell”.  A quick en-route/terminal system overview of the National Aerospace System from a technician’s perspective. Michael works for the FAA as a systems technician in the Santa Barbara area, and we’ll learn about all the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep our air travel safe and reliable.     SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, June 15th, 2018 at 7:30 PM Goleta Union School District Board Room 401 North Fairview Avenue in Goleta We hope to see you all at the meeting! Post expires at 10:35pm on Friday June 15th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.