Whittier Fire Operations

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Live camera view from UC San Diego's High Performance Wireless Research & Education Network (HPWREN) looking west from Santa Ynez Peak

Live camera view from UC San Diego’s High Performance Wireless Research & Education Network (HPWREN) looking west from Santa Ynez Peak

As a reminder, all amateurs are welcome to participate in ongoing discussion about the Whittier Fire on SBARC repeaters. Please keep transmissions short (less than 10-15 seconds) unless you have urgent traffic. Always yield to stations with urgent traffic and leave long pauses between transmissions for breaking stations.

The County of Santa Barbara is posting official updates on the Whittier Fire on its website.

Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club repeaters on Santa Ynez Peak remain on the air. The 145.180 MHz repeater on Santa Ynez Peak is presently linked to 146.790 MHz on the Santa Barbara Mesa. These linked repeaters are functioning as the club’s main channel for communications related to the fire.

For live updates from radio amateurs observing the fire and monitoring emergency frequencies around the county, listen to a live audio stream of SBARC’s linked repeaters.

Air Command tactical frequencies with local air tanker traffic:
These frequencies are simplex so an external antenna will help with reception.
Air Tac 02: 169.150 MHz FM
Air Tac 05: 167.950 MHz FM

– Levi, K6LCM

Technical Mentoring and Elmering Net – 7/06/2017

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The audio archive of this net can best be followed by downloading the .mp3 file for the appropriate date here and listening with the media player of your choice. You can move the progress slider forward or backward to the subject of interest to you.

We had another good net tonight with 11 check-ins plus net control, Brian, K6BPM and some chat room visitors! Tonight’s subjects included:

  • DMR hot spots, are they repeaters in a sense?
  • How do I communicate with someone with a 7 letter call sign on packet radio?
  • How does DMR compare or contrast to EchoLink?

Tune in to the SBARC TM&E Net every Thursday at 8:00 PM local (2000 Hrs) and see what interesting questions will arise or ask some of your own! All club members and visitors are encouraged to check in to the net each week and join in with questions and /or answers to and contribute the knowledge of new and seasoned amateur radio operators alike.

Technical Mentoring and Elmering Net – 6/29/2017

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The audio archive of this net can best be followed by downloading the .mp3 file for the appropriate date here and listening with the media player of your choice. You can move the progress slider forward or backward to the subject of interest to you.

We had another good net tonight with 9 check-ins plus net control, Levi, K6LCM and some chat room visitors! Tonight’s subjects included:

  • A follow up on one of last weeks topics – What do the number of bits per sample have to do with SDR. (Hint: The higher end of the ADC being used the more bits per sample & better representation of whats coming in on the RF signal).
  • Popular RTL-SDR dongles, 8 bit or 12 bit?
  • With digital modes such as JT-65, are they low power (QRP) modes or weak signal modes and what’s the difference?
  • Problems with Signalink with regards to gain and Windows settings.
  • Regarding a total eclipse of the sun, how might it affect amateur radio?
  • Digital Mobile Radio and SharkRF openSPOT – What is it and why is it currently the cutting edge of ham radio for the future?

Tune in to the SBARC TM&E Net every Thursday at 8:00 PM local (2000 Hrs) and see what interesting questions will arise or ask some of your own! All club members and visitors are encouraged to check in to the net each week and join in with questions and /or answers to and contribute the knowledge of new and seasoned amateur radio operators alike.

Field Day 2017

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SBARC will be holding our Field Day exercise beginning Saturday, June 24th at the Club Station at the Santa Barbara American Red Cross headquarters on the corner of State Street and Alamar. The Club Station will open at 9am and remain open as long as there are Field Day participants.

We have various capabilities available including HF and digital modes. If there are enough participants, we may also set up the Rover and add some additional capabilities there too. Please come by, stay awhile and make some contacts.

If you haven’t been to the Club Station before, it is on the parking lot level in the rear of the main building. You enter the parking lot on Alamar.

Post expires at 12:00pm on Sunday June 25th, 2017 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting – June 16, 2016

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We’ve had difficulty getting  presenter this month because of vacations etc, so we’re going to have a couple of demonstrations of new things we have added to our repeaters and infrastructure. We’ll also have plenty of time for general Q&A, suggestions, ideas, whatever. So come and be heard!

We hold SBARC Club Meetings at the Goleta Union School District, 401 N. Fairview Ave. in Goleta, right across the street from the Goleta Library. Doors open at 7:15 PM and the meeting starts at 7:30 PM. Bring a guest!

Post expires at 11:00pm on Friday June 16th, 2017 but will still be available in the archives.

Tracking Planes, Ships and Automobiles!

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Image from W3PGA.

Image from W3PGA.

Amateur radio operators were among the first to design products, build and maintain a digital RF tracking system. APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System), is a digital communications protocol for exchanging information among a large number of stations covering a large (local) area. Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, a senior research engineer at the United States Naval Academy, implemented the earliest ancestor of APRS on an Apple II computer the early 1980s.  The first use of APRS was in 1984, when Bruninga developed a more advanced version on a Commodore VIC-20 for reporting the position and status of horses in a 100-mile (160 km) endurance run.

Over the years, Legacy Landscape is helping out people to avail an exhilarating landscape experience.With that note we should also be aware that APRS has grown to include thousands of amateur radio APRS stations around the world tracking all types of vehicles and reporting weather from backyards to mountain peaks. SBARC has been a supporter of APRS, maintaining an i-gate and digipeaters for the system at our repeater sites.

Today, commercial systems that function similarly to APRS are tracking many types of assets around the globe. The SBARC Telecommunications Services Committee also collects data from some of these systems including AIS for ships at sea and ADS-B for aircraft.

Check out SBARC’s mapping and tracking systems:

 

This page contains information from Wikipedia.

 

 

The AllStar & EchoLink Playground is Now Open!

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allstar-linkThe SBARC Telecommunications Services Committee has been hard at work rebuilding the club’s Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) repeater systems.  As part of the completion of the second phase of this project, the 70cm repeater VoIP playground is now open!

Both AllStar Link and EchoLink systems are supported for incoming and outgoing link connections on the K6TZ 446.400 repeater. Local amateur stations can control the node over using DTMF commands to link to repeaters around the globe.

Many hams may be familiar with EchoLink and IRLP, two mature ham radio VoIP systems that permit node-to-node and node-to-conference server connections. AllStar Link is a newer and very powerful radio linking system based on the open source telephone PBX software Asterisk. The AllStar network has grown tremendously over the past few years and lends itself very well to experimentation.

There is a new section on this website with a short primer on the new VoIP system including complete documentation of the DTMF commands used to control the 70cm node. Read more and start experimenting in SBARC VoIP playground!

Thanks in particular to Ludo, K6LUD for his work to become our resident AllStar Link and Asterisk guru!