General Club Meeting – February 15, 2019

Last August our topic was DMR radio. Since then I have had a lot of requests for another DMR presentation, and since some new capabilities have become available, I thought this would be a good time. A lot of members have purchased DMR radios and would like to know more about their use and capabilities. A lot of our members have also purchased and Yaesu System Fusion radios as well. In fact, the Yaesu FTM400 mobile radio is probably the most popular general mobile radio in the Santa Barbara Area. There are probably 20 or more SBARC members with these radios but only use them for regular FM. Yaesu YSF radios are digital capable, but use a different digital protocol. Now it is easy to use your Yaesu YSF capable radios to communicate on DMR on the SBARC or other favorite talkgroup. At this meeting, we’ll show you how and do some demonstrations. So bring your DMR radios and Yaesu YSF HT’s if you have one. And, bring your questions about this or DMR in general. SBARC is lucky enough to have their own dedicated talkgroup, and we need to utilize it more. With this new capability, hopefully we can get more members to come over and give digital a try.   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 11:00pm on Friday February 15th, 2019 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting August 17, 2018. – DMR Revisited

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.

General Club Meeting – Friday, October 20, 2017

Our club meeting this month will have two parts. At the November meeting we will hold our annual elections to elect board members and officers 2018. The nominating committee will present it’s slate of nominations for these positions and we will officially open floor nominations from the membership at large. There are a couple of other issues on the ballot as well, and we’ll discuss these, hear opposing views, and hold a question and answer session to make sure everyone understands the issues that will be before membership in November. The second part of the meeting will be a hands-on demonstration on using DMR radios. We have previously had presentations on a general overview of DMR, programming radios, and now it’s time to learn how to operate. Many of our members have purchased excellent TYT MD-380 DMR radios and have them programmed and ready to go. DMR is quite a bit different than using normal ham FM radios, and there are a lot of features available. We’ll talk about using the menu options as well as all of the advanced features and explain all the interesting things you can do with DMR. So if you have a DMR radio, bring it to the meeting with you so you can follow along! SBARC General Club Meetings are held at the Goleta Union School District, 401 N. Fairview Ave. in Goleta, right across the street from the Goleta Library. Doors open at 7:00 PM and the meeting starts at 7:30 PM. Put the date on your calendar and bring a guest! Post expires at 11:00pm on Friday October 20th, 2017 but will still be available in the archives.

SBARC General Meeting: August 18th 2017

If you haven’t yet tried a DMR radio, this month you will get your chance. Last month we had a great introduction to DMR presentation by Michael Rickey, AF6FB of the PAPA Radio System. This month we are going to follow up on that meeting with some DMR radio demonstrations, and a discussion on installing firmware, contact databases and programming codeplugs. For many of our members this may all sound complicated so we are going to try to take some of the mystery out of this for you and show you on the big screen how simple it is once you understand the DMR concept. We’ll also show you how we programmed a DMR HT for Dave, K9KBX to take on his upcoming European vacation. He has repeaters programmed in for 16 different cities he is going to visit, and he will be able to call back to Santa Barbara with a single PTT press. Getting into DMR is inexpensive and fun. If you are at all interested in learning more about it, please join us! SBARC General Club Meetings are held at the Goleta Union School District, 401 N. Fairview Ave. in Goleta, right across the street from the Goleta Library. Doors open at 7:00 PM and the meeting starts at 7:30 PM. Put the date on your calendar and bring a guest! Post expires at 11:30pm on Friday August 18th, 2017 but will still be available in the archives.