General Club Meeting – March 15, 2019

The March 15 meeting will feature a presentation by Steve Noll, WA6EJO, on antennas and propagation. This will be a live demonstration exploring radiation patterns and polarization of a variety of antennas from ground planes to loop Yagis to helices, plus actual demonstrations of a variety of propagation phenomena including ducting, refraction, diffraction, knife edging, Fresnel zone, velocity of propagation, and more. If you would like to know more about the black magic of radio waves and how to use them, you don’t want to miss Steve’s presentation. He is an expert in the field. Steve Noll, WA6EJO, has been active in Ham Radio for the past 40 years. He pioneered 2-way Amateur Radio Laser communications in the late 1970s and operated an experimental 23 centimeter repeater and an X-Band beacon in Ventura for many years. Steve chaired several of the West Coast VHF/UHF Conferences in the 1990s where he also built and ran the antenna gain and pattern plotting range. He is a member of the Amateur Television Network and is a founding member of the MAKE Ventura makerspace. Steve retired from Advanced Photonix after 22 years as their Senior Test Engineer. SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, March 15, 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 11:53pm on Friday March 15th, 2019 but will still be available in the archives.

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.

Election Night – Home Brew Night – November 16, 2018

It’s that time again! Time to elect your club officers and board of directors. If you cannot make it to the meeting, and want to vote by absentee ballot, please check out this post for more information. In addition, this will be our Annual Home Brew night. Bring whatever you have that you had a hand in — Designing, Building, Modifying, Ruining — all will count. Put something in writing next to your entry to let us know about what you did. Don’t be embarassed — be proud. Bring it! Our guest speaker this month will be our own Levi Maaia Ph.D – K6LCM. Levi will present an update from his attendance at the annual Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) International Summit held in October in Washington, DC. He will share updates about the repair status of the on-orbit radios aboard the station, new amateur radio technologies being developed for space and information on how you can make contact with the ISS using equipment you probably already have! The ARISS program is the longest-running experiment aboard the ISS. In fact, astronauts have been using amateur radio to contact hams on Earth since the Shuttle program. ARISS provides learning opportunities by connecting students to astronauts aboard the ISS through a partnership between NASA, the American Radio Relay League(ARRL), and the Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. (AMSAT) The partnership also includes other amateur radio organizations and space agencies in Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe. ARISS educational outreach programs inspire students in the U.S. and worldwide, to pursue interests and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) through Amateur Radio. Levi’s PhD research at UCSB focused on STEM education in high school settings including student participation in ARISS. He is founding member of the ARISS-US Education Committee. SBARC General Club Meeting Friday, November 16, 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 November 16th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

SBARC Election: November 16, 2018

At the General Club Meeting on November 16, 2018, the Club membership will have the opportunity to elect the 2019 SBARC Board of Directors.  Members must be in good standing for at least 28 days prior to the election in order to be eligible to vote. Expired memberships may be renewed online. The SBARC Nominating Committee has submitted the following slate of nominees for consideration by the membership. Additional nominations may be made from the floor by any member in good standing prior to the vote being taken at the November 16th General Club Meeting.   Nominees for the Executive Committee These candidates are presently running unopposed. (i) = incumbent candidate President and Chief Executive Officer: Brian Milburn, K6BPM (i) Chief Financial Officer: Tom Saunders, N6YX (i) Secretary: Dorothy Oksner, K6DSO Nominees for Director At Large Members may vote for up to 4 directors. (i) = incumbent candidate (i*) = currently serving on Executive Committee Director At Large: Ken Alker, KA6KEN (i) Director At Large: Wayne Beckman, AF6GX (i*) Director At Large: Michael Taylor, K6RQV (i) Director At Large: Rick Whitaker, KG6VLB Director At Large: Darryl Widman, KF6DI Absentee Voting: The official SBARC ballot is available by clicking here. We hope you can make it to the meeting, but if you can’t for some reason, we still hope you will cast your vote by absentee ballot. Here is the procedure: Download and print the ballot. Make your selections, sign and date it at the bottom of the page. If you have a scanner, please scan the document and save it to a PDF file. if you don’t have a scanner, take a clear digital picture of the completed ballot. Send either the scanned ballot or photo of the ballot by email to the Club Secretary, Wayne, AF6GX at secretary@sbarc.org. Please note, if you are submitting your absentee ballot by email, it must be received by 11:59 PM on November 15, 2018.  Of course, you can also send it by regular mail to the address below. Please make sure your ballot is received by November 15th. Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club, Inc. Post Office Box 3907 Santa Barbara, CA 93130-3907 Submitted to the membership by this duly appointed Nominating Committee in accordance with the SBARC Bylaws: Levi C. Maaia, K6LCM Michael Taylor, K6RQV Post expires at 1:00am on Saturday November 17th, 2018 but will still be available in the archives.

General Club Meeting – October 19th 2018

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

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

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.