Tag Archives: Social

(Darryl KF6DI) – Mike Bales, KI6VBK, is the CEO and co-founder of the Santa Barbara Hackerspace, which was founded 6 years ago in his garage. Mike moved from San Diego to Santa Barbara to attend Santa Barbara City College to get a start on a degree in Electronic Engineering. He was frustrated with the limited access to the labs there and couldn’t afford the equipment that was required for an electronics project he was working on.  His life changed when he attended the Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo that year and discovered the concept of hackerspace. He thought that there must be others in a similar situation in need of space and equipment for personal and school projects given Santa Barbara’s many schools so he decided to try and start a hackerspace. Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people share their interest in tinkering with technology, meet and work on their projects and learn from each other.  SB Hackerspace started small, about a half dozen people meeting in Mike’s apartment / garage for the first 6 months or so. Once they built up a small core group they rented their first space on Aero Camino in Goleta and quickly grew and acquired more members.  Mike has a day job as a systems administrator for a small IT company which manages networks and equipment for 30 clients in the Santa Barbara area, in addition to running the hackerspace, and developing open source weather balloon trackers and other neat projects.  If you would like to know more about this young, exciting group of people and what they are doing, you are invited to drop by and pay them a visit. The Santa Barbara Hackerspace is a fun and friendly setting for makers and hackers to build, experiment and learn together. They welcome all participants, no matter their level of skill or experience. Their general meetings are on Saturdays from 2 pm until late, and there are usually people there during the evenings on most weeknights. So, you can drop by their location on Saturday after you leave the SBARC Club Station, which closes around noon, and while you are there you can also join their mailing list for updates! Post expires at 9:00pm on Friday June 17th, 2016 but will still be available in the archives.

(Darryl – KF6DI) In 1957 the world was in its 12th year of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the world with its surprise launch of Sputnik-1, a two foot diameter 180 pound man-made satellite orbiting the earth every 92 minutes. This Soviet achievement caused the United States and Canada to build a massive military defense system which would give warning of an attack by “orbiting bombs.” ICBMs had not been invented yet. That system, the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, will be described in detail by a person who worked on the BMEWS project for 400 days in Northern Greenland. Skip Aubry was first licensed as KN2LXC in 1955. In 1964, while serving in the United States Air Force, he was a certified Electronics Counter-measures instructor for *SAC EB-47 bomber flight crews. * Strategic Air Command In 1968 he joined RCA Service Company as a Tech Rep and was assigned to support the RCA BMEWS presence in Northern Greenland. As an RCA Tech Rep he was initially a BMEWS radar System Engineer and later a BMEWS Computer operator. While in Greenland he was licensed by the Danish Government and was active on the ham bands for more than a year as OX5AC. Come find out more about this fascinating fellow at our April SBARC Club meeting and about what it was like to think that during the next few seconds our lives and those of our neighbors could be turned upside down. We hold our Santa Barbara Amateur Radio 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 7:00 PM and the meeting starts at 7:30 PM. Post expires at 1:00am on Saturday April 16th, 2016 but will still be available in the archives.

Orville Beach, W6BI spoke at SBARC’s February General Club Meeting. Orville is a member of the Simi Settlers Amateur Radio Club of Simi Valley, Calif. who says he is now All Digital, All the Time! Orville spoke to the group about the success of digital mesh networking in Ventura County and encouraged Santa Barbara-area hams to join in the the fun of using 0ff-the-shelf wireless networking gear to create private IP networks using the exclusive ham allocation in the 2.4 GHz band. Listen to audio from his presentation below and learn more about the software his is using that is coming out of the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) Project.