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| United We Stand |
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Brainerd Area Amateur Radio Club |
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Club Membership Meeting on Thursday, April 26, 2007 |
| As usual, monthly membership meeting was held at the Brainerd High School South Campus at 7 PM. |
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(l-r) Fritz WØKO, Darrell ABØVP, and Lyle KØLR at coffee time. |
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(l-r) Mark WØMH, Jess NØQKH, and Terry KIØFW. Mark and Jess are radio broadcast engineers. Mark lives in Brainerd and Jess was visiting from Minneapolis. |
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(l-r) Lyle KØLR and Alan AAØAS at the club station. They always have a great time at the meetings. |
 The speaker was Tom WØQF. He helped at the BAARC Field Day 2006 with his kit-built Elecraft K2 Transceiver. Tom will discussed his kit building experiences with the group: The trail to QRP: I got interested in QRP operation while living in New York. In the early 90’s I was using a full sized 20Mtr beam up 60 feet fed with hard-line. Using my 100W, I found my CW signal was getting a lot of Russian short wave listeners QSL cards, all giving me 589/599 reports. I started to reduce my power, and over a year or so was down to 20W still maintaining excellent signal reports. The next year I decided to enter the ARRL 160 meter CW contest using QRP. Problem was my ICOM RF power output would only reduce to 8W. After a little experimenting I was able to attenuate my output signal to 5W. I put up an inverted V over the beam, fed it with open wire feeders, and went on the air.. I won the contest for the eastern section, but had to stay up all night to do it. Later after moving back to Minnesota, I started building QRP rigs, must have built 6 before stumbling upon the Elecraft K2. Wow, now here was a QRP radio that had band switching, adjustable filters, automatic antenna tuner, and other bells and whistles! Should I go for #7 radio? Well, after receiving the new kit, I opened up the cartons and took out all the bags of parts, stood back and thought, “I have made a mistake!, I’ve paid $600, and all I have to show for it is some large bags of parts, now what?” I did not keep track of the time it took to build/test the new radio, but I now had the K2 on the air. Finally, I had found a radio that had everything one could want in a QRP radio. The receiver is very quiet, selectivity is very adequate, variable output-power from 0.1 – 15W, and all the panel controls are user friendly. Since the radio has been operating, I have not had any maintenance issues, so I am a happy camper, and would recommend anyone to buy the rig. There are folks mentioned on the Elecraft web www.elecraft.com site that will build a rig for you, some will do it for free…. Tom Jones, WØQF |
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Of course, everyone wanted to see what the kit looked like up close. |
| At the meeting on Thursday, May 31st, we be shown the APRS precision mapping software that the club has just purchased. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend. |
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Comments?
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This page was last updated 05/13/2007 Ø
