DECEMBER 2002 DARC MEETING
December 2002
President: Ron Sappington WI7Z V.P.: Dan Farwell W8EQA
Treasurer:Travis Lofthouse KD7FRN
Board of Directors: Casey Lofthouse, Travis Lofthouse, Duane Beecher
Our next DARC meeting will be the Christmas dinner on
Friday December 6, 2002
The
Cotton Town Village on Mill Creek is over in Washington by John Carter's Dance
Factory. The address is 25 North 300 West in Washington. We
will start at 6:00 PM.
Yes,
there will be a raffle as well as some door prizes.
Raffle
tickets will be priced as follows:
1
for $1
6
for $5
13
for $10
28
for $20
60
for $40 (just in case)
There will be talk-in assistance on 146.91- to help you
find the restaurant.
We will have our annual
election of club officers and appointments for the board of directors.
Please prepay for the dinner
as soon as possible. Send only $8.00 per person to:
Travis Lofthouse, 444 East
Sunland Dr. # 69, St George, UT 84790
Make your checks payable to
Dixie Amateur Radio Club.
Raffle prizes include:
An Icom V8000 75 watt 2 meter
mobile rig and a Yaesu VX-150 HT
********************************************************
Dixie Amateur Radio Club
Bank Balance: $926.75
DARC is looking for volunteers to help remove existing antennas at the home of Ed Kaufman (N7ROA) now a silent key.
There are several high frequency vertical antennas on masts that would work very nicely for someone that just has a hand held and wants a little better coverage from the their home. Also a multi-band trap dipole.
Please contact Dan Farwell, W8EQA, (435-688-1609) if you can help or would like one or more of these antennas.
DARC conducted a VE session before the last club meeting and we’re happy to report that there were five participants that went away with new FCC licenses.
Landon Cottam (tech.), Lloyd Bundy, KA6EMS (extra), Harvey Hatch (general), James Black (general) and Hal Whiting (general). Congratulations to all who successfully passed or upgraded and many thanks to the VE team for another job well done!
There will be a VE session in December. Please stay tuned to the Sunday evening DARC net for more details (146.91- at 7:00 PM)
ELECTRONIC LOGGERS
My intent with these
Ham Radio pages is to
instruct and inform those operators who are not aware of some of the great modern developments in computer technology and how it relates to amateur radio.
About seven years ago I became obsessed with the idea of integrating an electronic logging program into my station operation. My main focus was chasing DX and some contesting but, I also wanted the luxury of having my entire QSO database at my fingertips instead of searching endlessly through logbook pages to confirm contacts for cards I had received.
I read the latest logging program tests that QST magazine reviewed and finally settled on a modest program called Hyperlog. It boasted the ability to store as many contacts as I cared to worry about as well as a number of other very desirable features. For example it would give me country statistics with only the entry of that countries prefix. That would include beam headings from my location. The time at my location and the country in question and distances between the home station and the station entered in miles and kilometers. This logging program would track Worked All States and DXCC totals for all the amateur bands. It also has many other features like a ten-minute ID timer and a log and QSL or envelope print function. But, by far my favorite feature is the RS-232 transceiver interface that would automatically display the correct date, time, frequency and mode being used. The logger also would automatically read a call book in the CD ROM bay when a call sign was entered and register the complete name and address information for that particular call sign. (Real handy for getting a fellow hams name if you missed it!)
Now this is far from the top dog logging program. And it wasn’t long before I realized that even though this would keep track of all the contacts in a given contest I still had to figure out my score. Total the contacts points, multiply this by the multiplier figure (states, countries or whatever) and come up with a total. Then there was still a summary sheet to be written up with the station location, contest category and operator information as well as the total claimed score. (Whew!)
Enter the contest logger. Another $50 bought a contest logger that would compute all of the needed information previously mentioned and compute the final score and prepare a summary sheet report. (It also updated the score after each entry and kept track of the total time spent operating in that contest!)
So it took several years of regular use to become comfortable with all the commands and functions of these two loggers and a little over $100 to purchase them.
These aren’t for everybody, most casual operators are fine with a pencil and paper log system (or none at all!). But, when you get more serious the cost in time and money goes up.
Now there are a number of FREE logging programs that can be had simply for the downloading and will go to work for you with just the time invested to learn how they run.
N1MM FREE Contest Logger:
FREE Windows based logging program:
Here’s wishing you luck whether you log a little or a lot, the realm
of electronic logging programs is waiting to serve YOU!
Dan Farwell W8EQA
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR!!