Category: Club
March 17, 2020
We had 15 people show up for the SPARC in the Park event. I brought my Wolf River Coil and setup the KX2 and FT-891. I mostly played with the KX2 CW paddle as I hadn't tested it out yet. It will take some getting used to. I made a POTA contact and one contact with Billy KN4LUZ in the parking lot.…
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February 9, 2020
The club tower was bent badly during a storm that came through on Thursday night which had a tornado. The club weather station clocked the wind at 65mph. https://www.sparc-club.org/sparc-tower-damage-from-pinellas-park-tornado/ It's bent at the first extension so we can't lower it. We're working on…
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January 28, 2020
Once again we had Winter Field Day at the Clearwater Fire Training Facility. It's a great location and they give us the run of the training areas. We setup a beam, a rotating dipole, 2 slopers and an off center fed dipole. We ended up with over 1200 contacts and covered every US section. It was a…
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December 23, 2019
I received my ARRL Volunteer Examiner credentials today. Now I can proctor the amateur radio exams the club puts on every 3rd Tuesday of the month.
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November 15, 2019
This past weekend was the annual SPARC Fest, the club's hamfest. It's free for vendors so we keep getting a great turn out. 65 vendors showed up. As the new President I ran the club table, we sold quite a bit of stuff. It's interesting what people will buy. I was there to help setup before dawn…
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November 2, 2019
At tonight's SPARC meeting I was elected as club president. I am looking forward to leading the club and getting even more involved in the hobby. The first event after my election is next Saturday 11/9 for the annual SPARCfest at Freedom Lake Park in Pinellas Park, FL, it's free so come on out.…
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September 25, 2019
Once again the St. Pete, Clearwater and Upper Pinellas radio clubs joined forces for a radio clubs in the park event. We met up at Eagle Lake park in Largo, FL. This is a nice county park so it doesn't count for Parks on the Air but it was still a fun event. Unlike Field Day where we setup specific…
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June 23, 2019
This weekend was ARRL Field Day. This is also my 100th blog post, Yay! I was on the committee for Field Day this year. We had conference calls and did a dry run to make sure we had all the connectors and accessories we needed. Quite a bit of planning is required to make this event go smoothly. It…
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June 8, 2019
Today we had the field day dry run. We setup all the computers and made sure we had all the cabling we need. There's a lot of cables to run 3 stations. We also have 1000ft of coax. At winter field day we had a bunch of 100ft coax all jumpered together and it was a chore to troubleshoot the issues.…
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June 7, 2019
Dave WS1ETI gave a good presentation on SETI.
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