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among members and their families. My
wife and I have spent a lot of enjoyable time with PARC members during some
thinly disguised radio activities, and we'd like to see more family involvement in PARC activities.
4. Providing a constructive forum for substantial resolution of organizational issues arising from the participation of amateurs in public service activities
5. Providing more resources to members so that the communications networks
under development can enjoy continued expansion.
6. Increasing the frequency of core group turn-over. Believe it or not, it'd
be better if we had more frequent turn-over on the Board of Directors. The
mean-time to burn-out in a social organization is about two-years, and we're
way over that in some cases. Five to ten percent of the members will always
do about 90% of the organizational work, but I think a larger percentage of
the overall membership should be filtering through that core group.
7. Providing more liaison between PARC and our counterpart clubs on Oregon and Southwestern Washington.
So, that's it. Some of the new stuff is announced elsewhere in the sPARCgap;
some of it will be rolled out in the future, and some of it will be rolling
along unnoticed.
Finally, I am always interested in talking to people about PARC issues and I'm the most accessible guy on earth: Telephone 709-7620 day or nite; office
727-5294 days; email n7rx@arrl.net; VHF 146.94-. I look forward to hearing
from you.
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APRS.
The Novice/Tech station was active for the entire contest and provided substantial points. In total, the W7LT gang scored 11,910 points on 1,278 QSO's and bonuses. This was a 1,765 more points and 74 more Q's than our 5th in the country, 1st in the region 1999 finish. Good job!
Overall, we had 74 more Q's this year than last with a markedly different band & mode distribution. The most improved station was the Novice/Tech station, whose QSO output increase by 90% due not only to the installation of a tower mounted 10M yagi, but also to the diligence of the ops. 20M CW, also improved dramatically - a QSO increase of 60% over last year, no doubt due in large part the to ZL Special at 90' which AL7W built and installed.
On a point count basis, the U/VHF station performance increase by 40%, due
in large part to scoring the satellite bonus. 40M Phone also improved, by 30%, although the overall Q count remains low at 66 Q's. 40M Phone is a tough nut for a QRP contest station, compounded this year by the peculiar behavior of the rig and the matching system. They ran 85% of the 'test at about 1W, which would have killed them entirely on 40M phone had it not been for the killer Lazy-H at 100'. They recovered somewhat on 15M Phone Sunday morning, although performance was nevertheless down 50% over last year. The 15M CW Q count was down as well due to equipment problems, 32% less than last year, due in part to the loss of about 1.5 to 2 hours op time at the start of the test due to antenna problems. 75M Phone was down a whopping 613%!! Early reports from one station captain is that the ops didn't switch to the 100' high 2XZepp in the evening and may have run 75PH with a 20M yagi. Ooops. Finally, 20M Phone and 40M CW were consistent performers, the former with an 8% increase and the latter with a 3% decrease compared to ' 99. Otherwise, we noticed that 20M suffered from a very high noise level for much of the day Saturday, although when it opened it stayed open well into the evening hours and 80M was very noisy throughout.
The set-up saw either improvement or modification in four areas: Antennas,
ops, power, and shelter. Three new an
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tennas were rolled out - a Lazy H, ZL
Special, Inverted L - and another revived - the 10M monoband yagi. The yagis were also tower mounted this year. Improvements to the power system enabled us to use laptops for logging this year, an innovation of and in itself. Every station was fully enclosed - no more tarps and dining fly's. Finally,
our operator headcount was also improved - we had more young people and
experienced ops than the prior year.
We also enjoyed a lot of off-the-air time. Set-up went so smoothly on Friday
that we were essentially finished with antenna installation at 4:30 and spent the rest of the evening eating pizza and settling in. Chuck Parker got the Saturday evening BBQ together and a lot of families came up to the site. Chuck also surprised people with breakfast Sunday morning.
None of this would have been possible without the outstanding efforts of the
station captains: AL7W, KC7GFX, NO7V, WA0DIM, WA7VTD, KD7ERU, KD7CTF, K7FLE,
KD7IZM, KC7AOI, and KC7PDI.
Except for the usual set of Murphy events, the whole operation went smoothly and we all enjoyed a contest station performance without a contest station attitude. The weekend was relaxed, yet competitive. A good time was had by all!
Neal N7RX
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MYELMER Program.
Ever had technical or how-to-do-it question which you wanted a quick answer to? PARC has set-up an email reflector called "myelmer" in order to provide members with answers. A panel of experts has been assembled to monitor the reflector and provide other members with advice on their ham related problems. The panel presently includes KC7PDI, NO7V, WA0DIM, KC7AOI, KD7CTF, K7RUN, KI7GA, AL7W, WA7NE and N7RX.
To ask your question, simply email it to: myelmer@egroups.com. If you want to subscribe to the list, send a subscription request to:
myelmer@egroups.com.
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