New England QRP Club : The Excitement is Building....

Well, The Chelmsford High School Amateur Radio Club had its early kickoff today. We set up under an outdoor gazebo two stations. Both running Yaesu FT-897D's (One the schools and one ours) connected to computers and running ham radio deluxe for logging. One radio was connected to the dipole the other to the 6M beam and 2M vertical. We started around 12 PM and really started operating at about 1, after lunch which was a cookout...yes it was raining out but you can't extinguish that desire to operate! We made a few contacts on 20M voice and 6M voice, however both bands were dead...

We ended up building a 2M J-pole antenna for use at the high school this year for monitoring the ISS SSTV (Yeah its good enough for the ISS SSTV, though not circularly polarized). Many of the members got to help out and cut the copper pipe and solder it together. In the picture it is on a bench right in the center... its hard to see but its there! We came back operated a little and then played some CHSARC Football with my little brother HIHI, we were soaked by the end of it, but it was so fun!

Then we jumped back on the radio and started PSK31 on 40M. That was when we made a few more contacts, actually most of out contacts! We got Matt, one of the unlicensed members very interested in PSK and talked to someone using Flex Radio which was right up his ally since Matt is very good with computers. Gillian talked to Belgium and a few of us talked around the US.

Overall, the day was a blast! Great way to start the school year! We hope to get some kits together for the members to build. mostly QRP type gear, most likely recievers, mabye some transmitters but that would be a touchy issue of those who are not licensed! I did in fact get Matt interested in QRP PSK31 since it is an increadably efficient mode and you can easily work the world on 5 watts! when he gets licensed we will have to help him out in getting that set up!

Well thats the story on todays events, hey I guess it ties in with QRP too. This year will be interesting in seeing where the club goes and how we operate. Over the past year it's been great to see how young hams take on the challenge of Amateur Radio and the way they approach it. Operating and being comfortable talking is one of the major stepping stones and we will see how we can address that this year!

***PS last year I brought the Ten Tec 1320 3 watt TXCVR to school and hooked it up to a dipole up about 5 feet inside a fenced off playground area with the ends of the antenna about 2 feet from the fence and the sides about 15 feet and no tuner and worked Italy! great fun!***