Arlington Amateur Club Meeting Minutes - July 17, 2009
President Reed called the meeting to order at 7:30 PM. A minor correction was made to the previous month’s minutes and the approved. W4WVP was the only club station in Arlington County that participated in the Virginia QSO Party. The Treasurer made his report. George provided an accounting of the food costs for Field Day.
CERT - Cynthia noted that 46 CERT members had participated in the Pentagon Operational Emergency Test that concerned decontamination of the test subjects. CERT had also helped a group from Georgia (part of former USSR) with readiness for emergencies.
CERT will also sponsor a two day Technician training course on October 3 & 10 at the Arlington Fire Training Academy in Shirlington. The County will start an emergency advisory committee in October to advise the Arlington County Board on preparations for future emergency preparedness.
An event on June 22nd in Fairfax required both the CERT and Red Cross to respond. Their emergency victims included an number of elderly Korean and Vietnamese people. Language was a barrier. There was also a need to provide proper food for these people. These were practical lessons for all involved.
Old Business - The W4WVP repeater is sounding very good. There was one repeater outage due to a power loss. Craig noted he has a backup repeater should the main unit fail.
Field Day was considered to have went well. Certain prizes were awarded by drawing to participants. Mike will submit the Field Day log with scans of newspaper articles. The submission will include photos of the Field Day Information Booth and the banner outside the building. Mike will edit the Field Day log to assure accuracy and completeness. He will send it on a CD to Dennis for e-mail submission to the ARRL. Mike noted that the use of FD Log as the logging method did lead to some errors. Some sections were not correctly entered in the log. However, overall, the antenna situation was good with less antenna cross talk. Our final class was 10F.
The discussion about Field Day covered some the of the following points. First, Field Day was providing good practice for emergency communications. Some members felt the Field Day organization and setup process could be more organized. Others supported a more laid back approach. Ideas for changes included having designated leaders for each band or band & mode combination. This could included getting advance commitments from some members in advance of the actual event. Again, it was noted that the key was getting many of the members operating the actual club equipment in an emergency environment.
Arlington County Fair - This is August 19 to 23. We will have a booth with the Red Cross, potentially with electricity. President Reed solicited members to notify him by e-mail of their intent to participate.
New Business - The W4WVP repeater has a new south side receiver site. The club was requested to reimburse the Repeater Committee for $ 235 for a new antenna and coaxial cable needed to set up this site. This was approved by vote of the club. The site has very good coverage of south Arlington. The site uses a PL tone because of interference from other sources on the input frequency. It was noted that at some point, it may be desirable to add the PL tone to the Rosalyn site, which also receives interference in the input frequency range of the repeater.
The possibility of setting up a Volunteer Examiners group for the club was also mentioned, but not discussed in detail. The meeting adjourned at 8:30 PM.
Attendees were: Ken WB4AKK, George KR4MU, Mike KG4RKO, Jack WA4FXX, Chuck KI4DHW, Prentiss K4PDJ, Cynthia KJ4CLK, Mike NW3V, Gary KC5QCN, Craig K4GGR, and David Church.
