2023-02-26 Weekly Ham Radio Activities

Maybe you’re looking for next week’s or last week’s newsletter?

Recap 🔁

  • 02/22 Wed LCARA Technical Committee Meeting: CANCELLED due to snow
  • 02/25 Sat Cowlitz ACS Exercise
    • 15 checkins, good participation. Still crunching the numbers, will report further details Wednesday at the ACS meeting.

Upcoming Events 🗓

Later in March

Pirates 🏴‍☠️

And now, a word from Brian KJ7OX, regarding pirates…

Now that the HF bands are getting better and better with the start of Solar Cycle 25, this means the idiots will come out of hiding. This means “Pirates”. These are definitely not the swashbuckling variety! They are callsign stealing, no callsign using, bad intentioned radio thugs. I don’t want to call them “CB’ers” because they’re not all that way but I will say most of them are and bring bad habits to our hobby.

The other day I was calling CQ just above 28.500 and someone with the callsign “121” came back allegedly from the Bahamas. I asked him “is that your full callsign”? He responded resoundingly and excitedly “yes” as if I were some distant rare DX contact. I asked once more, “am I missing some numbers or letters in your call”? “121 is correct”? He quickly responded with “4-10” another CB slang term for “10-4”. It confirmed what I suspected at the start, he was a radio pirate. I asked him “are you wearing the puffy pirate shirt to go along with your illegal pirate radio operation”? Crickets, No response… Scared away.

I started a conversation with another radio pirate who was using an SK callsign. This means a ‘dead guy callsign’. It pays to have QRZ.com callsign lookup going in the background while you’re on the air. I called him on it and he was gone.

Friends just be aware that there are those out there with ill intentions who have no respect for our hobby. Also know that ‘you’ can become responsible or liable for enabling the situation. As Amateur Radio Operators we are a self policing body. I’m not advocating you to interact with radio pirates as I did even though it was very brief. It’s best to ignore and warn other hams on the next QSO that there are one or two around. I did warn a few other hams that I’d heard some pirates were navigating 10 meter waters not far off shore.

On another note… A friendly reminder, I’ve heard 2-3 technicians who ‘mistakenly’ were above 28.500. This is General Class and above radio real estate. I was angered that a few hams actually worked them on the air without checking QRZ.com callsign lookup. General class and above amateur operators should ‘politely’ remind the person that they’re operating out of band privileges and to please stop.

Now for some band edge clarification. Novice/Tech 10 meter phone operations take place from 28.300 - 28.500. This being known, you may not operate at 28.300 nor 28.500 specifically. Half your transmitted bandwidth will take your signal beyond each of these frequency limits and you’ll be illegally out of band. You also cannot transmit on 28.303 nor 28.497 because some of your signal might escape the band edge. With some older more narrow filtered radios at about 2.4 KHz wide it cuts close but with newer transceivers at 2.8 KHz bandwidth you ‘could’ be heard just out of band.

Nets ✅

NEW GMRS Net

New night: Tuesday / New time: 20:00

Other Nets

Clubhouse Internet

In mid February 2023, LCARA switched internet providers for the clubhouse. The connection should be noticably faster and more reliable now. The wifi network name and password have not changed.

Please report any issues you experience with the internet at the clubhouse to Glen N7UIG or Masen KF7HVM

If you are interested in beta testing remote access to the clubhouse radios, please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

Kindly send any comments, corrections, events, pictures, stories, or content for this newsletter to kf7hvm@0x26.net.

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