It’s Field Day
Sat Jun 28, 2008 12:11 pm by McGehee [AK4MC] [Humor?] [Coweta County]	Today at 2:00 p.m., hams across the country begin “Field Day,” a 24-hour activity designed to practice emergency-power operations, make contact with a lot of other hams far away, and if possible show off the hobby to interested prospective new hams. My club will be having its Field Day fun at the Coweta County Fairgrounds in Newnan.

EEEEEE

Wed Apr 30, 2008 10:49 pm by McGehee [AK4MC]

That’s EE3, which refers to the fact that I’m now managing not one, not two, but three separate and distinct installations of ExpressionEngine. Back when I took over the webmaster duties for our local Amateur Radio Emergency Service group, the Emergency Coordinator, or group leader, asked what I thought of the idea of installing content-management software on the site to permit some interactivity for ARES members. He suggested Drupal, which I promptly downloaded, got all over my fingers, and washed away with soap and water after a very brief encounter. It’s not that it was bad software, at least not as far as I could tell from the fiddling, but that it would have required me to climb a whole new learning curve after having spent years settling in comfortably with EE. So, the other day I set up a database on the ARES site and installed EE’s free version, Core. The site is now run entirely with the CMS but casual visitors wouldn’t know it unless they looked in their browser’s address bar by mistake. We’re not ready to go interactive yet because I haven’t talked with the EC about his ideas in that direction. Honestly, the real reason I went ahead and installed EE Core was because maintaining a consistent theme among even a small number of pages can be cumbersome when a link changes on some element common to all of those pages. With EE of course I can create a single common template and embed it on every page, so that a change that needs to be seen on all of them only needs to be made once. Naturally, the other amateur-radio website I maintain, for our local radio club, also has these theme-consistency issues—and a lot more pages. Plus, I’ve been using a Wordpress blog on that site for more-or-less regularly updated announcements. Well, I’ve got that site on EE Core now too, including the announcements blog. As with the ARES site, a casual visitor would never know it was run with a CMS. In fact, both sites look just as rough-around-the-edges—each in its own way—as this site. I don’t know why that is…

Echolink

Mon Mar 31, 2008 12:51 pm by McGehee 1 comment [AK4MC]

The computer age has come even to amateur radio, in the form of digital modes such as APRS and WinLink, and Echolink, which is software that allows a ham with a computer to access amateur-radio repeaters via the internet. This way, one doesn’t have to be in range of the repeater’s airwave signal to use it for communications. Both Chris and I have the software, but so far she hasn’t been successful in using it. This afternoon she and I tried to QSO between my home-office bugbox and a computer at the NWS office where Chris works, but while I could hear her just fine, she couldn’t hear me—or even receive the text-chat messages I tried to send her via the program. We think there’s probably an unresolved firewall issue, since she was able to hear all other Echolink-generated system sounds just fine. I’ve used Echolink multiple times now to check in to the weekly local ARES net and to monitor the Georgia SKYWARN severe weather nets when there’s dangerous weather in the area. Both are also available by way of a nearby repeater that gets linked in for these nets, but when I’m at the computer I’m far from the radio. Not all repeaters can be reached by Echolink; the two repeaters owned and operated by our ham radio club don’t have it, but it could be done without adding equipment to the repeaters themselves—someone would just need to set up a dedicated radio connected to a computer, with the radio keying up the repeater like any other ham. Of course, having the extra radio and computer to dedicate to Echolink access is the tricky part. Anyway, Chris is going to continue troubleshooting her connection at work, and probably we’ll try to get her home-computer setup working too since we know it can work from here. We also have it on our laptop so we can check in to the ARES net even if we’re across the country—as long as there’s a good internet connection where we are.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Wed Feb 13, 2008 8:18 pm by McGehee 1 comment [AK4MC] [Coweta County]

I don’t talk much about my ham radio activities here, now that I’ve got my Extra-class license and my vanity callsign—I did get on the Coweta County volunteer-examiner (VE) team and have graded and signed off on too many tests to count. I’m secretary of the ham radio club that Chris and I belong to (she’s treasurer). And I’ve been helping Chris in her duties as Coweta County emergency coordinator—which is what we call the head of a county’s Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) team—by helping to keep the Coweta County ARES website updated. Not that there was a whole lot to do in that regard. The team had been adrift for a couple of years before she took over, and she was up against a lot in trying to reverse that. She worked hard for the last two years, but I think it’s safe to say she’s relieved that she won’t have that on her shoulders anymore. The statewide head of ARES, with Chris and the EC in neighboring Fayette County, has decided to merge the two counties’ teams, with the Fayette EC in charge. Chris will be an assistant EC with duties that will play more to her strengths. And I’ll ... be helping with the Fayette-Coweta ARES website. Barack Obama had nothing to do with any of it. He might try to take credit for it anyway.

D-Oh!

Tue Aug 28, 2007 11:48 pm by McGehee [AK4MC]

Our local ham radio club had its regular monthly meeting tonight, and the attendees, sitting by mutual assent as the nominating committee, came up with a slate of candidates for each of the four officer positions. Next month, if all goes as planned, there will be an actual election for officers for the first time in at least two years. Chris volunteered for treasurer, and I offered myself for secretary. I had briefly considered running for secretary when the question of electing new club officers first came up—I had some ideas for improving club communications, which seemed to be something we needed—but I had the good sense back then to lie down until the feeling passed. At the meeting, unfortunately, there was no place to lie down. Our probable new president has had at least two years’ prior experience in the post and made some very encouraging noises about getting the club fired up again, which gives me some measure of confidence that this could be a decent year to be a part of. And if Chris is an officer too we can backstop/support/prop up one another as needed. Years ago in Alaska I’d served a year as vice-president of the Interior Taxpayers Association, and followed that up with a term as treasurer that had to be cut short when we moved to Georgia. Serving as secretary of the radio club seems an appropriate addition to the CV. There’d better be elections again next year.

Examiner, Examinee

Sun Aug 26, 2007 11:15 pm by McGehee [AK4MC] [Coweta County]

This afternoon I showed up to what would have been my first amateur radio license testing session as an accredited volunteer examiner. I was one of eight VEs who showed up (three are required to conduct a testing session). We had quite a time sitting around jawing at each other. There wasn’t anyone else to talk to, seeing as how no candidates turned up to take any tests. Chris had been hoping to be ready by today for her Extra upgrade, but the Salt Lake City trip put a pause in her studying so now she’s shooting for a session in a neighboring county the first week of October. But even if she had been ready today, she would have been the only candidate there, and as her husband I would have been unable to sign off on her test. Oh well. There’s another Coweta VE session toward the end of October. Maybe we’ll have some takers then.

VE Haff Vays uff Gradink Your Tests
Sat Jul 14, 2007 1:11 pm by McGehee [AK4MC]	I faxed in my application to become a ham radio volunteer examiner about three weeks ago, and today the ID card and certificate (suitable for framing!) arrived in the mail. So, one Sunday every other month or so, I’ll have something to do. The pressure. It’s already too much.

Website Tinkering

Sun Jul 1, 2007 1:15 pm by McGehee [AK4MC]

...but not here. My wife Chris is the head of Coweta County’s Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) outfit, which means that, among other things, she makes sure the regular Sunday night “net” takes place (usually she does this by conducting it herself). She’s also responsible for the Coweta ARES website, but being a busy woman she’s not really had time to get to it. So I volunteered. Hopefully it’s now simpler and more user-friendly.

Chris Is Going to Make Me Change My Callsign
Fri Jun 29, 2007 7:38 pm by McGehee 1 comment [AK4MC] [Humor?]	...when she reads this thread at QRZ.com.

AK4MC Is Now Mobile

Wed May 30, 2007 7:20 pm by McGehee [AK4MC]

A while back Chris took her car in to our regular shop for routine service, and she asked them to see if they could improve on the not-so-tidy installation job she and I had done on her 2-meter mobile ham radio rig. They did such a fine job that I decided to have them do mine too. Not only did they handle the wiring, but they also took care of the antenna lead and set the radio on a bracket of sorts, which Chris’ rig didn’t need. The hardest part was making sense of the programming instructions so that I could get into the local repeaters, but once I got that sorted out I was quickly able to program in several more repeaters that I thought might come in handy during my travels. Now if our HF antenna kit would just get here so we can get the base station rig on the air, we’d finally be in a position to put these licenses to some serious use. And of course, we have that four-band radio she got for home use on the bands the HF rig won’t do, and it’s supposed to replace a 2-meter handheld that we’ve been using at home, freeing up the latter for field use (it was, in fact, one of the two radios we used to keep in touch while driving our respective vehicles from North Pole, Alaska to our present stomping grounds). The last time we tried to set up the four-bander, though, we apparently got the juice hooked up backwards or something. Fixing that was one of two jobs that Eddie, WB4QAU, did for us—the other being fixing this mobile rig that’s now installed in my Bronco. No, neither one of us has ever shown much inclination to do any “contesting.” Mostly, Chris wants to be able to take part in various ARES-related nets, which because of the ranges they cover need to be conducted in the longer-wavelength bands.

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