2nd Hello from Paige

Remember Paige who made her first GOTA contact with W5RRR during Field Day ?  (https://w5rrr.org/2017/07/03/wx4bk-welcome-to-ham-radio/)

Tanner Jones, W9TWJ, was generous enough to take the time to send her a W5RRR QSL card and some NASA mementos.  Here’s a photo of a beaming Paige with her NASA JSC outreach items from Tanner.  Influencing young persons is a real joy of this hobby.  Superb job, Tanner!

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Field Day 2017

The JSCARC and CLARC joined talents, skill, and sweat equity, to once again continue the annual tradition of holding Field Day at the Gilruth.  There were so many special activities that happened, and without any problems nor issue.   A terrific time and an awesome event for the radio community.

Highlights included:

2017 FD huge success for both JSCARC and CLARC team

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Field Day – ongoing

A wonderful crowd today.  All W5RRR stations were full up.  We mostly had more operators than available stations (5), so next year we’ll likely increase our ops plan. A large turnout of boy scouts and girl scouts were expertly coordinated by Beth Scully with terrific support from Mike McCann.  The kids were super interested and … Read more…

Mr. Murphy arrives early

It’s not even field day, but Murphy’s Law has arrived.

Suspect Beta feed match on 20m yagi
  • The W5RRR shack back doorlatch is broken. Completely kaput.
  • The 20m Yagi has degraded to the point there is no discernable resonance and the defective feed connection is causing splatter during transmit.
  • The 15m Yagi has now gotten worse. Resonance has shifted to 21.7MHz.
  • The IC-781 is broken again. Intermittent TX and RX. Perhaps lose internal connector.
  • On the antenna patch panel, the SO-239 threads assigned to the 15m antenna have worn down. All PL-259 push-on connector shells make unacceptable contact. Not a big deal but needs attention.

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JSCARC scores a shiny new Yagi antenna

At 3:30pm it was a nice hot 95 deg day to visit superham Bryon, W5FH at his QTH in Alvin. Bryon had an incredibly great condition TH7DX 20/15/10m triband 7 element yagi for sale, and we luckily snagged it to replace our tired HF yagis ontop W5RRR 80′ tower. Bryon’s shack was easy to spot, since he has two monster 100′ towers with an impressive array of HF /VHF/UHF antennas.

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