As many of you may have already heard, Yahoo! groups is shutting down permanently in December. Just as several other ham radio reflectors already have, BARC has set up a new list on the groups.io website.
You can sign up for the email reflector at https://groups.io/g/BostonARC.
The October 2020 edition of the SPARC is now available!
The September 2020 edition of the SPARC is now available!
Remember to mark your calendars for Thursday, 20 August at 7:30PM for the August BARC Meeting! Bruce Blain, K1BG, EMA Asst. Section Manger and Affiliated Club Coordinator, will be speaking on the state of United States Amateur Radio Licencing. Watch your email for details Thursday morning!
The August 2020 edition of the SPARC is now available!
Depressed that hamfests throughout the world have been cancelled? Unhappy that the New England Division Convention is not to be this year (see last post)? Well, there is an alternative…this weekend!
ICOM and the QSO Today podcast are attempting to hold a massive virtual, online hamfest on the weekend of 8-9 August. How do we define massive? 20 000 hams have registered for this free event! There are 162 prizes being given out! Dozens of speakers in four different tracks over two days! Vendors!!
These folks are attempting nearly everything a “brick & mortar” hamfest does, but their attempting to do it virtually. No, it’s not a replacement for everything we lost this year via our normal way of interacting with each other, but if anyone can deal with virtual communication, it’s us Amateur Radio Operators.
Visit the website. Register. Let’s give this a try!
The news we were all dreading was made official a few days ago: the 2020 New England Division Convention has been officially cancelled. While distressing, on a personal level I applaud Bob, K1IW, and his team for making the hard, but right call.
All we can now hope and say is, “Next year, at Marlborough!”
I’ll let Bob take it from here.
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Large indoor gatherings such as our convention are currently prohibited by Massachusetts state law. This is highly unlikely to change by November. Unfortunately, we will not be able to hold a physical convention this year.
However, we do plan some virtual activities, all free. We are currently working on the details for these and will keep you posted as they develop:
We plan to the operate the W1A special event station over the weekend of October 31st – November 1st. To avoid a conflict with the November Sweepstakes, we moved this to one week earlier. W1A will be operated from the operator’s home stations. Dennis, W1UE, is coordinating the schedule. If you would like to be a W1A operator, please contact W1UE by email at w1ue@hamxposition.org. For those who would like to work W1A, we will be posting the operating schedule once it is ready. Note that this will give regular attendees the unique opportunity to work W1A (something which would have been more difficult for many to do operating portable from a hotel room).
We will also be hosting a Saturday evening virtual banquet on November 7th, featuring a guest speaker. There will be no charge for this event. Order your favorite take-out or delivery, pull up a chair to your screen and join your friends for an interesting presentation. After the talk, virtual break-out rooms will be available for you to converse with your “table”.
The Nashua Area Radio Club will be running an online version of the “Ham Boot Camp”. This is a multisession program for hams young and old to learn about the various activities they can do with their license. Details to follow.
From the entire HamXposition committee, we wish you good health, be safe, and we look forward to seeing everyone in person at our 2021 convention on July 23-24-25, 2021.
73,
Bob – K1IW
Chairman, HamXposition 2020
Please remember that the deadline for article submission for the August edition of The SPARC is this Saturday, 8 August. This is a significant way you can contribute to your club!
Please send your articles to Doc Kinne, KE1ML at “ke1ml@arrl.net.” I’ll be very excited to see what we get!
Thank you!
This Thursday evening, LIVE, on your computer – the Boston Amateur Radio Club’s July Meeting!
Again, due to COVID, etc, we’ll be meeting as we did last month via Zoom. Not only will we be able to check in with each other and share what we may be doing during this odd time, but we’ll be having a speaker, Charles Bures, WA3ITR, talking about FT8.
There seems to be a new digital mode nearly every month on HF (and they’d work on VHF and UHF as well!), and FT8 has proven itself to be among the most popular. We’re looking forward to this talk since the last time I was active before I moved to MA, FT8 didn’t even exist!
Club members will be getting an email with the Zoom Meeting ID that you’ll need to have to get into the meeting.
For those of you for whom this is new, check out zoom.com to download the free software available for Windows, AndroidOS and iOS, as well as extensions for Firefox and Chrome (if you want to try coming in from a Chromebook!).
As new people take over and get used to the infrastructure, some glitches are going to happen. This is the first, and it is totally the new folks fault.
In respect to what has been published in the SPARC, it turns out that we’ll be welcoming and looking forward to Charles Bures, WA3ITR, speaking to us during our Zoom Meeting this month.
We very much regret the confusion and are looking forward to Charles speaking to us!