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Please join the Waltham Amateur Radio Association in welcoming John Langner WB2OSZ for a presentation on Dire Wolf, APRS Software. John is one of the main developers of Dire Wolf so we are lucky for this opportunity!

If you are not a WARA member and would like to be invited to the presentation, please fill out this form and we will email you an invite before the presentation starts. SIGN UP HERE

Agenda: 
Pre-Net: 6:00-7:00 PM 
Club Business: 7:00-7:20
Presentation: 7:20 – 8:30

In the early days of Amateur Packet Radio and APRS, it was necessary to use an expensive “Terminal Node Controller” (TNC) with specialized hardware. Those days are gone. You can now get better results, at lower cost, by connecting your radio to the “soundcard” interface of a computer and using software in place of the traditional TNC.

Dire Wolf is a software “soundcard” AX.25 packet modem/TNC and APRS encoder/decoder. It can be used stand-alone to observe APRS traffic, as a tracker, digipeater, APRStt gateway, or Internet Gateway (IGate)

We are starting this disussion on APRS as the club has identified a goal of improving our APRS installation. This will further leverage our existing investment in full time high speed internet access. The club’s current APRS setup is a digipeater with a traditional TNC. We are in a great location and can serve the APRS community well to add in iGate functionality.

Some links to look at before the meeting if interested:
About Dire Wolf: https://packet-radio.net/direwolf/
WB2OSZ’s Github: https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf
Building an iGate: https://ww8tf.club/building-an-aprs-igate/

See Chime info below. For best experience use a computer and install the client. Dial in to the pre-net to check it out!

Hope to see you soon! BEST 73 DE KG1T

Ron Senykoff
President – Waltham Amateur Radio Association
https://walthamara.org/

Note: WARA uses Amazon Chime for online meetings. It will work with just Firefox or Chrome, but you may want to consider downloading the client to avoid issues. Also consider signing in for the “pre-net” where we start an hour early to test your A/V setup.

https://aws.amazon.com/chime/download/

If you are not a WARA member, but would like to be notified of our meetings and receive the dial-in info, you can now SIGN UP HERE. We send 1-2 emails per month and only use it for critical announcements. We will not share your email address.

The December 2020 meeting would have fallen during Christmas week, so it was shifted a week earlier. Here is a screen shot from meeting.

The October 28th meeting’s presentation is now available on YouTube.

Greg Algieri WA1JXR is the presenter. The presentation is an Introduction of Principals, Techniques, and How to Use the popular MFJ 259B Antenna Analyzer and the SDR-Kits Vector Network Analyzer. How they Work, What is inside Under the Hood, and what are some of the things you can do with them.

Note: The recording missed the first part of the discussion on the 258B. However a lot of techniques discussed with the SDR-Kits apply regardless of analyzer brand.

When: Wednesday October 28th @ 7:00 PM

This month we welcome Greg Algieri WA1JXR who will be presenting. The presentation will be an Introduction of Principals, Techniques, and How to Use the popular MFJ 259B Antenna Analyzer and the SDR-Kits Vector Network Analyzer. We will show How they Work, What is inside Under the Hood, and what are some of the things you can do with them.

If you are not a WARA member and would like to be invited to the presentation, please fill out this form and we will email you an invite before the presentation starts.

Sign up here ——> https://forms.gle/vpVMJdso6NNLdqBf8 <—–

Note: WARA uses Amazon Chime for online meetings. It will work with just Firefox or Chrome, but you may want to consider downloading the client to avoid issues. Also consider signing in for the “pre-net” where we start an hour early to test your A/V setup.

https://aws.amazon.com/chime/download/

Hi Waltham ARA members. I recently sent out WARA membership renewal emails, and my mail provider, Yahoo, bounced most of those messages. Apparently, Yahoo now has severe restrictions on “bulk mail” – I was only sending 39 emails. Fortunately, I had better luck by emailing via the club’s web hosting company, DreamHost, who by the way is kindly giving us free service! Unfortunately, I know of at least one club member who didn’t see the email until he looked in his Gmail Spam folder. So …

If you are a WARA member, please look in your Spam folder for email coming from membership@walthamara.org. These emails were sent on Monday, August 17, just after 8:00 PM. And please add this address to your Email Contacts, or otherwise tell your email provider that you trust me.

Thanks,

Eliot
W1MJ

Bob DeMattia, K1IW, Northeast HamXposition 2020 Chairman writes:

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

In preparation for “WARA Field Day 2020 – Alone Together”, the club will hold two online training sessions.

• Wednesday, June 17, 2020, 7:30 – 830 PM: N1MM Logger
• Wednesday, June 24, 2020, 7:30 – 8:30 PM: FD 2020 Q&A

The links to these online sessions will be available by the same methods used for our May 27 online meeting.

It would be helpful if you install the latest version of N1MM Logger Plus before the June 17 session, or at least try, so that you will know what you don’t know. If you are new to N1MM, be sure do the “Full Install” and then the “Latest Update”.

Prior to the June 24 meeting, K8GT’s excellent presentation about FD 2020 is highly recommended: tiny.cc/fdsd

The Waltham ARA, along with many radio clubs around the country, will help slow the spread of COVID-19 by operating “alone together”. The ARRL has made two FD 2020 rule changes to aid in such efforts:

1. Individual entries can include the name of their favorite club. The ARRL will sum the individual scores for each club and publish these Aggregate Club Scores.
2. Contacts between home stations using regular commercial power (FD Class 1D) will be counted in the score.

Field Day 2020 will be on June 27 & 28. For more information, see the ARRL FD Page, and a great presentation by K8ZT at tiny.cc/fdsd. And stay tuned to the WARA web site for updates.