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Tuesday, February 08, 2005

February Broken Arrow Amateur Radio Club meeting

Last year, after some arm twisting, I accepted a change in position from secretary to president in the BAAARC. One concern was "quality programs." So I asked Harry (KC5TRB) to come out and talk to us last night about his informal (anyone can join) Oklahoma Research Balloons group. Rich (KD5JXU) came to help. They showed off the various ways (easy, hard, simple, powerful) to deploy a APRS station and access the "Ham internet."

The also talked about the history of their club (about 15 launches), and the balloon internals. Very interesting use of small computer (Palm III class gear and pencams) and Ham rigs.

I had starting playing around with graphing temperatures in and around chambers of different construction methods and colors. I'll wrap the experiment up, graph the points and write about it soon. I'd like to fly my own payload at some point.

I bought a Mac Mini today. Hoping to have a "QRP" computer.

Also in the hopper at radio station KD5NJR, a Telpac station to provide Broken Arrow with low speed Internet email via the Winlink 2000 suite.

W5GGW is writing tiny clients for Winlink, Echolink and APRS in Java. In theory that would port to almost any device.

Nikropht asked me some crazy thing about magnetic fields while I was freezing in the parking garage. Wonder what that is all about.

More later.

73
Scott

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