The March 17, 2007 meeting was held in Suite 102 at the Chisholm Trail Outlet and Retail Mall. The meeting was called to order at 9:14am by President Mike Harvey. Present were Ko Bartel, Fred Becker, Lee Buller, Lon Buller, Tom Dhooge, David Duerksen, David Godshall, Bob Harder, Marion Harper, Mike Harvey, and Dan Inskeep.
Minutes: The February Minutes were accepted with a couple corrections: Field Day is the fourth full weekend in June, not the third, and the an.
Treasurer's Report: Paid Kent Stutzman $17 for domain name renewal for newtonarc.net and newtonarc.org, leaving a total of $721.69 in checking and $40 in petty cash, totaling $761.69 in club funds.
Camp Hawk: Power has been run and they are doing final checks. Could be up and running in a week or two.
Grain Elevator: Mike and Dennis went up the grain elevator at the existing repeater site to investigate some signal loss, found there was water in the coax and there was a spot the coax sleeve was worn to the braid. It also had a large signal loss, with about a 10:1 SWR. They cleaned the connections and transformer and tried to get it working better, but there is still a problem. Mike is going to look at it again next weekend.
Rail Yard: Looked at the spool of coax that the railroad is donating to the club if we can haul it away. Connectors are about $107 apiece and it would be difficult to use, so Mike is suggesting we sell it, possibly on eBay. It's about 600' and Mike says new it costs about $9 a foot and thinks we might be able to sell it for $4 a foot. Jack Casper of the railroad also said the railroad has done quite a bit of work trying to track down the interference, so he's hoping the problem has been resolved.
MCC Relief Sale: April 13 & 14, Friday and Saturday. Normally start around 1pm on Friday for setup, and the sale starts around 4pm on Friday, and then early Saturday morning, ending around 2-3pm. Talk-in is on the 146.82 repeater, and the local frequency is 146.48. All are invited to come and help with the communications, or at least come enjoy the sale.
Oklahoma QSO Party: Bob and Lorna drove about Oklahoma working counties as rovers in the Centennial Oklahoma QSO Party. Go to http://www.qrz.com, look up w0k to see information about their activity. Bob said he has decided this is now his favorite Ham Radio activity.
Awards: Lee reported that Bob took first place for schools in the nation in the November CW Sweepstakes contest, and Bob reported that Lee and his gang took first in the midwest region and 13th in the nation.
EOC: The vertical antenna was broken off at the base, Dan is getting it replaced under warranty. The dipole is okay.
Newsletter: Mike has started sending out an E-Mail newsletter and he wanted to verify that we've been getting it.
Silent Key: Dave Bishop, WB0C, passed away February 10th at the age of 53 of a brain aneurism. He used to be a member of the club and active in the Newton area.
IRLP: Mike sent around a handout and talked about the IRLP system that is now active on our repeater. He said the website http://www.irlp.net is the key website for finding out what other nodes we can connect to. Newton is node #3906, and there are currently three other nodes in Kansas (Colby #3608, Goodland #3769, Lenexa #5870), about 1200 in the U.S., and a bunch more in Canada and worldwide. To activate, send the 4-digit code for the node you want to connect, wait about half a minute to make sure there is no conversation in progress, and use 73 to close the connection. We can only connect to one node at a time -- reflectors can be used to connect multiple repeaters.
Repeater Coverage: There was some lively discussion about various pros and cons of expanding our repeater coverage via remote links. There was concern about possibly attracting amateurs from outside of Harvey County that might not have the Newton Radio Club's interests at heart. The potential for enhanced emergency communication capabilities with wide area coverage was also pointed out.
Club Equipment: We are compiling a list of club-owned equipment. David has not yet sent an E-Mail to club members to start getting this list compiled.
