ICARC Meeting Minutes – 02/12/2009

President Mike opened the meeting at 7:20 pm at the Glenn Raymond School in Watseka.

The January minutes were read, corrected and approved. The treasure’s report was read and approved.

Committee Reports

Incorporation and Non-Profit Committee—Mike is in the process of registering with theCharitable Trust Division, Office of the Attorney General. He is also filling our 28 pages for the IRS.  The report is almost ready to send in.

Technical Committee— Steve and Benny reported that both repeaters were working well. Steve has prepared a small heavy duty light for heating.

Program Committee—We decided the March meeting would be a demo of EasyPal slow scan TV and Skywarn info by Mike. The meeting will be at Glenn Raymond School.

Publicity Committee—No report

ARES Liaison—No Report

Red Cross Liaison— We still need to work on antennas. The signs could be removed from old office and the big Red Cross sign could be put up over the door.

ESDA Liaison—Drills both table top and full scale to be later this year.

VE Liaison—Carl reported that we have VE testing on March 5 at the Glenn
Raymond School. Testing starts at 7:00pm in science room. We conducted a VE test session on Feb 7th with two people and one person passed the Tech test.

OLD Business

Dues for 2009 were collected from a total of 16 members and we hope that a few more will pay dues next month.

Member voted to buy 2 general study guides to have to loan out of our library.  The books were received and placed in our club library.

ESDA is planning to have a weather spotting school soon and we are to encourage hams and other public safety groups to attend. Kankakee will have their weather spotting class on March 4 at KCC.

Pictures of field day and work on north site have been added to the web site.
The top latch on north site door needs to be moved slightly. We would like to get a key to the north site to have for emergency use only.

NEW Business

Carl suggested the Field day is June and the April and May meeting could be
building and testing of wire dipoles. Sam suggested that we include a lesson on soldering connectors.

March 13 and 14 is an advanced weather school at the College of Dupage.
Carl is planning to go.

We voted to donate to the KARS club the old Motrac cabinet in Sam’s garage. We will strip out and try to sell the radio inside.

Troy reported that another school roundup is on Feb 9-13th and that W9GRS would be on the air for several hours. They have made 72 contacts in first 4 days.

We need to add more Decon to north site. Our Micor is still in Kankakee and we hope to get time to look at it in the coming days. We discussed the idea of getting a new 03 repeater to replace the Mastr II.

Scott mentioned that the bouncy house at Firefest needed a group to man it over the July 4 and 5th.

All members filled out our membership forms to aid in having a quick way to contact each other for bad weather conditions or other emergencies.

Snacks for this month were by Paul. March snacks are to be brought by Steve.

Net control for 2/16 Jake, 2/23 Troy, 3/2 Brian, 3/9 Scott

Members present for the Feb meeting were Carl, Chris S, Mike, Troy, Benny, Steve, Phil, Jake, Scott, Tim, Keith, Chris M, Paul, Gery, and Sam.

Guests were Daniel Focken and Rollie KC9OZZ

Meeting was adjourned at 8:38.

Paul provided our snacks.

The program was a demo by Phil on logging programs and Carl
brought his new K3 radio. Phil’s program was done on the overhead computer projection

Sam Ripple W9QKF Sec.

Sam Ripple W9QKF KAE7607

Desecheo DXpedition Adventure

02/11/2009

Tomorrow…. Thursday morning we are heading out…

Since Monday we have staged over 25,000 pounds or more of ham antennas, towers, equipment, food, tents, generators, supplies, etc. etc. etc…. this does not include the weight of
15 operators and their personal gear….

This will involve over 30 trips with the 2 helicopters. ..

just check out the soon to be uploaded photos on our web site of our staging area on the west coast of PR…. it is a whole parking lot filled with white transport bags filled with everything….

We hope to some stations on the air late in the day.

We hope to have internet from the island ….. but I doubt if I will have much time for that

We should have daily updates on the website at: http://www.kp5.us

73
Jerry WB9Z

02/17/2009

Hello from Desecheo,

We finally got the satellite up-link going with some new equipment….
and now have the Internet.

We have completed 4 days of around the clock operations with
5 stations and are getting close to 40,000 contacts….. the pile-ups are un-believeable as Desecheo is near the top of the most wanted list worldwide The team leaders gave me the honor of making the first voice contacts from this operation and I logged over 300 stations in the first hour.

Our supply ship came today, but the seas were too ruff for a landing spot close to our camp…. so the zodiac had to beach about 1/2 mile from our camp…. we ended up humping over 30 5 gallon gas jugs for the 4 generators and over 30 5 gallon water containers plus food and supplies over very ruff and rocky terrain…. one of our guys went down in our camp area from heat exhaustion, and lucky for him and us Doctor Gary is with us…. he put Mike on a IV and Mike come back to almost normal in 6 hours….

I am hoping to get out on the next supply ship on Thursday when the next group of fresh operators come in. Hopefully the seas will permit the zodiac to get in….. it will only be able to take one or 2 of us off at a time to main boat…. which is just a big fishing boat.

There are plenty of rats running around here at night and the folks that are with us here from Island Conservation have traps set up and catching a lot of them at night….. the federal agents that are here to protect us are super guys and I have got to be good friends with the head guy… Billy who is Puerto Rican….. we hope to have a LOT of beers with him when we get back to Puerto Rico on Thursday night as he is leaving then too….. did I mention there is NO alcohol permitted on the island so there are several of us that are VERY thursty here.

There should be more new pictures on our web site soon as Mike just uploaded them to the webmaster.

http://www.kp5.us

Regards

Jerry Rosalius WB9Z / K5D

Easypal Digital TV

Hi All – I heard some guys talking about a new digital TV program and it is really slick. Check out www.kc1cs.com and download EasyPal. You can monitor their pics on 14.233 MHz. I was able to get mine set up and exchanged a few pics with KB4BW.

Michael Marcier