August 29, 2013

RCARC's First Weekly Net... is in the can!

The Rusk County Amateur Radio Club held its first weekly net Thursday night (August 29). Sixteen amateurs, including net control, checked-in to the net. Hams from as far away as Pittsburg and Lake Palestine joined in on the conversation.

"I was very pleased with our first net," said Keith Ballow, the club's current president. "It was very successful." Keith also served as the net control for the on-air meeting.

The net was held on the club's repeater on 146.78 MHz, with an offset of -0.6 and a 131.8 PL tone. The club is planning to hold a net every Thursday evening at 7 p.m., except the fourth Thursday of each month, which is the night of the regular club meeting. All hams are welcome to check-in during the next net!

August 26, 2013

Repeater reaches new heights!

New Repeater Location
Thanks to Richard, Jon and Dudley for lending a hand Saturday (August 24th) morning to move the RCARC's repeater to the Rusk County Electric Association's tower, which is located off highway 43, just east of Henderson.  We also very much appreciate the Rusk County Electric Association for allowing us to place the repeater at their tower site.

The repeater's antenna is now located at the top of the REA tower at an elevation of approximately 410 feet, and we have already received several excellent signal reports from amateur stations in Jacksonville, Lake Port, Nacogdoches, and Tyler.

This site will allow Amateur Radio Operators in the area to be much more effective when responding to public service events such as SkyWarn (inclement weather reporting) and other emergencies that might arise in our area.

August 05, 2013

Back to the Mesh Nodes gentlemen!

A new version of the HSMM-Mesh node software has been released. And with the new release, comes a change in the name. The non-intuitive, albeit nice and short "HSMM-Mesh" has changed to a fairly cumbersome, but descriptive "Broadband-Hamnet" I'll leave it to you to determine if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

At any rate, the new software WILL NOT communicate with the old, so upgrading is an all or nothing proposition. Basically, if we upgrade one node, we'll have to upgrade them all. So let's get to it and flash some ROMs! Good luck and no bricks!

More details are available at: http://hsmm-mesh.org/