President’s Message June 2020
It has been a tough month. We’re still keeping our distance to stay safe from the Coronavirus, and now we have civil unrest. I hope everybody is keeping safe from that as much as possible.
Our first remote VE sessions went off without a hitch. We tested 11 candidates. 8 passed their tech license, 2 upgraded to general, and we even had 1 upgrade to extra. We used Zoom and ExamTools from HamStudy.org to administer the exams. Tier 2 of ExamTools is now in testing, it should streamline the paperwork considerably. We will be announcing our next group of sessions soon. Tell your friends! We will prioritize students from MGRC or MNYARC classes, hams who want upgrade to Extra before the question pool changes at the end of June, and residents of the Dakota division (MN, ND, and SD).
The MS-150 has been made “virtual” this year, so they don’t need ham radio. TRAM has not been officially cancelled, but as far as I know preparations are not underway.
The August 8th Antique Car Run has been cancelled. If the day is nice, I’m thinking of just driving the route in commemoration. Perhaps others would like to join me, but I don’t want to make it an “official” club event. This is just an excuse to get out of the house and charge up my car battery. I’ll talk about this more at the club meeting.
For Field Day, most clubs are going to be operating individually. It’s tough to do a proper field day event with social distancing. But Field Day is all about adapting to the circumstances, and this year is no different. The ARRL recognizes this and has made a couple one-time rule changes. One is that class “D” stations can contact each other and still have it count. Class “D” is established home or club stations running on commercial power. I’m still going to set up a generator and run class “E”, so I can practice how I would operate in an emergency. The other change is that the ARRL will publish aggregated club scores of individual stations. When you submit your logs, be sure to put “K0LTC” in for the club name.
Ralph Bierbaum showed me pictures from his deployment at the Becker Fire. He agreed to give the presentation at the next club meeting, and I think it will be a great one!
That’s all I have for now. Everybody be safe out there!
Benton Jackson, K0BHJ
