The Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club (NVARC) is offering a free amateur
radio licensing course beginning on March 10th. The course will prepare
students for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Technician
licensing exam that will be offered at the completion of the course. The
Technician level radio operator’s license is the first of three amateur
licenses offered by the FCC. Each license has increased levels of operator
privileges.

The course consists of twice weekly sessions, beginning on March 10th, and
meeting on Mondays and Wednesdays for four weeks. The course will be held at
the Grady Research building, 323 West Main St., in Ayer. Sessions will start
at 7PM and last for 2 hours. An FCC license exam will be scheduled for the
end of the sessions. The course is free, but there will be an FCC required
$15 testing fee if you take the exam. The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual, 5th
edition, will be the study guide used for the class. A limited number of
study guides may be purchased from the instructor for $30 or online from the
American Radio Relay League (ARRL) or Amazon.

This course is open to all, there are no age limits. Pre-registration is
required, no walk-ins will be allowed. To register you must contact the
instructor, Bruce Blain at (508) 341-5124 or via email at
bruce.blain@charter.net.

The FCC Technician license exam covers basic regulations, operating
practices and electronic theory, with a focus on VHF and UHF applications.
The FCC exam consists of 35 multiple choice questions, chosen from a
published list. The FCC no longer requires Morse code proficiency for an
amateur radio license. This Technician licensing course is ideal for
Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members to quickly get their radio
operator’s license.

The NVARC has resources available to help new hams with equipment selection,
set-up and getting on the air. There are handheld radios available for as
little as $30 that will economically get you on the air and talking to other
hams in your area.

Club meetings are currently being held at 7:30PM, on the third Thursday of
each month, see the club website or contact bruce.blain(at)charter.net for club
meeting details (on-line or in-person).

The Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club has been meeting in Pepperell MA for
30 years. It is an American Radio Relay League (ARRL) affiliated club that
provides amateur radio training, licensing, and community service to
communities surrounding Pepperell and Groton, MA.

NVARC had a table at the recent Algonquin ARA Flea Market in Marlboro. Les N1SV headed up the effort. Several club members showed up. Shown: Rod WA1TAC, Les N1SV, Matt KC1TUV, and Matt’s son Max.  Cold weather and an impending storm might have impacted attendance, which I estimate was down 15-20% from last year. I managed to spend a whole $2 for a couple of connectors sought by Jim N8VIM for the repeater upgrade.

de KK1X

I went out on another POTA adventure to round out my goal of 500 contacts a month. This time I trekked out to Prince River Wildlife Management Area in Barre, Massachusetts. The antenna this time was a 53 foot inverted-L design I modified from an idea I found on YouTube.

A commercially-available antenna from Chameleon is a 25 foot telescoping whip that connects to a variety of other stuff they sell for the portable ham radio market. I don’t have any of the Chameleon parts ($$$), but I have a spool of wire($). To an electron, a 25 foot piece of wire looks pretty much like a 25 foot telescoping whip…

The design I ripped off used a 28 foot piece of wire and an alligator clip to extend the whip to 53 feet. I just cut a 53 foot section of wire and put a support loop at 25 feet. The 25 foot section is vertical, and the remaining 53 feet goes out more-or-less horizontally. A number of radials and a 4:1 unun round out the setup. In Barre I was using 15 radials which worked pretty well. The 53 foot length is essentially one of those carefully-selected “random” lengths that, with the 4:1 unun, tunes on multiple bands. I’ve had this antenna “tune” on all bands 6-80, and the contacts were made this day on 10, 15, 20, and 40 meters.

At the site are remains of what must have been a sizeable house. The fireplace is large – I estimate (poorly) that it’s ten or twelve feet on a side, and the hearth looked to be about six feet wide and half that as wide. The foundation was 25 feet or so a side.

One can see that the coverage of the antenna was reasonably good. There were additional contacts in Germany and Spain that didn’t show up in the screenshot.

More information about my POTA operations and antenna “experiments” will be coming up in future editions of the Signal.

73,
John KK1X