The new officers for the 2023-2024 school year are as follows:

• President: Young – KI5TIA
• Vice-President: David – KG5UBB
• Treasurer: Juan – No Callsign

Thank you very much to Sameer Bibikar for his help throughout this change in leadership and to our wonderful elmers for the help with club history, maintenance, and general advice. 73s to all.

The University of Texas Amateur Radio Club is alive and well despite few posts during the past year.

Our primary communication vehicles have been Slack, Discord, and the UT news group server. This site has fallen into disrepair and will hopefully get fixed up as an outward facing communications vehicle to the broader community.

Young Ho remains the president for 2023.

The shack is temporarily off the air due to construction in the area of the tower on the ‘shack building’ More information on this critical topic will be available in the upcoming weeks and months

(Bob Ascott, WB2FHR, Club Trustee)

It is my great pleasure to announce our new officers for the 2022-2023 school year:

• Young He, KI5TIA, President
• David Puma, KG5UBB, Vice President
• Keolailani Rose, KI5RGZ, Treasurer

Congratulations y’all, and thank you for volunteering to keep the club running! The new officer team is planning some cool activities for next year, so stay tuned!

One of our projects this semester was to get packet radio operations up and running once again at N5XU. After some hiccups with failed hard disks and a trip to UT Surplus, we are now successfully transmitting APRS packets from the shack. The TNC is a TNC-X given to us by Joe, K5EJL (thank you Joe!), connected to the FT-847. Here is the current lineup of equipment for the packet station:

• Yaesu FT-847 transceiver (perhaps the FT-7900 could serve this purpose in the future)
• TNC-X at 1200 baud (9600 baud serial interface)
• 2m horizontally-polarized yagi (future work is to use a vertical ant!)
• YAAC software for sending and receiving APRS packets
• Old Dell computer running Xubuntu and YAAC

I also tried yesterday to use the Linux AX.25 stack to log in to the KA5D BBS system, but somehow was not receiving packets from the BBS node. The BBS node itself is working correctly – Kyle helped me figure out it’s something on the software side at the N5XU shack. That is a work in progress…

In the future, hopefully we will get a vertically polarized antenna that we can keep connected all the time. Our tower is about 120′ AGL, on top of the ETC building at UT, so we disconnect the antennas in case of lightning strikes. Lightning protection and stuff will be another task for the future!

UPDATE (Mar. 8): We have been allocated rooms for Tuesdays. Please see below!

NOTICE (Feb. 23): The license classes have been RESCHEDULED to Tuesdays at 6pm. We do not have a room yet, but I will update this page and send out emails once we get one. Until then, we will meet in the ETC lobby, and we will try to find a place to go over the material.

Due to popular demand, UTARC is continuing license classes this semester with a General license class! If you are interested in joining us, the class will be weekly, on Tuesdays at 6pm starting February 7. The date, time, and location of each meeting is in the table below.

In each class, we will go through the material and answer and discuss FCC exam questions.

If you would like to have a copy of the notes we have gone through so far, please email me. My email is posted here.

At the end of the class, I recommend taking a few practice tests at HamStudy and making sure you are consistently scoring more than 90%. Then you can sign up for an online exam with GLAARG or take another exam of your choice. Note that GLAARG is strict about what stuff you can have around you, like multiple monitors, so make sure you prepare your workspace following their guidelines before going to the exam.

More resources

Here are some resources I shared with last semester’s Technician class.

• Regarding propagation, there’s all sorts of “space weather” and “solar weather” data and predictions which are useful to predict the success of various modes of propagation. One website providing this data is the NOAA.
• Earlier, I mentioned the “ham bands have boundaries” – these boundaries are documented informally in this chart. It’s useful to have a copy near you when on the air. We have two nice laminated ones at N5XU. We will talk about this in more detail in the regulatory part of the class.
• W2AEW’s video on reflections on transmission lines.
• Mr Carlson’s Lab’s video on reflections on transmission lines.
• APRS spots at aprs.fi
• WSPR spots at WSPRnet