At our January meeting we recognized FARA’s 2012 board members to include Andy K1RA (president), Tom KG3V (vice president), Greg KI4ZKJ (treasurer) and Harv K2PI (secretary). The activities manager position is currently vacant and we are looking for volunteers.

Harv K2PI presents overview of LDE's

Also at the January meeting Harv K2PI presented information regarding Long Delayed Echoes or LDE’s a phenomena that causes radio signals to be returned to the sender after delays of more than 2 seconds. Harv discussed and presented slides covering definitions, history and audio which demonstrated the more common short/normal echoes one here due to backscatter, or EME as well as some documented LDE’s. His presentation sparked interest and comments from the entire club, both in trying to explain and detect the events as well as presenting their own first hand experiences with such strange radio events.

You can download Harv’s presentation here.

Harv K2PI presents info on his DX world travels

This October Harv K2PI presented a pictorial of his DX travels from over 27 yrs. He discussed the challenges of operating from both common and rare DX locations. Harv covered some excellent information including his 7 steps for success when considering operating from abroad.

To download and review Harv’s PPT presentation (4MB) click here.

Mark KD6AKC presents info on various emergency related services

At the September meeting Mark KD6AKC presented information on several amateur radio emergency related services. This included coverage of ARES, Skywarn, RACES, NTS, ARRL, FARA and MARS, which was covered by Larry K4LLQ. Mark presented both the unique aspects and capabilities of each of these services, as well as the areas in which they overlap.

If you would like to download or review the PPT presentation (2MB) please click here.

Energy Losses of Various UHF Connectors (Red) vs. others (Blue)

John, kx4o, presented measurements made on several examples of ‘UHF’ (PL-259 and SO-239) connectors alongside SMA, N, BNC and TNC connectors. The above charts show the UHF connectors in Red, the other connectors in Cyan and a reference baseline in Black. A particular focus is the idea mismatch loss results from the connector’s deviation from 50 ohms which won’t necessarily show up as heat loss… a concept unknown by many hams.

Conclusions include:

• ‘UHF’ connectors perform adequately at 6m, but begin to have measurable issues at 2m and above.
• There is a large variation in tested ‘UHF’ devices.
• N, SMA, BNC and TNC connectors were consistently superior to ‘UHF’ connectors.
• No UHF connector performed near as well as the SMA, N, BNC or TNC connectors.

The ‘UHF’ connectors show some promise in the way some use them at 2m and above. However, the reasons to accept any performance penalty, however small, are made moot by the introduction of the newer, post WWII, N, BNC, TNC, SMA and other modern connectors.