N3VEM | openShack Blog

We’ll just kind of skim past the fact that it’s been a year since I’ve written post :-)

Before I go further, a couple quick plug reminders… support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network. Donations of cash, or commitments to connect existing repeaters to the Pride Network have the biggest and fastest impact!

While it’s been ages since I’ve written, It’s not because I haven’t been busy in the hobby! With a big family, time is tight, so when I have a few minutes I often end up spend it “doing radio stuff” instead of “writing about radio stuff”.

Since my last post though, I’ve started a new role at work, so it’s possible I’ll be able to sneak in some writing time again, some time to record some short videos for peertube, etc.

Anyway, for the quick update, in the last year radio-wise, here’s the summary of what I’ve been up to:

• Hosting the Narwhal Amateur Radio Society monthly net.
• Working on redoing the audio in my shack
• Started working on redoing some of my shack “infrastructure”
• Made some improvements to my workbench
• Actually making some contacts on HF
• Setting up an HF Packet Station

As I get some time, I’ll try to write some posts on each of those, but in the meantime, give me a ping on Mastodon - I’ve been chatting with friends there and sharing pics of my projects and such, even when I haven’t had time to do any write-ups on them.

Hope to hear you on the air!

CQ CQ CQ. CQ Salk Special Event Station. CQ Salk, and standing by for a call!

Before I go further, a couple quick plug reminders… support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network. Donations of cash, or commitments to connect existing repeaters to the Pride Network have the biggest and fastest impact!

if donations aren’t your bag, Buy some cool stuff to support the projects!

One of the clubs that I’m most active with, the Narwhal Amateur Radio Society is doing a special event station from April 5th through April 19th to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the US approval of the Polio vaccine. This vaccine, and many others, are responsible for saving at least 154 million lives over the last 50 years, and we’d like to celebrate that!

Be sure to check out the details, and maybe even sign up to be a guest operator, by visiting the club’s info page on the special event.

https://nars.narwhal.be/polio

I’ll be doing a few slots as an operator, and I’m really looking forward to it - I hope to hear you!

Happy New Years!

I decided to take a page from KC8JC’s book, and throw down a quick note by way of a ham radio retrospective of 2024, and my goals for 2025. His post is available here - I recommend going and giving it a read!

But, before I do that, lets do the plugs - support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network. Donations of cash, or commitments to connect existing repeaters to the Pride Network have the biggest and fastest impact!

if donations aren’t your bag, Buy some cool stuff to support the projects. In addition to getting some neat stuff, walking around town, going to club meetings, or heading out to a ham fest, while wearing the swag helps bring more attention to the effort, and can be very impactful in the long run!

The most eventful thing that happened for me in 2024 was the birth of my 5th child. Having a baby in the house this year means that I didn’t get a ton of radio time, but I did still manage to do some fun stuff:

• Got more active in my club, the Narwhal Amateur Radio Society, hosting our monthly club net
• Dealt with my repeater going down, and got it back online while also starting the r4e project.
• Started working on version 4 of my radio rocket project
• Made my first contacts via packet radio
• Got an AREDN node on the air

So while it’s not a huge list, I definitely did some fun radio stuff this past year.

I don’t really like the idea of ‘resolutions’ but I do like making goals. For 2025 I have a long list of ham radio goals that, while improbable that I’ll do them all, are all things that I’d like to tackle this year.

• Do more FT8 (I currently have made less than 10 contacts on FT8)

• Do More HF in general. 2024 was the year of VHF/UHF for me, and I’d like to make more HF contacts this year.

• Relearn CW. I got myself up to 7ish or so WPM a few years back, made 2 contacts, and haven’t touched the paddles since.

• Set up a permanent packet station. With the help of the FARPN crowd I got my first couple packet contacts under my belt, and would like to set up a permanent packet station as part of their efforts, using the radio that I used to use mobile, but has been sitting in my shack since I’m mostly a shack sloth now in the radio world.

• finish v4 of the Radio Rocket

• Get High Power Certified. This is a rocket thing. I currently do model and mid power, but I’d like to get into high power to try pushing some of my electronic radio payloads higher and faster.

• Finish building the equipment racks/cabinets I started. I don’t think I’ve posted about this at all, but I have started building some cabinets that will get build into my operating position, to house my mixer and some related equipment a little differently. That’s an effort thats need more time than money for me to finish up.

• Get new mast up to raise the height of my VHF/UHF antennas (and get a 6 meter antenna back on the air).

• Finish KJ7OMO repeater (Milestone 2 of r4e)

• Get a NARS repeater on the air. This will likely become Milestone 3 of r43e.

• Launch a non-profit. There’s a couple things that have been getting kicked around for a couple years that I’d like to formalize. I have some materials to gether to pitch to a crowd of interested folx, including drafts of mission statements, codes of conduct, charters, choosing a board, etc. This is something that I think could make a good umbrella for my various community/charity oriented projects, so I’d love to see it formalized with a group of like-minded folx.

There you have it! My goals for 2025!

Good day surfers of the web!

I wanted to take a few minutes to give an update on the repeater projects, since it’s been about 2 months since my last formal update. As a refresher for those not in the know - the repeater that I run died not long ago (I wrote about that here.) When that happened a couple very kind individuals donated some money to help out, I started an official fund-raiser to fund repairing my machine, and some others as well, and I also opened up a shop selling merchandise to raise money for the same effort.

So first of all, the plugs - support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network. Donations of cash, or commitments to connect existing repeaters to the Pride Network have the biggest and fastest impact!

if donations aren’t your bag, Buy some cool stuff to support the projects. In addition to getting some neat stuff, walking around town, going to club meetings, or heading out to a hamfest, while wearing the swag helps bring more attention to the effort, and can be very impactful in the long run!

First - if interested in the nitty gritty details, the financial status is available here. every dollar helps, so PLEASE DONATE!

We raised enough in cash and donations of parts that we were able to reach our “Level 2” goal for my N3VEM repeater! There were a couple very generous cash donations, and a decent number of sales through the shop, which helped purchase some of the needed misc. bits to get back on the air, plus a donation of a couple key replacement parts for the repeater that let us get the same? a replacement? repeater back on the air. The question marks are there, because while it’s in theory the same repeater, so much of it is now replaced parts, that its kind of like the old parable about the sailboat - if you’ve replaced all the timbers and all the planks over the course of a number of years, is it still the same boat, or is it a whole new boat?

Either way, we’re back in business at 100%!

This means that we are now more formally pushing ahead and have…

Milestone two, the KJ7OMO Repeater, has officially started! With some of the left over cash from donations and shop sales, I’ve already started building a “new” repeater for KJ7OMO. The core parts are already in hand, so over the next couple months I will mostly be buckling down and doing some physical assembly, basic machining on the enclosure that will house everything, programming of radios, etc. There will likely still be an additional $100-$200 worth of misc. hardware and connectors to purchase, so please keep the donations and shop purchases coming, as all of the funds raised are now being directed straight into this part of the effort.

While nothing official has been decided, I am starting to put some stuff on the “workbench of the mind” while we’re working on the KJ7OMO machine. I currently have 3 machines in inventory, and am leaning towards building Milestone 3 around one of the Kenwood TKR-820 machines that I have on hand. These are older, but reliable, machines. Both of the ones I have were narrow banded, so I’ll need to either revert them back to wide-band, or maybe leave it narrow-banded and use it connected to a hot-spot of sorts to convert it to one of the various digital modes. In addition to the machine itself, we’ll also need to ultimately find a physical home and a trustee (i.e. the callsign it will operate under) for it as well. Lots of decisions to still be made!

Anyway, that’s the update for now! Thanks for stopping by!

What’s in a name?

Quite a lot if it’s long enough!

I figured there would eventually be a Radio Rocket Version 4, once we we learned something interesting enough, or had an idea for a new design for the electronics or the rocket that warranted building the next version. As it turns out, a number of those things came together at once:

• I stumbled across a product that gave me an idea for a redesign on the main CPU board
• The redesign above would warrant redesign of the various modules
• I wanted to try to design some of my own modules, instead of relying on breakout boards
• The 12 year old had an idea for a new design for the actual rocket

So while we are going to continue doing stuff with version 3 and plan to do more launches to test out more ideas with the current hardware, and will keep version 3 in our flight rotation for the forseeable future, we decided it was time to start planning and building version 4!

but as always, before I get into the details, Let’s get the plugs out of the way!
support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network. Donations of cash, or commitments to connect existing repeaters to the Pride Network have the biggest and fastest impact!

if donations aren’t your bag, Buy some cool stuff to support the projects - the margins are smaller, but walking around town, going to club meetings, or heading out to a hamfest, while wearing the swag helps bring more attention to the effort, so can be very impactful in the long run!

Those who have been following along are likely aware, but we have been using Sushi and Fish related terms for the various versions of our rockets, and we’ve been going in alphabetical order, to try and keep it clear which one comes after which. That means that for version 4, we needed a Sushi/Fish related word that starts with a Q.

We struggled for a while coming up with something, until we stumbled across a species of Hagfish called “Quadratus.” I liked the ring of it, and the 12yo pointed out that the “Quad” prefix was also a perfect match for our fourth rocket.

While siting with that idea, we were chatting about rockets in general, and I mentioned that I thought it would be fun to do a rocket that had side pods. Again, the 12 year old was quick to point out that it should probably have 4 pods, in keeping with the “Quad” theme. I was down with that, so we moved on to talking about what the main part of the rocket should be like. Being a fan of the Big Bertha series of rockets, 12 said “Bertha of course!” to which my spouse chuckled and said, “Bertha the Hagfish.” which honestly felt like just as good of a name as Quadratus.

Being fans of unnecessarily long names, we kicked some additional ideas around, the 12 year old drew up a logo, and we landed on a final name for our rocket, so without further ado..

There will be lots of information coming and getting shared as we build version 4. We’re still pretty early in the process, but we already have a pile of rocket parts to start assembling the body, and the first boards for the new electronics package are making their way from the fab house to us, so things should move along very nicely. Redesigning and fabbing the new modules will take some time, but I’m hoping that throughout the rest of the summer we’ll do a couple more launches version 3, and with a bit of luck we may be able to start making launch plans for version 4 sometime this fall or winter.

Till then!

A wise person (okay - it was N6MTS) once mentioned on the Ham Radio Workbench something along the lines of, if you pick up something just to learn the thing, you likely won’t go far with it. If you instead have an actual problem to solve, where said thing has an application, then all the sudden it becomes much easier to dig in and learn said thing.

It was quite a while ago, but if I recall correctly, he was specifically talking about micro-controllers like Arduino etc. In my case, the thing that I’ve been dancing around, but didn’t actually have a use for (before now) was AREDN. I’ve been fascinated by the AREDN project for a while, but with no nodes close to me, I didn’t have a good reason to put up a node to just be spitting data into the void. More recently however, I finally had a use case.

Before I get too far though, let me get in the plugs:
support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network. Donations of cash, or commitments to connect existing repeaters to the Pride Network have the biggest and fastest impact!

if donations aren’t your bag, Buy some cool stuff to support the projects - the margins are smaller, but walking around town, going to club meetings, or heading out to a hamfest, while wearing the swag helps bring more attention to the effort, so can be very impactful in the long run!

The use case that finally made digging into AREDN worth it for me, was related to the Radio Rocket project. For versions 2 and 3 of the rocket, and for the upcoming version 4 (more on that to come…) we built some stuff into the dashboard to be able to post live telemetry updates to the rocket’s mastodon account. We started toying with the idea of streaming some video too, but on a mobile hotspot the data can get chewed up ($$$) pretty quickly. Since our most common launch sites are fairly close to home, this finally gave me a use for AREDN - set up a node at home, and take a portable node to the launch site. This way we could send data via the mesh back home, and then from home run some software that kicks said data out to the broader internet. I’ve been slowly picking away at that, and today we did our first successful test from the parking lot next to where we often launch.

Since we’ve been busy it took awhile, but the basic set up is this:

• A Microtik BaseBox 2.4 at home, with a vertical omni-directional MIMO antenna on my eve-mount mast.
• The BaseBox is connected to a smart switch, which in turn has a couple small computers connected to it, serving up various services, one of which is a node red server.
• At the top of the portable mast is a GLiNet device, with a POE extractor, so that I can use POE coming up the ethernet cable to power the node and transmit the data, so that I can use just that single wire running up the mast.
• for the test, I just accessed the UI of the node red dashboard that is connected to the BaseBox, via the portable node, where I made myself a small tooting interface.
• The node red dashboard then relays that through the device’s connection to the internet at large, to send the message.
• For the ground station’s dashboard on launch day, there are some node red nodes that send telemetry messages back home the same way.

Here is our successful test message, on Mastodon

The most interesting learning here, is that I had a plenty strong signal even before I extended the mast, so on launch day I can use my much smaller, more portable, Buddipole mast, or even just put the node and it’s small mount, right onto the clamp on the side of the ground station.

At our next launch, we’ll likely turn on this interface, so if you use Mastodon, be sure to follow the radio rocket there, and you’ll get live updates from the rocket during its flight, that will have traveled via LoRa from the rocket to the ground station, via 2.4Ghz AREDN from the ground station back to the home QTH, and then out to the internet from there.

Hello fellow travelers!

I wanted to take a few minutes to give an update on the repeater projects, since another month has rolled over. As a refresher for those not in the know - the repeater that I run died not long ago (I wrote about that here.) When that happened a couple very kind individuals donated some money to help out, I started an official fund-raiser to fund repairing my machine, and some others as well, and I also opened up a shop selling merchandise to raise money for the same effort.

So first of all, the plugs - support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network. Donations of cash, or commitments to connect existing repeaters to the Pride Network have the biggest and fastest impact!

if donations aren’t your bag, Buy some cool stuff to support the projects - the margins are smaller, but walking around town, going to club meetings, or heading out to a hamfest, while wearing the swag helps bring more attention to the effort, so can be very impactful in the long run!

First - the financial bit. We’ve got a couple hundred dollars socked away towards our stretch goal of acquiring a Yeasu DR2X via the Yeasu repeater program. if less than 10% of the folx who follow me on Mastodon donate 5 dollars each, or each purchase a clothing item from the shop, we’ll make the goal so…

PLEASE DONATE!

I also wanted to share the update on what is currently on the air serving as the N3VEM repeater, since goal 1 in the effort was to just scrounge together whatever I could, really fast, to get back on the air. It’s nothing fancy, but it has us operational in the meantime. What I scrounged together was essentially a pair of Kenwood TK-840 mobile radios that I already had, the small notch-type duplexer out of the dead repeater, the small PC that was running Allstar for the dead repeater, and a new RIM-Lite interface from Repeater Builder to allow me to use the PC and the Allstar software as the repeater controller.

While we haven’t quite reached the $ level for milestone 2, We are likely staged for success there, thanks to a recent ham-fest haul - I was looking at a Motorola repeater that a radio shop was getting rid of. The folx said it would be good for GMRS but they couldn’t promise it would work down to the Ham Bands, so they’d give it to me for $40. I’ve been considering putting a GMRS repeater on the air for family use anyway, so I figured why not for that money. In the interest of them wanting to pack up for the day, while talking they said they’d throw in a couple Kenwood UHF TKR-820 repeaters for free, since they weren’t having luck selling them. This model is old, and programming can be finicky, but for free, we can likely make it work. I also bumped into someone who works for that radio shop, who is willing to give me a direct replacement for my dead GR1225, so all I need to do is make arrangements with him to pick that up. So between the 2 Kenwoods, the Motorola that might tune down to the ham bands, and the promised GR1225, we’ll be able to get a proper used machine back on the air if nothing else.

My dead GR1225, and one of the newly acquired Kenwood’s:

A second Kenwood, and a Motorola CDR500 sitting on a shelf in my utility space:

This is the big goal! essentially raise a minimum of $700 to allow me to use that plus pitching in some of my own cash out of pocket to get a proper, modern repeater on the air. Did I mention that donations or shop purchases will help with that?!

Milestone two, the KJ7OMO Repeater, officially begins in September, but with the recent haul of equipment we should be off to a good start. At a bare minimum, I should be able to package up my current temporary machine into a nice little 4U or so sized box, and get it, along with a new antenna and some coax, shipped out to her to get her machine back up and running. I’m hoping though to be able to do something a bit better than that, depending on how this equipment and future donations work out.

While nothing official has been decided, I’ll probably start looking in ernest into what comes next while we’re working on the KJ7OMO machine this fall. Again, it depends on how the equipment and donations work out, but I suspect one of these current machines can serve as the basis for whatever this ends up being. The NR7WL club has an Allstar node set up, connected to the pride network already, so something I’ve floated with the club already was that it might be nice to find a place to put up one of these machines so that that node has an RF side as well - TBD!

Anyway, that’s the update for now! Thanks for stopping by!

First - the plugs:

support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network

Buy some cool stuff to support my passion projects!

Clubs that are so inclined, should use the opportunity to show that their club is welcoming to everyone, by flying the colors at their field day site! To encourage promotion of Pride at Field Day sites, I’m going to do a little last minute contest!

To ‘enter’ send your pictures of your Field Day Pride Display to:

n3vem.radio@gmail.com

or post them to mastodon and tag me, @n3vem@mastodon.radio, in the post.

The winner will be chosen by a distinguished panel of judges (my family!), and will be able to choose any 3 clothing items from my Subversive Radio Shop to give to the members of their club or group that they think would most appreciate them!

fine print - winners will only be chosen from places I can ship too - see the shop for details on shipping locations for clothing items. All Items must be shipped to a single address, with the winner taking care of distributing the items to their club/group members on their own. Pictures should include enough in-frame to make it clear that the display is at an ARRL Field Day site.

First - the plugs:

support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network

Buy some cool stuff to support my passion projects!

Hey folx! We had a very successful launch of Ponzu (Radio Rocket v3) on June 13th!

The first week after school lets out each year we do “Daddy Camp” which is basically a week of backyard camping and summer camp type activities - one of the mornings was set aside for Rocket launching, so we launched 7 rockets, including Ponzu, and it was a smashing success!

First, the details on Ponzu for this flight:
Height: 109.86cm ; 43.25” Diameter: 41.6mm ; 1.64” (BT-60 sized tube)
Launch Weight, w/o Motor: 487g ; 17.18oz
Recovery: 30” parachute
Paint: Gold on the bottom 2/3, fading to blue with a spattered fade
Telemetry: Magnetometer, gyro, acceleration, barometric pressure, altitude, and messaging via LoRa on 434MHz. Motor: G53FJ, 9 Second Ejection Delay
Launch Weight:634g ; 22oz
Altitude: 588.92m ; 1929ft
Max Velocity: 324kph ; 201mph
Max Acceleration: 179m/s^2 ; 18g (641.02m/s^2 ; 65g at parachute deployment)
Flight Time: 132s

This was our most impressive radio rocket flight to-date, in pretty much all regards - fastest speeds and highest altitude due to the new rocket and electronics design, AND the rocket was successfully recovered! There were only a couple things that went ‘wrong’ during this launch, which I’ll detail in a bit, but first, let’s do the exciting bit - launch videos!

As I tend to do for these launch reports, I’m just going to throw down the bullets of what we learned/things we might change for the future etc.

• I had my laptop along to let the very youngest watch some Daniel Tiger during the setup etc. between launches. That went a long way towards keeping the tiniest members of the flight crew from going feral on us during the session:-)

• We forgot our magnet to turn on Ponzu’s payload from outside the rocket, so we had to do a weird half-disassembly maneuver while the rocket was on the rail, to push the internal power button. It worked, but for the future we’re going to buy a bunch of big magnets on sticks to keep in the box, in my office, in the car, etc. so that we don’t have just 1, and leave it behind somewhere. The kid have some of these (associate link) at their school that they use for some lessons. They are nice and chunky and hard to loose, so we’ll probably order a package of these to have around in some strategic places.

• We need to fiddle with the colors on the ground station’s touch screen to try to get maximum visibility outdoors. The current colors were a scheme that are considered high contrast, but outside it was still a little hard to see. I may need to just take it out in the back yard on a sunny day and play with colors till I find a combo that works well.

• We need to tweak the code that generates the ‘velocity’ portion of the data. You may have noticed the dashboard didn’t show any velocity data on the velocity gauges - that is partially because I used units (cm/millisecond) in the code that turned out to not be quite granular enough. I’m updating that code to measure in mm/millisecond which gives more granularity/precision. I use weird units like that in the code, so that I can use integers in all the calculations (which the microcontroller can do faster), and the multiply up/divide down to more standard units in the dashboards for final display.

• We had a much longer walk than planned - the rocket actually landed one farm over from our launch site, but luckily it was a farm where I know the farmer because we have kids the same age, and talk regularly enough that I was comfortable flagging him down in his field so that we could hike out through the hay he was raking to retrieve the rocket. Since we’re flying higher now, I probably need to invest in a Chute Release device (associate link). These slick little things basically use a rubber band wrapped around the parachute, to keep the parachute reefed when it deploys, so that the rocket will fall faster down to a set altitude before releasing the band and allowing the parachute to unfurl. This keeps the rocket from drifting too far during it’s descent.

• For part of the ascent we didn’t get any telemetry (you can see several seconds in the video where no telemetry is received.) For now I’m going to blame that on our temporary antenna situation with the new ground station. Since the new ground station isn’t quite complete, the antenna was just sort of thrown on the table dangling from it’s little coax jumper, instead of being mounted. We may even switch to an egg-beater or even a directional antenna mounted via the mast-holder that we put on the side of the ground station box.

• I think we’ll add 2 meter APRS back into our next flight. Luckily visibility was good, but we were high enough that we could have easily lost sight of the rocket, making it hard to find without some location tracking.

• OR we may look into LoRa APRS - that’s a thing now, and since we already have LoRa on-board, if it isn’t too difficult burping out periodic LoRa APRS packets might help us keep the weight down instead of adding an additional device. That will be pretty contingent though on the infrastructure around here - I’m not sure how many, if any, LoRa igates or digipeaters are around my area.

• I want to get our AREDN setup finalized, so that we can ‘send our data home’ via AREDN, and then do the live tooting and site updates from our home internet connection, based on the data received through the AREDN devices.

• We’ll be ready to finish/tidy up the back panels etc. of the new ground station now that we know everything works pretty well.

• We’ve got some options for adding on-board cameras laying around here, so we’ll try to work on that for some of the upcoming launches. We have a couple little ‘dongle’ cameras that we could attach, and I’ve also dabbled with ESP32 cams, so this could end up being either a recording that we retrieve later, or a live stream of video during the launch itself (or both?!)

• Video, screen-grabs, helpers, etc. rocket flights are so short, that having lots of video, screen grabs, etc. helps when reviewing stuff post launch. I might try to rope in some more helpers, and more devices, in the future, to try and capture more video, dashboard stuff etc.

• Dashboard playback - after this flight I whipped up a python script that will basically “play back” the telemetry data, so I can tweak up the dashboard and stuff and test with real-time data now, for future updates.

• Max Acceleration data - The max acceleration recorded was actually at parachute deployment - I may tweak the code so that it shows “Max acceleration during ascent” since that’s what we’re after more than what the sensors read when the rocket blows its sections apart for recovery deployment.

• Radio Rocket v4? I may start ‘building’ another series of radio rockets in parallel to the continued work on v3 and future iterations of the Radio Rocket. I’m thinking something along the lines of a “Radio-Rocket-Lite.” A lot of people have been interested in this project, and I’d like to do a much more simplistic version where I can put together a step-by-step of; go buy X rocket kit, X tracker, connect it to a battery, load X firmware, and go launch it!

This will wrap up this post for now, but I may come back and edit it, or write a follow up, as I continue analyzing the data. I’ll have some charts and such to share, which are always fun too!

Before I get started, I’m going to throw out the plugs:

support some repeaters financially, or with donations of equipment, or by connecting an existing repeater to the Pride Network

Buy some cool stuff to support my passion projects!

Last night was my first time ever being net control! I volunteered to host a monthly net for the Narwhal Amateur Radio Society (NR7WL), of which I am a proud member. The Pride Radio Network graciously has allowed us to connect our hub to their network, so that our members (and non-members!) can connect via the plethora of bridges they have set up (DMR, YSF, D-Star, P-25, NXDN, Allstar, Echolink, etc.)

Because I figured we’d probably only have a handful of check-ins for this first time around, I decided to do the net “E-Cars” style, where as net control, I’m on for the hour, and just put out periodic calls for check-ins. I felt like that went very well, and it made me wonder why more repeater-based and network-based nets don’t run in that style, instead of the “be here at the exact right moment” variants.

I felt like it makes it easier for participants, because they can show up whenever they want during the hour, and it takes the pressure to feel like the airtime has to be filled up, off the net control and other participates. Instead, it makes it a time where you just kind of hang out, call for check-ins periodically, and either chit chat with folx who checked in, or wait quietly while multi-tasking between check-ins, based on whatever the net control, participants, and vibe for the net seem to dictate.

Anyway - I had a blast! If you’re potentially interested in checking in in the future, here are the net details:

Check out the Narwhal Amateur Radio Society, and our Nets Page (details coming soon, if they aren’t already there!) for more info.

Net details as follows:

Narwhal Amateur Radio Society Monthly Net

Time: 1st Tuesday of Every Month at 7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern

Location: Hosted on the NR7WL Allstar Node (61672), the N3VEM Repeater (Allstar 56001 & Echolink 994842), and the Pride Radio Network.

We’d like to specifically thank the Pride Group for allowing us to connect our hub to their system - The Pride Radio Network enables club members and non-members wishing to check in to connect via DMR, System Fusion, D-Star, IRLP, Echolink, M-17, NXDN, P-25, Hams over IP, Hamshack Hotline, plus some others. Be sure to check out the Pride Radio Network site as they regularly make updates and improvements to their network.

If you want to join the net via Allstar, you can simply point any Allstar enabled repeater, hotspot, or VOIP application at node 61672 during the net. If you’d like to connect via any of the other modes mentioned, please visit the Pride Radio Network Information Page for details on node numbers etc.

The NARS Club Net is a directed net, and also serves as a 1 hour time slot where net control will be monitoring the hub even if there are no check-ins. This means that folx can feel free to check in at any point during the hour that works for them; just tune in and listen for the preamble and call for check-ins which will be repeated periodically, or throw out your callsign if a few minutes goes by and you don’t hear anything.

When checking in, feel free to share your name and location as you are comfortable (or not), answer the net question, and/or share anything else that is on your mind. We strive to be welcoming and accommodating, so don’t worry about whether or not you are ‘doing it right’ - with us, you’re always doing it right as long as you’re following the guidelines of your license and having fun!

Please refer to the Narwhal Code of Conduct, which governs our behavior during the net.