[K3pzn-board] Happy New Year (and it's here !)

[Curt Milton]

Honestly I hadn't thought any of club matters for the past couple weeks (nor work either!).  I am re-engaged FWIW.  

Inquiry - do we have anything planned for the Jan meeting (one week from today I think ...) ?  

We have had some casual discussion on small mod's to our meeting format, maybe its time to start making some small adjustments ?

My thoughts:
a) we kinda agreed we don't want business to be an overwhelming presence

b) maybe we need to bound our presentation/technical portion to some reasonable bounds ?  note detailed questions/dialog can be invited to spill into the after-meeting time, to not tie up the less-interested ....

c) new thought for me -- perhaps include some public/emergency service communications focus every meeting - awareness and training are key thoughts.  is ~ 15 minutes of informal training in something worth considering ?  i admit to not knowing many of the acronyms in use - we ought at least prepare the club to be engaged in anything happening in the upcoming month ?  this may be worth some fresh/modulated thinking of you all in the know

i am kinda interested in what unique/useful beyond voice communications capability we can further integrate into our operations, and hopefully demonstrate in exercises

d) engaging those who don't regularly attend -- we ought to think thru how we can be involved with those hams busy raising family, etc who don't come to meetings or are rare birds.  let me work on this some more!  i related since i was once a rare bird

e) how about a YL net on the repeater ?  maybe we can recruit a team of YL's to get something going?  (someday when we have youth, perhaps another net ...).  

f) other - i did get invited to the Washington Co area club Xmas party (based on my MD QSO party involvement).  nice group of folk, well until ARES is mentioned as it doesn't exist there perhaps for multiple reasons!  i sense WI3N has some additional fence mending to do, of course it helps to have KZ3AB as his more-than-able assistant.  WI3N by the way is an excellent singer!  

they do have the 'challenge' that many of their members live in PA, and a few in WV - so state boundaries are less evident there than say in Carroll County!  

g) technical - toward encouraging member interest, and more for my own interest:

- i essentially completed my research on regens, and i can almost describe one, and my prototype of a solid state regen is about 80% assembled

- a smaller project being considered, i wish to build a simple digital mode interface that operates without RS-232 or USB, but uses transmit audio to key the transmitter -- anyway its in the ARRL handbook and my current shack PC has no serial port

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday celebration, time with family/friends and maybe a little ham radio.  I operated a little in the RTTY contest with very little station automation, but managed to have fun.  MMTTY is nifty at receiving signals that my S-meter doesn't see, and most of the time I could contact those I heard.  

73, curt