[SMCARA] K3NHK

[Frederic Clarke]

Hi all (or Y'all, if you prefer!),

Well, the antennas at W4OKW came down last weekend and the radios are 
packed up. So I guess we are really MODLOCing ( a Navy term meaning 
"modify location" used when moving a unit from one place to another) to 
Geechieville, AKA Charleston SC in early November. OT: Geechie is the 
dialect spoken by the Gullah natives in the low country, although some 
of the perpetually offended seem to think it is derisive.

You may know that there has been a ham station on the NAS for years 
(originally W3PQT, then K3NAL). We used to be in a quonset hut behind 
the post office until a CO of NAS decided the hut and it's 100 foot 
cedar antenna pole were "ugly". That 100 foot pole was the home of the 
WR3ACP 13/73 and later the K3HKI 04/64 repeater. So along came the 
bulldozers and Bldg 1216 was gone. We were relocated to the HF 
transmitter site that is in the woods behind the museum. It is about a 
15 minute trip on a pot hole infested dirt road (West Patrol Road), so 
attendance at our daily lunch meetings dwindled to me, mostly and Tony 
when he could break away. The site has 5 Rockwell-Collins 3KW HF 
transmitters and five 100 foot tall, conical monopole antennas. The base 
has not used the those transmitters in over 10 years,  so we had free 
access to a great antenna field! As you can imagine, when they fired up 
those 3KW Collins rigs, we couldn't hear much other than NHK-4! No, we 
never cheated an fired them up on the ham bands, although that would 
have been a hoot!

Facing the inevitable, we have decided to close up shop and return our 
room to Ground Electronics (the building also houses the base UHF 
trunking system.). Pete and I have moved a lot of the gear out to the 
museum, as well as the cabinets and work benches. We will clean up the 
remaining items this week and relinguish the keys to GEM.

All club equipment and most of the residual ex MARS gear has been moved 
into the cabinets in museum building C. This includes the Icom 
725/735/751A/746 HF tranceivers and a Yaesu FT-747 and FT-8800. There 
are also a couple of Icom commercial VHF/UHF transceivers programmed for 
the local repeaters and simplex. These are FCC Part 90 Type Accepted 
radios so they could be used for GMRS (might be handy for the club Comm 
Trailer). The prize of this collection is an Icom 7300 transceiver that 
will be used in the soon to be renovated K3NHK club station. This radio 
came to us via a circuituous route from Navy MARS (SK), but is on no 
ones inventory, so it defaults to the museum. This is a great radio and 
we have been using it on FT-8 a lot. I will forward a copy of the 
annotated club inventory form to the club FYI.

I hope to join WA4USN, USS Yorktown (CV-10) in Charleston and help 
activate the ship more frequently. We will be living in the downtown 
historic district, so I imagine between crushing EMI and antenna 
restrictions, I will be limited in my operations! There is always mobile 
I guess! I'll be listening for K3HKI 3A MD/DC next June!

I will be turning over the keys to the repeater site in Hermanville to 
Pete, since a trip from CHS to the repeater is probably not in the 
cards! We could use a volunteer or two to help Pete as the repeater 
committee and control operators.  Also, as I am the trustee of the K3NHK 
license for the PRNAM club station, a voluteeer is needed there also.  
No big rush to make it happen, but on the "to do" list.

73 de W4OKW