There will be TWO Maker activities at the Hamfest this year. Tools and assistance will be provided. Kits may be purchased at the event.

The first will be the NEW kit from Four State QRP Group – the End-Fed Half Wave Antenna Experimenter’s Board. This is a generic board with multiple possible user configurations permitting many circuits to be tried. Builders will receive the board and components, which, when connected to a wire, will make a multi-band antenna! Cost of this kit will be $20

Our second build kit is the ‘Humanalight’. This is a kit that was sold by the Ears To Our World Foundation, and is a flashlight circuit capable of running from depleted AA batteries. Cost of this kit will be $10

Following the Hamfest on Saturday August 7, we will be hosting a Banquet at the Central City American Legion, 6 Central City Road, Central City Iowa. This will be a catered, buffet-style event, with a menu of

Two meats – Pork Loin and Chicken Breast

Veggie – Corn

Party Potatoes

Drinks – Water, Tea, Lemonade

Salad – Sweet and Sour Pasta Salad.

The Legion Hall will open at 5:00 with a Social Hour with cash bar. Dinner will be served at 6:00. and our After-Dinner activities will begin at 7:00pm.

ARRL Midwestern Division Director Art Zygielbaum, K0AIZ and Iowa Section manager Lelia Garner WA0UIG will have a brief discussion of strategies for new ham recruitment and retention, followed by a recognition and awards ceremony.

Our Keynote Speaker will be Guy West, N0MMA, presenting “World Adventures in Radio” – an overview of his international radio adventures. It will be a fascinating presentation for all audiences.

We require a head count for the banquet NO LATER THAN JULY 24. Please contact Christopher Caldwell at kc0ygw3.16@gmail.com to make reservations.

The Cedar Valley ARC Hamfest and ARRL Iowa State Convention will feature a new event this
year. We will be conducting field measurements on two types of 2-meter FM stations: Mobile
and Handheld transceivers.
The large area available at our venue makes this endeavor possible. The tests will be conducted
starting at 1:00 PM Sunday Aug. 8th by retired RF engineer Rod Blocksome, K0DAS. Two types of
tests are planned: Azimuth antenna pattern for mobile stations and effective radiated power
(EIRP) for both mobile and handheld radios. The results will later be computed, plotted, and
emailed to the owners as well as published by CVARC. The test frequency will be 146.58
Simplex.
The results will provide insight into the best antennas and mounting configurations for various
radios. All who wish to have their radios measured must attend Rod’s forum (earlier in the day)
on this subject in order to register, record their radio/antenna data, and be briefed on the
measurement process.

Members of the Cedar Valley Amateur Radio Club have been providing assistance to the Nauticos Group in their search for Amelia Earhart. Part of this has been to use the signal reports of Navy ships in the vicinity of Earhart’s disappearance, along with known ionospheric conditions of the date, to attempt to predict her location at the time.

One of the activities at the CVARC Hamfest will be listening tests to refine our predictions. The idea is to use paired up Earhart simulated transmissions at known S/N levels from our database. These will take place Saturday beginning at 9:00 in a special listening room set aside for this purpose. We would ask each ham to listen and rate which signal in each pair is stronger.

We will also have equipment of the type used during Earhart’s flight on display. This will include a 1930’s RA-1 Rx, WE13C TX, and the Bendix Loop and loop coupler for a static display.

Our next meeting is 14 January at Kenwood Park UMC, and the program that night will be a photo tour of the Antique Wireless Museum in NY, presented by Joe Spinks AA0KW. Joe has this to say:

The Antique Wireless Museum begin in 1964 located in a carriage house.  The 3rd generation shared a building with the Historical Society.  They are now in their 4th generation housing, located in their own facility in East Bloomfield, NY.  They are still expanding as their collection continues to grow.

I had two opportunities visiting the Antique Wireless Museum, located in Bloomfield, NY.  The first visit was May of 2013, they had just transitioned into a new facility.  We saw their old building, 3rd generation, they had occupied for many years, which is a tremendous upgrade from where they begin.  Our second visit was in 2014 and they had begun tours at the new facility, 4th generation.  The highlight of this visit was seeing the Collins VOA transmitter which was in their storage area.

This talk will be a photograph tour of their facility showing just a portion of their exhibit and items in storage waiting to show.  My son and wife, neither are hams, went thru the exhibit and both of them really enjoyed the tour.

If you regularly monitor the local repeaters in Cedar Rapids you may have noticed a new callsign (W0WSV) on a few of them. Over the past few months we have been working with the Cedar Rapids Repeater Association in their desire to donate their repeaters to CVARC upon dissolving their group.  On January 1 we completed the donation of the repeater equipment from the CRRA to CVARC so the repeater callsigns were changed to CVARC’s second callsign, W0WSV.  The W0WSV callsign was chosen since it has been unused for some time now and also to differentiate the repeaters based on physical location of the equipment.

On behalf of CVARC, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the CRRA for the generous donation of equipment and resources to our club.

David, KC0ALC
CVARC Station Trustee

The next meeting of the Cedar Valley ARC is our annual dinner, which will be at Scott’s Family Restaurant (1906 Blairs Ferry Road NE). The meal will start at 18.30 hours, ONE HOUR EARLIER than our usual meeting time.

CVARC will pay for part of the meal, so the cost to members is $10 per adult, $5 per child 4-12, and younger children eat free. You can also pay your annual club dues at the event, which remain $10 per year for a family.

You should plan to arrive around 18.00 to give us enough time to process all the dues and meal purchases! It does take a while.

See you there!

73
N0GUD