Headlines

Posted on July 3, 2021 by Rich

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Coming Events:

July Educational Meeting–July 10 at 1:30 PM. Details below. Here is the Zoom link

Rain or Shine Net Season 3, #5–July 11 at 9 AM at Volunteer Park. Details below.

SIGNUPS ARE CLOSED. WE HAVE REACHED CAPACITY PSRG Summer Picnic 2021!  Sunday July 25th at Magnolia Park. UPDATED: Details below. UPDATE: Please RSVP at Signups are closed.

August Board Meeting–August 14 at 1:30 PM. Details have yet to be determined.

This Website’s Menu is undergoing some reorganization. Temporarily, you may have a harder time finding items, but the revisions should be complete soon.

Board Policy on Site Accessibility–We can use your help! Although we are currently reviewing the site to make it as accessible as possible, it is difficult for those without a particular limitation to anticipate all of the possible problems users might have in accessing parts of the site. You will see some changes over the coming weeks aimed at ensuring that all our users can access the content, but if you notice something that could be an obstacle, please let us know. Contact webmaster@psrg.org.

Board Policy on Gatherings: In light of the uncertainty about when large group gatherings will be safe again, it is not a good use of volunteer time to plan for our normal events. Board Meetings and Educational Meetings will be held online until further notice.

Educational Programs Materials–The website has a new page (and menu item at the top of this home page) for educational material. Links to recordings of presentations or slide sets will be available.

Got photos of PSRG events? Contact K7RCH@PSRG.ORG.

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Send Us Your Photos!

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Rich

We have added a Photo Gallery page to the website. We are seeking photos of PSRG events beginning with 2018 Field Day, especially the Annual Dinner, Annual Meeting and 2018 Picnic. If you have photos to submit, email them K7RAG@psrg.org. (Note, if you have trouble sending them, email Rich for help.)

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Comm Academy

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Rich

Comm Academy, An emergency communications & amateur radio conference was held on April 10-11, 2021. Presentations are available in their archives. Information is available at the updated  website Comm Academy.

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PSRG January Educational Meeting: Wireless sensing at insect-scale

Posted on December 20, 2020 by Rich

Updated: The next PSRG Educational Meeting is scheduled for Saturday, January 9, 2021 at 1:30 PM. The meeting will be on Zoom.

This should be fascinating! The speaker will be Vikram Iyer, a final year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Vikram builds end-to-end wireless systems that push the boundaries of what is possible with particular focus on power, size, and weight. Enabling mobility for small wireless devices is challenging, but this is an area where nature excels. While man-made robots at these sizes are fundamentally limited by battery energy density, small insects like bees can fly for hours. This talk presents his recent work on bio-integrative systems that seek to piggyback on the capabilities of live insects for mobility. This includes Living IoT, a first of its kind platform to include sensing, computation, backscatter communication, and localization in a package small enough to fly on the back of a live bumblebee. He will also discuss how we (meaning people smarter than the average ham) can design more complex sensing systems like wireless cameras that are still small enough to be carried by a live beetle, and how these technologies can be adapted to track invasive “murder” hornets.

Vikram has worked closely with the Washington Department of Agriculture to help track and eradicate Asian giant hornets. Vikram’s work has been recognized by a Microsoft Research Fellowship, best paper awards, and a Marconi Society Young Scholar award.

This meeting was recording and can be viewed here: January 2021 Educational Meeting.

 

 

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Volunteers Wanted for 6m Repeater

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Rich

PSRG is adding a 6m repeater to the stable! Are you interested in helping out with some technical projects ? This is a call for volunteers looking to get into some repeater building work! We provide parts and mentoring.

  1. We need an air-cooling system for the new 6m repeater, that will trigger when the transmitter’s PTT is pushed and stops maybe 30s after the PTT is dropped. Great project for an Arduino or similar.
  2. The 6m repeater will be set up much like our 2m system, so we need someone interested in setting up the Raspberry Pis that will act as the Allstar nodes.
  3. Finally, we need to be able to remotely control the repeater — power cycling, shutting down the transmitter, etc.. This is also an RPi project.

If you’re interested in helping out and learning a little about repeater systems, contact Quenton Caudron and he’ll connect you to the right person.

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PSRG November Educational Meeting: Repeaters, WWARA and the Future

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Rich

The November PSRG Educational Meeting, Repeaters, WWARA and the Future was recorded and is now available: November 2020 Educational Meeting.

The amateur repeater landscape is currently undergoing a significant change and it has been happening for the last 10 years. The WWARA is the repeater coordination body for western Washington and has identified trends, which mirror what happened in the commercial space, with a slow transition from traditional ‘wide band’ analog FM repeaters to digital and narrow band repeaters. This talk will provide some background on the how and why repeater coordination happens, the role the WWARA plays and provide some insight into the coming narrowband transition. The goal is to educate the repeater users and owners in western Washington and collect some feedback on how hams would like to shape this transition.

The speaker was Kenny Richards, KU7M. Kenny is the Secretary of WWARA, the frequency coordination body for Western Washington.

 

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PSRG September Educational Meeting: Build that rig!

Posted on August 26, 2020 by Rich

Update: The September PSRG Educational Meeting, Build that rig ! An exploration of home-built radios through the ages, with speakers Tim, WT1IM, and Quentin, K7DRQ was recorded. The session can be viewed here: September Educational Meeting

 

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Weekly Simplex Voice and WinLink Peer-to-Peer Nets

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Rich

Weekly Simplex Voice and WinLink Peer-to-Peer Nets are happening on Saturday Nights at 8 PM or 2000 Pacific Time.

The Simplex Voice net is hosted by Vince KD7PVY on 146.550.

The Simplex P2P Winlink net is hosted by Charles KJ7GKQ on 445.550.

Come give them a try!

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2020 Annual Meeting

Posted on February 12, 2020 by Rich

The PSRG Annual Meeting was a great success! It was well attended and we had a fascinating and mind-blowing presentation by Quentin Caudron on Fractal Antennas.

Update: Copies of his slides can be found here.

Theresa McLaird KG7AII gave her final Treasurer’s Report that PSRG is financially healthy. A copy of the Treasurer’s Report is included with the President’s Report slides.

President Doug Kingston reported on the two major projects accomplished during the last year–slides from Doug’s President’s Presentation are posted here.

Doug Kingston was unanimously re-elected to the position of President and Quentin Cauldron and Allison Dalton were unanimously elected to Board Slots #2 and #4, respectively. At the board meeting following the Annual Meeting, Quentin was appointed Secretary and Allison was appointed Treasurer.

PSRG thanks Theresa McLaird and Jack Wolfe, KI7RMU for their 2 years of service as the Treasurer and Secretary. They both did a great job and have offered to help the new officers get up to speed.

 

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IRLP No Longer Supported

Posted on January 19, 2020 by Rich

The owner of the IRLP system, has decided to disable the keys for all IRLP systems that are using IRLP via the Allstar system software.  This is impacting lots of repeater with dual connectivity, and there does not appear to be an amicable solution. Since PSRG’s repeater control software and the voting system it provides use Allstar, so we have no intention to retreat from our use of Allstar so we have no option but to remove IRLP support from our repeater.  Practically, this will have virtually no impact on our users as virtually all our internet connectivity is via Allstar and Echolink, both of which are unaffected.

For those interested in in the background and politics, you can read more on the arm-allstar-irlp email group: http://lists.hamvoip.org/pipermail/arm-allstar-irlp/2020-January/thread.html.

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