Month: January 2019

And just like that the 2019 Winter Field Day event has come to a close. Hams all over the country (and perhaps world) have started thawing out from their operating stations, finished eating their sandwiches, and commenced the long trek back to their respective QTH’s and personal bathrooms.

This year the OVEC group decided to hold their event in two cabins out at Cowan Lake State Park, located near Wilmington Ohio, and it was a great success. With sleeping accommodations that were more in line with a 4 star hotel room than what the mind thinks of when you say “cabin”, everyone involved came away from the event feeling spoiled. read more

So what is the deal with these fast radio bursts, or “FRBs” from space? It’s been reported that a repeating source of these signals has been discovered and identified by the CHIME observatory located at the University of British Columbia. (BBC Story Here) So what does that mean to the Ohio Valley Experimenters Club?

Well to be perfectly honest, aside from being a pretty neat story, it doesn’t mean a whole lot to us unless they can speak PSK31, CW, RTTY, or DMR (even though that’s “not really ham radio” so I hear..). And although it would be pretty great to have one of our members make contact with the source of these radio signals for the first time, I have a feeling that the people of earth could probably find another more suitable resident smart person to ask the good questions. And lets just be brutally honest here, would we REALLY want our first contact with extra-terrestrials to be made by a ham radio operator? Although imagine the irony if the first contact was between a local ham here on earth, and some random alien-ham doing his/her thing on their planet. What do you think they would discuss? Because I’m fairly certain it would go something like this:

Earth Ham – “The weather here is pretty nice. We had rain yesterday, but it has since cleared up. I was able to pick up my medication from the Walmarts yesterday between rain storms which is good, but the XYL was pretty unhappy that I couldn’t get those gutters cleaned. Back to you Alien Ham”
Alien Ham – “Yeah its been pretty nice here too. But it rained acid for a bit, which hurt. My XYL was also unhappy I couldn’t clean the florp from my florpkens, but I’ll just have to do that another day.. 73 Earth Ham, and keep doing that hammy thing you do…”
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Tonight OVEC held it’s first club meeting to kick off 2019, and the hot topic at this month’s meeting was Winter Field Day planning!

Some of the topics covered include:

1 Station to be operated

Multiple antennas to be used

The club repeater will be monitored

Will use N3FJP logger or KC8QCH’s custom made logger

KD8GQW will bring “THE SANDWICH”

There will be coffee

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