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Shack
News
Linear Amplifier
Our 1kW HF linear amplifier came
very close to lasting all of 2004, but in the late afternoon of
December 31st, a high-voltage capacitor failed in a somewhat
spectacular manner while I was attempting to contact Tonga. When
the smoke finally cleared, both figuratively and literally, the
damage was actually fairly minor -- although at first it appeared
to be much worse. From what Art, WA2YQV, was able to determine,
the blower had failed and everything overheated as a result. In
fact, in the 2 years I've been operating that amp, I don't ever
recall that blower running full-speed (I'd thought it was just a
very quiet amp).
If you have shack access and want to use
the amp, new procedures are being developed that will need to be
adhered to. Please see Peter, Alan, Ted or Art and we'll happily
show you what now needs to be done. Anyone with HF shack access is
welcome and in fact encouraged to use the amp; if it's used
correctly, it can give HoSARC a good, loud presence on the
bands!
Donation of Estate Equipment
In
mid-December, the grand-daughter of a silent-key ham, Elbert Van
Houten, W3TPW, contacted the club and asked if she could donate
her grandfather's old ham equipment to us. She's a member of the
Hall and even volunteered to bring it down to us! On Boxing
Day we took possession of his complete station. As a result, we
now have another Kenwood TS-440S in very good condition, a PS-50
power supply, a Drake MN-2700 high-power antenna tuner and
numerous station accessories.
The timing was excellent
because we just auctioned off our older AEA AT-3000 high-power
tuner. This gave us a first-class tuner in great shape -- and one
that's far better than what it replaced. We're also keeping
the newly-received TS-440, but we intend to sell our old 440. The
remaining equipment will be also sold to bring in funds to help
the club recover from the cables and other equipment we needed to
acquire in 2004. The equipment will be displayed at the January
2005 general meeting at reduced prices for club members. If there
are no takers at the meeting, the equipment will be auctioned on
eBay to the highest bidder. If you're interested in purchasing any
of these items, please contact Tom KC2CBA, Alan AE2J or Peter
W2IRT before (or at) the January 11th meeting!
This
is a list of what will be offered for sale:
Our old Kenwood
TS-440S HF transceiver
Kenwood PS-50 Power Supply
Yaesu FT-209R HT with mobile
charger, speaker-mic, 5/8 wave and rubber duckie antennas
Drake CW-75 electronic keyer
MFJ-901B HF Antenna Tuner
MFJ-721 "Super Selector"
MFJ-812 VHF Wattmeter
Qual-Comp CB (and presumably
HF) SWR Meter
Kenwood SWT-1 VHF 200W tuner
(?)
Radio Shack 2.5Amp power supply
EICO Grid dip meter with all
coils
Radio shack miniature
multi-meter
115 VAC Muffin fan
2 code practice keys/buzzer (1
broken)
Turner Desk Mike
Home-brew digital clock
Valor HF Mobile antenna parts
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WWW.HOSARC.ORG
is now live!
In early October the domain name
hosarc.org was registered and in the ensuing month or so, all the
content has been transferred over from the old -- and slow --
QSL.NET servers to our new lightning-fast hosarc.org host's
servers. We hope you see a dramatic improvement in the overall
site performance as a result, in addition to the
easier-to-remember Web address.
The hosting plan we have
now allows for 2 Gigabytes of data transfer per month and 200 Mb
of disk storage, both of which should be ample for our purposes.
The cost for this plan is $9 a year for the site hosting and $15 a
year for the domain name registration.
One of the many
features our new hosting company allows is an unlimited number of
e-mail accounts "@hosarc.org." Please e-mail me if you
want your callsign or a personalized e-mail account and I'll be
happy to set it up. You can use it as Webmail, log in via POP3 or
just have your mail automatically forwarded to any existing e-mail
account if you wish. Please see the sidebar article that describes
how to access your e-mail via the Webmail interface. It's a little
tricky the first couple of times but it should work smoothly after
that.
Another fun feature is a message board that can be
reached at www.hosarc.org/forum.
Please check it out, register your username and enjoy! This
feature is currently open to everyone and most features are
enabled. It can be a great way to stay in touch with club members
and friends if you can't hit the repeater or if the machine's down
or you're out of town.
s the months
progress, Susan, Ted and I will be bringing some new and
interesting features onstream, and we hope to completely redesign
the site with a more modern look and feel, and with some nicer
graphics. If you'd like to see any specific feature added, please
drop any of us an e-mail and we'll do our best to accommodate.
How To Access
Your New E-mail account.
If you've asked for and received
an e-mail address "@hosarc.org" here is the procedure
you'll need to use to log in and access your e-mail. You can do it
from your Web browser (you ARE using Firefox by now aren't you?!)
by going to www.hosarc.org:2095
or simply going to the www.hosarc.org
home page and scrolling down to where it says Members E-mail. When
you click that link you will be asked to provide your User Name
and your Password.
The user name is your FULL E-MAIL
ADDRESS, not just the first bits (in other words, n2xxx@hosarc.org
not just n2xxx). Your password will be the password that was
either e-mailed or told to you when you first got the account. Log
in with these credentials, and, after you do so, you will see a
link to change your password on the lower-left of the welcome
screen. Please do so immediately for security purposes. Only you
will know your password, and if you lose it, it can only be re-set
to a default value (so write it down!).
On that welcome
screen you can also choose to forward a copy of your mail to any
other valid e-mail address (or stop forwarding it later) as well
as setting an "I'm on vacation" type of autoresponder.
Use these if you wish. You can then select which of three
different mail viewers to use. I personally prefer Squirrel of the
three, but the choice is yours. They're all pretty good.
Please
note: You only have 3 Mb of storage space, which will fill up very
quickly. In order not to go over your mail storage allotment
(meaning new mail will bounce), you will need to delete your
stored e-mail every so often. You must do this even if you're
forwarding to another account (it forwards a copy and leaves the
original in your mailbox).
Once your password has been
changed, you can then use your e-mail program (Microsoft Outlook,
Eudora, Pegasus or Thunderbird, for example) to get your mail via
the POP3 protocol. In order to do this, you'll need to know that
the incoming mail server is called mail.hosarc.org and it will
connect automatically after it's been set up.
73 de Peter (W2IRT) w2irt@nac.net
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