Archives 2015

Its that time of year!  Cooler weather, good food and Hamfests!  Talking about Hamfests… The Stone Mountain Hamfest was the first weekend of November and it was real blast! The Tampa Hamfest is coming up just around the corner in December.  Probably the best Hamfest in the south is the Orlando Hamfest coming up in February.  So get with your Ham Radio buddies and plan a Hamfest road trip!!!  The more who ride together the cheaper and more FUN the Hamfest road trip is!

Talking about the Holidays… Thanksgiving is just around the corner and Christmas is right on its heels.  The VARC membership wishes Happy Holidays!

Don’t forget to ask Santa for that Ham gear you have been eyeing all year.  Also make sure to make the New Year resolution to be more RADIO ACTIVE!

73 from the crew at W4VLD…

W4VLD would like to wish all Americans a fun and safe July 4th!

Ham’s have always used their communications skills to monitor the skies around them as part of their community service.  Today it is easier than ever for both hams and non-hams to participate in the home or business weather station revolution.

One of the latest weather stations to be installed in Lowndes county is KGAVALDO5 which maybe viewed on weather underground website.  This new station has been sponsored by VARC member KB0Y.  All area hams are encouraged by the VARC to sponsor their own weather station in their community.  The following is a recommendation for anyone wishing to install their own weather station.

One of the latest stations low cost but power packed units to hit the market is the WS-1001-WiFi (Observer) by Ambient Weather.  The Ambient Weather OBSERVER weather station, combines reliability, easy installation and dual wireless technology. The OBSERVER is accurate, precise, and affordably priced. It transmits 915MHz from the outdoor sensor array and indoor temperature sensor to the display console.

The OBSERVER transmits outdoor temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, UV and solar radiation from the all-in-one sensor array. The OBSERVER also transmits indoor temperature, humidity and barometric pressure from the indoor temperature array.

The OBSERVER also displays dew point and rainfall rate, and a graph provides detailed trends for barometer, temperature and humidity.

Although Internet connectivity is not required, the display console sends and receives internet data using WiFi connectivity.

The menu based multi-screen display includes NIST internet time server synchronization, imperial and metric units of measure, high and low alarm conditions with audible alert, calibration of all major parameters, real-time internet weather publishing by Wunderground.com, and encrypted WiFi transmission.

The OBSERVER also displays minimum and maximum conditions with time and date stamp, historical archived data, which can be exported to SD Card or advanced data analysis in Excel, and detailed time graphs for spotting weather trends.

HamWAN is a “by hams, for hams” wide area high speed digital network which is now being deployed in the Lowndes county and the South Georgia area.  Networking technology has now progressed enough that Amateur Radio operators are able to integrate their analog and digital emergency communications networks with low cost HamWAN wireless technology in order to achieve superior communication stability in the face of emergency communication situations.

HamWAN provides advanced internet protocol routing techniques in order to provide a seamless networking experience for Amateur Radio operators and by offering network services such as weather cameras, repeater access, VoIP PBX, ADS-B and SDR receivers. When systems are properly configured, software applications will keep on functioning just as if nothing had happened, and the all-important mission of emergency communication can carry on.

HamWAN, when not being used for non-emergency situations, provides networking capability for individual hams using our allocated 44Net IP space for day to day communications requirements.  Presently several area repeaters have been linked together using Ubiquiti microwave radios & Mikrotik routers and switches.  To experience this new and exciting technology tune your station to the VARC 146.760 repeater system today.

The Georgia ARES statewide meeting is coming up on Saturday January 24th.  This yearly event will be located at the following address: