Our neighbor club, W5YD at MSU, as successfully mounted their 2M antenna on the MSU radio tower in Artesia.  The antenna is about 250' up, and the repeater is now connected and has been running at 25 watts for about a week.  In conversations with Mike McCraw and Jarrod Marsh, it sounds like the W5YD club plans to increase repeater power to around 75 watts in the near future.

Conversations on the W5YD frequency (146.805, no tone) included stations as far south as the Macon area, and as far west as Eupora.

The ARRL released the following announcement on March 20, 2012:

We are excited to announce two new ARRL membership benefits that will be introduced in June 2012.
In addition to the print copy of QST, all members will have access to an online, digital edition of QST at no extra cost. You will be able to access QST from anywhere--on nearly any computer, laptop, mobile device, smartphone and tablet (including Apple iPad, iPhone, and devices using the Android operating system).

Also in June, members will gain access to archived issues of QST from December 1915 to the present (previously, only issues through 2007 were available to members). If you are familiar with the current periodicals archive (which serves images of pages), that platform will be expanded to include all of QST from December 1915 through December 2011. A second, new archive will be introduced for issues beginning January 2012, featuring enhanced functionality including full-text search.

Be Prepared!
Members must have a valid ARRL website login to access the current digital edition of QST and archived editions. For a smooth launch of these exciting new benefits, and so that you will be able to quickly access the digital version of QST as soon it becomes available, we are e-mailing you some information that will help you login to the ARRL website prior to launch.

On March 8, 2012, Magnolia Amateur Radio Club members were treated to a presentation on equipment grounding during their regular monthly meeting.  Jimmy Wooten, N5VSB, used a Power Point presentation to explain the dangers of improper grounding, and the techniques involves in properly grounding a station and its equipment.

Despite it being spring break, eight members of the club came to the Central Grill in Starkville for a pleasant dinner and meeting.

Minutes of the meeting are in the forums.

(Photo courtesy of AE5LG, Jarrod Marsh)

The Club call sign, KD5GVU, was alive and well on Saturday, February 25th, during the annual Mississippi QSO Party. The MS QSO Party is sponsored by the Vicksburg Amateur Radio Club. Two Magnolia ARC members, President Jimmy Wooten N5VSB and Past-President Frank Howell K4FMH operated a rover or mobile operation in several areas of the state where there are few licensed hams using the Club call sign.

“Over the past few years, Mississippi hasn’t activated a large number of counties,” said Jimmy Wooten. “So I asked Frank if he would partner with me to help out by us doing a rover operation where we would travel to as many of these counties as possible to allow other QSO Party participants to add those counties to their logs,” Wooten continued. The Party scores points for each unique county in addition to the number of other hams contacted during the twelve hour period (9am to 9pm).

“What we did was to take the number of licensed amateurs in each Mississippi county from QRZ.com and plot them on a map. Those with less than 20 licensed hams were targeted as candidates for our route,” said Frank Howell. There were two other rovers operating as mobile so the Mississippi ARRL Section website listed each one. For MARC’s call sign, the following set identified the intended counties from Starkville departure (Oktibbeha) to completion in Vicksburg (Warren):

The KD5GVU Rover-mobile was Jimmy Wooten’s pick-up truck. It was outfitted with an HQ Texas “Bug-Catcher” style vertical with a capacity hat. A Yaesu FT-857D transceiver with a stock hand microphone and an Ameritron ALS-500M linear amplifier rounded out the mobile gear. Jimmy Wooten added, “Operating at about 400 watts even with the relatively low efficiency of the antenna installation helped us both get out to those seeking our station as well as to break a pileup or two.” To operate safely, one team member drove the vehicle while the other operated the transceiver. “Safety was the primordial directive,” according to Frank Howell, “and, in fact, we pulled over to the roadside when we had many stations calling us so that the drive could assist in the logging and station identification process.” Howell said that the team logged everything using an iPhone with the HamLog software. “This worked beautifully as our cellular data signal looked up all of the other fields, like location, and so forth, once we entered the other station’s call sign.” The team said that there were only three or four locations in the route where cell service was not available. The software just filled in the missing fields for previous calls once data service was regained so nothing was lost.

Our neighbors on the MSU campus, W5YD, will be hosting two license exams, one on March 6, and one on April 14. Both exams will be held in the third floor auditorium of the MSU Student Union.

Exact times of the exams, and any updates, will be on our club calendar, found on the left side of this page.

License candidates do need to bring $15 cash, a photo ID, and the original copy of any FCC license they hold right now.

Numerous members of the Magnolia Amateur Radio Club traveled to Jackson on January 28 for the annual Jackson Hamfest at the Trade Mart.  A couple of hundred vendors lined the meeting hall, and the aisles were crammed with lookers and shoppers.

Here are photos of Starkville and area residents taken during the event.

N5VSB, Jimmy, took a turn manning the Magnolia Amateur Radio Club table during the hamfest, giving KB5ZO, Ben, a chance to browse the hamfest.

Here's the Ameritron amplifier donated to the club by K5VVM, Ray. The amp was given a thorough going-over by Ameritron, and given a clean bill of health.

The MFJ family of businesses were doing a brisk trade, with crowds of hams gathering to see the available products.

K5FLU, Martin, enjoys a visit with fellow hams at the MFJ booth.

Richard Stubbs of MFJ helps one of the many, many hams who sought MFJ's expertise during the hamfest.

Club president K4FMH, Frank, mugs for the camera near the MFJ booth.

AE5LG, Jarrod, and Bekah, KD5TDP stayed for the entire event.

Our December club meeting is coming up this Thursday, December 8th, at 6pm (dutch treat dinner) with program about 7pm. As usual, we will meet at the Central Station Grill.

The speaker this month is George Thomas, W5JDX (shown at left with club member Martin Jue), of Amateur Logic TV and the Ham Nation podcast. George resides in Ridgeland, MS and will join us via Skype.

Please remind yourself of this meeting as this is sure to be an informative session with the host of Smoke & Solder segment on HamNation. George will be open to questions about a range of topics but if you're interested in enhancing your homebrew skills, he's the "man"!

Plus, you may be nominated for an upcoming officer position unless you are there to defend yourself! I have appointed Ben Stapp and Toxie Coker to serve as the Nominations Committee for this year's MARC elections. While I plan to continue my membership in the Club, I do not plan to stand for another term as an officer due to my recent move to the Ridgeland area.

The November meeting of the Magnolia Amateur Radio Club enjoyed an hour-long visit, via Skype, with inventor and founder of of Heil Sound, Mr. Bob Heil.

Bob spent a pleasant hour with us, showing us his ham shack, and doing several gear demonstrations. One demonstration showed how a pair of microphones, wired out of phase with each other, would produce a sound-cancelling result.  This addition of this out-of-phase pairing to each ear piece is how noise cancelling earphones work.

Another interesting demo was the use of a simple, non-powered audio mixer to separate audio signals encountered during reception pileups.  Bob had several receivers functional in his shack, and ported the audio output of each to one channel of an inexpensive audio mixer.  When he encounters a pileup, he uses the tone controls of that receiver's channel to dial out the unwanted traffic.

This was our club's first experiment with having a presentation via Skype, and we were caught off guard with the audio.  The laptop speakers weren't enough for the task, and the AC output cable lacked the audio path needed to use the audio of the large flat screen.  We've since made plans to have supplementary audio power for our next Skype presentation.

Thanks to Mr. Bob Heil, this was one of our most memorable meetings!