April | 2017 | Lakeland Amateur Radio Club Blog

These are times of change. The most obvious is our new meeting location. It is much more comfortable than the last location from the point of view of space and acoustics. It is easy to be heard and understood, even without a microphone.

Field Day
The venue for Field Day 2017 has changed. Plans are to hold this year’s event at the Kathleen Historical Society grounds. This facility is air conditioned, making it more comfortable for participants. For those not familiar with this location, you can visit their website at http://www.kahsatsocrum.com/#

Deadline for MIGS
The deadline for Member In Good Standing status was April 1. If you have not paid your dues, and still wish to be a club member you should contact Patrick to pay your dues.

Club Records Update
April is also the time of year when we look at club records. Mike Oliver and Bill Johnson will be making a push to make sure club records are up-to-date. If you have not made changes to the paper that was circulated during the meeting, you will be contacted by phone. If the phone number we have for you is not current, then we will contact you by email. If neither phone nor email is current you will simply be unreachable. This could be disadvantageous, so unless you chose to be a Stealth Member, you should contact the Secretary to update your records. 🙂

Sign-in Sheets
As secretary I soon became aware that from day one, LARC has always had sign-in sheets at meetings and some events. No one ever questioned this, and to my knowledge no one has ever made use of them. I suppose on the outside chance you need an alibi for where you were on the first Monday of the month they might come in handy, but only if they are accurate. This is one reason we are considering the bar-code approach to attendance records, but there are others.

Generating bar-codes is not a big deal. If you wife is not also a ham, I created a bar-code with the suffix XYL for her. I also created a bar-code for you if you bring your son, YM or YL if you bring your daughter.

Other than being rather cool looking, and related to amateur radio in the sense that they were inspired by the Morse Code,bar-codes are a very practical and efficient way of generating attendance reports. A marked up sheet of bar-codes can be scanned into a worksheet in less than two minutes. But then what? For those interested, here is the workflow:

Members circle their call sign
Scan bar-codes into a spreadsheet – less than two minutes
Port data to a table in a data base – about a minute
Marry the scanned data with other information in the database, print out a hard copy, and generate a soft copy for publication. about five minutes.

We are going to try this for a while. There have been suggestions made to affix a bar-code to the back of your membership card. This is very doable, but it requires that you carry your membership card in your wallet. The concept of bar-coded tattoos on the forehead was rejected out of hand. However, judging from the amount of ink we see these days, maybe sometime in the future. 🙂

So what does a hard copy look like: (Please keep in mind that we are in the process of updating our records so if you paid your dues, or your information is not accurate, please be patient. Feel free to contact me with any updates and corrections.)

			Membership
Call Sign	Name	LARC	ARRL	ARE	SKYWARN
AA4HT	Roberet (Rip) H. Van Winkle	YES	YES	NO	NO
AA4HTXYL	Carolyn	YES
AB1DX	Oliver L. Richards	NO	NO	NO	NO
AE4RM	Roger O. Meadows	YES	NO	NO	NO
K1DU	Fredrick (Fred) A. Delaney, III	NO	NO	NO	NO
K2EUH	Robert F. Foxworth	YES	YES	NO	YES
KA2BVC	Alwin (AL) E. Pogue	YES	YES	NO	NO
KC2RMZ	Brian Volz	NO	NO	NO	NO
KF4Q	William R. Busbin	YES	YES	NO	NO
KG4PWF	James (Jim) O Scott	YES	NO	NO	NO
KG4YNI	Ernest (Ernie) H. Haynes, III	YES	YES	NO	YES
KG4YNIXYL	Joan Haynes	YES
KI4DNO	Larry R. Walker	YES	NO	YES	YES
KI4ZMV	William (Bill) Johnson	YES	YES	NO	YES
KJ4AFB	Patricia E. Morris	YES	NO	NO	NO
KJ4AYU	Victoria L. Walker	YES	NO	NO	NO
KJ4DSQ	Roger D. Land	NO	NO	YES	NO
KJ4MJ	Joy Gafford	NO	NO	NO	NO
KK4FEM	Matthew R, Stevens	YES	YES	YES	YES
KK4YXR	Franklin F. Fitzgerald	NO	NO	NO	NO
KM4BAO	Robert Doherty	YES	NO	NO	NO
KM4CUG	Debra (Debbie) M. Leahy	YES	YES	NO	NO
KM4STU	Leon T. Holzer	YES	NO	NO	NO
KR4R	Johnnie M. Ritter, Jr.	NO	YES	NO	NO
KT2T	Michael (Mike) Wayne Oliver	YES	LIFE	YES	YES
N2TE	R. Edward Marchese	YES	NO	NO	NO
N4ESS	Richard (Rich) Kennedy	YES	LIFE	NO	YES
N4KWR	Kevin W. Rought	YES	NO	NO	NO
N4PEG	Margret (Peggy) Lang	YES	YES	NO	YES
N7CUC	Samuel (Sam) H. Shaver	YES	NO	NO	NO
W4MQB	Barbara S. Ritter	NO	YES	NO	NO
W4XDS	James (Jim) Stewart	YES	NO	YES	NO
W4ZSC	Albert (Al) P. Sheppard, Jr.	YES	YES	NO	YES
WX4AMS	Andrew Stevens	YES	NO	NO	YE

What? You were there but you did not circle your name. Guess you will just have to make a point to do it next time. 🙁

Guest Book
In the past we have asked guests to sign in at the bottom of the sign in sheet. There wasn’t much space to do this and we did not ask for their email. That has changed. We now have a sign-in book, with a place for email so that those who visit can keep up with club activities, and maybe even become members someday.

Testing Testing 1,2,3 Testing

Left to right, George, Thomas KN4BOE, Joh, KM4MTQ, Mark Tech, Duain TECH, A, and Richard. Jon Byrd is now Extra, Thomas Conner General, Mark Welch General, and Dwain Hoffman is a new Tech. Brandon Dye also tested, and is a new Tech.

Below, Paul Pippin KG4EPU proudly holds his graduation certificate. He is now a General and free to roam the HF bands.Directly to Paul’s right, and also in the picture above is Chris AA4CB a visiting VE from the East Pasco Amateur Radio Society.