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      RARS Gathering and Hack Day   

Maybe we call it RARS Radio Ralley?

Every 4th Tuesday of the month.
7pm at the Ridge Road Baptist Church, 2011 Ridge Road, Raleigh, NC
Talkin on 146.64 -split, no PL

The key elements of RARS-Gathering-and-Hack-Day are social interaction and exploration of the various aspects of ham radio, including hands-on experiences.

Hack-Day: An opportunity for participants to teach a specialty to people who are receptive to tools or techniques outside their experience.  
A time period set aside for an out-of-specialty project that may be started and completed outside the context of the normal work environment.  

In a bridge club, we get together and do what?    play Bridge?
In a chess club, we get together and do what?    umm... Chess?
In a astronomy club, we get together and do what?    Look at stars?
In a shooting club, we get together and do what?    Targets?
In a ham radio club, we get together and do what?    Listen to Lectures?

Hmm... where did we go wrong?

RARS Gatherings are a collection of independent but concurrent activities, mostly in the same large room. Some outside, and we may have some smaller rooms available as well.
There will be no lectures.

All regular attendees should bring a hand full of [well labeled] tools and toys and a wish list of things to show and to learn.

We'll have a couple of HF ham radio stations in action throughout the two-hour gatherings. We'll set up two or three 20, 30 and 40m dipoles outside with RG8X coax fed to three tables in the fellowship hall. A half dozen other tables will be set up with chairs for some social and hands on project work. The space available will give us room for 50 or more people at a time.

 

It will take five or more people to set up the ham radio infrastructure elements of the gatherings, and another couple to deal with furniture. We’ll do setup beginning at 6pm, in advance of the 7pm public start of the gathering to give us time for stringing coax and power, tables and chairs. After tear-down, at 9:30pm or so, we’ll go out and have some pizza or something.

Back to questions.
How many of our members have gotten a chance to operate a tube transceiver, a Flex SDR radio, and an Icom IC7300? What if we have one of each hooked up and operational during each gathering?

Ever used a capacitive loop antenna? Would you want to try: A 2m SSB transceiver? 6 meter AM? A microwave link? A spectrum analyzer? Build a 5 element yagi? Improve the frequency response of an audio circuit using caps and resistors? Use a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA)? Build a repeater? Tune a duplexer? Program a repeater controller?

We can do CW contacts across the room, FT8 around the world.

Hams who have a ham radio related technique, equipment, collection, award, or project to show may bring it and have space and opportunity to share their ham-radio-related item/project/technique with other hams.

We want to have some standard events:

Does anybody want to play radio?

The 4th Tuesday of every month starting March 22, 2022
7PM at Ridge Road Baptist Church, 2011 Ridge Road, Raleigh NC.
Talkin on 146.64 -split, no PL

444.525 repeater demo