Our Club treasurer for the last five years, Joe Ducar, KJ4QFV, has decided to resign his office for personal reasons, effective immediately.

The Club thanks Joe for his years of service as Treasurer.

in accordance with the Club bylaws, a special election was held on June 19, 2020 via a Zoom meeting to elect a treasurer to fill in for the rest of the year.

Ed Prentice, K4EGP, was elected to fill the remainder of Joe’s term. Thanks, Ed!

The 2019 W4CQ Christmas Party was held on December 12, 2019 at the Salvation Army.  We had a good turnout, enjoyed some great fellowship, and had some great dishes to devour.

To view a slide show of photos from the party, click here.  All photos by Barbara Jones-Goodin.

You can now listen to the 444.4500 repeater on Broadcastify or via the Scanner Radio app on iPhone or Android devices.

Click here to listen on Broadcastify, or click on the play button below.

The Club now has a group on Facebook for anyone interested in amateur radio in the Charlotte area. It’s not just for Club members – if you are interested in amateur radio and need help with anything, such as how to get your license, how to set up an antenna or radio, or want to share something with the group, please join the W4CQ Facebook group.

We’ll try to respond to your join request ASAP, but it could be delayed a day or two.

To get to the Facebook group, click here.

We had a pretty good turnout at our March 2, 2019 Club meeting.  Bill Turner W4WNT came by and did a presentation on FT8, which was very well received.

FT8 is an amateur radio QSO communication protocol developed by Joe Taylor (K1JT) and Steve Franke (K9AN). FT8 uses 8-FSK modulation, transmission takes less than 15 seconds.

While sometimes criticized as being only a “paper chasing” mode because of its very structured format (no free-form text) and not being a conversational mode (like PSK), it’s great as a weak signal mode (and sometimes low-power).

It’s very good for evaluating propagation, since it’s easy to tell where you are being heard via the PSKreporter web site.

The software (WSJT, WSJT-X) is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Bill’s presentation is available in both Microsoft Powerpoint and OpenOffice formats.

For the Powerpoint version, click here.

For the OpenOffice version, click here.

For a printable PDF version, click here.

To download the software for your computer, go to https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/

Shawn, K4RSG