Society Speaks Out
To FCC on BPL


Owen Wormser, K6LEW, is a Director of the society and our FCC Committee Chair.  He has formulated a thoughtful and well-written position paper for our Society and submitted it to the proper channels in a timely manner for the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking concerning Broadband Over Power Lines issue that is currently in front of the FCC.  You may view the document at the Conference or contact me via email and I'll forward a Word .doc of same to you.

2004 Conference in Toronto


Peter Shilton, VE3AX and Bob Morton, VE3BFM, will be your primary hosts for the 2004 conference in Toronto.  Start planning now to spend your late-July of 04 by the cool waters of Lake Ontario.  They are putting together a team that will put on an interesting and entertaining conference for us next year.  They will make a formal invitation to all of us at this year's conference in Tulsa.

2005 Conference Host Needed!


Who will be the conference host for 2005?  As you might guess, conferences are a lot of work.  However, without different groups stepping forward to meet the task, we won't have conferences.  If you have an interest in hosting the 2005 conference, come to the conference in Tulsa ready to make an offer.  2004 is covered (Toronto) so you'd have two years to get ready and line up the team to handle all the tasks.  Without too much orchestration, the conferences seem to be alternating "north" and "south" from year to year.  (Toronto is "north" but also "east" J )  So a "south" central location would be ideal, but this society won't discount any generous offer to host the 2005 conference.  So is St Louis, Houston, or San Antonio ready to host a conference?  (I think the Twin Cities is eyeing 2006.)  If you can't come to the conference to make your 2005 offer, please contact any director or Gerald Handley W5DBY and put your name in the ring.

States Above 50 MHz
Award Program


2002-2003 program year is over and it's time to send your results to me!  I will accept them via snail-mail or via e-mail just as long as your electronic entry has all the same info I'm looking for on the downloadable logsheet.  Either bring them to the conference to hand to me OR make sure I get them by July 22nd if you are competing for one of the top three plaques.  Otherwise, just get them to me by August 31st and you'll get a nice certificate for participating.  The program wrap-up will be in mid-September.

Please recall that this year Canadian Provinces count!  (CY0 and CY9 count for NS).  In the coming year, I'm going to add a .pdf form that is editable by you.  I'm also going to make an excel spreadsheet available for download that was initiated by KØAWU.  It's a handy multi-band document that works well for him and it might be helpful for you.  If you have any other suggestions--run them by me.

In general, participation is slowly increasing across the country.  But participation in Minnesota, whose NLRS club is using the program as a local event, far swamps the rest of the nation.  Get your locals on the quest for states and start collecting states again because it's a new program year (2003-2004) as of July 1st.  Details and forms:  http://www.csvhfs.org/CSTEST0.HTML

Full results and wrap-up will be in the September issue.

VHF FM Sprint Contest Feb 9th
By KB9Q

The Milwaukee Radio Amateurs' Club sponsored an FM sprint back on February 9, 2003, from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM local time. Goals were to spur activity, spur regional club competition, and to provide a taste of vhf contesting to new technicians.  operation and encourage them to think beyond the rubber duck.
Each of four bands above 50 MHz were scheduled for 30 minute segments starting with 2 meters, then 70 centimeters, 6 meters and 1.25 meters. We felt that this order and format would concentrate activity and would let those with out equipment for the less popular FM bands get in and get out!

All the rules, including frequencies, were available at The MRAC website http://www.qsl.net/mrac/index.html .

Over 35 different local call signs are listed in the logs. There were 18 logs and 16 entries received.  The goal of getting the Technicians to learn the basics of contesting did not materialize. The entries and call signs heard were almost all from experienced operators. I think local clubs might have a useful project helping newbies to operate simplex.

CSVHFS Logo Far and Wide

When I was new to VHF/UHF weak-signal work back in 1989, I used to get QSL cards that had the Central States VHF Society logo on them.  It's time to get the logo on today's members cards.  Go to http://www.csvhfs.org/filearea/logos/ and download the images to your computer.  Then integrate them into your next QSL card order.  Also, put them on your web-page to show your pride in our organization.  You can either put a hot-link behind them or not--but at least give our logo some airplay.

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