School Club Roundup February 2010
It's time for another School Club Roundup. Good luck to all schools participating. Remember, we ask that all college stations send your daily dispatch or a summary of your log to contact@collegearc.com and we will post the results. Have fun!
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Haiti Earthquake Report Via Amateur Radio
I found this online and thought it would be nice to share. It's great to see such good use of amateur radio in a disaster. The emotions and reality of the report via radio straight from Port-Au-Prince is gripping.
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Your Facebook Profile & the CollegeARC Blog
I just finished up a round of attention to the blog with hopes of helping readers engage in active discussions of blog posts in addition to easily sharing their comments or blog posts with friends. www.Facebook.com is incredibly popular with college students. If your in college there is a 99.98234% chance you have a Facebook account (sense my sarcasm?). There are several ways that you can interact with the blog using your Facebook account which I will explain.
Sharing Posts
Using Facebook to share posts
Readers may easily share posts they are interested in with friends by posting an article to their Facebook profile (like a status update) or sending the link as a message directly. Readers will see two share buttons, one on the top of an article and one directly below. Clicking either of them will start the Facebook sharing process. If the reader is already logged into Facebook it will simply pop-up with the sharing options, if not then the reader will be asked to sign in. Most users will probably have Facebook already running in another browser tab or window making it all that much easier!
Commenting
Commenting with Facebook profiles
Discussions are no longer limited to just the CollegeARC blog. Readers can now hold conversations simultaneously on the CollegeARC blog and Facebook.com. When commenting the reader may simply enter name and email just like before or they may click on the "Connect with Facebook" button as shown. Just like before, if the reader is already logged in the Facebook profile is associated with the comment and if not they will be asked to login. The reader may also choose to post the comment and article to their profile wall as well as adding the comment to the post. This allows the discussion to widen also to a huge userbase on www.facebook.com.
Please let me know if you like these new features. We are currently working on even more Facebook integration as we have received positive feedback about using Facebook more. We hope this allows more discussions and even more ability to you as a reader to share your ideas and help spread the hobby of amateur (ham) radio. Please comment and let me know what you think!
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@CollegeARC
Many members of the CollegeARC community know about our Twitter account and some do not. Twitter is an interesting social networking media which I was first introduced to using with the @CollegeARC account. You would think that since I am a college student Twitter would already be a part of some “Swiss Army Knife” of my daily networking routine. Well it wasn't.
Twitter seems like it can be useful all the while being completely useless! I can see the usefulness if there is information to pass or something to converse about but quite Frankly how many people want to know which toothpaste you used last night? Maybe it's me but that one ranks pretty low on my information gathering goals 
If your not following @CollegeARC then what are you waiting for? I am the one who is usually on it but sometimes Brent will jump on. We are always looking to connect with others, especially those in amateur radio and the CollegeARC.com community. We also invite the clubs participating in the College Amateur Radio Club Association to send tweets that they want to send out on the Twitter account or simply re-Tweet. Happy tweeting!
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Almost There!
Ok so this blog has had about a week or two without an update. It's been super busy here at RIT and I haven't had time to edit any more blog posts. There will be a new posts about archiving club history this weekend. If anyone wants to help publish this blog then contact me at contact@collegearc.com or the "contact us" tab at the top of this blog. You will get an author profile and be able to write for the blog, your help would be well appreciated!
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Getting Louder at School With Amplifiers and Antennas
One of my recent projects for K2GXT has been to fix a broken Yaesu FL-7000 HF amplifier which K2GXT owns. It spent the summer at my house in Massachusetts where I actually have the time to fix it as opposed to at school where there is little free time. Bill Grassa N4ATS provided helpful information and parts for the amplifier. The power supply transistors had been blown causing the voltage to be too high. This caused the Yaesu FL-7000 to trip its protection circuits whenever the push-to-talk button was keyed; hence, we had an amplifier which was unusable.
Yeasu FL-7000 amplfier power supply
Prior to this the RIT amateur radio club ran barefoot which means using only the transceiver with no amplifier. This typically is about 100 watts with most of today's radios. Building an amateur radio station capable of transmitting a strong signal with only 100 watts is an important consideration. A station that is loud with such capabilities means it has an efficient antenna system and location, for the most part. When an amplifier is introduced to the mix, The loud signal heard on the air is that much more effective when the amplifier is used.
This boils down to antennas. There's no sense in using an amplifier with an amateur radio station that radiates power inefficiently. The RIT amateur radio club has such a station on the air. An off center fed dipole (OCFD) was built and installed a year and a half ago. The antenna is also referred to as an off center fed doublet. More information can be found on the L.B. Cebik (SK) Website. The antenna radiates efficiently, often preferred over the high frequency (HF) beam we also own. The Yaesu FL-7000 is going to really pump up the signal of the club with the antenna system installed. If you operated a school club with an ineffective antenna try to fix it before adding an amplifier to the system.
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