Message from Two Rivers ARC President

Hello Fellow Member,

It’s been a while since I have written to the membership, so I think a New Year’s message is in order.

First, I want to wish you a Happy New Year and hope 2024 brings you the best in every way.

Thanks to the efforts of our members our club is doing pretty well. We achieved several goals in 2023 that included getting our 501c3 application filed with the IRS, the relocation of our repeater to Lincoln Boro along with moving the Monday Night Net to our repeater. We also had a successful Hamfest, great Field Day, wonderful Picnic and our annual Christmas Party. I would like to extend a big THANK YOU to everyone that contributed to these accomplishments.
We also created Operations Night that has been a success and provides everyone a chance to operate on the HF bands and also receive instruction on operation and technical information.

It is our intention to focus more on education by providing seminars and information exchanges that are available to our members and those wishing to get into our hobby. If you have a radio related subject that you would like to know more about, please contact me or any BOD member and let them know what it is and we will work on getting you the information you seek.

We welcomed some new members in 2023 and will continue to welcome anyone wishing to join. If you know of someone that may be interested in becoming an amateur or someone that is already licensed, please introduce them to our club and hopefully they will become a member.

As I have previously stated: It is my goal to see our club become the most desired Amateur Radio Club in the region by providing as much information as possible to you thus benefiting you by being a member of TRARC. We are positioning ourselves for growth and future success by doing more radio “Stuff” and sharing the knowledge of our seasoned members.

For the first time in our club’s history we are going to participate in WINTER FIELD DAY. That’s January 27 and 28 at the Lincoln Borough Fire Dept. Social Hall. We are planning on providing snacks and drinks. Bring your radio and/or your temporary antenna or use one of the radios already there. This will be a club sanctioned event utilizing the club call sign W3OC. We plan on utilizing the permitted modes (CW, SSB, JS8 and RTTY). If anyone wants to operate any other permitted modes you are welcome to do so. Hope to see you there. QSO’s begin at 2PM eastern time (19:00 UTC) on Saturday and go continuously until 1:59PM (18:59 UTC) Sunday.

Just a reminder, for your convenience our club pays for a Zoom account so if you can’t make it to a meeting you can participate via Zoom. Please take advantage of this option if you can’t attend in person. Going forward I hope to see you at our meetings, and helping out at our club events such as our Hamfest on April 7, 2024.

I also ask you to please make more effort to check into our weekly nets. The Monday Night Net would be a good place to start as all that is required is for you to check in at the beginning of the net and if you can’t remain for the Newsline rebroadcast, that’s fine.
Our Wednesday Night GabNet has increased in popularity and we generally have some great conversations. The GabNet typically lasts an hour or so.

We are also starting to see more participation in our 10 Meter Net. This net reaches stations outside of Western PA when band conditions permit. Note: We currently don’t have a 10 Meter Net on the second Thursday of the month as we are all at Operations Night.
Below is a current list of our weekly nets:

Monday 8PM 147.12 repeater
Wednesday 8:30PM 147.12 repeater
Thursday 8PM 28.460 USB
40 meter net – to be announced

Mitchell W3OIE is interested in starting a weekly 40 Meter Net. This will hopefully open our net to worldwide participation and give our club international exposure. We will advise everyone as soon as the details are worked out.

Speaking of international exposure, have you checked out our Facebook page (Two Rivers ARC W3OC) and Facebook Group (Two Rivers ARC W3OC group)? John K3CRO has been working hard to keep both of them up to date and interesting. I invite you to check them out and join the group to automatically receive notices of new content. There are some other pages that appear to be associated with our club but are NOT.

Our club has purchased the Internet Domain of TRARC.ORG and our Media Committee is busy creating a totally new TRARC Website that will be much more user friendly and permit us to have a much more professional Internet presence. We will release details when they are available.

As our club’s President I pledge to do my best to serve you and our club to the best of my ability and maintain the effort to grow and improve TRARC in any way we can. If you ever have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact me or any BOD member.

73,

Jim Bricker N3JHB
President, Two Rivers Amateur Radio Club, Inc.