ARROW Communications Association

I bet (or maybe I should say that "I hope") a lot of you are wondering what's going on with amateur radio at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. Things are progressing, albeit slowly.

I take some of the blame for this. I got kind of busy and wasn't very aggressive about pursuing this for a while. As it turns out, this really didn't matter all that much as the museum is going to be remodeling, and the spot that we had identified for the amateur radio station is part of that remodeling project and is unavailable anyway. A permanent spot won't be available until the first of the year.

All is not lost, however. Last week, I met with Erin, A2HOM's director of external events (or some such title), and we discussed what to do in the meantime. She and I both came to the conclusion that setting up two Saturdays per month would be doable. Here are the dates we came up with:

August 18
September 15, 29
October 20, 27
November 10, 24
December 1, 15

I told her that hauling equipment in and setting up is usually easy enough to do. It's the antenna set up that's more difficult and requested that we talk about setting up something at least semi-permanently. She's now talking to their facilities people about this. My idea is to set up a 30-ft. or 40-ft. mast and hang a 40m/20m inverted vee off it. The coax would run to the spot in the museum where we would set up, so all that we'd have to do is plug in and go.

Sooooooo, having said all that, if you are interested in operating at the museum, keep those dates in mind. In fact, if you know that you'll be available on any of those dates, let me know, and I'll start keeping a roster.

I'm also hot to set up some kind of "hands-on" computer-controlled CW demonstration. They use a lot of older iMacs there, and I'm hoping that they might have a spare we could have or that I can get one cheap somewhere. My idea is to have some screens explaining what Morse Code is and the hands on part would be for them to type their names into the computer and have it send it back in Morse Code. If you know anything about Mac programming, I'd love to hear from you.

That's it for right now. Stay tuned!

73!

Dan KB6NU