DAREN of WV News June 7, 2020(E57)
(304) 679-3470 wa8llm@yahoo.com
Wood County Emergency Communications, 319 Communications Dr, Waverly, WV 26184
www.wc8ec.com or www.wc8ec.org
DAREN News, are articles and information about the Digital Amateur Radio "Emergency" Network of WV, which operates on 145.69 MHz. Anyone having any information about DAREN, or Amateur Radio in general, and would like to share it with others, may send it to WA8LLM @ PKBGWV on 145.69 MHz, or to my E-Mail: wa8llm@yahoo.com. A Statewide DAREN NET is operated every Saturday from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, and lately, before and after those hours. The DAREN Net Announcement, showing the MAIN NCS, ALTERNATE NCS, NODEs accessible to both, and the previous week's check-ins, are posted by Thursday on most of the Main county DAREN PBBS'. The DAREN News can also be found on the www.wc8ec.com and www.wc8ec.org websites.
Not much to report on the DAREN system, but a few of us have been experimenting with the HSMM (High Speed Multimedia) 2.4 GHz system. We have been testing some home made 2.4 GHz antennas. Only a couple of the antennas that we built seem to work pretty good, the others didn't seem to work at all. One of the home made antennas was built out of a used Direct TV Parabolic dish antenna. After looking for the formula to find the focal point on the Parabolic dish, I was able to modify a way of mounting an antenna on it. We tested the antenna by connecting to the HSMM station at my house from about 3 1/2 miles away. We compared the home made dish antenna with a commercial 2.4 GHz Parabolic dish. The commercial dish is a 14db antenna. The home made dish, which is a few inches larger, measures about 6db more signal. The modifications to the Direct TV Dish was made by drilling a one-inch hole in the middle of the dish and placing a piece half inch schedule 40 PVC pipe and a home made mounting bracket. The antenna itself was made out of a piece printed circuit board, placed at the Focal Point, and connected to a short piece of RG-58 coax cable placed inside the PVC pipe. Over the last few years I've collected several of the Direct TV dishes in case we could use them. We should now have plenty of dish antennas for locations that need point-to-point paths. We are wanting to build the system with as many omni directional antennas as we can to get more coverage. So far we haven't been able to establish a permanent link between any two locations. Most of our tests have been at ground level locations with a 20 mast pipe. The mast pipe isn't tall enough to get above the trees which kills the signals. Once we get some path links established, we can start testing different communications modes, including Packet Radio.
There were only 29 check-ins to the Statewide DAREN Net again this week. Remington Sweitzer, KB3TXG, needs only one more check-in to make 300.