Last fall the White Rock Amateur Radio Club awarded five lifetime memberships to some of the founders and builders of the club who are still involved in the society. On 15 Feb 2009 President Eric Kehler (VE7EGK) awarded the certificate to Karl Cremer (VE7KHC).  Karl had been unable to be at last fall’s AGM.  Congratulations Karl!

 

Stuart, our club Secretary reports that as of 12 Feb 2009, the amended WRARC society constitution and by-laws have been put on file by the Registrar of Companies in British Columbia. This completes the process and we are now officially done with updating the by-laws.

It's official! After 14 months of near SK living Ralph is back on the air with his new Stepp-IR antenna. 10 club members and 2 neighbours were on hand this afternoon to help Ralph raise his new tower with the Stepp-IR antenna into place. The whole process went very smoothly and fit together perfectly. The new beam looks great now that it is in place. Ralph now needs to fine tune the unit to his location and soon should be picking up South Africa with little difficulty!

Our repeater's cavity filter was transported to the work bench of Bryan (VE7BFY) who gave it a serious touch up. He even adjusted some of the critical coax lengths. In the end he reported that it is giving a 90dB notch of the frequency with a 1dB insertion loss. We are not sure of the de-sense level but initial field tests show significant improvement in receiver sensitivity. It now seems to be a workable repeater!

The White Rock club met for the first time in our new home at the Centennial Arena in  White Rock. This site houses the ESS radio equipment as it is the designated reception centre for White Rock. The city has provided use of the meeting room at no cost as a courtesy for our support of the City's emergency program. Here are a few photos from our first meeting on October 12, 2008.