Category Archives: Featured

This category is for featured articles that we want to include in the sidebars and other areas on our website.

Activities, Featured, General, Newsletter, On The Air

NARS Prepares for the Thirteen Colonies Special Event

2 Comments

The Thirteen Colonies Special Event begin this Sunday, July 1 at 9 am EDT. The event runs for 6 days and is the largest Amateur Radio Special Event in the world. Each state that grew from one of the original Thirteen Colonies will be using a K2x call and will have a nice QSL card available for Hams who work them. There will also be a very nice certificate available for Hams who work one or more of the stations that are part of the event.

2018 Thirteen Colonies Certificate
2018 Thirteen Colonies Certificate

The event is celebrating its 10th year in 2018 and we have designed a new QSL card for K2K New Hampshire this year.

The New Hampshire State Navy during the American Revolutionary War consisted of a single ship commissioned by the state of New Hampshire in 1779. The Hampden, a privateer owned by John Langdon, was purchased and outfitted by the state in August 1779. Our card features the Hampden.

2018 K2K QSL Card
2018 K2K QSL Card

Nashua Area Radio Society operators will be operating all of the K2K New Hampshire stations this year. We will be defending our Top State and Top Club titles this year. The NARS team made 12,838 contacts during the 2017 event and we are looking forward to making lots of contacts again this year!

K2K New Hampshire will be QRV on all bands 160m – 6m except for 60m. We will be operating using SSB Phone, CW, and Digital modes. We will also have a QRP station operating as K2K/QRP and some mobile stations operating as K2K/M.

K2K New Hampshire, QRZ?

Fred, AB1OC

Activities, Featured, Field Day, General, Newsletter, Youth Activities

NARS Field Day on WMUR News 9 Last Night

Congratulations to everyone for a wonderful Field Day this year.  WMUR TV Channel 9 sent out a crew yesterday, and a story about our Field Day operation made it on the news last night at 6:00 PM.  For those of you that didn’t see the show, I have copied the story and we’ve posted it on our home page. Thanks to John, W1SMN for inviting WMUR to our Field Day!

Dave, K1DLM

Featured, Field Day, General, Newsletter, On The Air

Field Day Operators Take Note – 10m and 6m are Open

I spent a little time this morning evaluating the band conditions on 10m and 6m in preparation for our upcoming Field Day Operations this weekend. To try for an “apples to apples” test, I used the antennas here with FT8 at 10 W input power. Our field day setup will have 1/2 the number of elements as we have here but we will be running 100 W so I believe the is to be a reasonable test. The beam heading for my tests was 260 degrees – the same as we will be using for Field Day.

As you can see from the image above, 10m was open for a good portion of the USA at 9:30 am this morning local time.

FT8 QSO with North Dakota on 10m
FT8 QSO with North Dakota on 10m

I made quite a few QSOs on 10m including several to the western states.

6m Band Opening
6m Band Opening

The 6m Band was also wide open and I was able to make about 40 contacts this morning include several to California and Arizona.

The openings on 6m and 10m were most likely a result of E-skip propagation. You can see the current propagation conditions on these bands here.

Digital, CW, SSB, and 6m operators at Field Day take note – its important to take advantage of openings on 10m and 6m during Field Day. These bands were not only open for FT8 digital but I am sure they supported SSB and CW contacts as well.

Fred, AB1OC

Radio Amateurs Developing Skills Worldwide