HRN 349, 350, 351, 352: Friday Morning at the DCC

Almost like binging Netflix... here are five talks from the 2017 ARRL & TAPR Digital Communications Conference, held September 15-17 in St. Louis.

  • HRN 348: Welcome to the 2017 DCC

    • Before the DCC sessions get started, TAPR President Steve Bible N7HPR spends a few minutes welcoming everyone to this year's conference, giving the lay of the land (bathrooms, lunch) and introducing the people who help put on the event.

      Listening to this session gives you a little more of the "DCC Experience." If you consider attending in person one year, you'll have a better idea of what to expect.

  • HRN 349: Radio Amateur's Digital Notebook

    • Jon Poland N0WL reviews ways to keep track of just about everything in your ham radio life with tools on the Internet.
  • HRN 350: Education, Testing, Training

    • David Bern W2LNX and his local club (the Montgomery MD ARC) cover all the bases in making new hams, with the help of the Laurel VEC.
  • HRN 351: Fusion from the Inside

    • Chris Petersen K9EQ digs into the capabilities and possibilities of Yaesu's System Fusion.
  • HRN 352: Noise in a Digital World

    • I really wanted to call this something obscure, like The Wet Diamond Noise Blanker (you'll see why), but I restrained myself.  FlexRadio's Steve Hicks N5AC gives an illuminating talk on how SDR technology lets you detect signals that are 'below the noise level' - and how you might not even know what 'the noise level' really is.

HamRadioNow has been covering the DCC since 2008 — 180 video programs (and counting), all on-line and free to watch. Details HERE.

HRN 347: Old JOTA

Did you know the Boy Scouts Jamboree on the Air has been around for 60 years? So that's why Old JOTA. But our panel of hams — Scout leaders from around the country — keep the discussion fresh.

Gary and David welcome Bill Stearns NE4RD, Brian McDaniel N4AE, Mike Crownover AD5A and Jim Wilson K5ND to the show to talk JOTA, the annual Scouting on-air event that's coming up October 20-22. 

If you or your club are interested in hosting a JOTA event, it's not too late to get involved (assuming you see this in early October). Here's a good place to start, but you'll have to dig a bit to volunteer: https://www.k2bsa.net/jota/. The guys give more tips during the show.

This show is (a lot of) talking heads, so the Radio Rating is A. If you want to know who's who in the graphic, the top row, left to right, is David, Mike and Brian, and the bottom row is Bill and Jim. 

HRN 346: Bull Session/West Coast Studio Test

Oh, geez, what to say about this 'episode.' In quotes.

This was just a Facebook Live session to let fans see how David W0DHG was progressing in his quest to duplicate Gary KN4AQ's ARVN Studio.

We would say this is hard to do, if Marty Sullaway KC1CWF, who busts in halfway through this episode, hadn't done it himself practically overnight. But that's the kind of thing that makes Marty the Newsline Young Ham of the Year (and our late friend Bill Pasternack WA6ITF should be in that title somewhere).

So there's a lot of screwing around, and a lot of references to the video (really... shouldn't this all be just audio, and wouldn't it be a lot easier?), so a Radio Rating is hard to pinpoint. Somehow we continue this ramble for more than 90 minutes. And it really is just for diehard fans of the show. And it's here in the audio feed only because we've got the bandwidth here at the end of the month, and we don't hold anything back.