Red River Radio Amateurs

The July 2026 RRRA Meeting will be our 4th annual Hams in the Park event; it’s a Ham Radio show and tell!

Enjoy an interactive experience, eyeball QSOs, and some dessert; no club business will be be discusssed at this meeting!

⚠️ Please RSVP to the Club President by Friday, July 17, 2026, so that we have enough dessert!

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Hi Folks!

Field Day 2026 is complete and I hope everyone had a successful
activation from either the field or home stations. Again this year we
activated W0ILO as 3A ND from the Cass County Highway Dept in West
Fargo. There was plenty of activity on all the bands, although heavy
QSB kept things challenging. We also had to ride out some
much-needed rain several times during the day.

Due to the gusty winds and a small setup crew, we opted not to put up
the Tribander Yagi this year, sticking to wire antennas and verticals.
We got to use the club's new Tower Trailer, which FM
Ambulance/Sandford Ambulance donated to us. It worked amazingly well,
and one person can easily set it up in under an hour. Teardown with
it is equally easy. It's an amazing asset to our club. We ended up
putting Tim's (K0CRF) Chameleon wire antenna on the tower in a sloper
configuration. We also had a Chameleon vertical also provided by
Tim, and a JPC-12 17 foot vertical I used on 40 meters and 6 meters.

We had a total of 3 operators in the logs this year. Tim K0CRF, Kent
KA0LDG and Erica W7WXR.

Here is our stats for this year,

40 meters CW Total Contacts = 3
20 meters CW Total Contacts = 35
20 meters SSB Total Contacts = 18
15 meters CW Total Contacts = 55
10 meters SSB Total Contacts = 17
6 meters Digi Total Contacts = 35

Total QSOs 163

Kent did all the heavy lifting on 20 and 15 meters CW. Tim got all of
our phone contacts on 10 and 20 meters. I stuck mostly to 6 meters
working FT8, and tried some CW on 40 meters but the band wasn't quite
awake yet. We had a few visitors during the activation including a
reporter from (I believe) WDAY news, as well as our ARRL Assistant
Section Manager, Nancy K0YL. Thank you, Tim, for filling the Public
Info Officer role and speaking with the reporter. If anyone has a
link to the news segment, please share it with the group.

Due to the small crew onsite and threatening weather I decided to skip
the overnight and Sunday operations, and we started teardown around 8
p.m. local time. Again, the tower trailer made this much easier.

Earlier today Seth KC0ODE and Mark KK0V picked up both trailers and
returned them to their storage locations. Thank you both for
transporting those to and from the site. I also got the ARRL Field
Day Bulletin from W1AW copied over RTTY and PSK31.

Just like last year I consider this a very successful Field Day
activation. Also like last year we have some lessons to review to
improve things for 2027. The Tower Trailer makes setup much easier,
however the Tribander requires a larger crew than we had for safe
deployment, especially with moderate winds. We might consider a
lighter antenna that will pair well with the tower trailer, like a
buddy hex antenna. Also, the club's trailer is getting a bit crowded
with items not needed for most activations. Clearing it out to start
set up as well as packing everything back in can be labor intensive
which may deter its use. There are also systems in the trailer,
like power systems, that lack obvious documentation or setup steps.
We always figure it out but it might be nice to ensure easy to follow
setup documentation is available. In future club meetings we would
like to discuss these topics in more detail to improve the user
experience and ensure setup and teardown are easy, especially for a
small number of people, since trends seem to be going that direction.

I'll get our logs submitted to the ARRL in the next few weeks.

Again, thanks to everyone who helped make this activation successful,
and thank you to all those who stopped by, even just to say hi.

73s!
Erica, W7WXR

The July 2026 Contest Corral is available for download from the ARRL Contest Calendar page.

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In this episode of ARRL’s monthly On The Air podcast: ARRL Technical Editor Conrad Trautmann, N2YCH, joins the podcast to talk about what digital modes are, why it’s worth it for hams of all classes to use them, and how to get started. 1

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“Ham radio and the outdoors, together. Hike, bike, paddle, ruck, or go mobile. Every tile counts.” 1

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It’s not too early to gear up and get ready for ARRL Field Day! Field Day 2026 takes place June 27–28 and will bring together more than 30,000 amateur radio operators for one of the most popular on-the-air events in the US and Canada.

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