TAOS AMATEUR RADIO CLUB
Meeting Minutes: March 11, 2020
The meeting was called to order at 6:07 PM by President Mike Kittredge, at the Taos County EOC, after a great pot luck.
Attendees: Mike Kittredge, Gary Ferguson, Craig Grillio, Glen Romero, Shelia Shortell, Greg Medina, Dan Pritchard, Brian Williams, Tim Henson
Voted to accept the February 12, 2020 minutes with revision to name corrections.
President’s report:
ARRL testing occurred March 7 with five licenses earned, 2 Tech, 2 General, and 1 Extra.
The next test is June 13, 2020 right before the Extra questions change.
Mike led the discussion on the need to have ARRL books to lend to members for license study. The suggestion was to buy 4 books for each license type, each time the questions changed, that way we will have the books for their 4 year life. Also suggested we should start with the new extra questions when they rollout 7/1/2020. Then is subsequent years Tech and General purchases of 4 books each. General agreement, but we did not vote on the discussion.
501c3 Status is we will use the postcard form to file our taxes for the 9 questions on the form and will become an IRS recognized non-profit. Thanks to Tom T for the research on this topic.
Treasurer’s Report:
Glen Romero, we have $2,531.75 in the bank. We paid 2 government bills.
New Business:
Brian Williams gave us an update on future happenings on Picuris and San Antonio (SA) Mountains. Rocky Mountain Radio Club is putting up a D-Star repeater on SA mountain. Digital UHF. There is fiber to SA mountain. TARC would like to piggyback as much as possible.
Brian also indicated there is a broken microwave link from SA to Picuris to be fixed this summer.
Brian continued to discuss the plan to add a DMR repeater on Picuris linked to Colorado and New Mexico. Brian also stated the need for solar backup update on SA.
In general discussion noted repeaters with the call sign NM5ML in the repeater book are linked for the state megalink, when you transmit on “1” you transmit on perhaps “30” repeaters all over the state.
Mike reminded us that the TaosARC Net is on the 4th Wednesday of the month at 7:00 PM. Tune in to the Picuris repeater “Taos (Picuris Mountain) 147.120+, 67.0 “ and join in.
Craig Grillio made a motion to adjourn at 7:01 PM, 2nd by Shelia Shortell, unanimously approved.
The formal meeting ended and many members continued into a workshop for about 40 minutes with Chirp programming HT’s and Q&A.