Category: News

Officers to be elected at January 9th Meeting

The next meeting of the Madison Area Repeater Association will be held on January 9th @ 7:30PM using Zoom. We have nominees for the offices of President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer and will be holding elections at the meeting. A link to the meeting will be going out in email soon along with the slate of nominees. Please plan to be there for the election. We will also be discussing the date and forming a group to plan our first Hamfest in three years.

2023 Madison Area Repeater Association Annual Dues

CQ CQ CQ MARA Members!

We are about to start a new year and collect Dues for the new year.

First, thanks to all of you who have supported us particularly over the past couple years while we’ve not been able to hold our Hamfest. While we’ve been running a deficit budget during the pandemic with your support we’ve been able to still keep our head above water.

We are about to enter a new year. The dues are the same as they have been for a while. For the Primary member in a household dues are $24 a year. If you have more than one Ham in your household every additional ham is half price or $12 each for the year. You have a couple ways to pay them.

1) Pay them online using a credit card at our Square Space shopping cart. Because of the cost of the transaction is about a dollar when you use a credit card we add $1 to the transaction and charge $25 for a primary membership. Frankly since a first class stamp costs 60 cents now it looks like a pretty good deal to me! To pay using a credit card please go to https://mara-membership.square.site/

2) If you’d rather write a check, it is still $24 for the primary member and $12 each for additional members in a household. Make the Check out to MARA, Inc. and be sure to put your call(s) on the memo line This year, to help speed our processing please mail it directly to the Treasurer. Jeff Fillian, MARA Treasurer, 1034 N Pleasant View Rd, Middleton, WI 53562-3577

I will record your giving on our website. If you have an opportunity to verify the information I have on you please navigate to https://w9hsy.org/admin . Your User Name is your call sign in capital letters, If you do not know your password please click on the “Forgot Password” link and the system will send you an email with an opportunity to reset your password. If you don’t get a link, first check your spam and if it is not there, I may have your email wrong. Send me a note at treasurer@w9hsy.org with your call sign and email address and I’ll correct it.

Your dues help keep us on the air. One of our major expenses is tower rent at the WMTV tower. With it we are able to provide probably the widest coverage in southern Wisconsin. We’ve had hams checking in to Nets from as far as Rockford, IL. This is a tremendous service for casual conversation, support for Public Service events as well as emergency services in Dane and surrounding counties. This coming year we expect to (finally) update the “76” repeater and antenna, that we have at UW hospital and provide an internet connection to that Yaesu System Fusion repeater.

Thanks to all,

73,

Jeff, KC9UNZ

MARA Treasurer

WIRES-X Testing Underway

Due to antenna problems in my current apartment I’ve had to suspend my WIRES-X and Echolink experimentation. I’ll be moving to better space later this spring and may be able to resurrect my testing. Thanks to all who tried it out.

We are testing WIRES-X through a Remote Repeater Link on the 147.150 repeater starting on Jan 14. Since Jeff is using his personal FTM-400 the connection may be down from time to time. Until we get a new W9HSY account confirmed through Yaesu the repeater will alternately identify itself as W9HSY or KC9UNZ depending on whether it is the repeater identifying or my FMT-400 identifying. Also currently WIRES-X is operating only in FM mode NOT DIGITAL. It means we can’t experiment with the C4FM side of things yet but anybody with a normal FM hand held or bigger radio can play.

Currently our plan is to allow for experimentation on FM for a few weeks and then switch it out to Digital for a while to get the reactions. The way we are set up it appears until we set up a second remote radio that is set to Digital we are only able to link one mode at a time.

Here are a few things to note:

  • Connect to the repeater as you normally would. No special settings are necessary. (i.e. 147.150, PL 123.0, Split 0.6)
  • This will only work on FM
  • You will need a radio with a Keypad that can transmit DTMF tones when you key the mic.
  • Any connection you create will automatically disconnect in 10 minutes. You can always reconnect but we don’t want it to stay connected indefinately. Please remember however to disconnect (DTMF *) when you are done.
  • Some commands to remember
    • * – Disconnect
    • #66666 – Connection Status
    • Connecting to a room/node
      • #21080 – America Link
      • #21667 – Wisconsin Link
      • #62086 – If you are travelling and can connect to a WIRES-X repeater use this command to connect back to the Madison Repeater. (This number will change when the New Registration is complete)
  • A couple of helpful lists

If you have any questions send them to wires-x@w9hsy.org and we’ll see if we can answer them. And let’s chat about this on our Thursday MARA Net to share our experiences.

January 6, 2022

I don’t have the check-ins yet for this net meeting but you will want to listen to the ARRL Audio News for December 31, 2021. If you don’t want to listen to all of it go to about minute 6 where you will hear a shout out to the Madison Area Repeater Association!

ARRL Audio News for December 31, 2021

Madison Area Repeater Association January 2022 Membership Meeting

We are holding the January 2022 MARA Membership Meeting virtually again this month using Zoom. We will meet on January 10 at 7:30 PM. You can connect to the meeting using your computer, your smart phone or your plain old phone.  You should have received an email with the Zoom Connection information, if not please send an email to Treasurer@w9hsy.org with your name and Call Sign and he will send you a copy of the connection information. 

At this meeting we will be presenting the Financials for 2021 as well as the Budget for 2022 and nominations and election of officers for 2022. See you there. 

New Membership Managment Software

We’ve created and installed new membership management software on our website. We are in the process of entering profiles for all the members of MARA and will soon send out an email on how to access your information. Your profile will include all the information normally found on our membership form along with information on current dues payments and donations (we won’t be entering records going back more than a year!). There will be one catch going forward. Each membership record will require an email address. We have found that we do not have current email addresses on everyone. We’ll let you know soon if we have a problem with your record. You will be able to see a record of your recent payments to MARA as well as keep your contact information up to date. As soon as we get the records up to date we’ll send out an email with instructions on how to access your information.

MARA Net Meeting

MARA has begun weekly net meetings again after a long “vacation”. We will meet every Thursday Evening at 8PM on the 147.150 repeater. We’ll check in, report on repeater news (if there is any), listen to the ARRL Audio News for the week and then brag, ask/answer questions, share ideas, in a round robin style discussion. You don’t have to be a member to join in, although we hope you will be inspired to join and help support the repeaters.

January 2021 MARA Membership Meeting

We are holding the January 2021 MARA Membership Meeting virtually again this month using Zoom. We will meet on January 11 at 7:30 PM.  For a Zoom invitation please email a request to treasurer@wglaca.org and he’ll send one along to your inbox.

At this meeting we will be presenting the Financials for 2020 as well as the Budget for 2021 and nominations and election of officers for 2021. See you there.