Category: News

A new year is almost upon us and you can renew your membership anytime now for 2025. We’ve not changed our yearly dues for 2025. It is still $24 for the first (or primary) member in a household and $12 for each additional member.

This year you can pay by check, by credit card or through your bank using Zelle. For more information and details go to our membership renewal page.

It’s been a good year. We are recovering from the hit we took during the COVID disruption where we were unable to hold our hamfest and we expect to surpass where we were before 2020 which will give us the opportunity to provide more services.

During 2024 our paid membership rose to 83, a number higher than I’ve seen since I became treasurer 9 years ago.

We’ve added internet at the WMTV repeater site which has allowed us to connect through WIRES-X to Americas-Link and other nodes on the digital side of our Fusion repeater and check in to the D-Star Wisconsin net as well as connect to some of the other reflectors available on D-Star. We’ve added a new section under “Nets” on our web site where we are starting to catalog interesting nets that you can check into through these two repeaters.

We continue to improve the functionality of these repeaters. We found that now that they are used more sometimes there is cross talk between them and we are working on correcting this. It is a good problem to have. If they weren’t being used there would be no problem! We expect to add some new filtering between the repeaters soon so we can have them both on full power and working independently.

In addition to the regular Dane/Iowa County ARES/RACES Net Meeting every Wednesday at 8 PM on the “15” and the Monthly (I hope we can make it more frequent) MARA Net on the First Wednesday at 7:15 (also on the “15“) we’ve been able to be the primary repeater for the Badger Challenge for a couple years now. And since we have space where we host our website we’ve given space for the Dane/Iowa County ARES/RACES group to host there site on our server as well.

Your membership ( as well as your help and participation at our hamfest) enables us to support amateur radio in our area and to maintain and improve the support we provide for the future. Please also note that when we elect officers for 2025 at our January meeting you must be paid in full to participate in voting.

Renew or Join today. Details on how to do so can be found on our membership renewal page.

Jeff, KC9UNZ, Treasurer, MARA

It’s time for us to meet again! Monday, September 9, 2024 @ 7:30 PM.

You have two choices either virtually or in person. As usual we meet in person at UW Space Place at 2300 S. Park Street, Madison. If you are unable to be there in person you can join us virtually. For information on joining the virtual meeting please send an email to president@w9hsy.org and he’ll send you the virtual connection information. If you are a member of MARA you should have already received an email with this information. If not, send the president an email and we’ll get the connection info to you.

We will NOT meet in person this month on September 18, instead we will meet virtually using Zoom starting at 7:30 PM. A new meeting invitation is being sent out, if you do not get the invitation please send a request to kc9unz@arrl.net.

I guess that all we really have to say. We have been joining together for an FM net on the MARA “15” every first Wednesday of the month for a few months. Now it is time to exercise our D-Star repeater. We will have a Net every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 7:15 pm on the MARA D-Star repeater on 145.305. For now it will be local only since we don’t yet have an internet connection at the repeater site but we will be able to test and exercise our D-Star equipment.

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.

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
  • Active WIRES-X nodes: https://www.yaesu.com/jp/en/wires-x/id/active_node.php
  • Active WIRES-X Rooms: https://www.yaesu.com/jp/en/wires-x/id/active_room.php

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.

If you are looking for the id Numbers for Wires-x groups to connect to you can find them here: https://www.yaesu.com/jp/en/wires-x/id/active_room.php