Category: News

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

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. 

There are a couple ways to renew.

• Send in a check to: MARA, 3835 County Road A, Stoughton, WI 53589-3913. $24 for the first member in a family and $12 for each additional family member.
• Or pay by credit card. Go to https://mara-membership-2022.square.site/ Please note: to defray the credit card transaction cost we have added $1 to the cost of a primary membership.

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 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.

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. 

Please note: the 15 repeater will be used in support of the SET on October 5, 2019. For normal FM traffic please consider using our repeater at 76