We had a different kind of meeting today. In lieu of training, we discussed several things that will be affecting the club moving forward.
For starters, we used the new Murray repeater located at the Murray Animal Shelter for our check-in net this evening. The repeater sounded great and nearly all checkins were totally clean and full quieting. Please take a look at our Club Repeaters page for more information about the new repeater. While this repeater has a power output of only 40W, it has an effective radiated power of around 300W due to the gain antenna and the antenna's placement at the 180 foot level of the tower that was on this site. This repeater provides an excellent resource for 1.25m communications across the entire Salt Lake valley.
To show our thanks for Murray City for sponsoring this repeater, Dan (N7XDL) proposed that we take our next scheduled club meeting next week, 13 May 2021, starting at 6:30 PM and meet at the repeater site to clean up the area. Please bring weed whackers, rakes, work gloves, saws, and whatever else you think you might need to help out. Dan will be sending out an announcement via e-mail to the club membership regarding this scheduling change. I will be deferring my discussion of the legal ramifications of our favorite Chinese radios until the following week's general club meeting.
Dan was also talking with Joey (KI7BQM), who is the Murray City emergency manager and our fire department representative. Joey informs us that Murray City will be adding some amateur radio equipment to the city owned communications truck, including a dual band antenna mounted on the extendable mast. We will do a little presentation on that vehicle at a later date.
Murray City has also started their CERT training again, and will be putting on a special class for MARC members. There will be no charge for this training, which will consist of five sessions, typically about two hours each. Personal equipment for CERT response will also be available for purchase, but is not required. Additional information about this series of classes will be made available when it gets a little closer.
On to a more personal note, Dan, our fearless leader and the founder and president of MARC has been selected to be the new Salt Lake County ARES Emergency Coordinator. Dan expects this to take quite a bit of his time and is concerned about impacts it may have on the operation of MARC. He will be sending out several surveys over the next couple of weeks to get feedback from the club membership about how this should be handled, including things such as a change in the board of MARC and who and how the monthly training sessions will be handled going forward.
Please watch for these surveys and respond in a timely fashion.
Thanks to everyone who participated in tonight's meeting. We had sixteen people in attendance, which, while not a new record, is still a good turnout. We would love to see some of the less active members start attending these Zoom sessions until such time as we are able to meet in person again.