News and Upcoming Events

Our new club year will begin soon

Our meeting on Tuesday, September 15 marks the beginning of our new club year. Our speaker for the month will be Tom Williams WA1MBA. He’ll be talking about the most common reason for “splatter” on the bands: Inter-Modulation Distortion (IMD) in transmit and other circuits, and he’ll show how to remove it by use of Pre-Distortion. The meeting will be at 7:30 in our usual location, the Wellesley Police Department at 485 Washington St. (Rte 16) in Wellesley. As always, our meetings are open to anyone and everyone who has an interest in ham radio.

Field Day 2026

On June 27 and 28, our club set up antennas, radios, and all the supporting gear we needed to put six complete in-the-field ham radio stations on the air from Needham (Mass.) Memorial Park. We joined with other ham radio operators from all over the world to take part in an emergency preparedness exercise to practice setting up ham radio stations in temporary locations, as would be necessary in emergency situations such as hurricanes or blackouts.

Our stations communicated with others by using our radios together with computers to send information using highly efficient data transmission modes, as well as traditional modes like voice and Morse code (“CW”). Portability and quick deployment were the goals. We used a variety of antenna types: long wires, portable collapsible vertical antennas, and folding horizontal antennas designed to be aimed at specific areas in the country and the world. This year we decided to run all of our stations from batteries in order to practice deployment when power isn’t available from the usual electric utilities. We showed ourselves that we were up to the task and ready to serve the public in case of real emergencies. Our next newsletter will include photos and a more extensive description of the weekend’s activities.