Our goal as a club is to grow and educate the central Wyoming two-way radio community. We will accomplish this by offering friendship, mentoring, education and fun opportunities to learn new skills and practice old ones.
CWARC has cleared some major milestones already this year. So far we have:
- Formed a board of directors consisting of a President (Hannes Stueckler), Secretary (Charles Burd) and Treasurer (Dominick Weigel).
- Formalized the club as a Wyomoing non profit corporation
- Received 501 C3 non profit status from the IRS
- Received a grant of more than $25,000 for teaching, tools, marketing, and radio repeaters from the LOR Foundation.
- Held a very successful public outreach with an ARRL field day gathering which included food, friendship and fun.
- Held several meetings that included seasoned radio operators and beginners.
- Signed up several new members with very little radio knowledge who want to learn more.
Now that we have a foundation of members and regular meetings, it is time to move to phase 2. We need to start offering opportunities and support for education. My plan, which is open for discussion, is to:
- Purchase several home study curriculums for the technician radio license, and possibly some for general and extra as well.
- Offer a deal for Club members to study the curriculum, and be refunded the full cost of the class when they pass their license exam.
- Hold free form, Q&A, or guided study sessions on two evenings a month. This could support licensing study, or cover other technical issues such as setting up a raspberry pi, programming an arduino, or building and tuning antennas. Of course, these are just examples, to be adjusted according to the needs of you, the members.
- Conduct Ham radio testing sessions about 3 times a year.
We will need Elmers (experienced radio operators) to step up and help with these efforts. I'm thinking one weekday evening every couple of months doesn't sound like too big of an ask. Many hands make light work. Contact me and let me know when you are available.
Once all of that starts to come together, the final phase for this year needs to be the purchasing of repeaters. The details of my plan are below. I would like to put it up to a vote to be sure that club members support this idea. Please read the details below and contact me with any questions
Problem statement: There are already too many Ham repeaters in the area that are rarely used.
Solution: Don't put up a Ham repeater for the club, and focus efforts that get more people using 2-way radio. This will be accomplished in 3 ways.
- Education. This is addressed in the previous Phase detailed above.
- Use grant funding to purchase up to 3 GMRS repeaters. GMRS radio is a great introduction to 2-way communication, and it is relatively easy and inexpensive to get started. We will provide a maximum benefit to the community with these repeaters, since there are no GMRS repeaters currently covering the club area.
- Use grant funding to purchase at least two Meshtastic Nodes, which would allow non-licensed people to use their cell phones to communicate on a privately controlled network that is independent of the cell phone infrastructure. Learn more about meshtastic at https://meshtastic.org/
Please carefully consider my proposed plan for the final phase this year and let me know if you support it or if you think that there is a better way to bring more radio operators online.
Hannes
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