President’s Message – Mar2025
President’s Message – Mar2025
Please join me in welcoming Roger McEntarfer, N9RM to the TARC board of directors. Roger was elected by acclamation vote of the members present at the February 12th club meeting to fill the vacancy on our board. Welcome Roger and thank you for being an active and contributing member to the club.
OK, this is it. If you have not yeat paid your 2025 club dues, then this will be the last communication you receive from TARC. We will be dropping you from the club’s membership roster and unsubscribing you from our Groups.io message service.
The charter bus trip to HamCation on February 8th was well attended with 23 riders. See the article by Frank W2XYZ in this issue of The Communicator for details and pictures.
Thanks also go out to Rich KQ4APW for suggesting TARC logo’d baseball caps to the club at last month’s meeting. Rich has taken over 30 orders for the caps and he placed an order with our vendor for them in mid-February. Hopefully they will be received in time for distribution to members at the March 12th club meeting. Our membership also approved of matching donations, up to a maximum of $500, on a dollar for dollar bases made by club members to the ARRL Education and Technology Program fund. Our online store now has product ordering options to pay for ordered baseball caps and to make individual donations to the ARRL fund.
Our intrepid club hamfester also is deserving of honorable mention this month. Steve NS4P spent the week in Orlando as a HamCation volunteer and also working a table in the hamfest area selling equipment that had been donated to the club since last summer. Steve delivered just over $2,000 in proceeds to the club treasurer at our regular monthly meeting in February. Thank you Steve for all you do!
Congratulations to Tony KX1G for proposing and hosting the first TARC DXCC challenge last month. Five club members achieved the goal of making 100 separate and unique DX contacts during the month to win one of Tony’s challenge mugs. Full details of the winners can be found in Tony’s March Communicator column. Tony also proved himself to be a good prognosticator!
The March edition of QST had an article from our ARRL CEO David Minister NA2AA titled, “A Callout to Radio Clubs” that really caught my eye. Tony must have read the article because one of the ideas to invigorate the “ham club” experience was to have sub-groups that focus on specific aspects of the hobby. These sub-groups would then serve to promote and help club members learn about some new aspect of the hobby. TARC has kind of been doing this with our occasional Fox Hunts, POTA activations and challenges, and (now that we have all the gear) satellite contacts. The article also suggested that club meetings be less of a business meeting and more of a social and hobby related exchange among club members. I plan to work with our board of directors in the coming months to find ways to make these ideas more of a reality at our monthly club meetings.