The party is held at the Cameron Center, located at 288 Greenmeadow Drive, just off of Lynn Road in Thousand Oaks, not for from the Oaks Mall. The map below shows the relative location. Late arrivals should park out on the street rather than block the drive.

Holiday Party Raffle

Hugh Bosma, AE6YC

You don.t want to miss out on this years White ticket prizes. Grand prize - The Yaesu FT-857D is the world.s smallest HF/VHF/UHF multimode amateur transceiver. It is the successor to the earlier FT-857. But the new D version adds the 60 meter ham band and includes the formerly optional DSP-2 Digital Signal Processing Unit. Second prize - The Alinco DR-235 features a full-featured 220 MHz 25 watt FM transceiver with an alphanumeric display with 100 memory channels, CTCSS encode and decode are standard. I.m sure our president has a few other surprises to throw in as well.

Red ticket prize is a new 2 meter mobile donated by our very own AA6JR, many thanks Jeff.

Remember you must be present to win the Red ticket prize. The lucky winners of a White ticket prize need not be present. White tickets are $10 each, 3 for $25, 7 for $50, and a crisp Ben Franklin will buy 15 chances.

Bozo Repeater

Hugh Bosma, AE6YC

You may have noticed the 147.885 on Rasnow ridge is sounding much better these days. Like many of us, old age and a few component failures had Bozo gasping for fresh electrons. Dave Norman, N6JMI has a full plate and has turned the reins over to KQ6K. Eddy.s team has been hard at work. The repeater has been replaced with a dual mode Motorola Quantar. They also identified and replaced a bad feed line jumper at the antenna, and have the duplexer performing to factory specifications. Things are a bit spread out at the repeater site but the coverage is vastly improved. The team is busy getting the system packaged and fine tuning. Please give Bozo a try and let us know how well we are doing. Eddy or one of the team is usually monitoring. If you miss us on the air please drop Eddy a note at KQ6K@pacbell.net.

ARRL Exam Fee Increases to $15 January 1.

Jeff Reinhardt, AA6JR

The ARRL has announced FCC Exam Fees for all Amateur Radio license classes will increase to $15 in 2009. CVARC has been affiliated with the ARRL VEC since the inception of the Volunteer Examination program.. The ARRL provides CVARC and other examination groups with exam booklets, FCC license applications, standardized answer sheets and Certificates of Successful Completion for candidates. The League also pays for shipping exam materials to and from its Connecticut headquarters. Following an exam, ARRL personnel process each exam package and electronically post the results to the FCC database.

4:1 Balun Construction Project

Hugh Bosma AE6YC

There was a surprising amount of interest in the 4:1 Balun construction project. We will keep the signups open until the first of September for those who weren't at the meeting. The signup sheet was passed around at the meeting. If you would like to participate, please email AE6YC at Hrbcrb@aol.com with your name, call sign, and whether you are a club member or not. THe cost is $10.00 for members, $15.00 for non-members.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the next meeting.

Operation Golden Gaurdian/The Great Southern California Shakeout

Neil Waybright, AF6CD

The organization chart in the article Ken wrote for the October issue of the newsletter came out so small that it was difficult to read. That was due to the two column format of the newsletter. Here the article is in a single column format where the chart is easier to make out.

The article is here as a PDF so it is easier to read.

Results of the June 8, 2008 CVARC VE Session

Jeff Reinhardt AA6JR - CVARC Exam Coordinator

The CVARC VE session of June 8 served eleven candidates. Among those who passed elements were:

Thanks to the VEs who gave their time to make this CVARC session possible, George Tamayo WD6EJO; Hugh Bosma AE6YC and we were assisted by Peter Grace KB1CVH.

The next session is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Sunday, August 13, 2008 at the East Valley station.

Parking At East County Sheriff's Station

We have filled up the Visitor's Parking area at the East County Sheriff's Station (ECSS) during our last couple of CVARC General Meetings due to the excellent turnouts that we have had. If the Visitor's Parking area is filled when you arrive for a CVARC meeting, you can park in the Employee's Only parking area which is to the immediate right of the Visitor's Parking area as you drive into the sheriff's station. There may be people coming to the sheriff's station during our club meeting looking for police department assistance. For that reason we should not park in the Visitor's Parking area "15 Minute Only" parking spaces.

Ken Larson
CVARC Operations Chairman

The Conejo Valley Amateur Radio Club, (CVARC ) sponsors amateur radio license classes throughout the year. The Technician Class license, which is the entry level license for amateur radio is presented five times a year and each class lasts for eight weeks Classes are held on Tuesday evenings from 7:00 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. and are free. The only cost related to this class is the cost for the Ham Radio License Manual which is $25.00 plus tax. Students who wish to purchase this manual through the CVARC class may do so at the time of class registration. This book is a course manual presented by the Amateur Radio Relay League. The new manual covers the new FCC test requirements for all Technician exams.

Classes are taught in Thousand Oaks in classroom facilities provided as a community service by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The current classes are held at 3645 Moorpark Road, in Thousand Oaks. This is on Moorpark Road, one block North of Olsen Road.

Classes are open to all ages, and CVARC is proud to report that our graduates include 7 year old children and 84 year old adults. There are no age limits imposed by the FCC on the Amateur Radio license, and both men and women participate in the magic of radio.

Whether you are interested in radio communications with other amateur operators around the world, or just want to have your radio license for emergency preparedness, the Technician Class license is your entry to amateur radio. If you are interested, or want to know more about amateur radio, call Karl Moody at (805) 523-0622 for information regarding the next class.

The Conejo Valley Amateur Radio Club (CVARC) has scheduled examinations for FCC Amateur Radio (Ham Radio) licenses six times during 2008.

Exams are conducted by accredited Volunteer Examiners and sessions are sponsored by CVARC. Exams are conducted for all FCC Amateur Radio license classes under the supervision of the ARRL VEC. No pre-registration is necessary, walk-ins are welcome. The Exams listed below will be conducted at the Ventura County Sheriff's East County Station at 2101 E. Olsen Road between Hwy 23 and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library at 8:30 a.m.

Candidates need to bring:

1. A form of government-issued photo I.D. (eg: Driver's License, Passport or School District ID).
2. Social Security Number or Taxpayer ID or FRN.
3. The original and a photocopy of any existing FCC license or CSCE notice of passing an exam element.
4. $14 Exam fee (exact change preferred).
5. Pens, pencils, calculator. Calculator memory must be cleared prior to exam

2008 Exam Schedule:

• February 10
• April 13
• June 8
• August 10
• October 12
• December 14

Should there be questions not addressed above, please contact Jeff Reinhardt AA6JR at aa6jr@sbcglobal.net or phone 818-706-3853.

The club has been successful in acheiving a reliable and high performance web site for the benefit of our members. Looking at the web site's performance over time shows that we have made dramatic improvements in the site's response time and availability. I'd like to thank each one of you that helped me in these efforts and let me know about outages as early as possible so that I could work on them promptly. Your efforts have made a difference.

For those that noticed the little jump in February, it was a result of extremely high net activity at the site I measure the latency from. The CVARC site was fine. My site was heavily loaded while I was copying all of the files for another site up to the hosting provider. That copying phase is over so the spike it caused shouldn't happen again.

Graph of web site access latency - lower is better

Thanks,

Neil Waybright, webmaster