ISRA Calendar

Our purpose is to advance the radio art and skills, help club members and others, and have fun doing it. 

We meet weekly on our 2 meter net, and monthly in person at our club meetings. Feel free to participate.

Club Update: 

Greetings,
We had a good meeting last night (23  April 2026) at Idaho Pizza. We had sixteen or so folks come and several were new to the group. Two were new Hams. That was great to see. Nils, W7BFN, with Chris Cox’s, N7COX,  help, did a presentation on DMR Radio. The Star Ham Radio Group has gotten heavily into DMR over the last couple of months. Nils demonstrated how to contact someone through the DMR repeater belonging to Valley Wide React. And someone from Japan responded. Nils then explained a bit about how DMR is set up. Basically it is Narrow Band Digital and has two time slots per Narrow Band Channel. There are over 300,000 users globally with 130,000 in the US. DMR has over 1700 talk groups. Nils mentioned that the Star Ham Radio Group set up their own Talk Group as well. DMR operates over the internet but can also go over repeaters or simplex.
To get on DMR Nils said you need a radio and he recommended the Baofeng DM32 that is currently $59 on Amazon. You then need to obtain a DMR number which you get from RadioID.net. Using the radio programming software you load in Talk Groups, one per memory channel on your radio. If you don’t want to go through a DMR repeater, a hotspot such as Aursinc ($102.99 from Amazon) is an option to go from your radio to the internet and talk with folks around the world. For more information on Nils presentation or DMR, contact Nils or Chris Cox.
For next month’s meeting we will be doing a help session for members and non-members to bring radios in or to get answers to Ham Radio related questions. Guidance on this will be forthcoming later as we get closer to the meeting.
The club will be doing Field Day again this year. It will again be at the Pavilion behind the State of Idaho campus off of Chinden Blvd. Thanks to Dave, KK7RPZ , for reserving it again for us. We are planning on doing the same thing we did the last two years. BBQ provided by the club. Bring your own radios to operate how you wish or just come to see what other folks are doing. More details on Field Day later since we are two months out. Field Day planning will also be covered at the next meeting.
73
Bart

Reminder, we now have club patches!  If you want a club patch, see Alicia at the next meeting.  Here is  photo.  It has an iron-on backing.  Price is $8 each.  

Again a Reminder: we have a weekly ISRA Club Radio Net on Sunday nights at 7:00 PM.  All are welcome to check in.  The ISRA Repeater is 146.94 with a PL of 100.  We look forward to hearing you on the air!

73,   Bart

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