Welcome to June. Boy, how’d we get here already. On a good note, as far as I know all of the Desert RATS have made it through. Yea Team.

Things are picking up and June is a busy month. Starting off on the 12th and 13th is the VHF Contest. It covers everything from 6 Meters (50 MHz) and up. All bands and all modes, just no repeaters, simplex only. On FM, try 146.520 or 446.000. Go find a hilltop and give a shout.

June 15th is our June RATS meeting, via Zoom. Gavin will send you the secret password to put into your decoder ring. The subject will be transmission lines and connectors. More on that further down. Don’t miss that. It’s something I get a lot of questions on.

The end of the month, June 26th & 27th is ARRL Field Day. Always a big event. Like last year we will be operating from our home QTHs using our own gear. You can operate any mode you wish any way you want to do it. Portable, Battery powered, Generator powered, Solar powered, QRP (5 watts or less). Just about anything goes.

By The Way… early next week we will be sending out a special reminder and kind of Cliff Notes on how to score Field Day, so don’t worry about that bit. And Joe KJ8O will be collecting all of your log submissions for The Club score. You can snail mail or email your log. Oh, I forgot to mention. You can make 2 submissions to Field Day, your own personal score you can send to the ARRL if you wish and then you may send one to Joe and it goes to the Clubs total score. If you are a Club member, you can download sample log sheets in PDF or Excel format from our document library.

So even if you take your HT and make one contact on 2M simplex (RATS board members will be monitoring 146.520), with all of the multipliers and bonus points, you can give the club about 125 points. Someone on 20M SSB would have to work hours to make that many points.

The important thing is just to have fun. If you don’t have a HF station and want to try it out, give the board a shout ahead of time and we’ll see who we can hook you up with.

Also way out in October, and we’ve told you about this, if you read your newsletters, we have set a date for the Desert RATS BBQ. Mark your calendar for October 23rd at Lake Cahuilla. You will just need to pay for the entrance fee, but the BBQ is on the club. Some of us will even be spending the weekend at the lake. Join us.

One last thing. Do you shop on Amazon? If  you sign up for Amazon Smile (it’s free), a percentage of everything your buy goes to The Desert RATS. How cool is that? Signing up is really easy – see our website for details.

See you on the bands.

73

Glenn WB6RLC

President Desert RATS ARC