Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club,
My name is Dave Swanson, KG5CCI, and on behalf of myself and Wyatt Dirks, AC0RA, I'd like to say hello to everyone. Wyatt and I are part of the K6R team that will be camping on Santa Rosa Island inside the CM93 grid square, on September 16th-18th in hopes of handing out that rare grid on Amateur Radio Satellites. We have assembled all the required equipment, secured all the necessary permissions, and arranged for travel and campsites on the Island, and we're just sorting out the final details now. One of those details we were hoping to find a volunteer from the club to help with.
We are in need of a expedition 'Pilot' of sorts to help us relay information back to the AMSAT Mailing list from the Island. We'd like to be able to update chasers as to who we have in the logs, so they know they made it. Since we'll be well outside cellular range on Santa Rosa, our best method of doing this is the K6TZ 220mhz repeater on Diablo Peak, on Santa Cruz Island. We will have 220mhz radios with us for this exact reason, and we think this will be the best method to get information out to folks.
So, if you have a reliable link into the 223.920 repeater on Diablo Peak, will be around the weekend of the 16th-18th, and want to copy and relay a bunch of information for a mini-dxpedition of sorts, please email me back at dave@druidnetworks.com with your availability and willingness to help, and we'll discuss the specifics of what is required.
On a side, but somewhat related note, on Saturday the 17th between 2PM and 4PM PDT we plan on doing some terrestrial VHF/UHF work from the 1200ft MSL 'Black Mountain' on Santa Rosa Island, inside CM93. We'll have a small 2 meter and 70cm beam with us, and we'd love to make some simplex contacts on the high bands from the rare grid. If you have a station that is up for the challenge, email us with your details and we'll try and set a schedule.
Thanks again everyone, we look forward to coming out west and we'll post any further updates to our QRZ page at https://www.qrz.com/lookup/k6r as the launch date gets closer.
73!
Dave, KG5CCI and Wyatt, AC0RA