Amateur Radio Meets Astronomy!
Do you wish to get your amateur radio license? FCVET Next No Charge Amateur Radio exam is on the first Saturday of every month except in July. It is on the second Saturday. Register here.
This group is dedicated to the pursuit of two objectives:
(1) The training, education, and dissemination of the benefits, fun, excitement and value of Amateur Radio.
(2) The training, education, and dissemination of the art and excitement of astronomy.
These hobbies have more value than just what you may think. Both hobbies uses Universal Time to schedule activities. Both hobbies are dependent on the atmosphere in one way or the other. Sunspots are monitored by both hobbies. We will be able to hold these at the same time and yet separately. In a large field is the perfect place to set up a radio, and it is also the perfect place to set up a telescope.
A Facebook group was started and it had 70 members the first week. The news service Amateur Radio Newsline did a story on the new group highlighting the Raleigh Astronomy Club as part of the story. The original story is here. The news service also re-formats the broadcast for the popular internet show Ham Nation. We were in the lead story there. Some of the members of the group monitor with Amateur Radio on the Carolina 440 UHF Link System using the local Raleigh area repeaters and its other extended linking abilities with DMR on TGIF talk group 440, AllStar 42235 and Echolink node 42704. There is a net scheduled for Saturday May 23 5:00 PM EDT/2:00 PM PDT. A net is where “hams” can communicate with other hams.
Amateur radio operators from all over the world can use the internet to connect to each other. My call sign is N4MQU.