As March winds down, I thought an update might be in order. This coming weekend, starting 5pm Friday (local) is the CQ WPX SSB DX contest. For those that enjoy HF contacts with DX stations, this is a major opportunity to fulfill your greatest DX desires. Hundreds of thousands of DX stations ready to work, all on at the same time! Contests are the best way to many DX contacts quickly.

You might reject the idea of participating in a contest, not being the competitive type or whatever, but contests are the perfect venue to really work DX, and are not all that complicated.

Each contest has it rules, and a specific "EXCHANGE." In the CQ WPX contests, the exchange is a signal report PLUS a contact serial number. Your 1st contact is "1", 2nd contact is "2", etc. All signal reports are "59". We can have a discussion some day of why contest signal reports are almost always "59", but suffice it to say here is there are very good practical reasons as to why. So how does the typical DX contact call go? For an example, suppose you dial across CN2R from Marrakesh, Morroco on 15M:

So if we started up a club net, what would it be about? What time, what day, what repeater? Who wants to be net control? We could have a rotating net control.
Preambles?

It could be the W7AZ Thursday rag chewing & project net, 7pm.

We could change the subject every week.

Thoughts? Ideas?

NOTE: the below is the original planning document written before the Jan. 2013 club meeting. See attached Comments and Files for progress reporting and additional information.
The first club meeting for 2013 was well attended, and we kicked off 2013 with a list of projects and events.

Red Cross Amateur Station:

Previously our shack in the Red Cross was in a very small room off the main lobby of the building. The Red Cross needed it for other purposes, so they gave us a larger room in the back of the building. We had to move all the indoor equipment, make a new entrance for antenna coax, etc. Equipment is in boxes and stacked up. We are in the process of turning the new room into a 3-4 station emergency comm center we can also use for non-emergency amateur radio.

Existing tower and antennas stayed where it was. Coax is through garage door/back wall for all antennas.

Yet To Complete:

Install ground rods for tower(no visible grounding so we must assume there aren't any)
Mount entry ground bar and lightning arrestors
Install