ICARC Documents

• ICARC Articles of Incorporation
• ICARC Certificate of Incorporation
• ICARC Bylaws

Membership

The current ICARC Membership Roster is available here.

Membership in the Iowa City Amateur Radio Club is open to all who have an interest in amateur radio. An FCC license is not required for membership, but if you are not currently licensed, we will help you pass the tests and become licensed if you so desire. Also, membership in the ARRL is highly recommended, but is not required. To join, please print and fill out the Membership Application and mail it to the address on the form, along with a check for your dues.

(Note: If you have trouble printing the Membership Application form, an Adobe Acrobat PDF version is available here.)

Payment of dues is required for membership. The ICARC dues schedule, as enacted at the meeting of February 9, 2005, follows (all amounts are per calendar year, prorated for part-year membership for new members only):

Individual	$15.00
Family	$20.00
Senior (age 75 and up)	$10.00
Senior Family (age 75 and up)	$15.00
Student	$10.00

Membership dues are now the sole source of income for the Iowa City Amateur Radio Club, and support the activities of the club, including the WØJV repeater (a very expensive undertaking), the Field Day potluck dinner, programs and refreshments for the regular meetings, and other activities as authorized by vote of the memberhsip.

2008 Club Officers (Board of Directors)

• Notes:
  • The Board of Directors of the Corporation, under By-Laws Article V,
    consists of the above listed Club Officers.
  • The Vice President also serves as webmaster and club equipment manager.

HamRad Officers

• Notes:
  • Rich Bingham, WWØQ, is serving as Interim HamRad Director.

History

The Iowa City Amateur Radio Club (ICARC) has been in existence since at least 1933, when it was first affiliated with the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association for Amateur Radio. The club callsign, WØJV, belonged to a long-time club member, George Carson, who was a Physics Professor at the University of Iowa. The club obtained it as a memorial callsign following his death. The callsign is used on the club’s two-meter repeater on 146.25/146.85 MHz, as well as for various club events, such as the annual Field Day exercise.

Activities

Monthly Meetings
ICARC normally meets at 7:30 PM on the second Wednesday of each month, at the meeting room in the Grant Wood Area Education Agency building, located at 200 Holiday Road in Coralville. Meetings consist of a brief business meeting followed by a program of interest to radio amateurs. Note: Before the meeting, some of the members get together for an informal meal and chat at the Arby's Restaurant at 801 1st Avenue in Coralville. Please feel free to join us there beginning between 6:00 and 6:15 PM.

Following is a list of meeting dates and the slate of programs that Activities Chairman Rich Haendel, W3ACO, has lined up for 2008:

January 9	Working the International Space Station with a 2m hand-held by W3ACO.
February 13	Antenna analysis using EZNEC software by W3ACO.
March 12	3YØX DXpedition video.
April 9	W3ACO on receivers, including the new Elecraft K3.
May 14	Field day preparation, followed by the BS7H DXpedition video.
June 11	Field Day finalization.
July 9	Mini swap meet, euphemistically known as "Junk in the trunk".
August 13	To be determined.
September 10	To be determined.
October 8	To be determined.
November 12	To be determined.
December 10	To be determined.

Minutes of past meetings are available on the "ICARC Meeting Minutes Index" page.

WØJV Repeater
ICARC sponsors the WØJV repeater which operates on an input/output frequency pair of 146.25 MHz / 146.85 MHz. The repeater is located atop Rienow Hall on the University of Iowa Campus, is open to all, and features an open autopatch.

The new unit's autopatch has the ability to do memory dialing. If anyone would like to utilize this feature, please provide us a list of the numbers you would like to have stored. You can email your list to the club email address shown in the "Welcome" section on the home page, or bring it to a club meeting.

With a simple programming command, the repeater can be tone squelch (CTCSS) activated, although there are no immediate plans to turn this on. The tone frequency that the Iowa Repeater Council suggests for our area is 192.8 Hz, and that is what will be used if we do activate this feature.

Sunday Evening Net
ICARC sponsors the Johnson County Sunday Evening Net which meets at 7:30 PM every Sunday evening on the WØJV repeater on 146.85 MHz. In case of malfunction of the Iowa City repeater, the first alternate net frequency is the Coralville repeater on 147.15 MHz, which requires a 192.8 Hz PL tone. In case neither repeater is functional, we will meet on the national simplex frequency, 146.52 Mhz.

Net control responsibilities are rotated monthly through volunteers from the ICARC membership. Information exchanged includes ham radio-related news, club activities, hamfest announcements and equipment for sale. Please check in whenever you can.

(For Net Control Stations: A suggested net control script is available here. You can download a log sheet in PDF format by right-clicking this link and choosing "Save Target as...". This log sheet has columns for each station's callsign, name and QTH, as well as columns to check as you acknowledge each station, and to indicate that the station has traffic (QTC). Finally, for those stations with traffic, a column is provided to summarize the traffic.)

Severe Weather Net
The HamRad director may activate the severe weather net on the WØJV repeater on 146.85 MHz when weather conditions warrant. Trained weather spotters may be deployed to various areas of the county to observe weather conditions and report their observations to net control. Please see the HamRad pages for more information.

Field Day
Field Day is the "big event" for the ICARC. It provides us a great opportunity to have a lot of fun, while improving our skills in setting up emergency stations, and operating under conditions that can be difficult, at best. We usually incorporate a Saturday evening potluck dinner for families and friends. Since we usually set up in a local public park, it also provides us an opportunity to show off amateur radio to the public. We usually get publicity for this event in the local newspaper, and often on a local TV station's weekend news broadcast. A brief synopsis of the rules is available here, where links are also provided to the complete ARRL Field Day rules and other ICARC Field Day information pages. There are a few photographs of the 2006 operation available on the Field Day Photo Album page.

Email Reflector
ICARC maintains an email reflector (or distribution list). Emails sent to the reflector are re-sent to all members of the list. Club officers routinely use the reflector for meeting notices and other information of interest to the club. The reflector is open to both club members and non-members.

• Members: If you have registered an email address with the club treasurer, you will automatically be a member of the reflector unless you have requested otherwise.
  
  
• Non-members: Please request a subscription via email.

HamRad* Training Exercises
During the year, HamRad participates in training classes and exercises to insure that we are prepared to provide effective communications assistance to the Johnson County Emergency Management Agency (JCEMA) in times of severe weather or other disasters.

Those training events include:

• The annual Weather Spotter class is usually held at the Johnson County Fairgrounds in the spring, before the tornado season begins. This class is a joint effort of the Quad Cities National Weather Service (NWS) office and JCEMA. A free meal is usually provided before the class. These are excellent, entertaining classes and we highly recommend that you attend!
• The Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo conducts annual training to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear accident at the plant. The training includes government agencies and amateur radio groups in counties near and downwind of the plant. These exercises are usually in the summer and are held at the Johnson County Fairgrounds or a local school, e.g. West High or Northwest Junior High.
• Other emergency preparedness exercises as determined to be necessary by the HamRad director and JCEMA.

Public Service
ICARC provides public-service communications for a number of community activities, including the annual Run For the Schools and the Solon Beef Days. Communications services are usually conducted on the WØJV repeater by club members using either handi-talkies or mobile radios.

*HamRad is the emergency communications response arm of the Iowa City Amateur Radio Club.

Last updated May 3, 2008 by KØCF