News

Field Day Testing Session

In-Person License Testing

Arkansas Valley Radio Club is proud to announce In-Person Testing! Our club has multiple accredited Volunteer Examiners and will be offering testing at many club meetings and activities throughout the year. It is not guaranteed that we will offer testing at every meeting or event as our VEs have their own schedules and lives. If you are interested in testing and don’t see an upcoming test scheduled, please let us know at least a few days in advance, and we will try our best to make sure we have enough VEs available to offer testing at an upcoming activity. All test levels are available and are FREE. Please arrive at least a few minutes early so we can get you signed in. We provide laptops for the testing session, you only need to bring the items noted below. If you or someone else is interested in testing, please read the notes below and reach out to our club! What to bring: ** It is highly recommended that you pre-register. You will need a FCC Cores account the subsequent FCC FRN to sit for an exam. If you do not have these, click on the links below for each and follow the instructions. If you arrive without these items completed it will take up your valuable testing time. ** FCC CORES FCC FRN Notes: To increase chances of success, please ensure that you have viewed every single question in the pool(s) you are studying for at least once. If you are…

Banner: 146.700 now linked statewide via the Colorado Connection. TX tone 88.5, RX 123.0 optional, offset minus 600 kHz.

146.700 is on the air with the Colorado Connection

Posted on behalf of Tony Hagans, K0RPC. Project update from this morning. K2AD made the 3+ hour drive from Longmont area to deliver our Colorado Connection repeater. He attended our meeting/breakfast and we went up to the site and installed the repeater. It was great to have several of the newer members and faces make the trek to the tower. We decided to leave the existing 2m antenna in place for now as it tested fine, we did discover the reason the 2m had been deaf, there was a bad coax connection (looking at you Kelly 😂). So, as of about 11:30 AM the 146.700 is on the air and linked full time to the Colorado Connection. This provides nearly statewide coverage on linked analog repeaters that are almost exclusively 2m. If you have monitored or participated on the Cheyenne Mountain 145.130 this is the same network. As a linked system, please be cognizant that keying our 700 now keys 18 other repeaters as well. If we have local traffic or a local net we will want to continue to handle that on the 625. The 700 however will likely always have someone listening and available for either emergency traffic or just a radio check or casual conversation. Important change — the input tone (your TX CTCSS) needs to be 88.5. This is shared across the entire system. The RX tone is 123 and as always is optional but if you don’t want to hear all the IDs and other…

Club members raise the antenna mast from the roof of the EOC van, American flag flying from the mast.

Field Day 2026: four stations, 926 contacts, and a park full of friends

Field Day 2026 is in the books. Over the last full weekend in June, the club operated four radio stations as a mobile emergency operations center from the pondside gazebo at La Junta City Park — EOC van, tower, and all. Setup started Saturday morning at 9am, and we ran continuously through Sunday morning. The event was open to the public, and our GET ON THE AIR (GOTA) station let unlicensed visitors sit down and work real contacts alongside a licensed operator. Refreshments and lunch held out the whole time we were on the air, exactly as promised. The numbers Our preliminary total score is 4,896 points. For comparison, last year’s final score of 3,606 placed us 3rd in the nation in our class — and assuming similar scores from other clubs this year, we’d finish solidly in second. We logged 926 contacts: 647 on phone, 267 on digital modes, and 12 on CW. Band CW Digital Phone Total 40 m 0 61 38 99 20 m 7 126 528 661 15 m 5 80 79 164 10 m 0 0 2 2 Contacts by band and mode. 20 meters carried 71% of the weekend. We worked 81 ARRL sections — contacts from coast to coast, with California, Ohio, and Florida topping the list, plus Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, six Canadian provinces, and a handful of DX. Not bad for a gazebo in the Arkansas Valley. GOTA — new voices on the air The GOTA station added…

New RMHAM repeater in La Junta is online.

On Saturday April 12th K9TOB, K2KLC, K0RPC, and KB0OBZ of our N0AVH Arkansas Valley Radio Club along with John Maxwell (W0VG) of RMHAM Group completed this install. N0SZ DMR REPEATER (RMHAM Group)La Junta Airbase Hill – Input: 440.1625 Output: 445.1625 – Color Code 6The La Junta, CO site is located at Airbase Hill (also known by the locals as the “Boys Ranch Hill”) near the La Junta Airport. RMHAM operates a low power “spot fill” repeater at this location. Power output is 30W and the antenna is mounted low on the south side of the tower to focus on filling the the Arkansas River Valley directly around La Junta. As can be seen in the coverage plot, coverage is approximately a 20 mile radius of the site.This site hosts Talk Group 700 (Rocky Mountain Wide) on Timeslot 1 and Talk Groups 718 (South East) and 719 (South) on Timeslot 2. For more information visit The RMHAM Site Info for La Junta

N0AVH Club Service Project

On Saturday March 22nd, 2025 the Ark Valley Radio Club (N0AVH) Gino K2KLC and Toby K9TOB completed a service project for the future RM Ham Group site out at the Frick Tower South of Las Animas owned by Tony Hagans K0RPC. While additional brush and trash removal will be necessary all the scrub brush under the entire tower and building entrance was cut down to the ground by hand. Though it was a bit windy the drive was nice. Note to future self…..bring a sharp chainsaw blade next time.

Repeater Coordination Finalized!

The 146.700 repeater is now officially on air and coordinated with the CCARC! Many people have had their hands in this project but this is mostly due to Tony Hagans K0RPC so please be sure to personally give him your thanks. The repeater information is linked above under Club Info. Also here. 73!