Author Archives: Orange County Radio Amateurs, INC

BikeFest 2014 this coming Saturday August 9th, OCRA 442.150 Repeater will be primary comm

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Reminder:
The OCRA 442.150mhz Repeater (+) (PL 131.8) will be used for primary communications support this coming Saturday, August 9th for the BikeFest 2014 Event.  147.135mhz (+)(82.5) will be secondary.

As mentioned in the event summary below (from the RARS Public Service page), this is a large event in terms of participants, and routes extending through Cedar Grove, Leasburg, Roxboro, Efland, Hurdle Mills, Carr, and with the start/finish in Hillsborough.

Ham volunteers needed for SAGS, rest stops and shadows. You can sign up to support this event on the RARS Public  Service page http://rars.org/public-service.php

Net control ops the Saturday morning 9:30AM OCRA ARES net are requested run an abbreviated net to maximize repeater availability for event radio traffic.

Net control for the event will be John, AI4RT.

See you Saturday!

Dan, KR4UB
W4UNC Trustee

BIKEFEST 2014

August 9, 2014 – Saturday – Hillsborough, NC
The Bikefest tour begins at the Superior Courthouse in downtown Hillsborough, and offers a choice of several rides: a 35-mile half metric, a 62-mile metric century, and a 100-mile English century. The 35 and 62 routes will have 2 rest stops while the 100 mile route has 4 rest stops. Tarwheels donates all proceeds, in excess of expenses, to bicycling related activities in our community. Since 2006 we have donated over $50,000! Previous recipients include Rails to Trails, East Coast Greenways, Chapel Hill Greenways, Triangle Trips for Kids, Lewis Days (bike restoration for children of need) and 78 needy kids who received new bicycles which we distributed through New Hope Elementary School and Durham Social Services.

This is a large 800+ participants. Due to the size and number of routes, we will need about 15+ ham volunteers for SAGs, rest stop monitoring and shadows.

* Ham Coordinator: John (ai4rt)
* Location: Hillsborough Courthouse, 106 E. Margaret Ln., Hillsborough, NC 27278
* Time: 7:00 am – Rollout 7:30 am
* Event Website:Bikefest 2014

OCRA/DFMA Groups.io Photo Upload Procedure

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A new Photo section has been recently activated for all subscribers to OCRA-DFMA@groups.io.

If you haven’t tried it yet and have some good Field Day or other amateur radio event photos, here is a demonstration of the procedure.

If you are logged in to groups.io, this link  https://groups.io/g/OCRA-DFMA/photos will take you direct to the OCRA/DFMA groups.io photos gallery.

Or, from the groups.io home page click on the   tab to go to the photos home page. You will see several albums already on the site e.g. 2018 OCRA/DFMA Field Day, 2018 Field Day Potluck, and others.

You can create a new album by clicking on the blue New Album tab  or you can click on an existing album to add your photos.

A couple of thoughts about opening new albums:

  • The reason the “2018….. ” albums shown above are listed first is that the site lists albums in alphabetical order.
  • If you do choose to open another album the name ought to start off with consistent naming with the albums already in existence, otherwise the albums for the same event will be scatttered though out the whole library of photo albums.
  • Lastly, you might want to consider adding your photos to an already existing album to avoid viewers having to open many different albums to see all the photos related to a specific event. Each photo within an album will show and give credit to who uploaded the photo to the album.

To select an existing album, click on the photo 

To upload a photo(s) click on  and the Upload Photos window will open.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

  • While you may have used a photo image viewer or your operating system file manager to preview  and select the photos you wish to upload, before attempting to upload those photos in the steps below, you need to close those applications. Otherwise those photos can be locked by the open applications and not available to the upload process. There will be no pop up messages to indicate this has occurred. The symptom will be that when you click on the blue “Add” tab below, nothing happens.
  • Lastly if you select a large number of photos to upload, take into account your ISP upload speed. For most internet services, the upload speed is typically 1/10 of your download speed.  So if you select a large number of images, whose size can be considerable with the pixel count of today’s cameras, it may take a while for the upload to complete.

After you have clicked on the above “Add Photos”, click on the “Browse” tab and a “File Upload” window will open as shown below.

Select the photo(s) you wish to upload and then click on the “add” button.

You browser application should give some indication that it is busy uploading.

After the upload process is complete, your newly added photos will be visible in the album.