12/05/2025
St. Petersburg Amateur Radio Club
Yes, it’s time for an antenna get together.
The plan is to remove the log periodic antenna from atop the storage containers, followed by the mast, rotator and thrust bearing. If you would like to help (or supervise) in this effort, the party starts at 10:00AM on Saturday (9/8) the day after the next SPARC meeting.
Hope to see you there.
SPARC will again be participating in the St. Petersburg Science Festival. This event is designed to
provide children hands-on access to the wide world of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math).
If you are interested in being part of SPARC’s ham radio demonstration team, please contact Bob, N2ESP. Additional details on the festival can be found by clicking here.
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SPARC member and fellow W4TA contester Scott O’Keefe N4RI placed second in the 2015 CQ DX Marathon Formula class. Scotty finished with 250 countries worked in 2015 just behind winner Joe W4TV with 254 countries. The Formula class is for people that are using only vertical or simple dipole antennas and 100 watts (there is a separate QRP category).
You can find out more information about the DX Marathon here. The way the award resets each year allows the people that have worked just about every DX country in the world to have a goal. As the DX Marathon site states, “It gives them a reason to turn on the radio each day.”
Congratulations, Scotty!
SPARC member Tom, NY4I has taken responsibility for the bridge program that enables two 
popular ham radio programs to share QSO data.
“N1MM” is a popular contesting program that is configurable for competition in most international Radiosport contests. “DXKeeper” is the logging component of a suite of programs known as “DX Labs.” The “bridging” program Tom is working on transfers the QSOs entered in N1MM to DXKeeper in real time. This allows you to update your needed DXCC entities list as you are contesting. The bridge is also compatible with “TR4W” contest software, sending real-time logging information to DXKeeper.
All of these sophisticated programs are FREE, thanks to programmers such as Tom that volunteer their skills toward the advancement of our hobby. The following URLs will provide you with additional information:
TR4W http://tr4w.net/
DX Labs http://www.dxlabsuite.com/