Secretary Arlene Murch’s minutes of the first meeting record the exact time — 8:15 P.M., July 16, 1958 — and list everyone in the room. Among them were Theron “Woody” Woods W6ANX and his wife Katherine W6HDG; W.C. Bauman K6CBP; Walter Dowdy WN6PMF; Jim Carman, whose name would recur for the next fifty years; and three boys with no callsigns at all, one of them ten years old.

The minutes give five reasons for forming a club, and they read like a mission statement the club never really abandoned: to help each other with equipment, operating and TVI problems; to make Civil Defense and public service work more effective; to encourage and assist prospective amateurs toward their licenses; to plan Field Day and transmitter hunts properly; and “so that some sort of message handling plan can be worked out for the Auburn area.”

Officers were elected two weeks later, on July 30: Woods as president, Gerald Murch vice-president, Arlene Murch secretary, Bob Hicks treasurer. Dues were set at five dollars a year, or fifty cents a month. Someone asked whether the club would incorporate or affiliate with the ARRL. The minutes note simply: “This was left pending.” It stayed pending for seven years.

The name was a contest

Sixteen names were submitted, with Walt Dowdy donating a prize for whoever suggested the winner. Two finalists survived to a vote on August 13, 1958: Sierra Foothill Amateur Radio Club and Mother Lode Amateur Radio Club. The majority chose the former — recorded in the minutes, and worth noting, in the singular: SIERRA FOOTHILL A.R.C. When the club pluralized itself to “Foothills” is not documented anywhere we could find.

The early club was itinerant and small. It met at the Naval Reserve building, then the fairgrounds “in the area next to the dance floor,” then — for years — in members’ living rooms: Mike Bowman’s house, Jim Carman’s, Sage Otow’s. Meeting after meeting turns on the same unresolved problem. In January 1961 Carman explained the possibility of getting a room in the old Naval Reserve building once a new one was built. In January 1962 he reported the building was being handed to the Fair Board and the club should move immediately, because Civil Defense and City Recreation wanted it too. The club never got it.

The traditions arrived early even when the room didn’t. Field Day participation was approved unanimously on June 1, 1960, with the site “tentatively the Bob Davis hilltop.” A barbecue at the recreation park became annual from August 1959 — steaks, pop and ice cream free to members, guests fifty cents. And by June 1966 the club was staffing checkpoints at Robinson Flat and Michigan Bluff for the hundred-mile horse ride, the beginning of an endurance-event partnership that is still running sixty years later.

The club finally affiliated with the ARRL on January 23, 1965. It is a strange date to celebrate, because by then the club was already dying.

The numbers tell it plainly

Thirteen paid members in August 1965, with $34.40 in the bank. Seven members that December — too few to hold the annual election, so they ate cookies and adjourned. Eight in June 1966. Five that October: “Had an eyeball QSO and then went home.” And in April 1967, the whole of the minutes:

Building locked so Bob and I stood outside and talked. Carl and his XYL came later and we talked for a while and went home.

— Dick Lund WA6HYO, secretary, April 19, 1967

The last official meeting of the original club was held on June 21, 1967, with seven members present. They discussed the upcoming Field Day and next month’s hundred-mile horse ride, signed up again for RACES, and looked at Jim’s photographs from previous Field Days. Ken Weger suggested moving the meeting nights and the meeting place to his room at Sierra College. Dick Lund closed the minutes with a question that went unanswered for five years:

Anyone else have any bright ideas?

— Dick Lund WA6HYO, June 21, 1967, the club’s last meeting

The club’s own records call the interval that followed The Lost Years — June 1967 to July 1972, no official meetings of SFARC. It is the only gap in sixty-eight years of continuous roster.

What brought SFARC back was not a meeting. It was a machine.

Jim Carman K6ARR — president in 1960, present at the founding meetings in 1958 — had a repeater on the hill above Auburn. Around it gathered the local amateurs who used it, and out of that group the club reassembled itself. Gary Cunningham KQ6RT, the club’s longtime history reporter, dated the resurrection to August 1972 and credited Carman and Ken Weger WA6EMU with it. Carman then served as president for six consecutive years, 1972 through 1977 — still the longest tenure in club history.

The re-founding was gradual enough that the minutes record what reads like a second restart. On November 10, 1977 the club met at the Auburn Fairgrounds “to see if the local amateurs using WR6ADI want to ‘reactivate’ the club into a more structured type as it used to be,” with a full slate of officers, higher dues, and by-laws revised “to keep pace with inflation.” Officers were duly elected on December 8, 1977. That same meeting moved the club to the second Thursday, created a Technical Committee chairmanship held by the station trustee, and renamed the activities manager an activities coordinator.

Growth was immediate: 26 paid members in January 1978, 41 in February, 52 by April. The club established a board of directors in January 1978 and elected its first three directors — Bob Bedynek WA6EBI, Bob Colling WB6AEU and Jack Crusinberry WB6BPO — the following month.

The Auburn machine has signed under three different calls. From roughly 1972 to 1983 the FCC issued amateur repeaters their own station licenses under a distinctive WR prefix, and the club’s repeater held one. When the FCC ended that program, the repeater reverted to its trustee’s personal call — and only became W6EK in 2005, when the club obtained the club callsign it uses today.

WR6ADI — c. 1972 to c. 1983

The FCC repeater-prefix license. Named repeatedly in club minutes from 1976 through 1978, once paired with a founder’s call as “WR6ADI/K6CBP.” Its original licensing date and named trustee are not recorded in any surviving source we found.

K6ARR/R — c. 1983 to September 2009

Jim Carman’s own call. After the WR program ended, the repeater signed as his station for roughly a quarter-century — the masthead of Sierra Signals still read “K6ARR/R 145.430” as late as September 2009.

W6EK — September 2005 to present

“Casey advised that the new club call sign was official: W6EK,” per the minutes of September 9, 2005. The club adopted it immediately; the repeater kept signing K6ARR/R for four more years, changing over between the September and October 2009 issues.

The club’s 2-meter output frequency has a precise birthday. Through 1977 the repeater ran 146.16 in, 146.76 out. In February 1978 the club voted to move it to a 146.145/146.745 pair, noting the Placer County Sheriff’s Communications Reserve would take 146.175/146.775, and estimating the cost of the change at fifteen dollars in crystals. That plan was superseded within two months.

On April 14, 1978, Carman reported to the Technical Committee that WR6ADI would change frequencies on May 15, to 144.83 in / 145.43 out. On May 11 he confirmed it would happen that weekend. Fred Jensen K6DGW later explained the reason: when the 145 MHz segment opened to repeaters, Carman moved the machine there to escape interference on 16/76.

That output frequency has been in continuous use ever since — going on forty-eight years. The 220 machine’s 223.86 output is nearly as old, appearing in the minutes of December 1977.

This is the thinnest stretch of the club’s documented history, and it should be said plainly rather than papered over. The club’s newsletter archive begins in August 2005; the presidents roster is nearly all that survives online for the intervening decades, and it is a bare list of names.

What the roster does show is a club that had stabilized. Twenty-two different presidents served between 1978 and 2004, most for a single year, several returning — Dennis Bartoldo N6PMI in 1989–90 and again in 1992, Richard Kuepper WA6RWS in 2002–03. Woody Woods, the founding president, came back for one more term in 1984, twenty-six years after the first.

Mary Ann Simmons K6HJA, later KI6TE, became the club’s first woman president in 1983; Janet Huttula KC6LIX followed in 1993 and Martha Vance KA6WUW in 1995. Jettie Hill W6RFF, president in 1987–88, went on to serve as ARRL Sacramento Valley Section Manager and received the Joe Knight Lifetime Achievement Award in June 2007; licensed in 1935, he was still the club’s oldest licensee in 2013, when the club celebrated his ninety-third birthday with a cake.

Anyone with minutes, newsletters, photographs or recollections from these years holds the missing part of this record.

The modern club’s story can be read almost entirely through the rooms it filled and left. It met in the Beecher Room at the Auburn Library on Nevada Street until February 2013, when it voted unanimously to move because, as the minutes put it, “we have outgrown the Auburn library.” The first meeting at the Rose Room in Auburn City Hall drew about sixty people and filled the city parking lot.

Along the way it acquired most of what it now does. The club joined four neighbouring clubs to launch the Sacramento Valley Hamfest in September 2008. It sorted out its long-neglected corporate paperwork in 2010, discovering it already had both a state corporation number and a federal EIN. Bob Brodovsky K6UDA proposed a club swap meet in July 2014, and the first Loomis Hamfest was held at the historic Loomis train depot in March 2015 for a $35 rental fee; by 2019 it was turning a $1,747 profit against a $702 goal and had been sanctioned as an official ARRL event.

Field Day moved from Nyack, its home since at least the mid-1990s, to Blue Canyon Airport in 2019 to escape the RFI from truck inverters and power-line signals. Winter Field Day began in January 2019 at Georgetown Airport and was added to the club calendar as an annual event that May.

The scholarship

In March 2018 the club lost Dan Fogard W6PRL — licensed in 1949 as W7VC, a CW operator who said that “to him, that is amateur radio.” His son Ken donated Dan’s equipment and asked that the proceeds fund a scholarship in his name for young people wanting a license. The fund paid its first award on June 14, 2019 to William “Willie” Lerma KN6BXV, with Dan’s family present. It has grown into a program that in 2026 awarded six $1,000 STEM scholarships across Sacramento, Placer and Yolo counties.

Placer County issued its first COVID-19 advisory on March 10, 2020. Three days later the board met by videoconference for the first time in club history — “an historical event of sorts,” the minutes noted. The Hamfest was postponed and then cancelled; so were the Tevis Cup, the Western States Endurance Run, JOTA, the White Elephant auction, the picnic and Field Day at Blue Canyon.

The club’s answer was the repeater. In April, Brian Gohl AI6US started the Coffee Break Net on 145.430 — every morning, 7:30 to 10:00. It has run 365 days a year ever since and had logged some 16,000 check-ins by the end of 2021. Field Day became a 28-hour net with over 165 check-ins and a 24-hour Zoom room. Gerry Brentnall WA6E found the legal basis for online meetings in California Corporations Code §5211; the first online general meeting, on GoToMeeting, drew over 65 people on April 10. The club’s first Zoom meeting came on October 9, and the November election was its first electronic vote.

The same year, both main repeaters were rebuilt — two Yaesu DR2X machines, an amplifier bringing 2 meters to 80 watts, AllStarLink node 51018 replacing IRLP, and the 70 cm machine converted to Fusion C4FM on a donation from Scott KK7AIR.

Membership went from about 100 at the start of 2020 to 163 by December 31. The pandemic did not shrink SFARC. It moved it onto the repeater and grew it.

The club met outdoors at the Methodist church in Loomis on August 13, 2021 for its first in-person meeting in nearly eighteen months — an event that doubled as the first Hot RF Nights car radio show. It then moved into the gym at Crossroads Church on Auburn Ravine Road, later renamed Confluence, where it stayed five years and ran hybrid in-person and Zoom meetings. In February 2026 it moved again, to the Cordova Room at the Placer County Health and Human Services conference center, and thanked the church with a $300 donation to the food bank.

Membership has more than tripled since 2019 — 366 as of this writing, drawn from across Placer County and well beyond it. The club has grown large enough that in-person quorum is now hard to reach, and most club business is decided by electronic ballot.

The repeater remains, in the words of a 2023 president’s column, “the heart of the club”: a Yaesu DR2X near downtown Auburn at 1,600 feet with three remote voter receivers, on the same 145.430 output Jim Carman moved it to in May 1978. Western States and the Tevis Cup still get priority use of it, as they have since 1966. In June 2026 the club put a 25-watt node with Starlink on Duncan Peak to extend coverage for Western States, and the Ironman Foundation gave $1,000 toward the repeater that made it possible.

The club that asked in 1958 whether Auburn needed a radio club, and got no answer at all in 1967, now runs a net every morning of the year.

Everything above is drawn from surviving records. These questions are not answered by anything we could find online, and are exactly the sort of thing a long-standing member may be able to settle from memory or a filing cabinet.

• WR6ADI. When was the repeater callsign first licensed, and who was its named trustee? It survives only in club minutes reprinted from 1976–78. The 1976 minutes also mention paying off a duplexer bought from Ken Weger for $300 — which suggests the machine went up around then.
• Foothill to Foothills. The name adopted in August 1958 was singular. When and why did it become plural?
• 1978–2004. Twenty-six years for which we have a list of presidents and almost nothing else. Minutes, newsletters or photographs from this period would be the single most valuable addition to this history.
• Incorporation. The club holds a state corporation number and a federal EIN, both predating the officers who rediscovered them in 2010. What year was SFARC incorporated? And when was Special Service Club status first granted — only a 2017 renewal is on record.
• Two dates. The revival is dated to August 1972 by Gary Cunningham KQ6RT but to July 1972 on the presidents page; and Fred Jensen K6DGW recalled it as “1974 or close.” Similarly, the 1976 duplexer minute is printed under the year 1966, which cannot be right — WR-prefix calls did not exist then.
• Gary KQ6RT. The club’s history reporter for over a decade, and the man who transcribed the 1958–78 minutes into Sierra Signals. If any fuller club history was ever written down, he is the person to ask.

1. Minutes of July 16, July 30 and August 13, 1958, reprinted in “50 Years Ago At The SFARC” by Gary Cunningham KQ6RT — Sierra Signals, July and August 2008.
2. Minutes of 1959–1962, reprinted in Sierra Signals, 2009–2012 issues.
3. Minutes of 1965–1967, reprinted in “Forty Years Ago At The SFARC” — Sierra Signals, 2005–2007 issues; the Lost Years statement appears in June and July 2007.
4. Minutes of 1976–1978, reprinted in “Thirty Years Ago At The SFARC” — Sierra Signals, 2006–2008 issues. WR6ADI appears in the issues of December 2006; April, August, September, November and December 2007; and January, February, April and May 2008.
5. “Jim Carman – K6ARR: 50 Years with SFARC” by Fred Jensen K6DGW — Sierra Signals, September 2009.
6. Club callsign confirmed: minutes of September 9, 2005 — Sierra Signals, October 2005.
7. Sierra Signals newsletter archive, 244 issues, August 2005 – August 2026.
8. Past Presidents and About SFARC, w6ek.org.
9. ARRL affiliated club record, affiliation date January 23, 1965.
10. Silent Keys roster — the club’s legacy history page, last updated June 26, 2018.