CLUB MEETINGS – IN PERSON

 The SFARC general club meetings are held at 7:30 PM on the second Friday of each month at

Placer County Health and Human Services Conference Center, Cordova Room 500 1434 B Ave, Auburn, CA 95603

Coming from Interstate 80, use the Bell Road exit for quick and easy access!! If you can’t attend in person, you’re welcome to join us virtually on Zoom.

CLUB MEETINGS – VIRTUAL

A pro tip before you join the meeting: if you aren’t talking, go ahead and mute your microphone. And “putting your best foot forward” often means putting on pants and checking your camera often.  Ready to go?  Click JOIN THE MEETING below.  While you shouldn’t be prompted for it, the Zoom meeting information is below with an alternate way to join.If Prompted:
Meeting ID: 962 6167 5605
Passcode: SFARC
You can also call in using only your telephone.
+16699009128,96261675605# *454729# US (San Jose)
+13462487799,96261675605# *454729# US (Houston)

LOOKING FORWARD

Sierra Foothills Amateur Radio Club. Vice Presidents
Jim Jupin (WA8MPA) & Greg Dolkas (KO6TH)

• For the February 2026 meeting, Jef N5JEF will be talking about a couple of emerging, frontier technologies that will have wide applicability to our future, and a playground, sandbox, or experimental lab for hands-on exploration. These include Spread Spectrum (particularly LoRa) as an effective RF physical layer, and Mesh Network routing, which is an evolving framework for communication that is off-grid, decentralized, resilient, and low-power.

  Why are these interesting?

  Spread Spectrum modulation makes communication in our increasingly noisy RF environment more reliable, and Mesh Routing extends that communication capability far beyond the direct point-to-point radio horizon. Between the two we can expect longer communication range, with increased reliability.

  In his day job, Jef is a senior analyst with the County of Placer Radio Services Group, focused on mission critical public safety and environmental utilities radio systems. The group develops and supports systems including the P25 trunking system for regional law enforcement and public service agencies. Before that, he was a technical and field service manager for over twenty years in scientific instruments for laboratory, industrial, and semiconductor metrology. He is also into emergency management, search and rescue, and personal preparedness, and is, he says, “a total science and technology nerd.”