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 11434 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)

Winlink E-Mail over MERCURY – Welcome to Free/Open OFDM Modes!

Coming up at the September meeting, Craig KM6LYW will be joining us to talk about Mercury, a new way to do high-speed digital communication via radio.

The guys at Rhizomatica just made a better VARA than VARA. Unlike VARA, it’s free, open-source, runs on Linux and Raspberry Pi. While not directly compatible with the proprietary VARA audio encoding, it does use the same API so existing VARA-HF clients (Pat, Winlink Express) can immediately leverage this exiting new HF radio transport!

Both VARA and MERCURY leverage “Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing” which is the foundation for modern/commercial RF transports, including WIFI. That’s how we get our speed and reliability. MERCURY includes “gear shifting” dynamically adapting to conditions and fading SNR.

Craig will discuss some of the interesting aspects of this new mode and hopefully send an email via Nevada using an experimental MERCURY Winlink email station (KO0OOO).