Welcome to 2025! May the new year bring you good times and lasting memories! Here at SFARC, the new year means more opportunities to engage with the community and demonstrate the many uses of amateur radio.

One of the best ways to do just that is through our monthly VE sessions, the first of which will take place on the 6th. I love meeting up with everyone for the pre-session dinners, and getting together with the candidates to discuss what interests them in ham radio always opens up new perspectives into the hobby. I highly encourage you to help out by Elmering candidates at the VE sessions because everyone has something to share. Help someone out, and perhaps even learn a thing or two yourself.

Our next club meeting will take place on January 10th at 7:30 PM at the Confluence Church Gym in Auburn, California and on Zoom at zoom.w6ek.org. Please welcome Scott (KM6RFB), who put together a comprehensive portable communications backpack inspired by medic bags. We all have plenty of radio gear, and sometimes it can be difficult to pack it all together for field use and transport. Come join us as Scott tells us about the items he used to get everything organized, where you can obtain them, and how easy it can be to tidy up your equipment for that next casual outing or an emergency event that requires rapid response and deployment. After hearing about what he’s done, I’m excited to build something like that myself so I can make better use of what I have and hopefully reduce the time it takes to set things up for outdoor operations.

For the contesters out there, January comes with two major events, the North American QSO Party. The CW contest starts at 10 AM on the 11th, and the SSB contest starts at 10 AM on the 18th. Both run for 12 hours, and the playing field is leveled by limiting the maximum transmitter power to 100 W. If you’ve never participated in a contest before or are interested in making contacts with hams all over the world, give the rules a read and get your station set up. It’s also a great way to learn about and experience for yourself how HF propagation is affected by the time of day as the different bands come alive and go quiet.

We finish up the month with our club breakfast at 7:30 AM on the 25th. This month’s breakfast will be at Mel’s Diner in Auburn, and following the breakfast we’ll go on a fox hunt. After a rainy December breakfast, I’m looking forward to better weather and a well-attended radio direction finding event this time around.