Attendance: David Sawyer arrived with his lovely daughter Gabrielle and his son Alexander. Don Weber, J.P. Rouland, Ralph Burr, Frank Neilson, Larry McDonald and Roger Rines were also present at our feedbag luncheon.
Don Weber has scheduled our BA-MARC equipment checkout day for March 4th @ 1:00 PM. Location will be at Don Weber’s office located at:
65 Hegenberger PL, Oakland, CA
94621. Purpose of this gathering is to check our radio installations to be sure they are ready for the up-coming riding and event support season. Don
will have his test equipment and facilities at our disposal. If anyone reading this has a radio installation issue or question or just wants to have a good time, this is a meeting to attend. After our equipment checks are completed we will do some
riding. Talk-in frequencies will be the same 147.240 + we use for the meetings.
As part of our discussion on checking the radios, I offered to help any of the members get radios installed on their bikes if they wanted to drop by my house some weekend. At least one member, Ralph Burr, thought this was a good idea and will be over as soon as he has his damaged bike back on the road.
Weather for the “Wings-On-the-Internet” (WOTI)
West Coast Ride-In (WCRI) in Hesperia, CA was unusually wet and windy. On Wednesday, 2-days before we were to leave for the event, my left fork seal blew-out on “Kitty” putting her into the critical-care unit of our local Honda-hospital. This was just as well as the next day; snow was reported on the
ground in Lancaster and Palmdale as cars were being escorted over the “Grapevine” and along Highway-14. Not the best conditions for a motorcycle.
As I write this on February 22nd “Kitty” is still in the hospital getting a good work over and a high bill. I wonder if my health insurance will cover a sick motorcycle.
Without a motorcycle I almost abandoned the trip, but remembered it was a good time last year and if I didn’t go, I would miss that good time and another opportunity to be at another MARC meeting. With those thoughts in mind, the van was loaded and the APRS beacon triggered as I headed south to what turned out to be a wet weekend with good company and an opportunity to spend time with my daughter
in Play-del Rey Friday evening and Saturday morning. Of course the weather in the LA basin was just absolutely wonderful for “Snowshoe” geese.
Our BA-MARC poster has just about been completed. David Sawyer has shown me a final draft that he will produce multiple copies on glossy photo quality paper. This great looking poster will be used to raise awareness of BA-MARC’s presence in the bay area and surrounding communities with the hope that it will help us improve our membership.
David has yet to select a holder for displaying the poster and “take-out” flyers that will be available as part of the display. All BA-MARC members will get to see what this poster looks like at our next BA-MARC meeting on March 11th. It is time to start thinking about where we should display our posters.
Our major topic for the February meeting was the
Tierra Bella Cycling Classic. This is the largest bicycle event in the state and last year we had over 1,700 bicycles riding one or more of the four courses.
For this event, we have 7-motorcycles signed up with the potential for one more bike if a work schedule permits. Two of the bikes in this event will be Ray Davis and DeWitt Morgan from Orange County land. This event is really large and 7-motors is about half of what is needed especially on the longer routes. If anyone reading this would like to help us build our team and area awareness by helping with this event, any participation will be warmly received. Just one note, this is not a charity event. We participate because it is a good way to get our local BA-MARC group needed exposure and to build our skills for supporting other charity events. From this perspective, we get as much out of this event as the event organizers do.
Having two operators who will work a stationary rest stop and or operate, as a SAG wagon is new to our local group. Having stationary operator support capability will be critical to us as we work towards being fully functional in supporting the entire communication needs of an area event. At some point we should be able to attract members who will prefer
that type of event support and we should be able to man our own net-control operations some day.
Attendance at our local meetings is showing a good trend and the quality of the people we seem to be attracting and the camaraderie that is developing is unusually high. If we can continue this trend our group should turn out to be more than just a
collection of people, but instead we are headed to being a family of friends.
73s,
Roger…
WB1CFQ
