Ham Talk Live Episode 204 - Virtual Club Meetings for Social Distancing

Matt Bonadies, KB9YOJ, president of the Southern Indiana Amateur Radio Association, will take your questions about virtual club meetings! SIARA will be meeting virtually due to social distancing requirements from the coronavirus, and we'll discuss ideas about clubs LIVE on Ham Talk Live! Thursday (3/19) at 9 pm EDT at hamtalklive.com.

Tune into Ham Talk Live! Thursday night at 9 pm EDT (Friday 0100Z) by going to hamtalklive.com. When the audio player indicates LIVE, just hit the play button!

If you miss the show live, you can listen on demand anytime also at hamtalklive.com; or a podcast version is on nearly all podcast sites a few minutes after the live show is over. Some sites include Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, SoundCloud, and iHeart Podcasts; and it's also available on YouTube. A replay is also broadcast on WTWW 5085 AM on Saturday nights at approximately 6:30 pm Eastern.

Be sure to CALL in with your questions and comments by calling 859-982-7373 live during the call-in segment of the show. You can also tweet your questions before or during the show to @HamTalkLive.

 

interes.

 

Just curious. Most radio clubs are regional. Why don't they just use their radios? Club nets, etc... have been used for "Social Distancing" before Social Distancing become a thing.

 

This is a good way to have guests speakers give presentations at local meetings that might not be able to travel.

 

Maybe they could have a net?

Has Ham radio really devolved to the point where we can't communicate without the presence of a discount buffet?

 

We were not able to get our usual meeting spot at the Fire Department because of all the Covid craziness. We are working on doing our meeting over the radio. I will e-mail out the minutes and treasurer's report with some notes to our members. Also plan on having Amateur Radio Newsline play over the repeater as well at the end of the meeting.

 

In DeKalb county (Atlanta), we (the Alford Memorial Radio Club) are trying ZOOM as the way to hold our meetings and still retain some face-to-face connectivity. That way we can retain the ability for visual presentations. Cost is $0 and our membership is game to give it a try. ZOOM may impose a 40 minute time limit, but so far, we have not encountered this. We did a test run for our board meeting and all went very well.

We also maintain our weekly club net and ARES net in addition to several other "special interest" nets on our repeaters (W4BOC). They are very popular and I don't think the present social distancing is slowing those activities in the least.

Stay well out there!

 

our club is using ZOOM.us

 

OARS and TCARES use Zoom and the regular 2M nets, works well.

 

We used Zoom(VIDEO) AND our local ARES repeater(AUDIO) for the virtual net and meeting. You should listen to the show! I had 21 check-ins and there were many visual antics going on, similar to Fast-scan TV! Had a blast and we will be doing this next month!

Matt
KB9YOJ

 

https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?th...gs-for-social-distancing.697214/#post-5405107

 

This is one of the reasons why I did this. Presentations and a visual component! Glad it worked well for you too. We had fun and caused some other hams to crawl out of the woodwork and get radio active.

Matt
KB9YOJ

 

I think?????? we're amateur radio operators so why do "we" need to do virtual meetings????
My local Club does a informal Round Table once a week, no live meetings for the last 5 years, everone enjoys the on air QSOs.

 

I just tested using Youtube live streaming with some board members of our club. OBS Studio is free software, and it functions as a video/audio console to output a live stream to Youtube... I flipped between skype video and my VNC session to the shack flawlessly. Kinda neat, but there was a delay to the live stream of about 28 seconds. Nothing major for a uni-directional gathering, but that would limit back-and-forth with membership and presenter a bit.

 

Our club is using Zoom for Board meetings, and streaming a presentation via YouTube for general meetings. Zoom is great.