AARL Membership, is it worth it?

Scott

Scott

Adventurist
So, I'm venturing into the world of HAM, and I have set myself a deadline to take the Technician's exam on January 24th. I was looking at the AARL website and was considering signing up for a membership. Anyone else a member? Is it worth it?
 
I've never seen much in the way of immediate benefits of ARRL membership...but they are a fairly large organization and do work pretty hard to ensure that the frequencies remain available to us.

Good luck on your test!
 
Joining a local HAM club and donating to their efforts ensures that your dollars go towards keeping your local repeaters up and running. Obviously, ARRL is a well run organization, but unless you're going to jump into HAM with both feet, there is a lot of stuff that may be over your head at this point. (As it is for me) I am only a mobile user and do not keep a home-based HAM set up.

I'm not sure if CA has a repeater connection, but here in Colorado we have the Colorado Connection http://www.colcon.org/welcome.html

It's invaluable to us as an offroad club and we donate heavily to help the cause. It's a great tool during Cruise Moab when we are coordinating all the drivers traveling through Colorado to get to Moab.
 
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I have nothing against the arrl, they do a lot, but I am not a member. I do send some donations to the Keller Peak Repeater Association when I can. It is the repeater that i use the most often and is used for emergency communications for a large part of SoCal www.KPRA.net
 
I should add that I was a member for a year right after I got my license, and then let it expire. The magazine they send pretty much went straight into the recycling bin and beyond that it seemed like I just got a bunch of advertisements for their books.

Like BlkWgn mentioned, it would probably be more beneficial to save that money, and donate to a repeater or repeater system that's local to you that you find useful or important.
 
The ARRL is to amateur radio as the NRA is to gun enthusiasts, hunters, and 2nd Amendment advocates. If you're interested in keeping abreast of the politics of ham radio, tinkering with radios and antennas, and the hobby in general, you might throw some dollars at a membership every year.

The advice about supporting local repeater groups and ham radio clubs is best, as the dollars go toward maintaining the systems we rely on. Remember that those repeaters are generally installed on mountain tops that require leased antenna and hardware space, electricity and sometimes Internet access.
 
And this is why I love this group. Thank you all for the input on this.

On a side note, Cris, I may need you to program my baofeng by hand one day. I can't seem to get chirp to cooperate with my laptop :(
 
offero said:
The ARRL is to amateur radio as the NRA is to gun enthusiasts, hunters, and 2nd Amendment advocates. If you're interested in keeping abreast of the politics of ham radio, tinkering with radios and antennas, and the hobby in general, you might throw some dollars at a membership every year.

The advice about supporting local repeater groups and ham radio clubs is best, as the dollars go toward maintaining the systems we rely on. Remember that those repeaters are generally installed on mountain tops that require leased antenna and hardware space, electricity and sometimes Internet access.
Click to expand...

Great post :coffee
 
Okay. The problem has to do with wonky (fake "Prolific") chips in some of those cables. I've even run into this situation with cables that came with the Wouxun or Baofeng radio from the factory. My memory is a little fuzzy on it (I manage a whole bunch of radios for both work and personal use) but I think the wonky cables will work on Windows XP and Vista machines, but will not work correctly with Win 7 or 8 machines. If I recall correctly, I've had success using Chirp for some of the radios, but not others on my old macbook and a linux box as well.

The easiest thing is to just find and order a legitimate Prolific chipped cable from a reputable dealer. It looks like this one should work:

Powerwerx

Or most certainly the one from RT systems, whom I've purchased a number of great programming cables from:

RT Systems Cable and Software

The RT systems link also has the RT systems software, which allows you to export and import lists from other radios, which is nice down the road when you have multiple radios that you want to keep sync'ed up with all of your freqs.

I've actually never learned to program any of my radios manually, because hooking up the cable and software is so easy, and I almost always have my laptop with me. Still, I keep printed programming instructions tucked away in the truck in case I ever need to be frequency agile and program on the fly.
 
I manage the radios for Verde Search and Rescue, the cable that comes with an RT program is good and should work with any current computer system.

And I really like he RT programs because of the ability to transfer programing from one platform to anther via export/import.
 
offero said:
The ARRL is to amateur radio as the NRA is to gun enthusiasts, hunters, and 2nd Amendment advocates. If you're interested in keeping abreast of the politics of ham radio, tinkering with radios and antennas, and the hobby in general, you might throw some dollars at a membership every year.

The advice about supporting local repeater groups and ham radio clubs is best, as the dollars go toward maintaining the systems we rely on. Remember that those repeaters are generally installed on mountain tops that require leased antenna and hardware space, electricity and sometimes Internet access.
Click to expand...

This X2. The large cellular carriers have been after several ham freqs for a while now, and they have mucho bucks to spend lobbying for that. ARRL's long relationship with the FCC has been a huge help in stopping band loss. They're really the only stroke we have in that arena.
 
Scott
It might be the USB to serial driver for the cable. Look in device manager after you plug the cable in. Do you see a yellow exclamation mark on one of the usb devices? If so, it is the driver. The latest driver does not work.
I've had the same problem occur even after having working. Windows update being the culprit. Let me see if I can find the link to the site with the correct driver. I'm on my phone right now, not my pc.
 
Try downloading the Vista driver here Scott.
http://www.cooldrives.com/wividrforprc.html
Then uninstall the old one and restart. install the Vista drvr.
Make note of the version info so you can double check it.
Windows thinks it is smarter than you and will try to override your will. :mad:
You have to tell the installer where you unzipped the file and select it manually. Don't let windows update either or you'll end up like me.
WTT = What the Tech? It was working yesterday.!:eek:
 
AARL has some good software. If you travel a lot and have a radio with multiple memory bands you can use the AARL software to plot your intended route and it'll then prepare a file to dump into your radio with all the repeaters on your route. I've never used it, but it's something my old scoutmaster (my elmer) said he used extensively in his travels being retired.

On USB drivers - sounds like a similar problem in had with the USB for my Wouxun. I had to try several drivers before finding the right 'version'.
 
Yeah its pretty much the same problem across devices using these cables depending on your OS of course.
Regarding software. If you have a smart phone you can install the free Repeater book app and pull up repeater lists as well.
 
offero said:
The ARRL is to amateur radio as the NRA is to gun enthusiasts, hunters, and 2nd Amendment advocates. If you're interested in keeping abreast of the politics of ham radio, tinkering with radios and antennas, and the hobby in general, you might throw some dollars at a membership every year.

The advice about supporting local repeater groups and ham radio clubs is best, as the dollars go toward maintaining the systems we rely on. Remember that those repeaters are generally installed on mountain tops that require leased antenna and hardware space, electricity and sometimes Internet access.
Click to expand...

I agree and I disagree. I agree with the first paragraph and want to expand on that. The radio spectrum is 100% full and allocated. So every time someone comes up with a new wireless do-hicky they need some bandwidth to make it viable. The real reason HDTV is here is because it uses much less bandwidth for broadcast TV and the FCC re-allocated all the old VHF tv frequencies. The ARRL is THE lobby group for Amateur Radio.

So IMHO your first dollars should go to ARRL to protect the entire HAM radio community. THEN some dollars should go to local repeater owners as repeaters ARE expensive beasts to maintain.
 
Jr_Explorer said:
I agree and I disagree. I agree with the first paragraph and want to expand on that. The radio spectrum is 100% full and allocated. So every time someone comes up with a new wireless do-hicky they need some bandwidth to make it viable. The real reason HDTV is here is because it uses much less bandwidth for broadcast TV and the FCC re-allocated all the old VHF tv frequencies. The ARRL is THE lobby group for Amateur Radio.

So IMHO your first dollars should go to ARRL to protect the entire HAM radio community. THEN some dollars should go to local repeater owners as repeaters ARE expensive beasts to maintain.
Click to expand...

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