Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 09:27:16 -0600
From: K4RO Kirk Pickering 
To: tcg
Subject: [TCG] Minutes Nov 8, 2003 Meeting

Minutes the Nov 8, 2003 TCG meeting at the QTH of K4RO

Attending were:

KG4PKQ
W4NI
W9WI
K4RO

Official Business
-----------------
The votes were counted.  It was a unanimous decision,
with all votes casted FOR the new constitution. The
most significant change is in the membership requirements.
The meeting attendance requirement has been dropped in
its entirety. One contest submission per year is the
only requirement for membership.   The TCG web site will
be updated shortly with the new document.  I'll try to
add some other new stuff while I'm there.  Dump in your
SS scores, for starters.

Sweepstakes
-----------
We assume everyone who wanted to get on for CW SS did,
and we hope you will put "Tennessee Contest Group" in
the CLUB field of your submitted Cabrillo file. If you
have any questions or problems submitting your log, just
contact a TCG member and ask for help.  The Phone SS is
this weekend, and we'd like to encourage EVERYONE to get
on, even if just for a short while.  Let's see how many
Tennessee logs we can rustle up this year!  Note that
each TCG member can submot BOTH a CW AND an SSB score,
and it only counts as one submission.  So if you can,
please get on for both modes and contribute your scores
for TCG.

Miscellaneous
-------------
We did a brief tour of the K4RO station. Nothing new has
been added since the last meeting. Still using the same
old stuff here. :-)  Inside the shack, we fired up for
the WAE RTTY contest and made a few contacts.  We tried
different methods, using an old AEA PK-232 with TR-Log
on the left radio, and using MMTTY under Windows on the
right radio. Both approaches worked well, with TR-Log
adding the convenience of the program's logging, dupe-
checking and scoring capabilities.

K4RO demonstrated a free QSL maker program available on the
web at: http://www.hfradio.org/wb8rcr/ .  Since returning
from VP5, K4RO's mailbox has been full of QSL requests.
The QSLMaker program makes it simple to crank out some
decent photo QSL's right on the ink-jet printer. The 67lb
or 100lb vellum card stock available at Staples works well.
W9WI suggested that I try a hack on the QSLMaker.exe binary
executable file to modify the QSO information block, and it
worked!  Doug was rewarded with a fresh VP5/K4RO QSL card
hot off the printer for our 10-meter CW QSO. :-)

I guess next month will be that last official TCG meeting
for 2003.  We will have a meeting in January (per the new
constitution) to elect officers for 2004. Please nominate
yourself or another member now.  Per the constitution, if
there is no quorum (one fourth of the membership) at the
January meeting, then the voting will be conducted via email
with results presented in February.  Given that we have not
had a quorum at a meeting in over 5 years, I feel that this
language has also become obsolete and should probably be
changed.  It just adds an unnecessary one month delay which
is 100% likely to happen.  I'll leave that vote for the
next administration, I guess.

I will schedule the next meeting here again at K4RO unless
someone else has another suggestion.  K4WX had mentioned a
new restaurant in NE Nashville -- any news on that Don?

Respectfully submitted,

-Kirk  K4RO