W4PAR

Lexington and Davidson County, NC's amateur radio club since 1963

Our monthly meetings are held at Speedy’s BBQ, 408 Piedmont Dr., Lexington, NC 27295. We’d like to invite all interested area hams to join us on the last Monday of the month at 6 PM for food and conversation with your fellow hams. The meeting starts at 6:30. (NOTE: The November and December meetings are combined into a single meeting in early December. That date is announced in early November.)

We also stream our monthly meetings on our Facebook page when possible.

The Healing Springs Mountain VHF Society is an ARRL-affiliated amateur radio club making its home in Lexington, North Carolina (EM95). We support several local VHF and UHF amateur radio repeaters including the W4PAR VHF/UHF repeaters. Our members also work with modes across the full spectrum of ham radio, including the HF and digital modes.

 What is amateur radio?

In the United States, amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is a licensed radio communications service, overseen by the Federal Communications Commission. The amateur radio service was created to fill the need for radio communicators who could provide backup to governmental agencies during emergencies. The FCC has also acknowledged the ability of radio amateurs to advance the communication and technical skills of radio and to enhance international goodwill.

Ham radio operators in the US have taken part in emergency operations from California to Puerto Rico in recent years. They have provided communications services to government and relief agencies as well as being a conduit for “health and welfare” traffic-getting the word to concerned families that their loved ones in the disaster area are OK.

Radio amateurs have also performed valuable work in the development of communications technologies, ranging from AM radio, to “high frequency” communications used to communicate around the world, through the FM communications now used by nearly every voice radio service. More recently, the use of radio frequencies in the gigahertz range as well as digital radio technologies have been a focus of many ham radio experimenters.

Ham radio hobbyists also has launched their own satellites (starting in 1961, 4 years after the launch of Sputnik), which circle the earth and provide opportunities for communications with other hams across the globe. Hams regularly bounce radio signals off Earth’s moon, pushing the boundaries of their communications beyond orbital satellites.

The newest area of exploration for hams is the “digital modes”. These modes range from weak signal propagation experiments into weak signal communications via protocols such as FT8 and JS8Call. Another hot area is DMR (Digital Mobil Radio), which has seen a surge in interest in the last 2 years.

More information of amateur radio is available from the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), our national association dedicated to promoting amateur radio.