The Russell Elementary Amateur Radio Club would not exist if not for the generosity of one man in our community, Mr. Richard Pugmire, the owner of Pugmire Lincoln-Mercury dealership. Mr. Pugmire has helped the Russell Space Team program at our school for 20 years. When we started discussing our plans for an amateur radio club and station at our school, Mr. Pugmire purchased outright several thousands dollars worth of brand new equipment for our station, including a Kenwood TS-2000 transceiver, power supply, and an off-center fed dipole antenna as well as several smaller accessory items like coax cabling and adapters.
Mr. Pugmire passed in February 2018. He will be missed by all of us at Russell Elementary, but his legacy and his kindness will live forever in our hearts. Rest in Peace, Mr. Pugmire.
Our club station was renamed the "Richard Pugmire Amateur Radio Station" and dedicated on May 4, 2018 during the STS-21 space simulation.
The station was completed on January 30, 2016. It is located in room #301 next to the Russell Space Team's Mission Control. No school funds were used to purchase any equipment. This station is the product of donations from people in the community like Mr. Pugmire, teachers, and just generally good-hearted friends of our club.
Equipment:
- Kenwood TS-2000 transceiver
- KT-100 Auto-tuner (not pictured)
- 35 amp 13.8 volt regulated power supply (Astron)
- 4-band off-center-fed dipole antenna (Buckmaster)
- 2m/440 vertical antenna (Jetstream JTB3)
KM4RE club station. The desk on the left now has a second computer monitor which is used for DX spotting, QRZ.com, and weather updates. The monitor on the right is used to log our QSOs. We use
Amateur Contact Log (and the contest software that comes with it) by Affirmatech Software, Inc. for all of our contest, special event, and routine operation. I highly recommend it. It is a quality product, ridiculously inexpensive, and you will find no better people to deal with than the owners Scott and Kimberly.
Close-up view of the operator's station. The computer is used to log contacts. Our auto-tuner (not pictured) is on top of the transceiver.
4-band off-center-fed dipole antenna mounted on our lunchroom roof. Total height above ground is 35 feet. It is in an inverted V configuration and oriented NE-SW. The apex of our V is actually about 9 feet higher than shown in this photograph.
2m/440 vertical antenna. This is used to work the area repeaters or for VHF/UHF simplex. It is mounted to the mast that supports the SW leg of our off-center-fed dipole.
This metal enclosure has a copper plate backing onto which lightning arrestors are mounted (lower left). The feedline from the antenna connects to the lightning arrestors so that our antennas are all grounded. The copper plate is connected to an 8-foot copper grounding rod by a 2-inch copper strap visible in the lower right corner. The feedline then runs through the 3-inch hole that we had bored through the wall (upper left). We also have all of our equipment in the station grounded to a copper bar that is then grounded to the copper plate in the enclosure with copper braid. (We had not installed this yet when the photograph was made.) All of these steps help to make our station safer and our operation less prone to noise and RF in the shack. The enclosure was made for us by Chris (KF7P) at Metalwerks.
Our tripods are mounted onto concrete blocks. Each block functions as a weighted base for each tripod/mast. This was done to avoid penetrating the roof and creating potential leak spots. This setup also allows us to easily change the antenna's position if we want.