The meeting began with discussion of the Explorer Post 599 webpage. Several ideas were passed around including the idea of having each member be in charge of a specific section of the webpage. Due to formatting and layout issues, along with the risk of having a user with the password being able to accidentally delete the wrong sections, it was decided that Alex (KD7ROD) will remain the only webmaster. All content shall be submitted to him for formatting and posting.
Various discussions of the content followed. It was decided that the basic layout and colors are acceptable, but we need new and up to date material to post. The sections that were discussed include the following.
An "About Us" section that will be an introduction to new people coming to the page should be added. It will stress that they can get public service hours by participating in events such as bike races. We need to make sure to include several words that will be picked up by text crawling search engines and hopefully bring new people in.
Another section that must be added is a "Meetings" section, which will include minutes for the weekly meetings and possibly a schedule of future activities. An up to date calendar has already been uploaded, but we need to try and plan as far in the future as possible. It was also decided the current "Members" page needs to be updated or eliminated.
It was then decided that we want a single "Pictures" main page that will have around a dozen photos with captions. Then near the end of it we will have a link for more pictures. The size of these pictures should be somewhere around 320x240. It is currently undecided who will write these captions or choose the pictures. No one volunteered for the task, but Alex is the most likely candidate.
The "Equipment for sale" section will remain a link to Scott Cowling's (WA2DFI) webpage that he will be in charge of updating as needed.
Finally we discussed possible contact information. It was decided we would create several new email forwarding domains to use and update when needed. It was discovered that current contact information for Tom Sharp (WA9OXY) is invalid and should be updated or replaced with the new system as soon as possible. The new system will have an email address for the major post officers that need to be contacted by the public as follows,
Webmaster@post599.org
President@post599.org
Advisor@post599.org
Next on the agenda was the ARA tracker project. A final tracker document was presented by David (KD7NZK) to hand out to the ARA members at the board meeting next Wednesday. After some discussion it was finalized that we will present the option of using a duel band radio. The price is nearly the same with either radio so we will present the pros and cons of both and let them decide. We will urge them to consider the Maxtrac radios because there are no heat issues and we wont have to install a fan or other cooling system.
Tom Sharp quickly ran though some ideas for future post officers and handed out chapter 1 of the Explorer Post handbook. If minutes are going to be kept on a regular basis as planned a secretary will be needed. Further discussion on this topic will be needed.
In the last ten minutes of the meeting Scott Cowling presented a quick talk on Software Defined Radios. He attempted to explain the basics of how they work while a USB drive with the software for operating them was copied to the various laptops around. He informed us that he has 5 kits for us to construct. We might get to work on these radios next week. Matt (KG6TCN) took home the demo radio to test on his computers. Again, further discussion on this topic will be needed.