Category: Club Business

Call	Name	Address	Dues
AA8IA	Tindor, Mike	Carrolton,OH-EN90ln	2026
AC8P	Latos, Frank	Farmington Hills,MI-EN82hm	2025
AC8W	Arnett, Stan	Marysville,MI-EN82rw	2023
AJ8B	Salyers, Bill	Waynesville,OH-EM79wn	2025
K1LT	Kean, Victor	Carroll,OH-EM89ps	2024
K8AJS	Bastin, John	Wooster,OH-EN90at	2024
K8BB	Chisholm, Don	Pontiac,MI-EN82ip	2025
K8GU	Miller, Ethan	Dayton,OH-EM79vp	2024
K8KHZ	Fleming, Sean	Madison Heights,MI-EN82km	2024
K8MR	Stahl, Jim	Chagrin Falls,OH-EN91gk	2024
K8ND	Maass, Jeff	Powell,OH-EN80ke	2025
K8NWD	Pepper, Tim	Waterford,MI-EN82hq	2023
K8RYU	Matheny, Ralph	Marrietta,OH-EM99gk	2023
K9ALP	Arnold, Louis	Columbus,OH-EN80lb	2024
K9NW	Tessmer, Mike	Fairfield,OH-EM79rj	2026
KC0RBV	Tuttle, Jennie	Otsego,MI-EN72dk	2024
KE8OC	O’Sullivan, Tim	Canton,MI-EN82gh	2024
KV8P	Hall, Robert	Holland,OH-EN81dp	2023
KW8N	Hayes, Bob	N Ridgeville,OH-EN81xi	2024
N8CJ	Rothweiler, Alan	Newark,OH-EN80sc	2027
N8EA	Holstein, Joe	Ortonville,MI-EN82gu	2023
N8ET	Kelsey, Bill	Findlay,OH-EN80ex	2024
N8FE	Fleming, Marsha	Huntington Woods,MI-EN82kl	2024
N8FYL	Huber, John	Troy,MI-EN82ko	2023
N8GAS	Stobbs, Greg	Bloomfield Hills,MI-EN82in	2023
N8SBE	New, David	Ann Arbor,MI-EN82cg	2024
N8VV	Hardy, Daniel	Newcomerstown,OH-EN90dh	2024
N8XE	Hissong, Jason	Hilliard,OH-EN80ka	2027
N8YXR	Tuttle, Robert	Otsego,MI-EN72dk	2024
NA8V	Chapoton, Greg	Emmett,MI-EN83ob	2024
NF8M	Maynard, Frank	Novi,MI-EN82gl	2024
W1NN	Offutt, Hal	Medina,OH-EN91ae	2023
W3HKK	Elek, Robert	Johnstown,OH-EN80qe	2025
W4ZN	Thernes, John	Erlanger,KY-EM79qa	2024
W8AJ	Jaffe, Allan	Cleveland,OH-EN91gm	2024
W8AV	Steingass, Goose	Wooster,OH-EN90bt	2024
W8EWH	Yergin, Mark	Novi,MI-EN82fl	2024
W8KNO	Wehner, Joe	Hiram,OH-EN91kh	2024
W8MJ	Meier, Ken	South Lyon,MI-EN82dl	2024
W8PT	Patellis, Charles	Middlefield,OH-EN91lk	2023
W8RU	Majewski, Ron	Commerce Twp.,MI-EN82fn	2024
W8TB	Royer, Jeff	Wadsworth,OH-EN91da	2023
W8TM	Kirley, Paul	Cincinnati,OH-EM79te	2024
W8UA	Miller, Javan	Rittman,OH-EN91ca	< 23
W8UE	Marlin, Thaddeus	Ypsilanti,MI-EN82ef	2024
W8WTS	Galm, Jim	Chagrin Falls,OH-EN91ij	2024
WB8SBI	Schwartz, Jay	Huntington Woods,MI-EN82kl	2024
WD8S	Van Buren, Mike	Ferndale,MI-EN82kl	2023
WZ8P	Jackson, Everett	Zanesville,OH-EN80xa	2025

This year’s Approved budget is the same as last year’s budget except for an increase to the Zoom Meeting License which has increased by $15.

2024 Planned Expenditures

Budget Item Description and Detail	Payment Due	Amount
Web Hosting for MRRC, Michigan QSO Party and Ohio QSO Party web sites All sites hosted under a single account with qth.com (e.g., no additional expense for multiple sites) and Web site domain name renewals for MadRiverRadioClub.org, MiQP.org, and OhQP.org	December	$200
Expenses for the Dayton Hamvention “Suite in the Sun” (Club hospitality and member sales area in the Dayton Hamvention flea market)	June	$225
Commitment of Support for the Contesters Super Suite at the Hope Hotel during the 2023 Dayton Hamvention (This is a max value which is reduced by the amount of beverage sales – in recent years our responsibility has been zero)	May	$350
Zoom meeting license	June	$175
Monetary support to the Ohio QSO Party for operating expenses and awards	June	$200
Monetary support to the Michigan QSO Party for operating expenses and awards	June	$200
	Total:	$1350

To Meet This Budget:

We need 54 members paying $25 each.

As of today, 29 members have paid their 2024 dues.

Respectfully submitted,

Tim O’Sullivan KE8OC                                                                                            5/20/2024

The next meeting of the Mad River Radio Club will be at 11:00 AM on Sunday, September 11, 2016 during the Findlay Hamfest, held at the Hancock County Fairgrounds in Findlay, Ohio.  The location of the meeting on the hamfest site will be in the covered aluminum grandstands in the center of the fairgrounds (the same location as in 2015).  Also, as has been recent practice, we can expect the meeting to be announced over the public address system in advance. The Hancock County Fairgrounds is not hard to locate. Referring to the map, exit from I-75 either northbound or southbound at exit 157 and proceed east on SR-12 into town.  Turn right (south) on S Main St for about two blocks, then turn left (east) on SR-568 for about one mile.  The fairgrounds will be on your right.  Access to the parking lot is from the east side of the Fairgrounds.

At the MRRC meeting during the Dayton Hamvention in May 2016, the club budget for its 2016 fiscal year was presented to the membership and approved by unanamous vote.

2016 Planned Expenditures

Budget Item Description and Detail	Payment Due	Amount
Web Hosting for MRRC, Michigan QSO Party and Ohio QSO Party web sites All sites hosted under a single account with qth.com (e.g., no additional expense for multiple sites)	December	$120
Web site domain name renewals for MadRiverRadioClub.org, MiQP.org, and OhQP.org	May	$40
Expenses for the Dayton Hamvention “Suite in the Sun” (Club hospitality and member sales area in the Dayton Hamvention flea market)	June	$150
Commitment of Support for the Contesters SuperSuite at the Crowne Plaza Hotel during the Dayton Hamvention (This is a max value which is reduced by the amount of beverage sales – in recent years our responsibility has been zero)	June	$100
Monetary support to the Ohio QSO Party for operating expenses and awards	June	$150
Monetary support to the Michigan QSO Party for operating expenses and awards	June	$150
	Total:	$710

To Meet This Budget:

We need 36 members paying $20 each  to meet this budget.

20 members pre-paid their 2016 dues totaling $284, (some at the old $12 rate, some at the new $20 rate)

17 members paid dues at the Dayton meeting,

so we only need 5 more members to pay dues to meet this budget

Because MRRC covers such a large geographic area, and the somewhat specialized nature of our primary interest, the club tends not to have regular in-person meetings.  Over its long history, the club has developed it’s meeting schedule to match it’s member’s interests, holding meetings at related events and augmenting these with “local” or specialized meetings as member interest requires.

Following this methodology, MRRC has three meetings on the schedule for 2020.  Click on the hyperlinks to see details about that meetings:

Christmas Party	(Saturday 4-Jan 2020 @ 2:00PM)	Aurora, OH
Dayton Hamvention	(Saturday of 3rd weekend in May)	Dayton, OH
Findlay Hamfest	(Sunday of 2nd weekend in September)	Findlay, OH

The Christmas Party meeting, historically held just after New Years at K8MR’s QTH in Cleveland OH, has been moved to 1500 Danner Drive Aurora, OH 44202.

    One of the ways MRRC members stay in touch with each other, and get their club news, is via MRRC’s e-mail reflector.  For those not familiar with e-mail reflectors, it is a mailing list where any e-mails sent to it are “reflected” back to all of the users subscribed to it; sort of an e-mail “party line”.

    The MRRC e-mail reflector is open to anyone – you don’t have to be a member to subscribe; perhaps to learn what the club is all about.  While the reflector is not “moderated” (where a club official would have to approve any e-mail to it), courteous use of the reflector will limit e-mails to topics of interest to the club and its members.

    There is no cost to subscribe to the MRRC E-mail Reflector. To join, send an email to

mrrc-request@contesting.com

    You must include the word “subscribe” (without quotes) in the body of the message.  Once you’ve subscribed, the list server will send you an e-mail confirming subscription, along with instructions in managing options in how you receive e-mails from the reflector, and how to unsubscribe.

    To send an e-mail to the reflector, simply address it to:

mrrc@contesting.com

    Please note that the above e-mail addresses are not actually text (which can be clicked on to send the e-mail, but are instead graphical images of the addresses to prevent automated Internet robots from grabbing the addresses and bombarding the reflector with spam.

    It is not recommended that you subscribe to the reflector through a forwarding address like arrl.org or similar. You have to send all your postings to the forwarding address, which then sends it to the reflector. The reflector then has to send the postings it distributes to the forwarding address, which then sends it to you. While this WILL work, it slows everything down for no good reason.

By Jim Stahl, K8MR
(Reprinted from the April, 1985 MRRC Flash)
With minor updating by K8CC

In the beginning there was the Potomac Valley Radio Club and the Frankford Radio Club.  In radio contests, they would compete against each other, and when it was all over they would congratulate each other, and say it was good.

Over the years, FRC drifted away from domestic contests and toward DX contests.  Murphy’s Marauders was born and took on the job of providing competition for PVRC.  It was still all simple, and it was good.

In the spring of 1970, at the urging of people from the other side of the country, the ARRL Board of Directors voted to extend the limits for club territories in Affiliated Club Competitions to 175 miles.  The Atlantic Division director was not sure that this was good, and asked to be recorded as voting against.  The July 1970 issue of QST announced this change, with the Operating News column including examples hypothetical such as a New York City club which could cover from Baltimore to Boston.

Living in the center of Ohio was Dick Bennett, K8EHU (now K8MZ).  He looked at what the new radius would cover in his neighborhood.  He also considered what might be covered by careful location of the center of this 175 mile radius circle.  With a paper cutout and a Gulf road map, he discovered that it would cover such cities as Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

At the Dayton Hamvention® in 1971, K8EHU approached various “big gun” contesters about forming a club covering such an area.  On Saturday morning, April 24, 1971, a group of a dozen or so contesters ate breakfast together at the VJ Pancake House, across the street from the Dayton Sheraton hotel (later the Biltmore Towers, then Stouffer’s, and today known as the Dayton Crowne Plaza hotel) which was the downtown hamfest hotel in those days (and still is).

Over pancakes and eggs, the contesters decided to go ahead with the proposed club.  Naturally, the question arose of what to call the club?  The Ohio-Michigan-Indiana-Kentucky-West Virginia-Pennsylvania-Ontario Contest Club somehow didn’t make it.  Where again was the club center?  No, the Wapakoneta Radio Club wouldn’t do either.  What’s this river running through Western Ohio?  The Mad River?  Sold!  The group also decided to make the 1971 Sweepstakes their first serious effort in the Affiliated Club Competition, elected K8EHU the first “Big Fish”, and then left to go forth, multiply, and search for flea market bargains…

The first club membership list, published in the second issue of the Flash listed 36 members including (with today’s callsigns) N4AR, K5TM, K7GM, K7NHV, KU7U, N8AA, K8BPX, K8MZ, WB8EUN, K8IA, W8KIC (sk), K8MR, K8NZ, NA8V, W8WPC, N9RV and K8RR (sk).  Each subsequent issue of the Flash listed more new members.  The weekly net on 75 meters was bustling with activity.  By SS time the club roster had grown to 154 members.  Needless to say, during the Sweepstakes weekends the bands were filled with the sound of “GO MAD RIVER!” as members greeted each other.  Naturally, all this caught the attention of the PVRC and Murphy’s.  When the SS dust settled, it was a close finish with MRRC out in front.  As the Flash put it:

“The SS results have not been taken well on the East Coast, especially by many of Murphy’s members.  It has also been reported that many PVRC members do not like our victory, but have generally accepted the situation like the sportsmen and gentlemen they have long been respected for.  On the other hand, some of Murphy’s members are very bitter and acting very frustrated.  However, we expected this reaction.”

Murphy’s did protest.  The SS results were published in the May 1972 QST with MRRC first with 9,960,874 points from 174 entries, with K7NHV operating from the MSU club station, W8SH winning both modes.  PVRC took second with 8.79 million points from 133 entries, and Murphys’ was third with 7.36 million points from 116 entries.  The MRRC line score contained the infamous asterisk, indicating that the validity of the entry was in question and would be determined later.  There was much haggling back and forth with ARRL HQ over whether certain MRRC members were indeed within the 175 mile radius, and whether needed to have any in-person meetings at all (the rules at that time said nothing on this topic).  A QST “Stray” in the June 1972 issue announced that the MRRC had been disqualified, and the club gavel went to PVRC.

K8CC addendum: “One of the other controversies raised about MRRC’s 1972 SS club entry is that new members were being recruited to join the club during the contest(s), in order to contribute their score to MRRC.  While this did not violate any rules in place at the time, it certainly contributed to the discussions at the ARRL which led to the “four in-person meetings per year” requirement which wasn’t instituted until much later (see below).”

At a Mad River dinner the following Spring at Dayton, the then ARRL President W2HD attempted to soothe feelings, but instead managed to give one of the better “foot-in-mouth” performances in recent times.  He told the club that as an experienced contester himself, he knew that “when Murphy strikes,  Murphy strikes hard”.  But MRRC already knew…

MRRC submitted a much smaller entry in the 1972 Sweepstakes, but it was ignored.  No specific rules for club entries were adopted until 1974 a requirement for four in-person meetings per year as instituted.  By 1975, interest in MRRC was again bubbling up, based around holding the four meetings at popular hamfests within MRRC territory.  Prompted by K8MR and K8NZ, a reorganization meeting was held at the ARRL Great Lakes Division convention in October 1975.  By the time of the 1976 Dayton Hamvention®,  the club was back to full strength.  K8NZ was elected “Big Fish”, succeeding club founder K8EHU who was keeping himself busy enough with law school in the evenings.  The club’s entry in the 1976 Sweepstakes Club Competition was accepted with no issue at ARRL HQ, taking fourth place with 3.7 million points from 42 entries.  The 1997 ARRL DX tests were the club’s first effort in a DX contest club competition.

MRRC was by then off and running, quickly becoming an active force in contesting, a legitimate contender for club awards, and frequent contest/DXpeditions by its members.

If you hang around MRRC long enough, you’ll eventually hear people refer to the “Club Circle”  There seems to be a fair amount of confusion as to what the circle is (or isn’t) so we thought it would be a good idea to explain the whole thing.

The history of the club circle dates back to 1972, when the ARRL, in order to prevent the formation of huge, artificial contest clubs that only existed on paper, made a rule for clubs entering an ARRL Affiliated Club Competition in the Medium and Unlimited categories that all members contributing scores for that competition had to reside within a 175 mile diameter circle.

The effect of this rule is that for ARRL Club Competitions, a club such as MRRC has to identify a geographic club center  and submit a roster to the ARRL showing all club members and stations that are located within 175 miles of the club center.  The ARRL then will only count scores from members/stations from that roster when totaling MRRC’s club score.

MRRC’s original club center in 1972 was selected to be at Marion, OH, which is east of Lima and north of Columbus.  This location was chosen to encompass the population of MRRC members, as it was at that time.  Since then, the circle has been moved twice to reflect changes in the club’s demographics.  In the early 90s the center was moved northwest to Findlay, to better cover the growing membership base in Michigan.  The club center has remained at Findlay to this day.

The map below illustrates the current club circle, covering a 175 mile radius from Findlay, OH (EN81eb).  The circle covers essentially all of Ohio except for a small area at the south.  It also covers approximately one-third of Michigan’s lower peninsula. In the process, it also covers a large portion of Indiana, which is of no benefit to MRRC since we have no members there (and most contesters belong to the Society Of Midwest Contesters (SoMC)).

Some things to understand about the MRRC Club Circle:

1. The club circle only applies to score submissions for ARRL Club Competitions such as SS, ARRL 160, ARRL 10 and ARRL DX.  It does not apply for score submissions in contests sponsored by the NCJ, CQ Magazine, or others.
2. The club circle has nothing to do with membership in MRRC. Everyone is welcome to join MRRC – you do not have to live or operate from within the club circle to be a member.
3. As mentioned earlier, the club tries to position the circle to cover the maximum number of club members.  We do not adjust the club circle from contest to contest. If you find yourself outside the circle, and you’d like to be inside, please contact club officers K8CC or K1LT to indicate your interest, and the club will look into a way to accommodate your request. Moving the club circle is considered official club business and requires a membership vote at an official club meeting (historically, this has been done at the Dayton meeting).

Hopefully, this information will clear up any misunderstanding about the MRRC Club Circle and what it applies to.