Our monthly meetings are on the first Tuesday of each month. The meetings begin at 7:00 pm and last until about 9:00. The meetings are located at the Lake Arrowhead Presbyterian Church located just south of Lake Arrowhead Village at 351 Hwy 173, Lake Arrowhead, CA 92352. Phone is (909) 336-1502.
Our meetings are open to everyone, licensed amateur radio or just interested parties. The club is family oriented and meant to be educational and fun.
Our purpose is to provide educational opportunities, mentoring, radio communication training, and providing radio communications for community events.
Each meeting also has a technical presentation on some aspect of amateur radio. For information about an upcoming meeting please go to the INFORMATION tab and send us an email.
Near the end of each meeting is our monthly mentoring session called an Elmer session.
We conduct weekly nets as part of our training and educational program. Anyone is welcome to check into our net which is held on Monday evenings at 7:00 pm.
We offer Technician license classes twice a year. The classes are normally in the April and October time frame. Normally there are between 25 and 30 in each class. Over the past three years our club members have taught and licensed over 200 members of the mountain communities as well as a number from other areas of the county. Our licensing success rate is very high.
Besides the Technician license we also offer assistance for upgrading to your General or Extra license. We now have testing session at each of our meetings but please call or email ahead.
The club has over ten Volunteer Examiners, or VE's, to provide the testing so everything can be handled up on the mountain.
For current class information download the current flyer.
We encourage everyone to learn how to program their own radio. We also practice this in our Elmer sessions. However, if you need to have a full mask of the local radio repeaters and frequencies loaded we will help you do that. We have the programming software for most common radios and bring it to each meeting. We do recommend that you contact us before the meeting and let us know what radio you need to have programmed to make sure we have the correct software, cables and other hardware to accomplish the work.
Special events and activities are announced in our monthly club member email and on the Monday night nets.
MTARA is not an Emergency Communications club. However we do have a large group of our members that are affiliated with the Amateur Radio Emergency Services, ARES, within the ARRL Orange Section.
If you are interested in Emergency Communications in times of a disaster consider our ARES group, CERT or ECS.
If you have interest in working with the County Fire Office of Emergency Services you should consider attending the Central Mountain ECS meetings and see if that volunteer organization is for you. ECS focuses on EmComm and provides in depth training for emergency services. Information about ECS is available on their website at https://sbcfire.org/ecs/ .
Copyright © 2015-2024 Mountain Top Amateur Radio Association - MTARA & Mountain Top ARES
PO Box 2441, Lake Arrowhead, CA 92352
Our next meeting is October 1st at our regular location
The topic will be Part 3 on getting outside and playing radio. there will be an overview of the different types of antennas. Part 1 was about battery configurations and Part 2 was about small radios for the field.
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NETS
Monday 7:00 pm - MTARA net on MTARA2
Tuesday 7:00 pm - MTARA 220 Net on MTARA5