About CORE

Just before Field Day in 2002, a group  of HAM Radio  friends had lunch together and started talking about the upcoming Field Day, after a little bit of discussion, it was decided to get together and operate a Field Day site.  The goal was to see if we could put some of the FUN, that we thought was lacking, back into the hobby.  We had a great time that year.  We didn’t score a lot of points, but we sure ate good, and more importantly, we found that we could work well together and have a lot of FUN doing it.

We decided afterwards, that we would look and see if there were some other things we wanted to do together as a group that would bring the FUN back into the hobby.  Over the next few months, we got together informally for dinners or lunches (eating well is a thread that you will find runs through all our activities) and we began calling ourselves the Clarksville Operating Radio  Enthusiasts, or the “CORE Group.”   

 We all had the desire to provide EmCOMM to community agencies, too, so we took it upon ourselves to become qualified by taking the ARRL EmCOMM courses  and some of the basic FEMA courses.  We soon affiliated with the local American Red Cross chapter and became their “emergency radio arm.”   We also took advantage on an off-road bicycle race held at Land Between the Lakes every Fall and provided race communications for them.  Little did we know the challenges we would  face in trying to communicate in that environment.  We met and overcame the challenges with a through cooperation and teamwork.  What a feeling of accomplishment that gave us!  

Several months later, we began to have regular meetings, and a few more local hams joined with  us.  We decided to take on the long range project of putting up a repeater at the Red Cross building and also to see if we could build an HF station at the Custom House Museum.  We all pitched in and contributed the time and the money to get both of these projects completed well before we thought we would, we also put a UHF repeater in at the museum.

A few of us decided to become VE’s  to enable us to give license exams and provide that service to the community, of course this also provided the benefit of potential new members of the group.    Over the ensuing years, the group has grown, but our  basic philosophy has not changed.  Just as the original group agreed that decisions would be made by consensus, not majority rule, we continue that today.  The original group also agreed that whoever came up with an idea was the one to head up the team to accomplish it and the rest would support it, so that we didn’t have a situation where the same few people got stuck doing the work for other people’s “great ideas.” 

We do not collect dues, all expenses are taken care of by donations as needed.  We are very informal and the meetings normally take the format of just a group of friends getting together to talk about Ham radio and how to have FUN with it and help each other learn and meet challenges associated with that in the process.  

C.O.R.E has regularly scheduled meetings on the second Tuesday of each month, at 7:00 p.m. We are currently meeting at the Park Lane Church  of the  Nazarene (see the info on the Home page). 

We have a monthly Meet and Greet net on the first Thursday of the month at 7:00 p.m.on our VHF repeater, K4ORE, 146.925. Go to the Home page for information on the repeater and our repeater usage guidelines.   

We also support the local ARES group which has a net on the third Thursday of the month at 7:00 p.m. on our repeater.  For more information on local ARES activities, please see the info on our Home page.

We get together monthly to operate the Museum station, and will operate it at other  times for youth groups and other special Museum functions.   

Periodically, we get together for a breakfast, or lunch at a local restaurant, or for a picnic at a local park.   

All are welcome to attend any of our events and join in any of our activities.
If you need more specific information that is not on this website, please contact us at  K4ORE@ARRL.net and we will get an answer to you.

.