The Beaches Amateur Radio Society (BARS) is an association of amateur radio operators living in and around the beaches of Jacksonville, FL. The beaches include Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, Jacksonville Beach and Ponte Vedra Beach. All persons with any interest in learning about amateur radio are welcome to any of our meetings or events!
We meet every month on the 4th Thursday evening of the month. See our monthly meeting location on the right side of this page.
We also have a regular breakfast meeting on the first Saturday of each month. See our monthly breakfast location on the right side of this page.
Our regular meetings include radio oriented discussions and some kind of educational program and are open to the public. If you want to learn more about amateur radio and becoming a “Ham” please attend one of our meetings!
We are good communicators! If you are having a public event where safety and and communications are important, we may be able to help. Hams assist in events such as triathlons, bike races, parades, foot races and air shows. Of course all that practice is just preparing us for the emergencies that we hope will never happen. Let us know if we can help with your event.
BARS owns and operates one of the amateur radio repeaters at the Beaches of Jacksonville. Our repeater operates on 145.350 and is open to the all amateur operators. If you would like to help support our efforts to maintain repeater coverage at the Beaches, please join BARS!
If you are a new ham and would like to borrow some equipment to get started with please join BARS and take advantage of our equipment loaner program.
BARS has been an ARRL (American Radio Relay League) affiliate club since 1962 and maintain our affiliate status by our members becoming and remaining ARRL members. For more club information visit the ARRL BARS Club page.
We announce meetings, gatherings and special events through the following social networking sites.
Oct Program Erin Citrullo, Communications Supervisor for JBPD & FD Title: Communications Center Activities Description: Erin shares about the operations in the Beaches 911 center
Breakfast Meeting NEW LOCATION
The next breakfast meeting will be 8:00am on Saturday, October 6, 2018 at Bacon In the Sun Cafe (798 South 3rd Street Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250) All are welcome!
Repeater Info
The BARS VHF repeater is online and available for use. To access KB4ARS VHF go to 145.350 pl 127.3 and if you have standard analog radio, set your tone setting to TONE SQL. The repeater is capable of both analog and C4FM digital (Yaesu System Fusion) that will mode switch depending on who keys up the repeater last.
Our UHF repeaters (444.875) is currently undergoing upgrades and is not fully operational at this time. Once the repeaters is back online we'll send out a member announcement and post an update here on the web site.
