About N5LOC

N5SAC owes a great debt to Jeff Locke. Mr. Locke is a retired Air Force Master Sergeant who served from 1974 – 1994 in places such as Greenland, Turkey, The Netherlands, and right here in Texas. It was in Texas, and specifically Sachse, where he got his license in 2010 under the call sign KF5IJH. He would earn his General class license later that year and took a new call sign, N5LOC.

The following year, Mr. Locke helped establish the Sachse Amateur Radio Association (SARA) alongside fellow ham and next door neighbor, John Findley, W5INF. They extended an invitation to fellow hams they had heard on the air and this initial group became SARA’s charter members.

Also starting in 2011, Mr. Locke purchased equipment for setting up a repeater and secured a frequency pair for use by SARA. The repeater also supported the mission of Dallas County RACES by hosting nets and other weather-related communications. Eventually, SARA acquired their own repeater with a different frequency pair, which can still be heard on the air today.

The N5LOC repeater fell silent for a number of years until N5SAC club officers approached Mr. Locke seeking permission to use the frequency pair, to which he graciously agreed. Today, the N5SAC radio club is proud to honor Mr. Locke’s commitment to community service by operating a new repeater dedicated to emergency communications on the same frequency pair he established.