Most amateur radio gear runs on a supply voltage of under 14V but there are many LiPo battery packs that produce more than that and need to be regulated down. Frequent SOTA operator David, VK3KR, has been building supply adapters for this purpose. At Gresswell Hill, of the power supply running the mcHF transceiver. Primary power source is an 18.5V LiPo which has sufficient power for many hours of activating David was lucky enough to obtain a commercial grade DC-DC Converter, recovered fro...

The November meeting was informal with mostly socialising and a bit of show and tell. Graeme, VK3NE, brought along a very nicely made WSPR transmitter using an early Raspberry Pi with a low pass filter for two (really three) bands. Peter, VK3TPM, brought along a Quansheng UV-K5. It's a decent successor to the low cost Baofeng UV-5R but it features USB-C charging (unfortunately not USB programming) and more significantly optional firmware that enables new features. It can be re-flashed fr...

Like last year, a few members of our club made the journey down to Rosebud for the RadioFest. Lots to see It was very well organised and there was loads of interesting equipment on display or for sale. This mystery item was purchased and I have to say that I definitely feel more energetic since getting it back to the shack and putting it to the test. Happily it turned out to be what I had hoped - an amplifier and speaker in a box with battery or external power. Very useful aroun...

As members know, the club holds a weekly net each Wednesday. From 8pm it's on the VK3RMM 2m repeater, which covers a lot of Victoria. From 8:30pm it's on 3.685MHz, which is generally regarded as a good spot for local chat. This week I received a reception report from Stephen, VK2BLQ, located in Chatswood, Sydney, who was able to hear some stations using an indoor receive loop. He's using an amplified broadband receive loop called an MLA-30 but he's enhanced it by substituting the thin...

VK3HUG Hugo, VK3HUG and Peter, VK3TPM gave a presentation about how trunk radio works and how they listen to local fire fighters (CFA) here in Victoria. While there are commercial scanners from Uniden that come with the CFA trunk frequencies in them, if you have a couple of low cost RTLSDR dongles there is a free option. SDRTrunk is free software and it is amazing. After explaining how trunk radio works and its many advantages over analog systems the presenters demonstrated SDR trun...

VK3RV Wolfenden wows the crowd yet again! Club member, Peter, VK3RV presented the talk he gave at the Macedon club to the prestigious Old Timers Club at the Caulfield RSL. The talk was a detailed history with many fascinating stories of the progress of electrification starting in Melbourne and slowly branching out to other suburbs. It seems that the engineers in Melbourne were up to date with advances around the world and, while starting with DC, had made early preparations for switchi...