At the next club meeting at 10am, Saturday, June 17, we are delighted to welcome prolific home brew builder Ralph, VK3ZZC who will share lessons from his long experience of metalworking at home. If you have the urge to construct your own ham equipment then at some stage you will be required to perform some simple metalworking operations. In the old days this activity was called "chassis bashing" when all things radio were mounted on an aluminium or tin plate steel chassis. Making the lar...

Ross Gairn with The Queen Saturday's MRARC meeting was a memorable one as we had a guest speaker, Ross Gairn, who worked in the Royal Household. You might well ask how does an Aussie get to work for the Queen? Ross explained the rigorous interview process. In light of the recent coronation celebrations in London, with the precision timing, immaculately attired participants and amazing procedures, our speaker gave us his account of the years he worked for both the late Queen and Prince Phi...

At this month's meeting, Barry Theodore, VK3BRT, gave a fascinating talk about his experiences building systems to automatically time laps of cars in races and also horse races. As a young teenager, Barry used to enjoy going to car races. Later, when he was working with computers, and watching drag racing at Calder, the race stopped due to computer problems. This led to an opportunity to help with the timing system and the start of a long association with this sort of technology. Cars...

At this month's meeting, guest presenter Andrew Martin spoke about railway signalling. Andrew Martin It was a fascinating romp through the history of technologies used to make it safe for trains to navigate complex track networks without banging in to each other. A Relay used for signalling There were many questions and we all learned a lot about the focus on reliability and safety that underpins a rail network. The VK3TPM "Bush 40" was on display Some members do home co...

Several members of the Macedon Ranges Amateur Radio Club were in attendance at the WARC hamfest. VK3TPM, VK3LRJ, & VK3HUG There was an excellent range of older gear on sale as well as all sorts of useful parts for the junk box. Several commercial vendors were in attendance. The day was well organised and the sausages, with onion and white bread, were well prepared by the talented chefs.