A big meeting today at Woodend. First up, Jim, VK3KA, gave a detailed presentation of the state of the Starlink low earth orbit satellite internet service. Amazing technology stack and continues to improve in various ways. Did you know that satellites are designed for demisability? As well as serving homes, Starlink also provides fast internet to vehicles, ships and planes. Already short messages can use it from standard mobile phones and in the future it seems it will support voice a...

A terrific presentation from Icom business Development manager Dan Hill. The new IC-7300Mk2 was covered in great detail with a demonstration unit on hand. The original IC-7300 has sold in excess of 100,000 units and the new version has some important improvements in both performance and connectivity. An IC-7760 was shown and demonstrated receiving an IQ recording of a 40m band during a contest. David, VK3KR, showed a new home brew portable antenna for 2m described in QST i...

A well-attended and engaging meeting today at Woodend. Joe, VK3MAB, gave a detailed overview of the state of the art in low cost SDR reception. He showed a variety of client software including SDR#, SDR++, and many others. Excellent HF recordings were played as well as DMR recordings of airport workers who can be heard from Joe's place. He demonstrated reception of 433MHz devices including a garage door remote. A UHF FM transmitter was demodulated. A fascinating a wide-ranging pr...

A good turnout and a lovely day for the coffee morning at Gisborne. Due to extreme fire conditions we weren't able to access our normal venue of the CFA building. Ron had the bright idea of simply dropping the name of John, VK3JCB at the near-by SES and that got us in the door there. Very kind of them. We had an animated discussion, solving world problems as always. Peter, VK3TPM, brought a new (to him) Xiegu X6200 radio which seems like an excellent portable radio with built-in ba...