A varied meeting at Woodend today. There were some left-over items from the Graeme VK3NE SK auction and we welcomed new member Wally Fiedler who is on the way to getting his call. FreeDV version 2.3 was downloaded, installed and the initial configuration done before a live audience. The club has purchased some useful items of test equipment including a nanoVNA, a tinySA and a HackRF Portapack Mayhem. Peter VK3TPM went through the amazing range of capabilities of this device and de...

The club has acquired some useful test equipment recently for use in presentations and for short term loan to members. The HackRF Portapack Mayhem device is primarily to produce demonstration signals for showing off receivers in the meeting room. It has many features beyond this. The NanoVNA Ultra I thought I ordered turned out to be a spectrum analyser. I was tricked by the listing and ordered the wrong "colour". Very annoying. I've gone ahead and ordered the other colour. ...

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...