At the club meeting in Woodend, our guest speaker was Tony Falla, VK3KPP from our sister club BAREC who talked about his experiences in providing backup communications that can be used during emergencies. Tony talked about how quickly the communications we rely on, primarily mobile phones, can stop working in times of stress. Reasons include power outages that exceed the backup batteries, destruction of cell towers, or even the network overload due to people calling for welfare checks of...

The new venue this year, Rowsley Hall, was bursting at the seams with all the enthusiastic amateurs in attendance. The intense sun telegraphed that the day would turn out to be a warm one. Happily there were refreshments including, I'm told, a large number of hot chocolate options. While there was a strong team from our Bendigo brothers, I didn't spot any members of MRARC, at least early on. While those excellent capacitors were very tempting, I came away with...

Today's meeting at Woodend was well attended. Graeme, VK3CDO, gave a fascinating talk starting with a bit of history of aircraft in Australia and ending up with a survey of air disasters in our region. Graeme covered the history of the "DC" line of planes, starting with the DC1, DC2 and later the incredibly popular DC3. 13,000 DC3s were built over the years. Among the "highlights" was DC2 VH-UYT which hit Mt Dandenong due, we think, to navigation errors which led to them no...

Once again many club members made the trip to the excellent Ballarat Hamfest. While the weather was warm there was a very pleasant breeze through the venue. Our congratulations to the organisers for another very professionally run day. It was great to catch up with many old and new friends.

The annual Macedon Ranges Amateur Radio Club family day on Mount Macedon was a very enjoyable get together. As we picnicked in the paddock there were entertaining discussions on a wide range of topics.

Quite a few members of the club live on larger blocks of land and have the space to experiment with big antennas. I'm fortunate to be on five acres with many trees so put up a full wave length antenna cut for 80m. It's not a thing of beauty, it just meanders around a few trees and is held up with paracord at each corner. I cut 82m of wire, strung it up, and then started shortening the loop until it was resonant within the 80m band. The loop is driven with a 4:1 balun and works pretty ...