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...

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...

Well guess what? The tour force of MRARC attended the fest. JoeVK3MAB, BarryVK3BRT, JohnVK3JCB, Ron VK3ZJ, PeterVK3 PRC, PeterVK3RV, Peter B, JohnVK3IC, EricVK3ED, CraigVK3CDN, Geoff VK3MGM. The day started with breakfast at the Big M at Ballan. The second wave arrive at the ham fest at 10.00am. Crew assemble ready to hunt for the best deals and buying what was on offer at the various tables. Everyone did at least three rounds around the tables looking for that elusive bargain. Lot...

After all the recent fires and flooding rains around the state it was a perfect day for the club's annual picnic day at Days Picnic Area on Lions Head Road, Hesket. The turnout was excellent with many members, including some who often don't make it to meetings. What was particularly striking was all the radio gear and antennas that were set up. There were end feds, squid poles, ground mounted verticals and even a loop antenna. Unfortunately band conditions where not terribly good but a f...

This year the club Christmas function was well attended and highly entertaining. Howard opened the bar, Barry and Peter cooked up a brilliant feast. Joe began gave a fashion parade of the proposed options for the club's coming range of clothing. A challenging four round quiz was run with only a few appeals - amazing given some of the proposed "answers" we were offered! Our thanks again to Joe, VK3MAB, for a fine effort in preparing the material. We were very pleased to welcome ...

Graeme VK3CDO and Peter VK3TPM spent a very pleasant afternoon, night and breakfast at the Barmah Lakes campground. As usual, Graeme came well equipped for the field operations. An end fed antenna was strung up and we had several contacts including to a POTA station in NSW and Richard VK3LRJ. The KX3 was matched beautifully to the end fed using a home brew Unun but the band seemed rather dead. Connecting the end fed direct to the radio brought the band to life and the KX3's amazing t...