Today’s meeting at Woodend was well attended and began with president Joe warming up the crowd and reminding us that next month is the annual general meeting.
Jim then spoke about a recent emergency exercise in Woodend that simulated extreme storm weather which had taken out power and phones. People were injured and, apart from finding things in the dark, the other challenge was communication.
Jim was able to show his 2m hand held and explained to the crew that he could communicate widely using the Macedon repeater which has a generator to back up main power.
Peter, VK3TPM, continued on the topic of emergency communication by showing a Meshtastic device which is a mesh radio system built on top of LoRa radios. These cost about $30 each and connect to a mobile phone via bluetooth and allow text messaging from the phone without relying on internet or even mobile phone service.
There are very few users in rural areas so Peter took his device on a recent trip to Sydney where it discovered 116 other nodes. Some were detected during takeoff and landing of the flight.
The range of LoRa is up to many km’s but mostly line of sight due to operation on 900MHz.
Peter gave an update on FreeDV as this weekend, being the third weekend of the month, is an activity day. More activity is being seen since FreeDV 2.0.0 was featured on the popular “Tech Minds” YouTube channel.
There will be a south east Australian net on 7.177Mhz starting at 10:30am eastern time on Sunday morning.