In the city 80m is a very noisy band but here in regional Victoria the situation is much better. The club's regular Wednesday night 80m net on 3685kHz attracts a good group of stations mostly running 100W or perhaps more. Signals are generally very good (except when our wires come down due to strong wind or bird attack). At the start of February I saw and ordered an amazingly small 10 band 5W transceiver from QRPver called the Minion. I am sympathetic to the wartime disruption in Ukraine but...

The June club meeting at Woodend was very well attended. Ralph, VK3ZZC, gave a passionate presentation on successful metalwork for the radio amateur. He gave tips on improving precision and showed a great collection of tools he uses including many he's made himself. Ralph made the case that a precision of +- 0.1mm is required for even amateur construction if nuts and bolts are to be used effectively. He talked about only drilling after "bluing" the metal surface, marking with a scribe an...

At the next club meeting at 10am, Saturday, June 17, we are delighted to welcome prolific home brew builder Ralph, VK3ZZC who will share lessons from his long experience of metalworking at home. If you have the urge to construct your own ham equipment then at some stage you will be required to perform some simple metalworking operations. In the old days this activity was called "chassis bashing" when all things radio were mounted on an aluminium or tin plate steel chassis. Making the lar...

Ross Gairn with The Queen Saturday's MRARC meeting was a memorable one as we had a guest speaker, Ross Gairn, who worked in the Royal Household. You might well ask how does an Aussie get to work for the Queen? Ross explained the rigorous interview process. In light of the recent coronation celebrations in London, with the precision timing, immaculately attired participants and amazing procedures, our speaker gave us his account of the years he worked for both the late Queen and Prince Phi...

At this month's meeting, Barry Theodore, VK3BRT, gave a fascinating talk about his experiences building systems to automatically time laps of cars in races and also horse races. As a young teenager, Barry used to enjoy going to car races. Later, when he was working with computers, and watching drag racing at Calder, the race stopped due to computer problems. This led to an opportunity to help with the timing system and the start of a long association with this sort of technology. Cars...