The next AREG foxhunt will be held on Saturday 1st August at 2.00pm, starting from a new location in the north park lands, on Lefevre Road, North Adelaide.
We will start with a 2m foot based 6 transmitter foxhunt around the parklands area.
Visitors are welcome and we do have loan equipment and training available for people to use who have never hunted before.
At 3.00pm those with vehicle based hunting gear will set off looking for a collection of 2m and 70cm hidden transmitters.
Liaison during the day will be via the Summertown 70cm repeater on 439.900 MHz (-5 MHz input with 91.5 Hz CTCSS access tone).
If you would like to find out more, contact us via the website!
Now for our next general meeting, members are firstly reminded that this meeting is our Annual General Meeting. We are looking for some new committee members to join the team as we say thank you to our president, Gerard VK5ZQV who is stepping down from the role after 3 years. If you feel you would like to become involved in steering AREG into the future, please consider nominating for the committee.
Introducing the Kestrel Project
At our AGM we will also have a special presentation from Derek VK5TCP. He has been developing a community-provided distributed Receiver network for aviation, maritime and amateur radio traffic, built from an operator’s perspective, opened up so anyone with an SDR and an antenna can join it. Nicknamed Kestrel, it allows monitoring of all sorts of radio services. Derek is currently integrating ADSB, AIS, AM/FM/SSB, Meshtastic, Meshcore, scanners, remote switching, and more.
An example below is his integration of ATC Air traffic control receivers with ADSB aircraft tracking.
More advanced features and strategies will be discussed as part of the presentation. . He continues to develop and expand the platform and is looking for others to use it and contribute if you can. This will be a fascinating look at what can be done with SDR technology today and is one not to be missed.
AREG AGM Details
The AGM will be held on Friday August 21st at the Fulham Community Centre, Phelps Court, Fulham. Doors will open at 7.00.pm with the AGM being held at 7.30pm. The technical talk will be held on conclusion of the AGM, with tea and coffee served afterwards.
The next meeting of AREG will be held on Friday June 19th and will feature an introduction to the world of Meshtastic and Meshcore LoraWAN networking.
We will take you through what the networks are made of, what you can do with them and how to get involved.
This will occur down at our Clubrooms, at the Fulham Community Centre, off Phelps Court in Fulham. The meeting will start at 7.30pm with the doors open at 7.00pm.
Visitors are most welcome! We would love to meet you.
AREG is pleased to announce that we hope to have a number of stations active during this year’s WIA Winter field day contest being held by the WIA over the weekend of June 20-21st 2026! At least 5 satations are expected to be active across most bands between 6m and 23cm, including portable activations from Ardrossan, Kulpara, Tarlee and Stirling as well as multiple home stations on the air as well!
We would love to see as many stations on the air on VHF/UHF Simplex in Adelaide during the contest so put it in your diary! Details of the contest can be found on the WIA Website. The event starts at 10:30 am ACST.
Are you one of the hundreds of people who have decided now is the time to start your journey into the world of Amateur Radio? We have many newcomers gaining their qualifications every month. Many of those, once they have their licence, take a step back and then ask themselves the question – now where to start gettng my own station on air?
At our May general meeting, we will have a panel of presenters take you through the process of working out where to begin, what to consider and how to get on the air from your own station.
We will introduce you to the various components you need to consider when getting on air on either the HF or VHF/UHF bands as well as highlight some activities where you can come along and find out more before taking the financial plunge yourself!
The meeting will be held at the Fulham Community Centre, on Phelps Court, Fulham, on Friday May 15th. Doors open at 7.00pm with the presentation starting at 7.30pm.
During the 2010’s AREG used to regularly enter the John Moyle Field Day contest hosted by the WIA. For various reasons that activity waned in the last 4-5 years. So this year, we felt it was time to re-enter the event and introduce the next generation of AREG members to domestic field day contesting.
VL5X Portable Hindmarsh Island – Multi-Op SSB Portable
Given this is a “Field Day”, it really needed to be a in the field club activity. That is what puts the “field” into the event after all. This year we were fortunate, through a friend of one of our members, to gain access to a 10 acre plot on Hindmarsh Island, about 90 minutes out of Adelaide. The site, which had a 10-15m hill at the back of the property and a couple of sheds in the middle was perfect and allowed us to spread the antennas out so we could operate a multi-operator station without causing interference between the bands.
Station Antenna Farm
Unique “Quick Deploy” Station experiment
One of the unique tricks used in this contest was Andy VK5AKH’s quick deployment station. He hired a van for the weekend, rolled his portable operating desk inside, loaded it up with gear and away he went. He was on air within an hour of arriving on site supporting our full 40m station.
Powering The Station
We set up three 400W portable contest stations on the site and then proceeded to power them as follows:
We had 3x Honda EU20i generators on site, originally planning that as our base load generation, given this contest did not permit us to use the mains to run the station. However, we also had something new that we had never tried before.
One of our members owns a Geely EX5 electric car. This car was unique in that it came equipped with a 3kW 240 Volt AC inverter, which we could use to draw power from the car’s 61kWh battery! Before the event, we were pretty trepidatious – concerned that the car would generate a lot of RFI and interference across HF. To our very happy surprise, however, the car was as quiet as a church mouse. In the end, we ran 2 of the three stations on the car inverter for the whole event. In the process, we invented a new unit of electrical consumption – “equivalent kilometres”. The two stations connected to the car, each with their respective 400W linear amplifiers, used a total of 65km worth of electricity. Not bad given the car has 410km of road range. This really does open up a whole new world for field day contesting into the future!
VL5X On The Air
As for operating the contest, we had a great turnout of operators, with VK5AKH, VK5QI, VK5FLY, VK5DUG, VK5VC, VK5FJ, VK5IR, VK5GR, VK5MN, VK5CIA. We also had a great roster of volunteers who helped construct and support the station including VK5ZM, VK5BX, VK5AG, VK5ZQV, VK5SAW, VK5KX, VK5AOK and others plus we had visits from Sue VK5AYL and David VK5ZL who were also interested to see what we were up to here at AREG.
We had operators as young as 10 yrs old (Douglas VK5DUG supported by dad Louis VK5FLY) right through to some in their mid 70s who remembered the John Moyle field day from a decade ago and wanted to come back and have another go. It was great to see them all getting into the spirit of the contest.
The crew was well looked after as well with support from Michael VK5MN who managed the catering and Jeremy VK5CIA who provided the bathroom facilities from his holiday home nearby. All the little things that become big issues when you are out in the field!
Thanks to Theo VK5IR, we also have a short film showing the setup including a few more details about the car we used to power the station and showing some of the on air activity including young Douglas VK5DUG who operated for us on several bands.
So how did we go?
Results are not out yet, but we were pretty happy with our score. We had the station manned for 22 of the 24hrs of the contest, and due to the lack of contestants during the night spent at least 2 hours calling with no answers. None the less, a great time was had by everyone. We look forward now to seeing the results and discussing what we might try next year!
A reminder that the next foxhunt run by the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be run at 2pm today, starting with a foot based hunt around the Victoria Park Wetlands in the south park lands in the City, off Beaumont Road via South Terrace.
A vehicle based hunt will follow starting from ~3pm on both the 146 and 438 MHz amateur bands.
Fox hunts are now run monthly on the 1st Saturday of the month and are open to everyone to participate in. We hope to see you there!
Liaison during the day will be via the Summertown 70cm repeater on 439.900 MHz (-5 MHz input with 91.5 Hz CTCSS access tone).
