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 the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be held on Friday 17th of July, starting at 7.30pm. This month, we have Ivan VK5RS coming to show us how he got started designing and then getting fabricated professional looking printed circuit boards for his personal amateur radio projects.
He will take you through the process from end to end, including what software he was using to design and lay out boards and then how he gets them fabricated so that he can bring his projects to life. He will bring along some samples of his work and will be able to answer your questions if you are interested in starting a similar journey. This is particularly useful for those in Amateur Radio who want to continue home brewing their own projects.
The meeting will take place at the Fulham Community Centre, Phelps Court, in Fulham. Doors will open at 7.00pm. Visitors are most welcome. A short business meeting will follow the presentation. We hope to see you there!
AREG members made the effort to head out into the field for the 2026 WIA WInter VHF/UHF Field Day contest, setting up a portable VHF/UHF station at the club’s HF receive site west of Tarlee. The hill that the site is located on is very well placed for VHF/UHF activity with at least a 100km path back into Adelaide for many stations.
The Station
The station operated as VL5X for the day, and consisted of a tri-band 2m/70cm/23cm colinear on a roughly 5m pole strapped to the fence, plus a 6m end fed half wave vertical also strapped to the fence.
The eqiupment used was an Elecraft K3 running 100W on 6m and an Icom IC-9700 operating across the 2m, 70cm and 23cm bands.
On Air Activity
The majority of activity was on FM, although several contacts were achieved with SSB on 2m and 23cm as well. 6m was almost exclusively an SSB operation, although there were a couple of contacts on 6m FM as well on 52.525 MHz.
VL5X (Green) and where we worked during the event
Other AREG On Air Activity
Members participated in various ways in the event. On site we had visits from Nathan VK5OG, Mark VK5QI and Dean VK5HQ, whilst out and about we had Michael VK5MN operating from Yorke Peninsula and Steve VK5AG operating from Stirling. We also had several members activate from their home QTHs including Steve VK5SFA (VL5L) and Charlie VK5VC.
All up, combined with the other amateurs across Adelaide also participating we were provided with a steady flow of QSOs across the day. Thanks to everyone who took part and we wait with interest to see how we placed!
The next AREG foxhunt will be held on Saturday 4th July 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).
Horus 72 was a flight for CSIRO – the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation, and launched on Sunday the 14th of June 2026.
AREG had been approached by CSIRO a few months ago seeking to trial some sensor payloads on high-altitude balloon flights, and we were happy to get involved! This flight featured a thermal imaging payload intended for use on a future high altitude platform. A big thanks to CSIRO for choosing AREG for their high-altitude balloon launch needs!
Launch
The launch site weather was fairly calm, making for each launch preparations. For this launch we tried to keep the distances between payloads fairly long to avoid ‘interactions’ after balloon burst.
Thanks to Tim Bolton from CSIRO for capturing many great photos of the launch preparations:
There was a little bit of breeze around launch time, requiring a short ‘running launch’ to avoid the CSIRO payload impacting the ground. The launch was captured on video by Autumn VK5CLD:
You can see the CSIRO payload at the bottom of the string, with the large stabilisation vanes – these appeared to work quite well, and we may use this approach on our own payloads in the future!
Chase & Recovery
After launch the chase teams quickly got moving – the flight was predicted to be heading out somewhere near Lameroo and Pinnaroo, a good 2 hours drive away.
On the chase we had:
Mark VK5QI, Will VK5AHV and Autumn VK5CLD
Andy VK5AKH and Dennis VK5DEN
Liam VK5ALG
… and following us was Josh Pease from CSIRO!
The balloon burst at 28855m, and with a somewhat higher than expected descent rate, headed in for a landing about 10k south-west of Lameroo. The chase teams were able to get into position to watch the landing:
A short walk into the paddock, the payloads were all recovered in excellent condition! Most importantly, the CSIRO payload had a nice soft landing, with the thermal camera lens undamaged!
Horus 72 Flight Statistics
Launch Date:
2026-06-14T00:51:06Z
Landing Date:
2026-06-14T02:59:11Z
Launch Site:
-35.07579, 138.85710
Landing Site:
-35.36621, 140.41932
Distance Travelled:
145 km
Maximum Altitude:
28855 m
Horus 72 Flight Path
Wenet Imagery
This flight also included a test of a new Wenet payload camera – this time using a PiCameraHQ, with a M12 wide-angle lens. This payload captured nice and sharp (albeit quite fish-eyed) images all through the flight, and is looking to be a winner for future launches!
Thanks to the following stations for receiving imagery from the Wenet payload:
Since this report took me a while to finish, we’ve already had one other balloon launch – Horus 73, on the 28th of June. You can find a mini-report for this flight here.
We’ll probably take a little break over Winter, as finding good launch days is quite difficult. Once we get into better weather, we expect to run the following launches:
Cross-Band Repeater re-flight, and more Wenet camera payload experiments.
Another LaunchBox launch for Fleet Space, hopefully including a 360˚ Camera.
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.
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).
