Category Archives: Meetings

February Meeting: Chasing Radiosondes for Fun and (no) Profit

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The next meeting of the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be held next Friday, February 16th at the Fulham Community Centre (formerly known as the Reedbeds) off Phelps Court, in Fulham. Doors will open at 7.45pm for an 8.00pm start.

The evenings presentation about weather balloons and RadioSondes will be given by Mark VK5QI.

“Every day, from over a thousand sites around the world, weather balloons are launched to capture atmospheric data. Under each of these is a Radiosonde, a small electronics package containing sensors and a radio transmitter. In this presentation, Mark VK5QI, will explain how these devices help contribute to global weather forecast models (used by the Project Horus team!), and how you can decode, track, and (if you are crazy enough), recover these devices from where they fall over the country.”

Everyone is welcome, visitors in particular. If you have ever wanted to know more about weather balloons this will be a great chance to hear from one of the very active balloon chasers in the state.

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ADVANCED NOTICE for the MARCH meeting

The March meeting of the AREG will be delayed by 1 week this year as our meeting hall has been booked out for the state election. So in March, the date will be March 23rd (the week before Easter). We hope to see you then! (A topic for the March meeting will be finalised shortly).

 

Next Meeting: Chasing DX (or how to work 3Y0Z)

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Welcome to 2018!

The Amateur Radio Experimenters Group Monthly Meetings are starting up again with one of our Beginners Series  of talks, but this one will have a twist. We will be running it as a panel discussion with the topic “HF Operating Etiquette – How to Work 3Y0Z”, and wish to invite all of the active DX chasers and HF operators in the room to share their collective thoughts on what to do and what not to do when chasing HF DX in general.

The aim is to spread the collective knowledge about how to get through those piles for that special ATNO (All Time New One) like the Bouvet Island DXPedition (#2 on the most wanted list). Topics will be guided by moderators and will include HF operating etiquette, how to work HF split, how, when and where to call in a pileup, what to consider propagation wise and much more.

We will have a live scribe taking down all of the best ideas and will post them here after the meeting for future reference.

Where and when is the meeting?

Friday January 19th – 7.45pm (for an 8.00pm start)
Fulham Community Centre, Phelps Court, Fulham.

Visitors are most welcome to come and participate in the evening. We hope to see you there!

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AREG Christmas Dinner Meeting – Friday 15th December

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The next meeting of the Amateur Radio Experimenter’s Group will be held on Friday December 15th. This is our Christmas Dinner meeting which will be held at the club meeting hall in the Fulham Community Centre, 1 Phelps Court, Fulham. Doors will open from 5.30pm with dinner planned for 6.30pm.

All are welcome to attend, AREG members, their families as well as our regular meeting visitors! To participate in dinner all you need to do is to indicate your attendance and the number of people (so we can get the catering right) on the form below. The cost will be less than $20/head (exact price TBA). The money will be collected at the door. The dinner will be Roast Chicken and Summer Salads, condiments and Desert arranged by our (almost) famous catering division.(Special dietary requirements can be catered for on request)

We would love to see you all for Christmas! 73 from the AREG Committee…

Clubrooms location

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November Meeting – Off Site Visit Planned

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The November meeting of the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be a technology site visit. This means that the normal meeting at the Fulham Community Centre will not be run this month.

Members will be in for an eye opening time looking and learning about some modern communications technology used among our community every day. Members who wish to attend the site visit will find the details on the internal club email reflector.

Unfortunately for our regular visitors, due to the security restrictions required by our hosts, this meeting has to be closed to financial members only.

We will return to our regular program in December with the AREG Christmas Party!

 

AREG October Meeting: SATNOGs Satellite Gateways

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The next meeting of the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be held on Friday October 20th @ 7:45pm at the newly renamed Fulham Community Centre.

Mark VK5QI will talk about the SatNOGS project, an open source project and community which is developing a worldwide network of satellite ground-stations, to help provide downlink capacity for the growing numbers of Low-Earth-Orbit cubesats being launched. Included will be a ‘worked example’, showing how you can set up a SatNOGS ground-station at a reasonably low cost.

After the presentation there will be a light supper available followed by an AREG business meeting. All members and visitors are welcome to attend so why not come along and find out more about whats happening in the world of automated satellite ground station technology?

The clubrooms are located off Phelps Court in Fulham. You can usually find members listening to the club repeater VK5RSB on 439.900 (91.5Hz CTCSS) if you need directions! Hope to see you there!

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AREG News: September Meeting – Power Supplies

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AREG’s next meeting is this coming Friday the 15th September at the Reedbeds Community Hall, Phelps Court Fulham, doors opening at 7:45 pm.

This coming meeting will be another in AREG’s Amateur Radio Beginners Series and the topic for this evening will be, Power Supplies.

Matthew, VK5ZM, will take people through the basics of power supplies, what their characteristics are and what do people need to look out for when selecting a power supply for Amateur Radio use. He will also discuss the pros and cons of Linear vs Switchmode and what makes a good or bad power supply.

AREG Repeater News:

We have noticed that VK5RSB 70cm appears to be dropping coverage. Our fault investigation team will take a look at our earliest opportunity but we suspect a problem with the antenna feeder or connectors. Also the VK5RWN D-STAR repeater is suffering from reduced performance due to mechanical issues with the antenna mounts. Plans are well underway to make repairs at both sites, which we hope will be completed in October.

Contesting news:

AREG is again making plans to mount a portable DX Contest Station for the Oceania DX Contest in October. This will be a QRO Multi-Multi station this year operating from a new site north of Adelaide. We hope to see other VK5’s get involved in this contest this year too, as it is your one opportunity to have the DX stations around the world pointing their antennas our way looking for us! The OCDX SSB contest is being held on the weekend of October 7th and 8th.

In DX News:

AREG wishes Grant VK5GR good luck in his activation of Niue starting next week. Grant should be heard across VK signing as E6AG, Echo 6 Alpha Golf, from September 14th through until September 25th on most HF bands. So keep a lookout for Grant and Grant, goodluck with your operations.

2017/18 Subscriptions now Due

Finally, all AREG members should note that their subscriptions are due for 2017/18. It is a great time to be a member of AREG and this year will be big, with the club turning 20 years old next July – who would have thought! Look out for some special activities throughout 2018 marking the occasion.

So remember folks, come along to AREG’s next meeting, it is this coming Friday evening, everyone is most welcome.

After the formal events, a light supper of tea, coffee and cake will be available whilst you can mingle, review and discuss the topics of the day.

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Annual General Meeting – Friday August 18th @ 7.45pm

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The next meeting of the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be held on Friday August 18th, at the Reedbeds Community Hall, Fulham.

The doors will open at 7.45pm for an 8.00pm start.

To start the proceedings, the committee will recap the year’s events before moving into the reports and then the business of the meeting. All positions will be declared vacant and nominations will be sought.

The outgoing committee wishes to thank in particular Scott VK5TST and Ben VK5BB who have both indicated that they wish to step down in 2017/18. We look forward to new enthusiastic members joining the committee and continuing to drive the club forward as we enter the club’s 20th year!

A general meeting will follow the AGM, with a general coffee and cake discussion to be held afterwards. if you have a project you have been working on why not bring it along and show it off during the coffee discussions.

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July General Meeting: Introduction to Antenna Modelling

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The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday 21st July, starting at 7.45pm at the Reedbeds Community Centre, Fulham.

We are pleased to announce that the speaker for the July meeting will be Paul Lawson VK5SL. Paul will be introducing you to the basics of Antenna Modelling, and will demonstrate how to get started using the 4NEC2 program to examine antenna performance (4NEC2 is freely available on the Internet). He will take 3 of the antennas that Chris VK5SA described in his wire antennas for beginners talk a few months ago and show how you can visualize their radiation patterns and what their characteristics are on various frequencies.

In particular, Paul will show you how to model a basic dipole, a Windom (OCF Dipole) and an inverted V antenna, explaining how to define these in the software, what the components in the software do and how to set them to produce useful models of how the antenna is performing. This will be a great simple introduction to the topic of antenna modelling.

For those who then want to delve deeper, Paul has agreed later in the year to run a tech night where more complex antenna modelling will be examined for those who want to take it further.

We hope to see you at the club on Friday July 21st. Doors open at 7.45pm with the presentation getting underway at 8.00pm sharp.

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