AREG is happy to announce that the radar interference has ceased and the VK5RSB 23 cm voice repeater has now returned to service.
The repeater TX is on 1273.5 MHz and the RX is on 1293.5 MHz. See you on the air!
Category Archives: Club News
August Meeting – Andrew VK5CV – “From Electric Eels to Human Treatments”
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 16th of August at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham, with doors opening at 7:00 PM, and the presentation kicking off at 7:30 PM. Everyone is welcome!
This month’s presentation will be from Dr Andrew Russell, VK5CV, titled “From Electric Eels to Human Treatments” – A history from the earliest observations of physical and animal electricity to state-of-the-art cardiac therapies. Andrew is a cardiologist, and this sure to be an interesting talk, with a topic a bit different to our usual fare!
If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome at the hall. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom, and will be recorded for upload after the evening.
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
Next AREG Meeting: July AGM and Grant VK5GR: The Flinders Island DXPedition
Update: This presentation is now available on Youtube (thanks Hayden!):
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 19th of July at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham. This will be the AREG’s Annual General Meeting, which will include the election of the 2024-2025 committee.
This months presentation will be from Grant VK5GR, on the Flinders Island DXpedition, which occurred back in April 2024:
Grant will take you on the journey the team followed to bring the VK5FIL IOTA and WWFF project to life and tell the stories of the fun had along the way. VK5FIL was the first time IOTA OC-261 had been activated since 2013 and so it was in high demand. Whats more, the three parks that covered parts of the island had never been activated before adding even more interest for the WWFF community.
Doors open at 7.00pm and the presentation kicks off at 7.30. Everyone is welcome to attend. If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom, and will also be recorded for release on the HamRadioDX Youtube channel!
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
AREG’s VK5RSA Adelaide CBD repeater – continuing support from KernWi-Fi
One of the services that the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group provides is a network of repeater stations that cover the Adelaide metropolitan and surrounding areas. These systems operate on the 6m-23cm bands from 3 sites in and around Adelaide.
One of the first repeaters conceived by AREG was the Adelaide CBD repeater. Inspired in the 1990s by the original 438.025 VK3RCC repeater in Melbourne (which was located atop one of the hi-rise towers in Melbourne CBD), the intention was to reach the deep CBD buildings and the Adelaide foot hills shadowed by the existing repeaters atop the Mt Lofty ranges.
The AREG repeater in Adelaide was originally established on top of the original Angas Street police station building – then 11 stories high in Victoria Square. When that building was subsequently demolished, it was moved to another building off Flinders Street, where it ran for many years before finally developing a terminal fault and finally being removed in 2024.
Today, VK5RSA is back on what now is one of the best communications sites in the CBD. This is all thanks to the support AREG receives from KernWi-Fi, who are continuing to sponsor access to RAA House on King William Street in the heart of the Adelaide CBD.
VK5RSA operates on 438.025MHz TX -7.0MHz RX with 91.5Hz CTCSS
VK5 Linked Repeater Network Coverage Map
VK5RSA is also part of the new central SA linked repeater network. This network now includes 11 repeaters, stretching from the Adelaide area right across to the eastern border of SA, south to Victor Harbor, and into the mid-north from Lochiel.
AREG offers it’s sincere thanks to Phil Kern at KernWi-Fi for his support for the project to re-establish VK5RSA – it is fantastic to have been able to restore this service for the amateur radio community in Adelaide – and from such a fantastic site too!
About our Sponsor
KernWi-Fi supply Fibre, NBN, Fixed Wireless Internet, VoIP, Event Wi-Fi and Radio Communications to residential and businesses all over Adelaide. They also specialise in servicing the black spots of Adelaide. To learn more, visit their website!
They are 100% Adelaide based and owned Licensed Carrier and work with many local communities to provide high speed internet services. They also sponsor various community groups across the state.
June Meeting – Adventures in the Microwave Bands by Iain VK5ZD
The presentation from this meeting was recorded and is now available on Youtube! (Thanks Hayden!) Unfortunately we had network issues when recording, so the audio has some corruption – apologies!
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 21st of June at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham, with doors opening at 7:00 PM, and the presentation kicking off at 7:30 PM. Everyone is welcome!
This month’s presentation will be from Iain VK5ZD, on his adventures in microwave operation over the years:
This talk will be about the many and varied pieces of equipment I’ve used over the years to delve into the world of microwave communications. Starting with a 10 GHz wide-band FM system used in 1987, I will be discussing the various pieces gear I’ve used for all bands from 1.2 GHz through to 134 GHz.
If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome at the hall. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom.
Unfortunately we are not able to live-stream this talk on Youtube, but will make a recording and upload it later.
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
May Meeting – Steve VK5SFA – Adventures in building a Remote Station
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 17th of May at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham, with doors opening at 7:00 PM, and the presentation kicking off at 7:30 PM. Everyone is welcome!
This month’s presentation will be from Steve Adler, VK5SFA:
I will be giving a presentation on my adventures in establishing a remote LF, MF, HF, VHF & UHF remote site.
This project has been 18 months in the making, and I would like to share with you all the way I failed my way to success!
The presentation will run for 2 hours, as there are many facets to discuss.
During the presentation, I will be talking about site establishment, antenna systems, remote control, setting up secure reliable internet, all the equipment required, and my latest addition, a steerable LF, MF and HF receiving antenna array which will blow you away!
Please trust me when I tell you that this is the one presentation you will not want to miss, as you will never see anything like it again!
For security reasons, there will be no YouTube or recording of the presentation, and I will be only presenting it once.
If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome at the hall. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom.
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
April Meeting – Amateur Radio Direction Finding 101
The next AREG meeting will be held on Friday the 19th of April at the Fulham Community Centre – Phelps Court, Fulham, with doors opening at 7:00 PM, and the presentation kicking off at 7:30 PM. Everyone is welcome!
Building on the success of AREG’s fox-hunt antenna group build, this month Mark VK5QI will be talking on Fox-hunting for beginners. No, we’re not talking about small furry animals, we’re talking about the sport of Amateur Radio Direction Finding. The talk will explain the equipment you need to get started, and some basic techniques that will help you find that first fox transmitter! There’ll be plenty of live demos showing various hunting equipment in action.
If you’ve never come along to one of our meetings, we’d love to see you there, all guests are welcome. For our remote members, the meeting will be broadcast via Zoom, and should also be streamed live on Hayden VK7HH’s HamRadioDX YouTube channel.
After the talks we’ll all be given an opportunity to have an eyeball QSO among ourselves whilst enjoying a tea or coffee and a biscuit.
73, Mark VK5QI
Bluetooth Earbud systems take on CW and FT8 Decoding
In this age of miniaturization it is amazing to consider what has been achieved with modern technology. With that thought in mind, a dedicated group of members within AREG has been exploring what could be done using the various models of Bluetooth connected earbud headphones that are currently available. Originally the thought was to see how they could help our fox hunting teams gain an advantage over the VK3 teams at the national championships, but then one of the team members made an amazing discovery. Hidden inside certain manufacturer’s products was a surprising amount of compute power, far more than would ordinarily be needed to convert a simple Bluetooth signal into audio.
On further probing and exploration, the team finally found a way to hack into the EarBud operating system and access the boot loaders. Now these operating systems and compute capabilities were completely unexpected, and so not only was this an eye opener, it was also a game changer as the team pondered just what might be possible! (It also posed the question, what on earth were the manufacturers planning in the future and why such compute capability was even required in these devices, but these are questions for later exploration).
Amateur Radio Applications?
Having opened up the operating system, the team made short work of learning how to load software into the earbuds, and then the creative juices started flowing. One of the early thoughts was whether there might be a way to connect one of the modern Bluetooth capable HF transceivers to these earbud systems. A quick look at the IC-705 from ICOM confirmed that this was simple enough to do.
The trick then was to see what the earbuds could do!
Morse Code – Music to your ears – with Speech Conversion technology!
The first simplest idea was to simply relay CW signals to your ears. The challenge however wasn’t to just relay the raw audio. Given the amount of compute power discovered in these ear buds it became clear much more could be done. The team then built a CW decoder and speech encoding routine that could take a HF signal straight from a Bluetooth transceiver and turn it into synthesized speech. The achieved results were impressive indeed.
CW Input Signal
Earbud Processed CW to Speech
Further work was then undertaken to work on the decoder’s ability to separate out individual signals in a pileup. After some experimental AI routines there was success! Morse Code finally entered the digital age!
Digital Operators delighted by FT8 success
Following on from the CW experiments, the FT8 devotees in the club got together to see if it would be possible to port the WSJT-X FT8 encoder/decoder into the earbuds. After some consternation about running out of memory, the following was achieved! Using additional AI routines to help select which signal to decode, the team was able to convert this:
into this!
Needless to say we believe this is the most unusual compute platform that FT8 has ever been ported to, but the results were simply stunning, with decode rates as good as any of the popular programs currently in use on the PC market today.
SSB Operators were not left out!
Of course AREG is all about equality and accessibility. We do not tolerate discrimination in the group. So, it was important that the SSB voice folk felt they were part of the project too. Of course, then it dawned on us. They were already included, as all we had to do was turn off the decoded software and the pure sound of SSB HF radio could once more be relayed straight to their ears.
How can you get involved?
The system is still in it’s infancy, and so far only a couple of models of Earbuds have been cracked. However as soon as we have stable supplies and have completed licensing the software on git-hub, we will make it available to amateur radio operators to experiment further with!
Next steps are to be able to have the reverse direction function as well, so an operator can simply speak and the earbuds can then turn that into what ever CW or digital modulation system you desire!
Meanwhile, if you would like to know more, please contact us via the project page!