AREG AGM – New Executive 2015

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AGM

The AREG held it’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Friday the 17th of July. This was followed by a talk from Chris VK5CP about RTTY Contesting and a general members meeting.

As a result of the AGM there is a new executive and committee, with a few familiar faces.

This year Scott VK5TST moves into the position of club Secretary, with Mark stepping down back to the committee. We thank Mark for this hard work over the past three years in this role.   Grant VK5GR has stepped up from the committee to take on the role of club treasurer, welcome Grant to the exec team.  Ben VK5BB and Andy VK5AKH will carry on as committee members.   We’d also like to welcome Josh VK5JO who has volunteered to join the committee team.  I was more than happy to continue on as president.

So the AREG executive team for 2015/2016 can be found here (click)

Thanks again for your support and we look forward to planning a new technical talk and activities program for our members pleasure.

73, Matt VK5ZM

VI5MCP Update

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AREG Members have activated the VI5MCP callsign 3 times so far.  The members have braved the elements and been out to get the station on the air.

Saturday 11th, Bob, VK5FO and Ray VK5RR set up and operated on 20M and 40M logging 5 countries and 19 contacts with 5 DXCC entities.

Sunday 12th, Bob VK5FO, Ray, VK5RR and Andy, VK5AKH Operated on 40, 15, 30 and 20M  A further 21 contacts were logged and 1 more DXCC entity.

Wednesday 15th the 100 year anniversary day, Ben VK5BB operated 40M and 2M adding a further 15 contacts to the log.

Take a look at the VI5MCP QRZ page to see the last 50 Entries in the logs.

More activities are planned and all are pending wx

AREG activates VK100ANZAC as the WIA National HQ station in IARU Contest

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On the weekend of July 11th and 12th, the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be activating the WIA special vk100anzacevent callsign VK100ANZAC as part of this year’s IARU HF Contest as the official WIA Headquarters station.

The IARU HF Championships encourage amateurs to contact as many other amateurs, especially IARU member society HQ stations, around the world as possible using the 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meter bands. Operation will begin at 1200 UTC Saturday and ending 1200 UTC Sunday (July 11-12, 2015).

Look for VK100ANZAC / WIA during this weekend and give us a call! Better still, why not give the IARU Championships a go yourself. Details are available on the ARRL website

 

VI5MCP Special Event Station

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MorialtaCP_QSL_Card_2

VI5MCP QSL Card

Between the 11th and the 26th of July Members of AREG will be activating a special event station VI5MCP.

The Special event is in celebration of the 100 years of Proclamation of the Morialta Falls Pleasure Resort, which we now know as Morialta Conservation Park.  The 100th anniversary of the park is on Wednesday the 15th of July 2015.

Morialta CP is located in the Hills to the East of Adelaide and is a popular location for Portable operations.  Activations of this park qualify for the SANPCPA – South Australia National Parks and Conservations Parks Award and also for WWFF and VKFF as VKFF-783

The Aim of this special event station is to celebrate the 100th anniversary and to  further promote awareness of portable operations and awards.

We are planning on Activations  from the park over the 2 week period and at the moment we have some confirmed and some tentative activations scheduled, please keep an eye on this post as we will update the schedule in the coming days.

VI5MCP Calendar July 2015

Planned activation dates and frequencies/bands

DATE LOCAL TIME / UTC BAND/FREQ NOTES
Saturday 11th
Sunday 12th 10:00 / 00:30UTC 7.140 SSB /147.500 FM then 14.240 or 14.310 Around 2 hours
Monday 13th
Tuesday 14th
Wednesday 15th 10:00 / 00:30UTC 7.140 / 10.130 /14.240 or 14.310 Around 2 hours or longer if a lot of chasers
Thursday 16th
Friday 17th
Saturday 18th 13:00 -17:30 / 03:30 – 08:00 UTC 14.240 or 14.310 and
7.140		 Looking for EU DX on 20M * running a 2Element on 20M
Sunday 19th 10:00 / 00:30UTC 7.140 SSB /147.500 FM then 14.240 or 14.310 Around 2 hours
Monday 20th
Tuesday 21st
Wednesday 22nd 10:00 / 00:30UTC 7.140 / 10.130 /14.240 or 14.310 Around 2 hours or longer if a lot of chasers
Thursday 23rd
Friday 24th
Saturday 25th
Sunday 26th 10:00 / 00:30UTC 7.140 SSB /147.500 FM then 14.240 or 14.310 Around 2 hours

*Note Mode will be SSB unless specifically noted as otherwise.

AREG Annual General Meeting: July 17th + Guest Speaker

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clip-art-meeting-700008Your AREG committee wishes to announce that the Annual General Meeting for 2015/2016 will be held on Friday July 17th starting 7.45pm. All committee positions will be declared vacant and elections for the coming year will be held.

Nominations are now open, so if you would like to become more involved in the running of your club then please notify the secretary.

RTTY Contesting

After the formal business part of the evening is over, we will then have a talk by Chris VK5CP on what he learned at the RTTY Contest University at the Dayton Hamvention. Hopefully Chris will also tell us some stories about what he saw at Dayton 2015.

The meeting will take place at our usual location of the Reedbeds Community Centre, 19 Fitch Rd Fulham. See you there!

UPDATE: VK5RSB 6m repeater is back, 23cm Repeater Offline for Repairs

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Regular users of the VK5RSB repeater tower clipart23cm repeater may have noticed a deterioration in audio quality when the repeater is in use for an extended period. As of the 15th of June, the  repeater has been removed from service so repairs can be affected.

Many thanks go to Colin VK5ACE for building and continuing to maintain the best coverage 23cm repeater in VK5!

Meanwhile, the VK5RSB 6m is now back on the air thanks to the efforts of Rod VK5UDX and Adrian VK5ZBR. The new antenna has been installed and the repeater has been repaired. Thanks guys for your efforts!

Next Meeting: June 19th – RPM200 Show and Tell

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00120.MTS_1

The next meeting of the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group will be held this coming Friday, June 19th at the Reedbeds Community Hall starting at 7.45pm.

The talk this evening will be a show and tell of all of the events leading up to and during the RPM200 from the communications network’s perspective. There is much that happens behind the scenes to make this event possible. We will talk about much of that as well as showing what the club has now assembled in terms of supporting equipment. The results from things like the APRS experiment will also be presented, and some early thoughts on what we might do in that space next year will be given.

There will also be an opportunity for those who participated to give the committee their feedback on what went right, and what can be improved for next year’s event. Your feedback is invaluable to us as part of our drive to continually improve the event so please come along and share your experiences too!

In addition, there will also be a short business meeting, as well as the usual coffee, cake and chat afterwards.

Visitors are always welcome so come on down! You can find the clubrooms at the address below:

[wpgmza id=”5″]

RPM200 APRS network experiment deemed a success!

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aprsOne of the experiments AREG members wanted to try was to see how APRS would fair tracking various assets across the RPM200 event. The idea was to see how much of an improvement we could gain in our situation awareness capabilities back at net control.

To facilitate this, the AREG built and configured 5 Byonics based TinyTrack3’s which were mated to 5W handhelds. Each of these were installed in one of the safety boats as well as various vehicles, which were run as unattended packet radio stations under the club callsign VK5ARG (in accordance with the amateur LCDs).

The biggest challenge we faced was providing enough coverage of the river. This stretch of the River Murray is in many places bounded by 20-40m high cliffs making even VHF radio access difficult, especially for small 5W trackers.

To get the position information back to the communications centre, various members then established mobile IGates from their vehicles or accommodation, which supplemented the local full time gate provided by Larry VK5LY in Renmark. This allowed the received packets to be forwarded into the APRS-IS network from various points along the river.

Members also set up their vehicles as WIDE1-1 local digipeaters whilst they manned checkpoints to provide additional coverage in places where access direct to an IGate or the local VK5RLD APRS digipeater was not possible.

Back at the communication centre, the combined feed was able to be monitored either directly from RF or the APRS-IS backbone via websites like www.aprs.fi

The Results

Coverage was surprisingly good for most of the event. A couple of problem areas were identified where we may look at putting temporary digipeaters next year, however overall we were most impressed with what could be achieved with 5 Watts.

VK5ARG-9 - Race Director

VK5ARG-9 – Race Vehicle

VK5ARG-12 - Front End Charlie 200

VK5ARG-12 – Front End Charlie 200

VK5ARG-13 Front End Charlie 100

VK5ARG-13 Front End Charlie 100

VK5ARG-14 Tail End Charlie 100

VK5ARG-14 Tail End Charlie 100

VK5ARG-15 Tail End Charlie 200

VK5ARG-15 Tail End Charlie 200

From the perspective of how this contributed to the event, on at least one occasion it proved invaluable when a fuse blew on the VHF radio on one of the safety boats, Despite that failure, the APRS kept running, allowing us to track the boat in question to a point on the river where we could send one of our service technicians to solve the problem.

Overall, while theoretically we understood what it should mean to have access to this sort of near real time information, there is nothing like the experience of operating in net control and literally having it available at our fingertips. It is one aspect of the event we are definitely going to look to improve for next year!