Broadcast - 6 August 2023
Last Saturday’s Equine Endurance Ride at Lebrina from a technical point of view went “swimmingly”. Maybe that’s a bad choice of adverb as the weather had other ideas and was not very forgiving, continuously changing and even varying drastically between Check Points throughout the day. A couple of Check Points were gumboots only and as for the wind gusts….. luckily the weight of the battery boxes managed to keep the awnings from departing the vehicles. The 80, 40 and 20 kilometre events all concluded safely even if quite a few riders were looking quite bedraggled by the finish. Many thanks to VK7’s Andre’ ZAB and Stuart FEAT for looking after Ride Base and converting all the spoken words into legible text and Roger ARN, Maddy, Leon, Idris ZIR, Stuart ES, Fran and Stefan ZSB who were having all the fun at the Check Points. HiHi
Now a couple of left over items from the last club technical night.
Peter VK7KPC as well as bringing in his latest Traegar transceiver also provided a slide presentation of photographs from his previous few weeks of travel around Victoria. These were displayed on the large TV monitor for all to see and featured some of his tourist stop offs. Two notable sites were firstly the Royal Flying Doctors Service Museum at Broken Hill. This featured equipment like the 1931 Traeger automatic Morse keyboard. This operated like a typewriter keyboard, by pressing one of the letter keys it activated strips of metal containing notches and indentations representing the dots and dashes of the Morse code to be sent. I suppose this relieved people of having to learn Morse code. Also a portable transceiver suitable for vehicle or horseback use and the iconic pedal powered generator manufactured by Traeger.
The second notable site was the Lake Boga Catalina Museum. Situated between Swan Hill and Kerang on the shores of Lake Boga. The museum is in commemoration to the service men and women who served at No.1 Flying Boat Repair Depot Lake Boga, Victoria from 1942 to 1947 and is the home of what looks to be a magnificently restored Catalina A24-30 flying boat. The museum also has the sites original secret communication bunker with communications equipment covering valve testers, Audio and Radio Frequency generators and alignment equipment. Even an ex-military American, left hand drive, Mobile radio jeep complete with anti-theft device mounted on the vehicle, notably a machine gun. Wouldn’t be arguing with that little addition. With over 500 exhibits it is good to see a range of wartime treasures that have been preserved for future generations. These museums would certainly be an excellent addition to the itinerary when visiting Victoria next, thank you Peter.
Andre’ VK7ZAB, had a 600 W transmitter for the AM Broadcast Band, model FTX600 from SRK Electronics of Burwood Victoria. This unit is one of their many AM and FM transmitters and is also notable because they designed and manufactured from the component level up in Australia. Printed circuit boards and all products are assembled in-house. They are even environmentally compliance tested on site by their technicians.
Established in 1999, they have provided locally manufactured radio transmitters for hundreds of sites throughout Australia. This unit is rack mountable and is complimented with another rack unit featuring two independent 240 Volt power supplies, meant to be fed from two power circuits. Needless to say the covers “accidentally” fell off. The unit certainly was manufactured to a high standard and featured six mountable 100 Watt Power Output modules on the top side of the unit with provisions for another six on the underside making it the 1200 Watt model. The unit is microprocessor controlled and comes feature packed with loads of broadcast programmable and adjustable features like power out, modulation, compressor/limiter and independently programmable positive and negative peak limiting etc etc. Basically a very nice unit, even better to see it was designed and manufactured in Australia. Thank you Andre’ for this glimpse into the broadcast world.
Last broadcast I mentioned Andre’ used his Spectrum Analyser to bringing to our attention a new signal in the 206 MHz area. It was the ABC testing the new Digital Audio Broadcasting Plus service for the Launceston area, or DAB for short. Soon after hearing about the test broadcasts Phil VK7ZPD, was hot on the trail to track down any possible software capable of decoding the signal that could be run on a computer. His perseverance paid off and he came up with a programme called “wello.io”. It is suitable for a variety of operating systems and is an open source software programme for decoding DAB and DAB+ using a software defined radio (SDR). I have downloaded the latest version 2.4 which comes with an ‘Expert Mode”. This opens up all the interesting options for the service information displays. Anything from locational information and encoder method, sample rate and stream bit rate, service performance and error rates through to displays for Spectrum Analysis, Impulse Response, Constellation Diagram and MOT protocol decoded imbedded images, with MOT being station logo and track information. What more could you want? It is however very interesting to look into various aspects of this digital broadcast stream. Thank you for tracking this little gem down Phil.
Software link is included in the text version.
Now to finish off, Nic VK7WW, has had another successful long distance QRP Morse Code contact. This time on 3553.7 kHz, but still using his recent transmitter project called the “Cent”, which Nic designed as a celebration of 100 years of Amateur Radio in Tasmania. Nic’s latest VFO add on project must have been utilised as it was no longer the original crystal locked frequency. This contact was with Mark VK6QI, who was using a remote station in Perth a couple of nights ago. This QSO spanned a distance of over 2950 Kilometres, from Legana Tasmania to Perth Western Australia. Still only using 1 Watt with a received signal report of 539 and no QSB. That’s pretty impressive QRP using one watt Nic!
Equipment pictures are available on the NTARC Web site under “Blogs” for this broadcast. Now back to the house keeping.
UPCOMING EVENTS
The Club Technical night - The next session will be on Wednesday the 9th of August and will commence at the winter time of 6.30 pm through to about 10.00 pm, at the Club room Archer Street, Rocherlea.
Coffee Morning - held every Friday in the NTARC Club rooms. Time is from 10am to noon and we look forward to seeing you all there. Why not pop in and join us for a cuppa, there is endless tea and coffee along with biscuits available for a donation.
Club General Meeting - Saturday the 12th of August at 2.00pm. Held at the NTARC Club Room, Rocherlea Scout Hall, Archer Street, Rocherlea. If you have items you would like added to the agenda please email the secretary at: secretary@ntarc.net no later than Friday the 11th of August.
The TestNet and TechNet session - Wednesday the 16th of August. TestNet/CW course on 3.580MHz from 7pm till 7.30pm…. and a TechNet on 3.567MHz from 7.30pm till about 8.30pm. Your host for the evening will be Phil VK7ZPD.
FINALLY - A reminder to all members that if you have any items of news you would like added to our weekly roundup, no matter how trivial, then please email them to the Secretary at the following address news@ntarc.net all items to be received no later than 5pm on the Friday prior to the Broadcast.
That’s all folks,
73 from Stefan, VK7ZSB, Secretary NTARC Inc.
