Monthly Archives: October 2016

Saturday Member Day 8/10

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SDR PresentationWe had another fantastic Saturday member day up at the clubrooms!

Martin VK7MA was quick to show off his CW skills that he has been working on along with his Morse key using the club radio and was quick to make a QSO. In a hobby that is seeing so much progress being made in new digital modes such as FreeDV and WSJT, seeing people learning one of the first forms of radio communication is fantastic!

Ben VK7BEN brought up his home radio, a Yaesu FTDX-1200 which has recently had an FFT-1 board installed in it, with the promise of it being able to decode CW, PSK and RTTY on the radio, along with waterfall display.

Definitely the highlight of the day was Scott VK7LXX giving a practice run to attendees of his upcoming Ruxcon security conference presentation on using the popular RTL-2832 based TV tuners for computers as software defined radios and how they could be used for decoding LIPD signals, pager messages and many other signals heard in the spectrum! Thanks Scott!

We’ll be opening the clubrooms again on 29th October from 11am. This is around the same time at the CQWW SSB Contest starts, so we might try and operate the club station VK7OTC for part of the contest!

See you there!

October Presentation – Antarctic Communication and Science Programs

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AAD PresentationKim Briggs VK7KB gave a fantastic presentation on support the Scientific Program run by the Australian Antarctic Division with some communications references as well.

Kim started off with the Aurora Australis ship and the many different aspects that it is used for and how it is used. It is a very versatile ice-breaking science platform that is leased from P&O.

Throughout the talk there was references to the many many projects and programs that Kim has been involved in – from camera mounts, trawling, echo sounder refits, operating maritime mobile, calibrations, battery packs, data collection, whale recorders, Conductivity, Temperature, Depth instruments, etc. Kim has been involved in it!

We ran out of time for the communications presentation so we have booked Kim in for that presentation next year.

We finished of with many questions and ran a video from one of the trawl camera showing the sea bed at a variety of depths down to over 500m.

A huge thanks you to Kim and we look forward to the sequel.

The talk was videoed and will be played at this Wednesday night’s DATV Experimenter’s night.

(73, Justin, VK7TW)