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VK7AX > BCAST 11.03.23 03:46l 378 Lines 21937 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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VK7 Amateur Radio News 05Mar23
Text edition:
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VK7 AMATEUR RADIO NEWS BROADCAST
FOR SUNDAY 5th March 2023
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Welcome to the VK7 Amateur Radio News and this was first broadcast on Sunday the 5th of March 2023. At the mike of VK7WI this week is Rick, VK7RI.
On Sunday this broadcast goes out on repeaters all over VK7 and on digital radio - DMR Talk Group 5 and D-Star Reflector 91C by VK7ZCR
We go out on medium and high frequency courtesy of the following rebroadcast stations:
On 1.862 MHz by Any Takers,
On 3.670 MHz by Ross, VK7ALH,
On 7.140 MHz by Garry, VK7JGD,
On 14.130 MHz by Dale, VK7DG and
On 28.525 MHz by Tony, VK7VKT.
We also go out on UHF CB Channel 15 thanks to Mark VK7FMAC in the Hobart area.
You can hear this broadcast again on Tuesday night at 8:00pm on repeaters VK7RAA in Northern VK7 and VK7RAD in Southern VK7.
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Silent Key
Ian Milne ex-VK7IR SK
It is with sadness that we inform all that Ian Milne ex-VK7IR became silent key on 27 February 2023 and he was 89 years of age.
Ian gained his amateur radio licence in 1971 with the callsign VK7ZIR and upgraded to his full call in 1973 with the callsign VK7IR which he held up until recently.
Ian served as Federal Councillor for the WIA Tasmania Division for many years and attended Federal Conventions and was actively involved in amateur radio in VK7 in the Southern Branch.
Ian was also one of the team of readers of the VK7 Broadcast each Sunday for many years.
Ian’s worked for the SMA which became the ACMA in a Technical role and as a Radio Inspector.
Ian Fletcher VK7IF recounts working with Ian.
Ian worked with me in Hobart, he was running the Quoin Ridge monitoring station, usually by himself. I recall him in shorts in most weather, and it is often bitter on the Ridge although the building is warm. The natural environment suited him. He kept the old equipment running and loved suggesting new gear, new programs and new processes. When it arrived he was like a kid at Christmas. He could always find another Strepsils tin (remember those?) to build an interface something in, sealing it with a black substance I later discovered was pulverised self-amalgamating tape and hiding it in the bowels of the racks.
Ian was always excited about something or other, usually had a gadget to show off or a story to tell, and he brightened our days.
Our sincere condolences to his wife Janet and son’s Michael, Bruce and Peter.
Vale Ian
Richard VK7RO, Ian VK7IF, Justin VK7TW
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Statewide News
Thursday Night SSTV Nets
Another great net night that saw the following participants, VK7s – ZGK, ZAB, ZBX, PD, FGGT, KT, ZSB and OO all sharing twenty six photos.
There were various subjects like:
Street art on a Launceston flood levee
A selection of birds of flight
Good old Agent 86 and cohorts from Get Smart, including a variation on the “Cone of Silenceö
Historical series of VK7REC repeater and fire tower, including an “In Memory Ofö plaque to Alexander Amos VK7ZBA 1942 to 2004
Platform 9 and ¾ with only half a luggage trolley visible
Plenty of homemade RF projects
A Light House on the edge of an abyss
This week’s transport theme was big trucks, helicopters, a converted railway tunnel and a SeaCat destined for the armed forces
Remember Ken VK7KRJ’s and Steve VK7OO’s fully automatic 24/7 monitoring site that allows anyone who has sent an SSTV picture the ability to check them on their pages almost immediately, any time, both South and North Tasmania.
Check out some of the pre SSTV night test transmissions featuring magnificent sunsets and glorious Southern Lights.
If you missed the net there are archives of all SSTV nights.
These photos can be seen on Ken’s 2m SSTV website as an infinitely-scrolling web page or on NTARC’s website under blogs and arranged as weekly nets.
And a bit of trivia from Ken, the archives have the last 1,423 photos that have been shared since state-wide SSTV started in June 2022.
A reminder that in Southern Tasmania, VK7RAF (146.650 -600kHz) can be RF linked to VK7RJG by using a CTCSS tone of 141.3Hz. We get underway from around 7:30pm.
https://vk7oo.tasme.com/vhfsstv
https://sstv.vk7krj.com/scrolling%20web%20gallery.html
https://www.ntarc.net/blogs
73 from Andre’ VK7ZAB
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Technology News
Synthetic Media
There has been much written recently about synthetic media or AI-generated or generative AI or colloquially as deepfakes.
Wikipedia describes all these terms as referring to the artificial production, manipulation, and modification of data and media by automated means, especially through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, such as for the purpose of misleading people or changing an original meaning.
Some open source examples include - ChatGPT, ImageGPT, MidJourney and many other applications.
Justin VK7TW has been playing with an application called Descript which is used to train and produce video and audio material. Justin has trained this application with his voice and produced and played a Generative AI version of last week’s broadcast that was played in the South on Tuesday night for the rebroadcast.
There are many positive and negative opportunities and applications for this type of technology but judge for yourself - the real VK7TW recording can be found at the link in the internet edition of this broadcast - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NdCmZMxsZfeUK77y2YSemN4rX3fx8EP0/view?usp=share_link
And the Generative Artificial Intelligence version of VK7TW reading the same broadcast can be found at the link in the internet edition of this broadcast - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CSw7RfGaxFdzAzLWZITiwF3jKcjpoMZC/view?usp=share_link
Take a listen and let Justin VK7TW know your thoughts.
73, Justin, VK7TW
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NEWS FROM THE NORTH
SOTA/WWFF PARKS GROUP
The Summits On The Air/World Wide Flora and Fauna parks group meets twice weekly – Mondays and Fridays 10.30AM till 12.00 at the Glebe Gardens Cafe, Henry Street, Launceston.
For more information contact Al on 0417 354 410.
73, Al, VK7AN
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Northern Tasmanian Amateur Radio Club Incorporated
www.ntarc.net
If it is Sunday when you hear this broadcast then with a bit of luck there will be an NTARC crew at Wattlewood Park Sassafras. We should be packing up our portable repeaters, collecting the club’s communications trailer and leisurely making our way back to Launceston after what hopefully will have been a successful equine endurance ride on Saturday. Once again the club provided Safety Communications for the 80, 40 and 20 Km events for the day starting at 06:30. An update to follow at a later date.
You most likely have heard mention of ChatGPT, but probably not its full name, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, it’s touted as being a fairly advanced chatbot, developed by OpenAI and launched late last year. A chatbot is a software application used to conduct an online chat conversation via text. Well, Stuart VK7ES a few weeks ago decided to see how it would go writing some computer code for his Arduino, referred to as a Sketch. He provided the query to ChatGP in the form of a text description of his requirement including equipment and the functionality he wished it to provide. This included sensors, control equipment, indicators and the conditionals including timing that they were to operate under. It indeed reciprocated by replying with a full sketch ready to run, once loaded into an Arduino. Last morning tea, Stuart brought along a fully bread boarded prototype based on ChatGPTs allocation of Arduino Nano pins to be used, and loaded with the generated code. Although the overall requirement was not met, the individual functions required worked, which in itself is amazing! The code is being looked into to see how close it came to what is needed. Or do we indeed need to “tweakö the request instead? We also tried writing a text descriptor for ChatGPT to generate python code for a Raspberry Pi timer. The resultant code structurally looked correct and will be trialled when we have time. Considering ChatGPT draws its information from the “Ever Accurateö internet, it really did do an incredible job.
If you managed to catch the WIA part of last week’s broadcast, and decided to follow up the segment on the
Amateur Radio balloon launch that was scheduled to occur just after the talk back, then you would not have been disappointed. I found the club site with launch site location information, but luckily Peter VK7KPC found the link to the actual launch site for the day and posted it on Discord. There were live pictures from the payload camera updated every minute from Horus the balloon. These pictures started from launch preparations and balloon inflation, all the way through the flight that reached an altitude of 32,000 metres and back again to terra firma. At that height there is obvious a definite horizon curvature, and the sky portion of these pictures above the blue horizon is jet black. At this peak altitude the balloon’s “automatic burst timerö triggers and deflates the balloon, the parachute is deployed and the long descent starts. The final pictures were of sideways grass and the recovery team walking down the side of the picture, as the payload had landed on its side. The telemetry provided real time assent or descent velocity, horizontal velocity, altitude, direction and temperature. All this was incorporated into an APRS like tracking map provided by the website found on the internet edition of this broadcast.
https://amateur.sondehub.org/
Some technical information from the South Australia Amateur Radio Experimenters Group (AREG), High-Altitude Ballooning sub-group, Project Horus web site. Yes that’s quite a mouthful. On to the RF side of things the FM-SSTV transmitter was on 145.100 MHz, a Wenet Imagery transmitter was on 443.500 MHz. Horus Binary telemetry was on 434.200 MHz and the Radiation Sensor Payload was on 434.210 MHz.
The payload was transmitting images using the PD120 SSTV mode throughout the flight, and could be decoded using any SSTV software capable of decoding this mode. This is the same mode that is commonly used on broadcasts from the International Space Station.
This ballooning event didn’t interrupt the Northern 1296 QSO party hosted by Peter VK7PD but some of us certainly were keeping an eye on the computer monitor throughout the duration of the flight.
Web links to this event can be found in the text version of the broadcast.
https://www.areg.org.au/archives/211405 and for flight images http://ssdv.habhub.org/
On a much more mundane and dare I say “ a down to earth noteö, the NTARC newly elected club committee had its first meeting for the year as required by the Constitution, to set the ball rolling so to speak.
Mug Order - yes, we are talking about the white mugs for drinking out of, those that have our club logo on one side, personalised with your name and call sign on the other. We are placing another order so if you would like one then please see André at the Friday coffee mornings or at the Wednesday bi-weekly club Technical Nights. Those members who have already requested a mug, please email secretary@ntarc.net to confirm order, and anyone else who wants one please specify what name is to be printed above the call sign. The final price will be about $12 depending on eventual quantity ordered.
UPCOMING EVENTS
The Club Technical night - The next session will be on Wednesday 8th of March and will commence at the usual time of 7.30 pm, running through to about 10.30 pm, at the Club room Archer Street, Rocherlea. Pop in catch up with fellow amateurs, bring along something that you are currently building or just ask questions? You might also be able to answer some from other attendees. That is what the evenings are all about, anything of a technical or near-technical nature, however defined, is fair game.
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. We currently have a couple of QSL cards awaiting collection, so why not pop in and check the cards and join us for a cuppa. Endless tea and coffee along with biscuits is available for a small gold coin donation.
The TestNet and TechNet session - Wednesday the 15th of March. 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 Nic VK7WW.
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(at)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.
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NEWS FROM THE SOUTH
Radio and Electronics Association of Southern Tasmania
https://www.reast.asn.au/
https://www.facebook.com/reasttas/
https://www.youtube.com/reasthobart/
Kraken Direction Finding SDR Wrap-up
A huge thank you to Ollie VK7NFI who presented the crowdfunded Kraken Software Defined Radio that is built specifically for direction finding.
The Kraken was originally the Kerberos SDR that evolved into five individual RTL-SDRs running from a common clock and the glue hardware with some very smart software.
It is a crowd sourced product and raised $900,000 in under two months and went into manufacturing right when COVID struck.
What can it be used for? Five independent receivers from 20MHz to 1.3 GHz for GNU radio, SDR++, SDR Angel, etc. Passive Radar is another application but is somewhat contentious due to it infringing some international laws. Watch this space.
It can be used for radio direction finding using both linear and circular array direction finding. The five antennas are placed into a line or circle and used to direction. Ollie describes the different direction finding methods ending up with the way the Kraken performs which is Correlative interferometry.
Ollie goes into the cloud based system that shares the information from the Kraken to the Cloud which can be displayed on a notebook or mobile phone application. We went through the arrangement with five antennas on a vehicle array.
Ollie showed the Byonics Foxes that he did some experiments and then went into the Circular Array Calculator spreadsheet to setup the best resolution with the antenna array. There were some static slides of the direction finding and the data stored and sent to the cloud software and showed on the mobile application.
Ollie went through what else they have planned for the Kraken.
There was a screen recording from Ollie's phone of his direction finding using the software. This was fascinating as it actually showed the multi-pathing of the signal with multiple lobes shown on the map.
Ollie then answered questions from the audience.
https://youtube.com/live/2Ao0te5OloA
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Presentation Nights
Magnetic Loops - Myth-Busting Demo
https://fb.me/e/2lMJiTddt
The REAST April presentation and demonstration will be all about Magnetic Loop antennas.
There are many many myths out there on the internet about magnetic loop antennas and so this presentation and demonstration will focus on myth-busting by presenting the facts, demonstrating them in real-time and busting some of the myths that many amateurs hang on to about these fascinating antennas.
The presentation will be streamed and go out on DVB-T RF.
This will take place on Wednesday 5th April 2023 from 7:30pm in the Queens Domain Clubrooms.
See you there.
73, REAST Committee
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DATV Experimenter's Night
https://fb.me/e/2JoFedbKt
This Wednesday night we get back underway with the DATV Experimenter’s night and will have segments from Rex VK7MO on his recent auroral propagation experiments, the latest on the CaibouliteSDR, Magnetic Loop Tuner, we review the latest OTN Newsletter and much more.
We stream the nights on the REAST YouTube channel.
https://www.reast.asn.au/news-events/live-stream/
https://www.reast.asn.au/special-interest-groups/amateur-tv/
We go out on RF - DVB-T 7MHz Standard Definition on 445.5MHz. So, if you have a TV, Set-top box or USB DTV Dongle that you can tune and scan 445.5MHz and you can see the Queens Domain, then you have a good chance of receiving the DATV Experimenter's Night Signal. Look out for VK7OTC. We also stream the nights on the REAST YouTube channel.
https://www.reast.asn.au/news-events/live-stream/
https://www.reast.asn.au/special-interest-groups/amateur-tv/
https://www.youtube.com/c/ReastHobart/
73, Justin, VK7TW
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Training and Assessments
REAST’s 2023 Foundation Licence training and all licence assessment days have been finalised and they occur every two months with the next one next Saturday March 11th.
If you are thinking of coming along then please let Reg Emmett VK7KK REAST Learning Organiser know ASAP by phoning 0417 391 607 or via the REAST Website Contact Form.
https://www.reast.asn.au/contact/online-contact-form/
Check out the REAST Foundation Licence Training Videos that can be found on the REAST YouTube Training and Assessment playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsnsP_zjw831mdC6sY4XqavRUY-53ZWUn
And checkout the REAST Facebook page events for further details.
https://fb.me/e/2lrgEJgfd
73, Reg, VK7KK
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Technology News
ICOM Release of the ICOM IC-905
Icom Australia expect to release the IC-905 VHF/UHF/SHF All Mode Portable Transceiver in late April, subject to Australian Type Approval.
The IC-905 is an all mode transceiver covering 144/ 430/ 1200/ 2400/ 5600MHz and 10GHz (with extra module), including the D-STAR DV/DD mode and ATV in the FM mode.
The expected Recommended Retail Price for the IC-905 will be $5,500-$6,000, and the CX-10G 10GHz transverter will have a Recommended Retail Price of $2,100-$2,300.
https://www.icomjapan.com/news/3735/
Sourced from the ICOM Japan Website
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Regular VK7 gatherings and events over the coming months:
Regular gatherings:
Sewing Circle Net – Daily on 3.640 MHz commences at 6:00pm AEDST.
Statewide SSTV Net - held every Thursday night via the North/South Link on VK7RAF/VK7RJG from 7:30pm. In the North and North West - VK7RJG on 438.55 -7MHz and in the South - VK7RAF (146.650 -600kHz) CTCSS tone 141.3Hz to link RAF North-South.
State-wide – MICROWAVE QSO Party – following the Sunday broadcast call-back on 1296.15 MHz FM. One group in the greater Hobart area and another in the greater Launceston area.
Then North-south digital contacts on 1296.2MHz using Q65-60B.
Stations in the Launceston area transmitting on the odd minute. Southern stations on the even minute.
SOTA/WWFF Group – Meeting Mondays and Fridays 10.30-12.00 midday at Glebe Gardens Cafe, Henry St, Launceston.
NTARC - Fridays - Coffee mornings in the NTARC Club rooms from 10am to noon.
NTARC - Wednesday 8th March - Club Technical night - from 7.30 to 10.30 pm in the club room Archer Street, Rocherlea.
NTARC - Wednesday 15th March - TestNet and TechNet - TestNet/CW course on 3.580MHz from 7pm till 7.30pm and a TechNet on 3.567MHz from 7.30pm till about 8.30pm.
NW VK7 – Wednesday from 8:00pm local – NW Tassie Amateur Repeater Group Net on VK7RMD
NW VK7 - Thursday commencing at 8:30pm local) - N.W. Tassie 2m DX Net 144.190 USB
REAST – WAGS – Wednesday Afternoon Group meet in the Queens Domain Clubrooms from 12 noon.
REAST – DATV Experimenter’s Nights from 7:30pm live in the club rooms also on DVBT RF and YouTube Streaming
CCARC - 27 February 2023 - SSTV nights from 7:30pm using VK7RMD 2m repeater on Mt Duncan on the 4th Monday in the Month.
Events:
REAST - 5 April - Magnetic Loop Antennas - Mythbusting with demo with Justin VK7TW from 7:30pm in the Queens Domain clubrooms.
VK7 - June 2023 - VK7 Amateur Radio Centenary
ALARA - November 2023 - ALARAMeet 2023 - Hobart Tasmania
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A reminder to those people rostered for next week’s broadcast:
Newsreader: VK7PD
Repeaters: REAST, NTARC and in the NW thanks to N W T A R C, West Coast Radio Group, Cradle Coast Radio Amateur Radio Club, VK7AX, and VK7DC
160m: Any Takers
80m: VK7JGD
40m: VK7DG
20m: VK7TPE
10m: VK7VKT
UHFCB15: VK7FMAC
DMR: Talk Group 5 and D-Star: Reflector 91C VK7ZCR
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You can hear this broadcast again on Tuesday night at 8:00pm on repeaters VK7RAA in Northern VK7 and VK7RAD in the South.
A huge thank you to all people and organisations that assisted with this broadcast.
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That concludes our VK7 Amateur Radio News Broadcast for this week.
You have been listening to or have just missed VK7WI. Next week the National WIA news can be heard at 0900 followed by the VK7 Amateur Radio News around 0930 hours.
Items for the broadcast can be emailed to vk7arnews(at)gmail.com
Further information about the broadcast can be found at the VK7 Amateur Radio News Groups.IO Group.
https://groups.io/g/vk7arnews
The deadline for items is 21:00 on Friday prior to the Sunday of the broadcast.
VK7WI is now closing but will reopen shortly for callbacks and relay reports. Callbacks will be taken on the frequency to which you are listening. Relay stations will use their own callsigns during the callback.
On behalf of the VK7 Amateur Radio News Team, 73, stay safe from Rick, VK7RI.
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(Posted to the packet network courtesy Tony VK7AX)
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