Wellington VHF Group

This month's SIG meeting will cover the use of and services available over the mesh.  James ZL2ET has also created the virtual tunnel to the nodes of Rob ZL1FLY.  This in turn has allowed us to view other sites around the world.

James will outline the VTUN, the services he is hosting at his QTH, and how to use them.

Mike ZL1AXG will show us the services he is hosting and how we can access them.

The highlight is that we hope to be able to use the voice facilities over the mesh and James and Mike are excited to be able to demo this.

The August general meeting will have two speakers:

Propper networking in the microwave bands: John ZL4JY will talk about professional microwave networking and why the mesh is not the answer to everything. John has considerable experience across the subject, and has provided the microwave link that brings internet services to Colonial KNob for the DMR repeater. What next?

A further series of mobile field strength test runs along Stratton Street has been performed, and a report is being prepared for consideration by the interested parties.

An inspection of the BQ32 sheet of the Topo50 map series shows that some receive locations on Stratton Street are line-of-sight from Belmont and are heavily obstructed from transmitters using the adjacent 494 to 502 MHz and 510 to 518 MHz bands, potentially resulting in reception in these bands having an unfavourable signal-to-noise ratio, caused by any out-of-band radiation of the DATV transmitter.

Since the DMR system was set up at Colonial Knob, a number of enhancements and extensions have occurred.  The code plugs determine the radio front panel channel setup, and changes have been made to make the radio easier to use when moving around the Wellington region, to support new DMR repeaters, and allow for the upcoming frequency changes.  Support for the analogue channels has been made within the local zone, and plenty of channels added to make the radios usable in a number of situations.

The June general meeting will be a talk from the NZART President Stuart Watchman ZL2TW.

When commissioned in 1965 the Benmore-Haywards interisland HVDC link was a pioneering feat of electrical engineering. Stuart (a non electrical engineer!) will present the history of this link and how it fits into the NZ power grid.

Date: Thursday 25 June
Time: 7:30 pm Location: Tawa Community Centre

Links related to the presentation:

The May general meeting will include voting on the NZART AGM Remits followed by Show and Tell so bring along your projects.

Date: Thursday 28 May
Time: 7:30 pm Location: Tawa Community Centre

The April general meeting will be a look at AREC and the modern amateur:

A look at the role AREC plays in amateur radio and the role radio amateurs play in emergency and public service communications.

We will cover:

• Digital radio and AREC
• 5MHz and the world wide push for an aligned amateur allocation
• The funding of, and expect contributionfrom AREC to emergency communications.

Date: Thursday 30 April
Time: 7:30 pm Location: Tawa Community Centre