John Andrews, Senior Energy Analyst at NZX Energy will give a presentation on

The recent Downstream Conference for the electricity and gas retailers and generators covered the possible effects of batteries, PV and EVs on the lines companies, the national grid and electricity retailers and generators. Much information from other markets was presented, but the big question remains- is New Zealand really different? And does NZ have the right model in place to deal with these changes?

Talk in Belmont 710 and DMR VKZL
Park at Churchill Drive car park and walk along to the Troop Picnic Area for a BBQ. Bring your own everything (Free BBQ's are available).

Date: Thursday 25 February
Time: from 6:00 pm
Location: Otari Wiltons Bush, Troop Picnic Area

Due to the Weather the picnic has been cancelled

Talk in Belmont 710 and DMR VKZL
Park at Churchill Drive car park and walk along to the Troop Picnic Area for a BBQ. Bring your own everything (Free BBQ's are available).

Date: Thursday 28 January
Time: from 6:00 pm
Location: Otari Wiltons Bush, Troop Picnic Area

For the November meeting we are privileged to have Peter Lake ZL2AZ, IARU R3 Director, speak to us about his 10 years as director and the progress that has been made during this time. Peter has recently announced his retirement and this will take effect just before the meeting.

Date: Thursday 26 November
Time: 7:30 pm
Location: Tawa Community Centre

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.