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Radio Spectrum Management has granted a short-term licence, number 256129, for additional tests of Digital Amateur Television transmissions from our Mt Belmont site.

The first transmissions will consist of an un-modulated carrier on 506 MHz during testing of the modified transmitting antenna. The dates and times of these tests will be notified on this website.

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.

Dick was educated at Stratford Technical High School, Taranaki, then joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force at Blenheim as a Boy Entrant. Later after two years study at the RNZAF Electrical and Wireless School, Wigram, Christchurch, coupled with service at Defence Main Signal Centre, Wellington, he graduated RNZAF Communications Fitter.

Members of the DATV Project Team recently met with representatives of several Government agencies to
discuss the final series of adjacent-channel spectrum compatibility tests.

Following the extensive series of field tests that have been carried out, and laboratory simulations using an output filter
consisting of a 6-pole cross-coupled bandpass filter plus a 6-notch filter, we expect a successful
outcome from the tests.

We are grateful to one of our corporate sponsors for the bandpass filter, and also to our member Steve ZL2ASF,
for the notch filter.

The unmodulated CW carrier on 506 MHz has been turned off, on the completion of coverage testing. Our thanks go to everyone who provided a reception report.

A prototype 2-way splitter, being one third of the 4-way drive splitter, has successfully passed all tests. A similar prototype, a 2-way combiner designed for higher power operation, is now under construction.