Tag: Australia

Foundations of Amateur Radio #168

How to start your own net …
In the past I’ve talked about a weekly net I run, called F-troop. It’s intended to be a place where new and returning amateurs find their feet, have a chat, test their gear, meet new friends, ask questions and sometimes get answers

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VK6WIA NewsWest for Sunday, 10 June 2018 – History of AR Edition

A sky full of satellites, musings on the lot of the YL and the ACMA engaging us in a consultation. Not a bad mix. Welcome to NewsWest, the Amateur Radio news programme for the VK6 call area and beyond. I’m Bob, VK6POP, the NewsWest producer this week, and the team is Andrew, Onno and Glynn

In this History of Amateur Radio edition of Newswest, we take a look at this time of the year in 1958, as revealed in the Amateur Radio magazine and newspapers of the day.

Lots of things happened in 1958. NASA was formed, the world was putting satellites into orbit. Sputnik, Explorer. Vanguard. Amateurs were hearing the satellites. The microchip was invented. Elvis is drafted. Kruschev becomes the premier of the USSR, and Charles de Gaulle becomes the Prime Minister of France.

Roy’s still absent, hopefully he’s recuperating, so we don’t have Helpline. Onno presents his weekly offering of Foundations of Amateur Radio. (more…)

Foundations of Amateur Radio – Episode 157 Logging of a Different Kind

We as radio amateurs log things. We log our contacts, we log our progress towards an award, we log how many different countries we’ve contacted, which stations we heard with WSPR, how many kilometres we managed per watt, which stations were in a net, what callsigns received a QSL card, what location we’re in when we made a contact. You get the point, we log things, many things and for many different reasons.

Here’s a log that I started last week.

An asset log.

You heard me, an asset log, a thing that logs what amateur radio stuff I have, when it came into my life, where it came from, what brand it is, what model, what the serial number is and if I spent money on it, how much money I spent. It shows things that I’ve loaned to other amateurs and it shows things that are on loan to me.

It started with a conversation about a silent key. That’s what we call radio amateurs who have died. The idea of a silent key is one that reminds us that everyone is unique, that every manual Morse code transmission has a (more…)