Wellington VHF Group, Inc: Online.

The January Meeting will be a BBQ at Sladden Park on Thursday 26 January from 6pm.

VHF+ RECORDS 2011-12

Following on from the very succsessful 2011 award featuring N.Z. Railway Stations run by Wellington VHF Group, the Kordia National System Award will be presented this year by The Hamilton Amateur Radio Club and will run from 1 January 2012 to 6 February 2012, featuring Category 2 Historic places.

For a list of Category 2 Historic Places, see the Historic Places Trust Register at:

http://historic.org.nz/en/TheRegister.aspx

And, for full information, including rules, a list of qualifying branches, and logsheet, see Hamilton Amateur Radio Club at:

Via the Wellington Thursday Night Curry group I became aware of a goodly supply of workshop equipment likely to be of interest to those with a more practical hands/on bent, currently for sale.

The listings can be viewed on TradeMe. The notice I received included the following:

A friend who is a brilliant inventor and engineer is in his 80s and close to the end of his time with us.

Cheers

As a follow up from the last time we ran this event and people wanted another chance to attend, we are running a hands on training evening with the Land SAR radios.

We will look at the Tait hand helds, the portable VHF repeaters, the portable HF stations and the field base VHF radios.

We will also have a look through the new Radio Procedures Guide, which has the background info you need to be able to speak the same language as the Land SAR field teams.

7.30 PM at Tawa Community Centre in the Boardroom. (same venue and time as the main meetings).
Followed by supper.

Digital Radio Mondiale is an OFDM radio transmission scheme having provision for callsign ident, text, voice, data, moving & still images, in bandwidths from 2.5kHz (non-standard ham mode) thru 96kHz (DRM+ FM band digital radio). It can operate in a single frequency network (SFN) to reduce band congestion and work cleanly even over HF paths – raising the possibility of a Digital National System distributed via HF.
I embarked on a series of experiments to test it out....

http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news/regulation/51390-senate-enquiry-calls-for-dedicated-emergency-comms-spectrum

The mobile telephony industry has failed to convince a parliamentary enquiry into the communications needs of emergency service organisations that these needs are best met through services provided by the mobile communications industry rather than by dedicating spectrum for emergency communications services.

Click above for more.

There are lots of ways to communicate via lightwaves and this project gets started with a simple optical headend transceiver compatible with direct modulation or the more complex modes by using a PC to do the modulation and demodulation using DSP and SDR techniques.

I picked up an article on Slashdot that may be of interest to some:

Bionic Implants and Spectrum Clash

"The battle over scarce radio spectrum that has embroiled the mobile broadband world even extends to a little-known type of wireless network that promises to reconnect the human nervous system with paralyzed limbs. At its monthly meeting next week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will consider whether four sets of frequencies between 413MHz and 457MHz can be used by networks of sensors implanted in patients who suffer from various forms of paralysis. One intended purpose of these MMNS (medical micropower network systems) is to transmit movement commands from a sensor on a patient's spinal cord, through a wearable MCU (master control unit), to implants that electrically stimulate nerves."

Slashdot being a discussion forum, folks will likely be interested in some of the comments likely to come up... both smart and witty.
The root article comes from Techworld Australia.

In 2009, when the inaugural EofA project to activate as many large Apollo-era dishes for a day of Moon talk on 23cm was announced, I had good reason to be interested. My workplace had one remaining 30.5 metre, fully steerable antenna that had been replaced with a smaller model and the site decommissioned, a fate already dealt to five similar size dishes and countless 10-metre class TVRO setups around the country.