Wellington VHF Group, Inc: Online.

Well done to Rick, ZL2TVY. You made the front page of the Dominion Post today!. And well deserved too.

de ZL1VMF.

The MED have invited response to their discussion paper concerning the replanning of the 806-960MHz band to achieve greater spectrum efficiency.

Your committee commissioned committee members to research and produce a submission. This has now been finalised and submitted to RFS, MED.

I attended NZART Conference during Queens Birthday weekend, which was organised jointly by Hastings and Napier branches, and held in the Opera House at Hastings.

Operating from the Te Marae o Tane Information Centre at the Otari-Wilton’s Bush Reserve this evening event provided training for Land SAR Wellington in navigation and communications. The venue was kindly made available by the Wellington City Council.

The SAREX kicked off at 1700 with John ZL4JY, Dick ZL2TGQ, and John ZL2HD on site. Operations on VHF used the Wrights Hill EE band LandSAR repeater maintained by AREC and a Police ESB band portable repeater deployed on nearby Tinakori Hill. Two Icom F110s were used at base. HF was also established to give the teams HF practice with an Icom F7000 and autotune antenna setup for 5680 kHz. Event logging was maintained by AREC using IMAN.

Event Manager Rowena Johnstone talking to a team on VHF.

IMAN is the incident management software that LandSAR Wellington uses for search operations. It is the alternative to paper based systems and works on both stand alone and networked computers.

We now have a Google Calendar tracking Events @ The Wellington VHF Group.

This has great potential - keep an eye on it for upcoming events and for those who use Gmail (etc) already, you can integrate this into your own Google view.

David ZL2SX was made Honourable Life Member of NZART at a presentation at the annual conference held at Hastings. In presenting the citation Stuart Watchman ZL2TW, Acting President of NZART, commented on David’s outstanding service to the association over a period of more than 30 years, and said that the award was in recognition of his meritorious service to all Amateurs.

Some highlights of David’s service to fellow Amateurs that were mentioned in the Award Citation are:

Preparing for KiwiSAT - report

The KiwiSAT project is progressing closer to a possible launch. Terry ZL2BAC, our KiwiSAT representative, gave a very interesting presentation, including:

Questions & Answers

The sequence of events the KiwiSAT will experience when finally launched.

The MED have invited response to their scoping paper concerning a future review of spectrum of interest to us. The decisions that will result from this process are seen as pivotal to the future of the amateur allocations of 50MHz-54MHz, and 614MHz-622MHz.

Following on from the 2007 VHF Forum, a paper was published in Q-Bit and on the www.vhf.org.nz website. A number of comments were received and these made up the basis of that paper and was published in June 2008.

At Convention in 2009, John ZL2HD outlined the ideas in the paper and outlined the following recommendeations. The CTCSS Reccomendations is an informal document that those considering CTCSS on their repeaters should read and consider using the recommendations. This is rather than creating rules for CTCSS usage.