Wellington VHF Group, Inc: Online.

The management committee has authorised the Contest Rules to be hosted and maintained on the VHF Group website. The rules can now be found in On The Air, Contests. The current Rules took effect in June 2006.

Recession hits radio classes

One response made by the Government to the recession has been to wipe nearly all of the funding previously allocated for community education throughout N.Z. Consequently the community school, Onslow College, where we previously ran evening radio classes for amateurs, has withdraw facilities. This has forced us to cancel our radio courses planned for the next semester.

Location: Otari School and neighbourhood (no parking in school)
Time: 1800 to 2100

AREC will be providing comms for this exercise which will be similar to the Navigation and Radio SAREX held 6 June (see below) but on a smaller scale. This time the training is firmly focused on suburban search. Contact John Yaldwyn ZL4JY if interested in helping with comms for this event (limited numbers required).

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

There's a second, more detailed article.

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.

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.

In it’s advocacy role, your committee consider this matter to be of vital importance, and we are concerned that every effort be made to secure the amateur position. Accordingly, we have commissioned committee members to research and produce a submission to respond to the MED. During preparation, this submission paper has been widely circulated and has undergone thorough scrutiny.

Our submission has now been finalised, and has been submitted to the MED RFS. Those with a particular interest in viewing this submission, can approach ZL2TGQ for a copy. The Ministry will publish the submissions in due course.

Now that Brian ZL2BRF is off to work in VK, I have accepted the role of President until the next AGM in October. Thank you for entrusting me with stewardship of the Group.

Brian achieved a lot for the Group during his term as President, for which we are grateful. We presented him with a framed certificate of appreciation at a dinner held in his honour at “Curry Heaven”, one of his favourite dining establishments. Good luck for the future Brian, from your many friends in the Group.