Wellington VHF Group, Inc: Online.

There may be some disruption to Belmont services over the next week.

A number of trees have grown up into the 11kV supply line to the Belmont site and present a significant forest-fire hazard to the landlord's forest. As such the power has been disconnected. Until the power can be restored it will be attempted to run reduced services on a combination of batteries and a mobile generator.

21 January 2008

Welcome to the first entry of the President Blog for 2008! I trust you are all back with us safe and well after the Christmas New Year period.

At the December committee meeting we set the direction for 2008. The overarching direction like always is to support people doing Ham Radio. The things that should catch our attention are those that will enable people to do Ham radio and those that impeded it.

Hi Guys and Gals.
Just to make sure you're in the know, there's an 'Administrivia' Category on the BlakJak.net website which will provide updates on any issues or outages affecting vhf.org.nz. In the event of any problems keep an eye on BlakJak.net as this is the first place an update will be published.

It seems that the server BlakJak.net is currently hosted on has seen better days, so in the interests of longer-term stability a replacement box is being built at present. We hope to have this in service over the next month or so.

Wellington VHF Group apologises to anyone who noticed their site was down for approx 6 days from 29 Dec to 4 Jan, and also a few hours on the afternoon of Wed 30 Jan.
The former was layer 8 - the latter was Layer 3. In both cases services were restored with the aid of our service provider.

All is back up and running!
We apologise for the inconvenience.

Cheers
ZL1VMF
Webmaster WVHFG.

Apologies to anyone inconvenienced by an outage to our webservices today between ~0100 and ~1200hrs NZ Daylight time. This was caused by a webserver crash, however, all services should now be operational.

There will be a Branch 74 AREC Section meeting to be held at the special interest group meeting slot on Thursday 4th October at the Tawa Community Centre commencing at 7.30pm. All members are welcome. The topic of the meeting in an update on AREC matters and discussion of a development programme for the Group's AREC section.

- ZL4JY, Section Leader

The Annual General Meeting of New Zealand Land Search and Rescue Incorporated was held in Wellington on Saturday 29th September. The Minister of Police, Hon Annette King, opened meeting with Deputy Commissioner, Rob Pope, representing the Police.

Attending for AREC were Jeff Sayer, ZL4JS, AREC National Director and John Yaldwyn, ZL4JY, AREC Area 2 Manager.

A family tramping party headed in the Tauherenikau intending to stay overnight at either Cone or Tutuwai, to return Tuesday afternoon. After failing to return by next day and with a significant spike in the river flow the Westpac helo was tasked with one Police SAR Squad observer to search the area. The missing party were located just as the Westpac lifted off from Camp Kaitoke. With the Mt Climie SAR repeater temporarily off the air I sought permission from DoC to use their Cone ESB repeater as an alternative channel and made arrangements for programming SAR radios.

Wellington Land SAR held a Dog SAREX in the 12,000 acre Terawhiti Station behind Makara and out to the remote southeast coast of Wellington.

Attending were:

Brain Fearnley ZL2BRF
Dave Walker ZL2BHE
Rick Smith ZL2TVY
Tom Clarke ZL2TDD
John Yaldwyn ZL4JY

VHF operation was established on ESB58 using a Police portable repeater deployed by 4WD and an AREC Icom F110 base. VHF was used exclusively with teams and the Westpac helicopter on the same channel.

A man withy a medical condition was reported missing late afternoon from his home in Newlands. Police searched the house and all properties in the street.

After discussion Police and given the possibility of an urban search that evening or the next day I did a coverage check around Newlands on my way home to determine the most suitable VHF channel. The EE196 repeater at Wrights Hill provided excellent coverage and Rick ZL2TVY was asked to go on standby.

A friend of the family found the missing man without the need for search.

- ZL4JY, Section Leader