Sunday 24th Jan, I travelled to Portland to meet with the members of the Portland & South West Radio Group to let the members have some input to the proposed Heywood repeater site lease.
The meeting allowed the members to suggest numerous amendments to the draft document to be presented to the new owners of Mount Eckersley.
The lease agreement will be between the Mount Eckersley property owners, and the South East Radio Group, not the Portland club as originally planned.
Also, SERG will retain full ownership of the infrastructure, that includes the hut, tower, solar panels, and all the 2m repeater & link equipment in the hut.
The Portland club will provide the maintenance & tech support.
Another topic discussed was the storage container that SERG purchased to house the repeater, but has since been discarded following the acquisition of the concrete comms hut. The storage container will now be offered for sale to recoup the expenses incurred with its purchase.
PS Peter has spoken to the owners of the site and things are looking positive, still a few hurdles. We hope the revised lease agreement will be signed in a week or two and we’ll look to Portland Club to do some site works in preparation for the hut transfer.
Today (Saturday 16/1/21), with the easing of COVID-19 cross border travel restrictions, I was able to travel to Heywood for a meeting with the Portland club President, Peter VK3HEW, and Secretary David VK3DJC at Mount Eckersley, to meet with the new property owners, Casey and Bonnie Taylor.
A very friendly and accommodating meeting followed, with all the terms and conditions for site access verbally agreed to. A formal lease document is now being drafted for all parties to sign off in a week or two. Site preparation will commence as soon as the lease document is signed.
Following the meeting, we all adjourned to the summit of Mount Eckersley, where the precise location of the repeater compound was pegged out. An area of 17m x 6m adjacent to the geo-survey trig marker (the highest point of the hill) was agreed to, which will soon be fenced off to keep the cattle away from our proposed facility.
The new land owners were very supportive of our project and are keen to have it fully operational as soon as possible.
Following a visit by Norbert VK5MQ and checking his RTL-SDR dongle out I thought it might be fun to experiment with receiving the NOAA weather satellites. There are three of them circling the globe, NOAAs 15,18 and 19. They operate in the 137MHz area so can be heard on most 2M antennas.
Although I have tracking antennas, the satellites can be heard very easily. They’ve been up there for years and are quite big e.g. NOAA18 weighs 2.3 tonne was launched in 2005 and is in an orbit about 850km up. All these satellites are in polar orbit which means their path is north/south (mornings) or south/north (afternoons). Being nearly sun synchronous they appear more or less at the same time each day.
To receive the satellites you need a receiver that has a reasonably wide bandwidth, about 35kHz does the trick nicely so a software defined radio is probably best as you can adjust the bandwidth easily. I use a RTL-SDR.com Blog V3 dongle bought from South Eastern Communications in Frankston. I paid $44 which included the adaptor.
There are plenty of sites that show you how to get this going with SDR Sharp a software program that does the decoding to audio.
Use Orbitron (or one of a number of web based programs) to calculate when the satellites are going to be in view at your QTH. Orbitron is free and works well.
Once you have Sharp SDR working you have the audio available for decoding with WXtoIMG software. Download the Beta version of WXtoIMG from here: https://wxtoimgrestored.xyz/downloads/ I use Windows 10.
You’ll need to enter your details in the setup of WXtoIMG. Your Lat/Long is important for the program.
Because WXtoIMG must access the sound coming out of SDRsharp program you need to install a virtual cable (not a real cable) program so it listens inside the computer. I got mine from: https://vb-audio.com/Cable/ Download and install VBCABLE_Driver_Pack43.zip
Last job, go into your sound settings (right click on the speaker icon in the bottom right hand corner) and set your incoming and outgoing audio to the Output choose Cable input and Input device choose Cable output.
That’s it. All things being equal you should be able to receive pictures. By the way WXtoIMG does not start drawing the picture until the satellite is in view and then it starts automatically. It stops when it decides that the pass is over which is why your computer clock should be accurate.
Have a go, it’s fun and later you can use SDR Sharp and your dongle to decode weather satellites or the balloons from AREG.
On Sunday 8th November Norbert VK5MQ installed a new power supply and batteries at the Bluff. In addition he installed cable trays for the antenna cables to tidy the installation outside the building.
The new power supply is very capable, it monitors battery voltage/current, mains 13.8V volts and current and indicates charge rate. Another feature is a built in low voltage detect so we can stop worrying about damage to batteries in the event of a sustained 230V power failure.
Recently SERG was advised that its 2m repeater antenna at The Bluff would need to be relocated to the adjacent tower as a result of an Axicom requirement. An unused antenna that already existed on the new tower was made available for SERG to use and a test proved the SWR was acceptable for our frequencies. Unfortunately, after our main antenna was removed and the repeater recabled to the alternate tower, the coverage was extremely poor.After several days, an interim strategy was to install a temporary antenna to restore our repeater acceptable coverage, even if not quite a good as before. This has been achieved by the generous support of the rigging team of Dylan and Brodie from Gambier Electronics.Plans are now underway to refurbish our old antenna and reinstall it in the coming weeks when tower space becomes available.
Over the week-end of August 15/16th, SEAC hosted the 1st Round of the SA Rally Championship in and around the forests near SEAC Park, just west of Mount Gambier. Again, SERG received a request to provide all the communications to enable safe management of the event.
Sunday was a long day, with many arriving at their points at 7am, and not leaving until nearly 5pm. It was a huge dedicated commitment by all from SERG, where a large team was deployed to man every start & finish stage control, plus an intermediate point of each stage. Our members were able to quickly report the whereabouts of all cars, plus report back to the scoring team at Race Control all of the competitors Stage start & finish times to enable rapid compilation of results. Some points were even delegated the task of reporting any car making contact with a barrier which was then applied as a penalty to the drivers score.
All messages were relayed over our 2m repeater nearby on The Bluff which provided excellent radio coverage over the entire area of the event. Radio traffic was constant & relentless, yet our repeater performed faultlessly.
I would like to thank the following SERG members for an outstanding job.
Tom VK5EE
Colin VK5DK
Tim VK5AV
Norbert VK5MQ
Owen VK5HOS
Greg VK5ZGY & Gabi
Hans VK5PHS
Phil VK5PCL
Phil VK5BVC
Andrew VK5VKC
Deanna VK5FDCS
Your contribution made my sometimes difficult job in Race Control so much easier.
On Sunday 10/8/20 Peter VK5BE installed the new power supply tray for VK5RMG. As always, a really professional looking job. The VK5RMG/VK5ROH gear is something for our club to feel really proud about.
This is awarded annually to a Foundation Licence holder who has made a significant contribution to SERG, and this year it goes to Kate, VK5FKLY, for her outstanding work in recent years for the video switching at the Lakes Hillclimb.
Kate works quietly behind the scenes, rarely seen or heard, but does such an awesome job presenting the camera pictures on the TV screens that we all take for granted.
Congratulations Kate
President’s Shield
This is awarded annually by the SERG President to anyone that has made a significant contribution to SERG. This year, in recognition of the great work behind the scenes throughout the year, the award goes to our Welfare Officer, David VK5HDW.
Each month, David has made countless phone calls to our members ensuring they are not forgotten when they are unable to attend meetings or if feeling less than 100%. His very detailed monthly reports are always well received and most appreciated.
Congratulations, David, on being awarded the President’s Shield for 2020.
Today, July 24th, SERG received a request from our state’s emergency services for logistical support. The request was to assist with improving the phone and data service at the Princes Highway road block at GLENBURNIE, on the SA/Vic border. A recent announcement that SA residents may soon be refused entry back into SA, phone and data is a valuable asset to emergency services at the site. The location, unfortunately, has unreliable or little phone and data service due to being nestled amongst a pine forest. SERG has an emergency communications trailer, which is fitted with a large pump up mast.
SERG members, Andrew VK5MAS, Tim VK5AV, and Peter VK5BE quickly mobilised the SERG Comms trailer to the road block location. They set up a portable phone cell utilising a temporary antenna attached to the top of the trailer mounted pump up mast. It is all powered from the battery & mains charger in the trailer and provides a no-break cell for all the workers on site at the road block.
The emergency service workers at the road block were extremely thankful for the logistical support from SERG, as they can now do their border task more effectively.