CCARC NEWS 12-22

CCARC Club News WICEN 11/06/2012 | 0

CCARC NEWS 12-22

THE PERIODIC NEWSLETTER OF THE CENTRAL COAST AMATEUR RADIO CLUB

ISSUE No 12-22 11th. June 2012

In this Issue:

CCARC Lecture – Radar before the Magnatron – from guest speaker Brian VK2GCE.
Technology used by WICEN CNC at St. Albans this last weekend worked very well.
Upcoming events looking for support from club members.

1. CCARC Lecture 15th. June 19:30 – a lecture NOT TO BE MISSED!

Brian Clarke’s lecture on Radar before the magnatron was one of the best attended lectures at this years field day. Brian kindly offered to give the lecture to the CCARC members who could not attend as they were on other duties. This is a really interesting and well prepared lecture and I expect this will be remembered as one of the best lectures given at the club rooms. Brian is making a special effort to come up to the central coast to give the lecture again, so now is the time to organise your transport to get to the club rooms at Kariong if you don’t drive at night or to offer seats to others in your area if you do. Perhaps not only other Radio Amateurs, but other friends and colleagues that have an interest in technology. This is a great opportunity to let people know that the club is here and who knows, some of those guests may later want to get involved in this great hobby of ours, and what better way than through a club like ours?

2. Technology used by WICEN CNC at St. Albans.

The reason this CCARC NEWS was not released on Sunday as usual, is that I and an encouragingly growing number of other club members were out at St. Albans as part of the WICEN team supporting the St. Albans “One day ride” horse trials. This year the trails clashed with a national championship in Tasmania meaning less horses were expected and the organisers decided on a different format spreading the rides over two days rather than running on until past midnight on Sunday night as in previous years. This year there were two rides on the Saturday and four on the Sunday. This makes running the event actually easier and safer for the horses and riders as riding in pitch black conditions, in pouring rain down steep rocky slopes is not the most safe situation to be in! The St. Albans event on the June weekend serves as a practice for the week long Shazada main event in August. The Wicen group were only told a couple of weeks before the event that this year would require coverage for two days rather than one. With some re-arrangement of personal commitments sufficient staffing was found, in fact from the number of people who came to support we were in the lucky situation of being able to add some extra safety checkpoints over and above the minimum needed to run the event, lets hope we can get the same level of support for the Shazada event. What about the technology? With the new schedule we might have to initially do without the repeater, that is installed at the top of a very difficult to climb even in a 4WD, tall hill on a friendly farmers land. What about power – the repeater has to run twice as long as normal and there’s no easy mains connection on the top of hills so the repeater is battery powered. Well this portable repeater has been developed over several years and now takes a lot less power when on receive than earlier ones. It is able to be powered from two batteries in parallel and to send tones if the battery power drops below a certain level to let us know attention will be needed soon. The configuration runs for the complete week of Shazada so an extra day for the June long weekend event was not expected to cause any problems, and it didn’t – it worked flawlessly for the whole event. We owe Don VK2ZCZ and Bob VK2ZAR a debt of thanks for such a reliable and robust creation that we hope will go on to serve WICEN in exercise or live emergency situations for years to come.

The repeater gave good solid coverage over the required area, but not only that, it covered as usual into adjacent areas, where we had other radio amateurs listening in case any telephone messages were needed to be relayed out of the area as there is no cell phone coverage whatsoever in the area. This year the repeater was clear as a bell, not only to adjacent areas but as far away as the Central Coast where, when the rides were not in progress a short communication took place between two club members between North Wyong and St. Albans with no noise whatsoever.

3. Upcoming events looking for support from club members.

Any club members prepared to offer their help for any of the events below, please drop me a note at news-editor @ ccarc.org.au and I will pass your name on to the appropriate person organising the event.

Winter VHF-UHF Field day contest 23-24th. June

Remembrance day contest 11th. 12th. August.

International Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend from Nobbys Head Lighthouse 18th-19th. August.

Jamboree on the air (JOTA) – 20th.- 21st. October