WIA Conference Weekend - Presentations

Following the WIA Open Forum lunch was served and then there were two streams of presentations provided for attendees.

The first stream was chaired by Tony Monger VK2KZ and centred on policy and regulations and the second stream was chaired by Justin Giles-Clark and focused on interesting activities in the hobby of Amateur Radio.

The following is a summary of each Stream/Presentation.

Stream 1:

Liz Billiau VK2XSE presented on the Past Present and Future, Education with the WIA. Liz gave a concise outline of what has come before, what is in place today and what the future may look like for Education and the WIA.

Tony Monger VK2KZ covered the process of data collection from scientific cubesat missions by Amateur Operators around the world.
Scientific space missions by Universities and other non-profit organisations are becoming more common, all of these organisations share one major problem, limited access to ground stations. Amateurs can fill the role of globally distributed ground stations for these missions. This presentation will cover one such proposed mission CUAVA-1 to be run by the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. The benefits to the university and scientific communities is obvious, the benefit to Amateurs needs to be stated.

Dale Hughes VK1DSH presented on what constitutes the amateur service and covered that the amateur service depends on a relatively small number of documents and regulatory provisions that underpin its national and international existence. The presentation covered what the provisions are; how they are changed and who plays a part in changing them.

John Buckley VK2LWB and Peter Twartz covered a presentation titled RF in confined spaces - frequency management at large sporting events - specifically issues of site wide frequency management and co-ordination of RF issues at large sporting events in areas described already as High Density under ACMA guidelines.

Stream 2

David Rowe VK5DGR with a FreeDV 700D & 2020 Update - FreeDV is a Digital Voice mode for HF radio. You can run FreeDV using a free GUI application for Windows, Linux and OSX that allows any SSB radio to be used for low bit rate digital voice. FreeDV is being developed by an international team of radio amateurs working together on coding, design, user interface and testing. FreeDV is open source software, even the modem and speech codec. This means amateur radio operators are free to experiment - something that is prohibited with many other digital voice modes that use "black box" commercial speech codecs. David, VK5DGR will present the latest developments in FreeDV, including the low SNR 700D mode, and the high quality, 8kHz audio bandwidth FreeDV 2020 mode.

Andrew Davis VK1DA covered Summits on the Air - When SOTA came to Australia Andrew became interested in it and assisted in the survey and checking of the VK1 summit list. The VK2 summits list was next and he took on the role of Association Manager, recruiting and coordinating the efforts of a team of about ten surveyors who combed through many summit lists and topographic maps to arrive at the initial list of almost 1200 VK2 summits. In 2018 he reached the Mountain Goat level of the award by scoring over 1000 activator points, remembering that summits are allocated a maximum of 10 points each. He is well qualified to speak today about SOTA. He introduced us to the SOTA program and how it works, explaining what is needed to participate in the program and how successful it has been. He also described the links between SOTA and the WWFF parks award. He also explained why SOTA is a wife-approved radio activity!

David Minchin VK5KK presented the Epic VK Microwave Tour - Late in 2018, VK5ZD proposed to VK5ZT and VK5KK that instead of doing another “EU mmWave DXpedition” in 2019 that we do same type of driving trip in Australia. Whilst we don’t have as high a mountains in Australia compared to what we have operated from in Europe, we do have numerous accessible peaks 100 to 160 km apart in the eastern states that have LOS paths. Besides, as we had been working with a number of groups in VK2 & VK3 in developing equipment it was time to pay a visit! The presentation covers the challenges and adventures of the 5800km round trip to work mmWaves in VK1, VK2, VK3 and VK4!

Jamie Campbell VK2YCJ presented Secrets of the KiwiSDR - Jamie has been recently undertaking extensive "applied" research and development in the practical use and application of the KiwiSDR, and this talk will cover the how to utilise from these incredibly innovative, flexible devices. This was a "soup to nuts", highly practical presentation starting with the KiwiSDR basics of how to get started and then taking you through to more esoteric applications. Of special interest is the ability to use the KiwiSDR in remote locations as a fully tracking remote receiver directly controlled by your normal (late model) transceiver - this has immense DX and contesting potential.

A huge thank you to all presenters for sharing their time, skills and experience with conference attendees.

Page Last Updated: Saturday 1 June 2019 at 17:51 hours by Justin Giles-clark

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