The President’s on Holiday.
This holiday has seemed to take forever to arrive yet now it’s here there are signs that I am not as prepared as I should be. Never the less the thought of two weeks to actively spend working hard to as little as possible sounds nice. Pat and I know this quiet little town in South West Vic on the Glenelg River where it is possible to relaxo sand trucks "fantastic". Yes Nelson is a nice spot to unwind. The Glenelg national park is just a couple hundred metres up the track from the caravan park and the long sweep of Discovery Bay Coastal Park has access to miles of pristine beach this time of the year. Of course our real reason for heading this way is to be in Murray Bridge over the weekend of 4^th to the 7^th of October for the ALARA Meet. It promises to be a great time with river boat trips steam train rides plus the change to catch up with people to put faces to call signs. And of course while the ladies are doing their thing we men can chat about radio and put the rest of the world to rights. Making you jealous is it? Well I hope you all get your turn at relaxation.

It has been brought to my notice that the 8.30 am start time for the French Island ferry is a tad early so perhaps it would be more realistic to catch the 10 am ferry instead.

A few dates to remember, next meeting on 18^th Oct with a talk on digital modes by VK3yb then JOTA/JOTI is on 19^th Oct. A Fox hunt is being organised for Sat 26^th. Details from Albert VK3BQO.

Well that’s all for now the brain is well and truly in holiday mode so don’t work too hard folk’s while we are away, hope to catch some of you on the air waves soon.

73s
from Pat & Peter.

Reminder to VI3BJA Opps

30^th Sept to 6^th Oct VK3UK

7^th Oct to 13^th Oct VK3DHI

14^th Oct to 20^th Oct VK3YB

21^st Oct to 3^rd Nov VK3VB

4^th Nov to 10^th Nov VK3DHI

11^th Nov to 17^th Nov VK3YB

PS. Tickets are now available for the Christmas hamper and donations of suitable food items would be greatly appreciated. VK3VB.
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Special Guest For January

On the January General Meeting night our special guest Rod Mills will be bringing his military vehicle, a Humvee to the hall for a viewing. One of only a few in the country, this one is equipped with its original HF radio and camouflage colours and a 6.8 litre Diesel engine

. On this night the meeting will probably be delayed an hour to make the most of the daylight.
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Aocp/Naocp Classes For 2003
From March 17 - 2003, A Radio Class Will Be Conducted By The Club At The Cranbourne Scout Hall On Monday Nights

The course will take people through the fundamentals of radio and electronics theory. At the end of the course participants will be ready to attempt the exams necessary to obtain an Amateur Radio Operators license.

There are TWO points of entry into the course. STAGE 1 will suit those with no previous experience. On one night per week, over 9 weeks participants will learn the fundamentals of electricity and semiconductors. STAGE 2, which also lasts for 9 sessions, focuses on radio & communications topics, with transmitters, receivers, antennas etc. It will suit those with a background in electronics who wish to know more about radio topics or those with a Novice radio license who would like to upgrade to the full license standard.

The fee for the full course is $172 which includes Club membership for the 2003-2004 year. Those who wish to participate in the second stage only, pay $115. The classes will be from 7:00pm to 9:30pm on Monday nights. A $20 deposit will be needed with the application to secure a position.

Immediately following the course, an examination will be held at the same venue, for the full range of Novice theory, Full theory and Regulations topics.

For more information contact Ian Jackson, the Class Coordinator, on 5625 2545 or visit the GGREC website on www.ggrec.org.au .

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Dragon SS-201
Recently I had a quick play with a Dragon SS-201 hand held radio. The main reason for the interest being that the radio was a multi mode unit, ie it works on AM & SSB as well as FM, having all this in a hand held is almost unheard of. Usually you would have to consider a larger (and much more expensive) portable set. I for one are sick of the fact that most transportable and hand held sets are FM only.

This radio is sold as a 10 meter set that works as either a channelised 27 MHz CB or an amateur 28 MHz set, unfortunately the supplied documentation seems to have been written for a different version of the radio (software changed ?) and does not explain how to swap the set from channelised operation to full VFO mode. Fortunately the previous owner had tracked down the info and included it with the radio along with a review by Tony Landon "http://www.qsl.net/vk3jed/ss-201.html" Otherwise the documentation failed to mention some major facts about running the radio, like the fact that it’s frequency coverage is split into 10 bands, and these are switched by pressing the call button. (obvious button to use!) These bands are indicated by the last digit on the display stepping from "A" thru to "J", now if you are in VFO mode you can see it step the radio’s frequency up the band, however if you are in the channelised mode trying to give a yell on the CB, you had better make sure that last digit is an "E" or you will be a pirate operator (not to mention the fact that you should not use FM on the CB channels - yes it will let you!)

Anyway, the bands covered are :-

A - 25.160 to 25.609

B - 25.610 to 26.059

C - 25.060 to 26.509

D - 26.510 to 26.959

E - 26.960 to 27.409 - CB channels 1 to 40 including the missed steps like 15A

F - 27.410 to 27.859

G - 27.860 to 28.309

H - 28.310 to 28.759

I - 28.760 to 29.209

J - 29.210 to 29.699

Pressing the up and down buttons steps you in 10KHz steps, to change the 1KHz digit you use the step button, however you can then only change the last digit! This makes scanning up and down the bands a bit painful, as you cannot set a step rate as most amateur radio’s permit - it is either too much or to fine, with nothing in-between.

Operating the radio in the channelised mode it the weirdest part of this radio, to do so press "func" "call" and you are there, however the 1 KHz part of your frequency is then transferred to the first digit on the display and then becomes a fine tune, or "slider" function! One would think that when you switch to the channelised mode, you would be in CB mode on the appropriate band - No wonder the CB band was dead. When I tried to talk from this set to another nothing happened, so I hooked up a frequency counter and the penny dropped. Going to CB mode requires a lot more button pressing than "func" + "call" . This is definitely not a set to hand to an untrained operator or a CB user. (unless they are a committed pirate type)

One problem I had was with the supplied whip antenna, It would not cover the entire band from 25.2 to 29.7 MHz. On some of the bands (ie CB) the radio refused to put out full power (as shown on its bar graph display). The antenna itself was a sealed whip with no adjustment possible, you would have to make up your own antenna’s to cover the entire range of the radio or butcher the supplied one. This caught me out as this antenna is obviously quite resonant on a given frequency, unlike the short rubber dummy loads that come on 2m and 70cm hand helds that are broad as a barn door.

The antenna connector is a standard BNC connector, definitely not the best thing to mount a long HF whip on, but very handy if you want to connect a cable to an off set antenna & maybe an antenna tuner.

Power for the radio is from a 9 "AA" cell battery case that you can fill with either dry cells or Ni-Cads, there is also a socket on the side for external power from either the supplied cigarette lighter lead or the shack supply. This will also charge the batteries.

The manual recommends Ni-Cads, however I had no problem using alkaline dry cell batteries. (Watch out you don’t try and charge them from the ext DC connector)

Anyway, all said and done, after I figured it all out, I gave the radio back as I found no one to talk to (on a short HHT whip antenna that is)

Phew, there goes another article - no wonder I don’t have much time to get the IRLP computer up and running!

Come on, help John, Submit an article or two.

Paul VK3TGX.

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Mp3 Compressed Audio
You may have seen information about MP3 audio in the press, and also heard about it on the radio in passing during the MDRC’s weekly broadcast on Wednesdays. What is it ?, well like most things digital these days, it’s all about getting more information into less space. Several years ago during the development of digital video (i.e. DVD, Foxtel Satellite pay TV, and now digital TV) it was quickly recognized that they were going to have to find a way of packing the massive amounts of data that resulted from digitizing video (and audio) into a much smaller space. If you get yourself one of those $100 TV tuner cards for your PC and try to record a movie onto your hard disk drive in raw format (i.e. with no compression) you can easily kiss 20Gig of hard disk good bye. As you can see there has to be a better way, so the experts, this time the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) dreamed up a "lossie" compression technique that could cut pictures and sound down to a fraction of it’s size. What they did was to try and analyze the picture and sound and get rid of information that you would not miss. i.e. take a picture of a person standing outside, while you would want good detail in their face etc., you would not miss loss of detail in the sky and clouds behind them. The same goes for their jeans etc. The same technique was then applied to sound, rather than just digitize it and store it as is done with CD audio, they analyzed it by breaking the sound down into it’s various frequencies and looking at their frequency and amplitude. Any signals that would be hard for the human ear to detect (i.e. a soft signal very close to a louder signal in frequency) is deleted, the left overs are then stored. When you convert a sound ‘file’ into MP3, you can specify how much compression you want to apply to that piece (be it music, talking, whatever). The more you turn up the compression, the more signals the compressor removes, obviously speech can be compressed a lot more than stereo music. The result of all this is that not actual digital sound as such, but information about frequency’s and level’s in the original sound is stored so that when you want to ‘play’ an MP3 file, the player rebuilds the sound out of these descriptions.

This brings me back to where I was going to write about earlier, however I thought a description about MP3 audio was in order before I proceeded. Recently I was on the lookout for a portable CD player that could handle music saved on CD’s as MP3 rather than plain audio, the reason is you can easily get 10 or more albums onto one MP3 CD along with the song title, artist, etc. Once one of these players is started it can be many many hours before it ends, meaning I could set it up at work and forget about it for the rest of the day (also good for listening while you do the gardening etc., no getting up and changing disks every 50 odd minutes. Originally I bought a Digitor branded player from Tandy for $200, (Dick Smith Electronics now owns the Australian arm of Tandy) however I was not happy with it. The quality of the audio seemed fine however it would give a glitch in the audio every so often, and in the end I could not enjoy the music as I was just waiting for the next blip. The sales man at Tandy suggested that better quality disks (I was using Princo) would help, but no, I thought. It should be able to recover from any read errors, so I took it back.

Then I noticed a Teac unit for $150 from Harris Scarfe in Cranbourne. This one did not have anywhere near as much trouble with my disks, and it could also display the title and artist on it’s display where as the Digitor one only gave track numbers. You may be wondering how you could find anything on a disk with say 12 albums on it, but this is easy. When you create the disk you put each album in it’s own folder/directory on the MP3 CD, On the player you can then select your album with the "album" button, then select the track from that album. Other facilities include various equalizer presets (Jazz, Rock etc.), intro. play, random play (from within an album, not the whole CD, unfortunately), Song title search (enter the song name), and programmed play. Battery life is quoted at 10 Hours on MP3 CD’s (8 on regular CD’s) from 2 "AA" cells, or you can run it from the supplied plug pack for never ending audio. Also supplied is a pair of ‘bud’ style ear phones/plugs, while not exactly exciting audio wise, they are discrete. Much better sound can be had from a decent set of head phones, but if you intend using it on a train as I have, they can be a bit bulky to carry - not to mention the fact that they could also be easily damaged if shoved in the bottom of something. I bought a special carry bag from Dick Smith for $15 that carries the player and can also hold 10 CD in pouches (not their original cases). Another option is to use the "line out" socket to connect the player to an amplifier and speakers, I am looking out for a set of PC amplified speakers to see how they would go. Another idea I have to connect it to a small FM transmitter so I can couple it into the car stereo for those long trips.

The sound is not perfect, occasionally you can discern a compression artifact, but at $150, I am not complaining.

Now I can listen to the MDRC broadcast MP3 recordings (downloaded from their web site) whilst on the train. (To try and free up home time for the IRLP project)

Paul VK3TGX.
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GGREC IRLP/70cm Repeater Project
John VK3XJW

So it looks like I have been elected as coordinator for the IRLP/Repeater project as knowone was rushing to put up there hand at the last general meeting. So I should let you all know what is happening with the project on a monthly basis and the GGREC magazine look’s like a better place then any.

The repeaters location will be in Frankston 160 metres above sea level at the Bunarong Park water tank. UTM coordinates are: 55/ 338500 E, 5774750 N. I am currently arranging keys for the site from South East Water and hope to get them soon so we can start preparing the site for the repeater. The WIA has allocated 439.475MHz TX and 434.475MHz RX for the repeater and a license application has been sent to the ACA requesting VK3RLP as the callsign.

At the last committee meeting is was decided that the cabinet to house the repeater electronics at the site, will be custom made as a suitable cabinet can not be found. Many thanks to Reg VK3UK for making many phone calls to try an find a cabinet for the project. I have access to metal folding and cutting equipment so it should make the job of building the cabinet easier. A mechanical drawing for the cabinet will be finished soon and be on display a the next general meeting for club members.

Ian VK3BUF has order crystals for the repeater and IRLP link radio and should be arriving soon. The IRLP link radio and IRLP computer will be housed a my location for the cable internet access and Paul VK3XTG is currently getting the IRLP computer up and running. The repeater controller is on the drawing board or should I say on the computer and will be finished in a few weeks.

Once the IRLP computer is finished and the crystals are installed in the link radio, I will try and get the IRLP up and running from my location on the repeater output frequency (439.475MHz) in simplex mode. This will allow access to the IRLP on a temporary basis until the repeater is completed.

One thing we need for the project is about 25 metres of 9913 coax or better for the cable run to the antenna at the repeater site. Anyone know where we can get some cheap?

Well that is about it for now. If you have any questions about the club project or would like to help, see me at the next general meeting or give me a call on 144.600

73s

John VK3XJW
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Australia Day 2003
Ian VK3BUF

On the Australia Day weekend next year the Club will be exploring West Gippsland and sampling some of its finer produce. The plan is to spend the Saturday perusing a chain of delectable establishments culminating with a fine evening meal at a small venue Neerim Junction. Participants may come along for the day or join the group staying at the Neerim South caravan park on the Friday and Saturday nights.

Firm numbers and a deposit will be needed to secure a spot at the caravan park and restaurant. This will have to be taken some time in the next few weeks. There is a ceiling of numbers at the restaurant which if breached, may require us to switch to a larger venue.

Warning! You may have to drill some extra holes in your belt for this weekend!

Our itinerary, which is still being finalised, will go something like this:

• Rendezvous at the Robin Hood Hotel car park at 10:30am Sat (near the Baw Baw exit from the Princes Freeway, 25min due east of Berwick)
• Visit the Drouin West Fruit & Berry farm
• Call at the Jindivick Smokehouse and sample hams & specialty game meats.
• Stop at a park in Jindivick for a picnic lunch
• Try a selection of mild and tasty cheeses at the Piano Hill Cheese factory
• Examine the wares at Laurel Hill Antique dealers & furniture restorers at Rokeby.
• Also visit The Wooden Goose at the nearby Old Telegraph Road to view or purchase a wide range of country furniture and odds & ends.
• Return to the caravan park at Neerim South to prepare for the evening out at Piglets Teahouse 10 km to the North.
• On Sunday morning we move to the Ada River Winery to select some rather supernacular wines for tasting or purchase.
• Lunch will be a barbecue at the picturesque Tarago Reservoir. (pronounced Tar-a-go and not Tar-rago like the Toyota van.)
• After lunch, move North again to visit the famous Trestle bridge near Noojee.
• A few hundred metres from there is the Noojee Trout Farm, also worthy of a visit. Here you can purchase trout products or catch some yourself.

Some of the finest delicacies in the world are right here on your doorstep. If you don’t go, you will have to put up with many years of listening to the stories revelling in the culinary delights of those that were there.

When you see the booking list pick up the pen and write your name!
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GGREC General Meeting Minutes – 20 September 2002
Date: 20/9/02 Start time: 8:00pm.
Location: comfy blue chairs
Chairperson: Peter VK3VB Minute Taker: Ian VK3BUF
Present: All on the attached attendance sheet
Visitors and Guests: none that I could see
Apologies: none of those who were present were absent.
Correspondence Received: Mags from EMDRC, MDRC, QSL Cards for Vi call, A thank-you letter from MDRC for the brief use of our overhead projector.
Treas Rpt: Read by: Summary only given by VK3VB, Andrew was in VK4
Prev Minutes: Circulated by: Gateway, Moved: VIB 2nd: UK and carried.
Business Arising from Previous Minutes:
Club members examined the Cranbourne community hall for suitability as a Hamfest venue in 2003. Looks good, booking will be sought

• Science Show went well. Bruno and Mike attended. Good feedback was received from attending public.
• VI call booked out for most of the year. All going well
• Bruno is coordinating JOTA at the Guide Hall this year. If you can help as an operator, please let Bruno know ASAP.

New Business:

• Letter received from WIA regarding our 70cm repeater project. Frequencies have been allocated. Beacon frequencies still pending. A license application will be made to ACA soon. A cabinet is still being sought – we may have to make our own.
• Australia Day weekend in 2003 will centre on Neerim South and region. An itinerary will accompany the October mag. Names will need to be taken for accommodation and evening meal

• Tonight Albert VK3BQO demonstrates 240V domestic control systems.
• Radio Classes for 2003 will go ahead from March 17. Ian BUF to be coordinator. Advertising sheets will be distributed soon.

Meeting closed at 9:15pm
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