Snowy Mountains Amateur Radio Club Inc

We’ve added a Projects page to the website to display some of the homebrew efforts by our members.

Our first project is by Steven, VK2STG who describes an Antenna Tuning Unit project he worked on recently. Please visit the Projects page to see how this turned out.

We will publish more projects in the coming weeks.

The Club held a small field day at Merimbula Beach Carpark on Saturday the 26th of June. Whilst it was a very quiet affair with only a small number of members in attendance it was good to catch up and enjoy some off-grid radio on a lovely day.

The ARISS contact with students from Monaro High School went off without a hitch. It was great to be a part of history for the school and to see the students enjoy a very unique experience in their education.

If you want to listen to the contact you can do so by downloading the following MP3 file:

The Monaro High School contact with astronaut Mark T. Vande Hei on the International Space Station will occur at 7.25 pm on Wednesday the 19th May.

You can watch this live via Facebook Livestream by clicking here: https://www.facebook.com/monarohighschool/live/

Or you can listen to the live audio only by pasting the following link into your web browser: https://m.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/35486

Remember to click the play icon to start the listening stream.

Preparations for the Monaro High School contact with the International Space Station are progressing well. Our scheduled contact has now been confirmed for Wednesday the 19th of May at 7.25 pm. The ground station will be NA7V based in Portland, Oregon USA, and our Astronaut will be Mark Vande Hei. Equipment necessary for the contact is being tested and students have their questions ready to go. In addition to the main event, a number of Amateur Radio visual and technical displays will be available for visitors to explore. Various media organisations have expressed keen interest in covering this unique event for the school.

World Amateur Radio Day is on Sunday the 17th of April and is an important date for the Amateur Radio community.

The following information is an extract from the IARU webpage:

Every April 18, radio amateurs worldwide take to the airwaves in celebration of World Amateur Radio Day. It was on this day in 1925 that the International Amateur Radio Union was formed in Paris.

Amateur Radio experimenters were the first to discover that the short wave spectrum — far from being a wasteland — could support worldwide propagation. In the rush to use these shorter wavelengths, Amateur Radio was “in grave danger of being pushed aside,” the IARU’s history has noted. Amateur Radio pioneers met in Paris in 1925 and created the IARU to support Amateur Radio worldwide.

Just two years later, at the International Radiotelegraph Conference, Amateur Radio gained the allocations still recognized today — 160, 80, 40, 20, and 10 meters. Since its founding, the IARU has worked tirelessly to defend and expand the frequency allocations for Amateur Radio. Thanks to the support of enlightened administrations in every part of the globe, radio amateurs are now able to experiment and communicate in frequency bands strategically located throughout the radio spectrum. From the 25 countries that formed the IARU in 1925, the IARU has grown to include 160 member-societies in three regions. IARU Region 1 includes Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Asia. Region 2 covers the Americas, and Region 3 is comprised of Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific island nations, and most of Asia. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has recognized the IARU as representing the interests of Amateur Radio.

Today, Amateur Radio is more popular than ever, with more than 3,000,000 licensed operators!

World Amateur Radio Day is the day when IARU Member-Societies can show our capabilities to the public and enjoy global friendship with other Amateurs worldwide.