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Last Tuesday night we had a good turnout on our Repeater VK3RMC… Thanks to Bill VK3MMM for running the net and all the FAMPARC members that joined in.. We would like to see all members join in on this great net. Don’t forget to use this repeater as much as you want as it’s not only a good meeting place for our weekly net.. but anytime any day.. so get on and have a chat to a another FAMPARC member. If you are having trouble setting up you radio.. feel free to bring it to the club on Saturday or Wednesday and I’m sure someone will be able to set it up for you. Our thanks to the Moorabbin & District Radio Club Inc for the use of the repeater.. Hope to see you at the club… and enjoy our new 50” tv and a new seating layout and shortly our new couch and comfy seats.. Get involved! Cheers Craig VK3NCR

Hi Members, We have been very lucky to have had a lifelong member run our Tuesday night nets. Bill VK3MMM has been in the hot seat for many years. I cannot remember a time when he has not been at his radio at 8.00pm on 146.425. Whilst local members have no issue with joining the net. Other members who live further away report they cannot hear the net. A recent discussion at the club regarding the use of a local two metre repeater resulted in. Mr Ken Millis who is the secretary of the Moorabbin & District Radio Club offered their two meter repeater VK3RMC to Famparc to run our Tuesday night net. We are most grateful to their club for this very kind offer. Bill's radio has been set up, and found to fully quiet the repeater. Next Tuesday 12th July at 8.00 pm Bill will open the net through the repeater. Members will require to tune their radio as follows 147.325 up 147.925 and include a tone of 91.5 Please be aware the Moorabbin radio club holds their net meetings on a Wednesday. Please avoid disturbing their meetings, or you are most welcome to join in for a chat. As one Famparc member suggested, perhaps we could all monitor this repeater at other times. Repeater Details: Aprox. Location: Narre Warren Vic. Output Freq. 147.325 Input Freq. 147.925 Repeater Tone: 91.5 Grid Location: QF21PX Please do your best to join our clubs net each Tuesday at 8pm via the repeater.. At least make the effort to check in and check out if you are pushed for time. Enjoy what your club has to offer.. FAMPARC Don't forget our For Sale section on our Forum !

UPDATE REMINDER When: Friday August 19th at 7.30 pm. Where: Bendigo East Hall, 35 Lansell St. Contact: Graeme, 5441 5461. Official Launch of the BAREC Field Operations Group - Friday August 19th at 7.30 pm. Bendigo Amateur Radio & Electronics Club invites you to our August meeting - theOfficial Launch of the BAREC Field Operations Group, presented by Neil VK3ZVX. This Special Interest Group will focus on BAREC's contribution to Community Support during a regional emergency. Its mission is to Plan, Prepare, and Train for the inevitable. As an Amateur Radio Club, this is the most important work we can do. The first step in this process will be a Show-and-Tell night with a focus on Field Operations (SOTA, Mills-On-The-Air, Parks Activations etc). So if you have:- a Go-Kit, - a good box for a Go-Kit - a Squid Pole antenna of any sort, - a favourite Wire Antenna, - a portable Antenna Mount, - a Shack-in-a-Box, - a Shack-in-a-Sack, - QRP rigs, - Batteries, - Battery boxes, - Portable/camping Solar Panels, - a Pedal Radio setup, - Portable Logging Hardware / Software, - a Compact ATU, - something that you think is worth demonstrating - e.g. WinLink, Digital Mode - or anything else which might help you to operate away from home and without mains power, - even if it is only a half-baked idea, a half-built project, or a pile-of-bits for one ...BRING IT ALONG... (...and be prepared to explain it if need be...) What matters is that we get the widest possible range of ideas and inspirations. This will enable us to design BAREC's Go-Kits with the cleverest solutions from our combined experience and skills. Our Hall is well heated now, but with covid numbers rising again we encourage everyone to make their own best decision about attending. Masks, hand hygiene, and social distancing will apply for everyone's well-being. The presentation commences at 7.30 pm, Friday August 19th at BAREC Headquarters, Bendigo East Hall, 35 Lansell St. A gold coin donation would be appreciated, and a light supper will be provided. For more information, contact Graeme on 5441 5461. The presentation will also be made available after the event on the BAREC YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyg-RkGPc5yn5Mgp0gVJIrA

Photo Friday: Harlow & District Amateur Radio Society (HADARS) recently ran a Radio Masterclass for Year 7 pupils at Robert Barclay Academy, Hoddesdon. The young people experienced morse, satellite, voice and data communication, as well as successfully building their own one chip, digital FM radio. Altogether over fifty confirmed QSOs were made using VHF, HF and data modes. Each pupil was presented with a certificate of achievement for completing all the activities, as well a printed QSL card for the special event call used on the day (GB0RBA).

Foundations of Amateur Radio The microphone gain game ... One of the most misunderstood settings on your radio is the microphone gain. You'll often hear people talking about adjusting it up or down depending on what they hear and the results are often displeasing to the ear. The very first thing to know is that the microphone gain is likely the single most audible setting on your radio, right after the tuning frequency. It's pretty much the first variable between your voice and your transmitter. Set it too low and you'll hear nothing, set it too high and you'll hear gibberish. I said it's pretty much the first thing, but it's not the very first. That's your voice, unique in all its glory, loud, soft, happy, sad, funny or not, it's the thing that your microphone captures to transmit. Closely coupled to your voice is the distance between your mouth and your mike. The closer you are, the louder, the further, the softer and the more background noise creeps in. As an aside, speaking of noise, there's background noise at play, but there's also the noise that comes from the audio circuitry itself, which can for example change depending on the temperature of your radio. I'm going to refer to both as noise here, even though they're slightly different. So, starting with the ideal model where you always speak in the same way, at the same volume, at the same distance from the microphone, with a constant temperature in your radio, at all times, the next thing is the microphone gain, or gain. Gain is an imperfect attempt at corralling your utterings into electrical signals without causing the audio circuit to distort or drown in noise. Distortion comes as a result of overloading of the audio circuit when the gain is too high, causing clipping, which essentially changes the audio waveform into something that no longer resembles your voice. At the low end of the gain range there is no difference between audio and noise which results in your voice being buried inside a hissing noise. You might wonder why we don't just build transmitters that cannot clip and increase your volume. Well, we do. We use things like AGC, or Automatic Gain Control to attempt to prevent such things from happening, but this isn't perfect. All this results in the microphone gain being a setting that you need to tune to your voice and adjust as things change. Overall, the best outcome is when you set the gain so the AGC just engages when you talk normally. This gain setting also applies to computer generated signals, often fed into your radio via an audio or microphone input. If you set the gain too low, noise is the problem, set it too high and the Automatic Gain Control will distort the signal to the point where it no longer works and causes interference for everyone else including the station that you're trying to contact. On older radios the output power was fixed. This is also true for Software Defined Radios. To reduce output power, you can change the microphone gain down and reduce the power. Change it to halfway and your output power is essentially reduced to half power. This works for a range of settings, but get too low and we're back to noise and audio fighting each other. The opposite isn't true. You cannot increase the microphone gain to increase power. The moment you exceed the audio circuit range your signal is distorted. On an SDR this means that you're exceeding the ability of the Analogue to Digital converter to represent your audio. In digital terms, zero means no sound and all on means 100%. If your audio is so loud as to only be 100% on, that's like sending a tone out the transmitter, resembling anything but your voice. All of what I've talked about is related to SSB signals and to some extent AM. FM is a different animal entirely. For starters, output power on FM is fixed. The next difference is the signal or channel width. Without going into full detail, FM comes in different widths, WFM or Wideband FM, NFM, or Narrowband FM, and between the two, "normal" FM. To make things more fun, not everyone agrees on what each one means at any given time. Also, channel width and channel spacing are not the same thing, but that's for another day. Gain aside for a moment, consider two matched FM radios using the same channel width. Your voice volume is determined by how much of the channel you use. Louder means wider, softer means narrower. Adjust the gain up, the signal gets wider, but the limit of the channel width remains, get too high and it clips at the channel width and distorts. At the other end, changing the gain down, you'll use less of the channel width and eventually the noise and your voice will be at the same level and you won't be heard. Let's look at what happens when you use a normal FM signal to transmit to a narrowband FM receiver. Essentially your signal is too wide and the result is that your voice will be clipped unless you speak really softly or if you've set the gain really low, either way comes with more noise. Similarly, if you transmit a narrowband FM signal to a normal FM receiver, then your voice will be very low, regardless of the microphone gain setting and turning it up will only distort it due to clipping inside your transmitter. So, for FM, before fiddling with the gain, make sure that you're using the same FM mode as the other station. One thing to remember is when you use a repeater, if the audio is always too loud for everyone, your mode is probably too narrow. Similarly, if the audio is always too soft and you always need to turn up the volume on your radio, your mode is likely too wide. Check your radio specifications to determine what each mode means. In broadcast audio this whole thing is managed by calibration using standard tones, but as amateurs we tend to rely on other people reporting their feelings on the quality of your voice with the often heard admonishment to adjust the microphone gain. I'm Onno VK6FLAB • This article is the transcript of the weekly 'Foundations of Amateur Radio' podcast, produced by Onno Benschop, VK6FLAB who was licensed as radio amateur in Perth, Western Australia in 2010. For other episodes, visit http://vk6flab.com/. Feel free to get in touch directly via email: cq@vk6flab.com • If you'd like to join a weekly radio net for new and returning amateurs, check out the details at http://ftroop.vk6flab.com/, the net runs every week on Saturday, from 00:00 to 01:00 UTC on Echolink, IRLP, AllStar Link, Brandmeister and 2m FM via various repeaters, all are welcome. Thanks to :

Famparc member Graham Alston VK3GA has been awarded 1st place in 2022 WIA DX Awards. The list below was copied from Club Log and shows the number of stations worked in each DXCC zone Well done Graham an outstanding achievement.

A few of us have been battling with our HF transmission knocking out our NBN connection. This creates all sorts of problems especially to our loved ones who are trying to use the home Internet. I stumbled across this page on Andrew's VK3FS Blog page. Here! Comments from his site: 40m and Australia's NBN delivered over FTTN just doesn't mix. It's like oil and water. Transmit on 40 metres and kill the internet.... For further information Click here to visit's Andrew's VK3FS Blog Page. UPDATE! 4TH AUG. Update as of 4Th Aug. I received this tiny RF Choke from my good friend Richard, VK3TXD on Monday and installed it just as the image shows above.. I have been testing it over the past few days and since installing this tiny piece of magic, so far.. it works!!!! Amazing.. Thank you to both Andrew VK3FS and Richard VK3TXD.

𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗭𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝘀𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 - 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟕𝐭𝐡 𝗮𝘁 𝟭𝟬 𝗮𝗺! This Sunday's Special Interest Group digital modes Net will be at 10 am AEST (00:00 UTC) on VK3RCV repeater, 147.150 MHz. We will host a Zoom session after a brief catch up on the repeater. What have you been up to with digital modes? Discuss your activities, issues and questions. See the Zoom details below. If you use FreeDV and will be part of this weekend's activity day, please join us and share your experiences. We will also take a look at the HF chat mode 'VarAC'. 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐃𝐕 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟔! From the 'DigitalVoice' group" "We'll be doing another FreeDV Activity Day on Saturday, August 6, 2022! This event will bring together people interested in HF digital voice on the air for conversation and fun. Contacts usingthe official application as well as the SM1000 handheld microphone are welcome. Event time: 9AM Pacific time (1600Z) on August 6th to 8:59AM (1559Z) on August 7th (24 hours), though you're welcome to operate before or after this block of time :) Suggested frequencies: 80 meters: 3.625, 3.643 or 3.693 MHz 40 meters: 7.177 MHz 20 meters: 14.236 MHz 17 meters: 18.118 MHz 15 meters: 21.313 MHz 12 meters: 24.933 MHz 10 meters: 28.330 or 28.720 MHz (Note that LSB/DIGL is used below 10MHz as per current convention for voice modes, USB/DIGU otherwise.) As this isn't a contest, there's no pressure to make contacts or send logs, but you can always confirm QSOs via the usual means if you'd like (LoTW, eQSL, QRZ, etc.) Enabling PSK Reporter in the FreeDV application and joining theQSO Finderare recommended, however, so others can see that you're on the air and hearing them (for instance, here'sthe current map of listeners). :D Feel free to spread this far and wide among your local ham friends and groups! :) Let me know if you have any questions about the event and definitely post here if you have issues getting the application working prior to the event. Thanks, -Mooneer K6AQ" http://groups.google.com/group/digitalvoice BAREC Digital Modes Net Zoom details. Time: 10 am, Sunday August 7th. Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82422573906... Meeting ID: 824 2257 3906 Passcode: 633786 A reminder to mute your Zoom microphone and computer audio while on the VHF Net. This avoids feedback and confusion. One person will relay the repeater audio on Zoom.

Hello Famparc Members. We now have within our Forum Area the For Sale section. Peter vk3tq has added some items that he wishes to sell. Click Here Don't forget to sign in so you can get updates etc and also follow the Forum. If you have any questions on how to sign in, give me a shout. Cheers. Craig vk3ncr

'𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐮𝐫 𝐑𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐨' 𝐚𝐧𝐝 '𝐌𝐭 𝐀𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐨 𝐖𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡' 𝐒𝐈𝐆𝐒 - 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐲 𝟑𝟏𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐭 𝟐𝐩𝐦 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐙𝐨𝐨𝐦. There will be a combined Zoom session for both Special Interest Groups this Sunday, July 31st at 2 pm via Zoom. Tony Falla VK3KKP will be hosting the session. The Zoom details are: Meeting ID: 814 0232 7501, Passcode: 454389. There will also be another Zoom session on Sunday August 28th.

To view the latest news letter from RASA dated 26th July 2022 Click the Button Below.

Recently one of our members had a small problem with his IC-705.. Nothing major, but it was a situation that it best not to use the rig. The problem is that tricky little Micro SD Card Slot.. It can be very fiddly to eject and insert the SD Card. Mainly because of the position of the SD Card Slot and size of the SD Card, being a Micro Card. The problem he encountered was when he tried to insert the SD Card back into the slot, what can happen is that you may insert the card beside that actual carrier of the SD card (The Slot), and when this happens the card can be pushed further inside the case, thus causing a nightmare. The SD Card can then not be retrieved. Once this has happened, it is best to contact Icom as did the owner, and it was quickly fixed. Or if you are game, dismantle the radio to remove the misplaced SD Card. (Not Recommended!) The good news is that the repair was done at Icom and no damage was done to the transceiver.. Good news hey !! So.. be careful when inserting that fiddly little Micro SD Card, as it's very easy to insert incorrectly. Craig. vk3ncr